So for the past couple of years at about this time of year I’ve pulled together a quick view of what have been the most popular articles on my blog over the preceding 12 months. It’s a useful reflective exercise to see what has chimed with people, and also gives me the opportunity to remember some of the things I was talking about over the year soon gone.
This year I’ve become a bit multi-channel. At the beginning of the year I became a blogger over on the cio.co.uk website, and also from the summer started cross-posting material from here onto LinkedIn.
So there are three round ups this year – one for each of the three channels I publish through. We’ll start with the top ten articles here on MMITII…
There are a couple of things to point out before really getting into this. Firstly that only three of my top ten viewed articles on my personal blog were actually published this year. And secondly, there seems to be an audience for pieces like this that reminisce about old gadgets.
A round up, from 2013, of all of the computers what I have had since the 1970s.
The article at number 10 was a follow up to this one, again from 2013, about all of the mobile phones I have ever owned. It’s probably useful that I wrote all of this down then, because I’m not sure that I could remember all of them now…
8 – Ding dong the curve is dead
There were a few things that I had trouble adapting to in my stint working at Microsoft, and at the top of that list was the performance management system and the dreaded forced bell curve. I have yet to see a less motivational, more divisive management technique, and this post was written at about the time in late 2013 that Microsoft announced its demise.
7 – Porter’s Five Forces (and the news for CIOs)
The oldest post on the top ten, going back to 2010. I read recently that Michael Porter is currently charging around $150,000 dollars per performance on the speaking circuit, so he’s obviously in demand. This article explores how the world of the CIO is now under competitive threat, and I also did a presentation along the same lines here (over 10,000 views now, despite the awesome “Pleeeease make videos to help with insomnia” review it’s been given).
The first post actually from 2014, an exploration of the troubles facing self-driving cars. Inexplicably, in the past couple of weeks this post has had a lot of views in Sweden.
From 2013, one of my favourite posts exploring the pointlessness of job titles in our ever-changing world.
4 – Crap tech industry metaphors: 8 The Hockey Stick
Part of an occasional series on stupid metaphors rife in technology companies, a bit of poking at the idea that exponential growth can be sustained for ever (it can’t).
Probably the most useful thing to come out of my time at Microsoft – a quick guide to why you might want to build an app rather than a website from a customer’s perspective.
2 – Becoming a digital architect
Work from January this year on the theme of Digital Architecture. Will be exploring this again in 2015.
1 – Six months with Chromebook
And at number one, again from January 2014, a look at the experience of being a Chromebook users.
So there we go. One final thought on the lack of 2014-posted articles in the list is that it shows the extent to which I use my blog as a repository of material to point people at after the event.
mmitII 