There has been a lot written recently about getting traffic to your blog. Recent posters on this subject include Biz Stone, Robert Scoble and Shelley Powers.

What I’m surprised none of them mentioned is the number one rule of getting traffic to any site: Content. Even if you manage to get people to click on your site or blog, they won’t return if the content is lousy. If the content is good people will start finding your blog and passing on links to it in their own blog. All of the recent blog entries point out why it is easier to get links to your blog than to a traditional site. This is because the blog world is so interconnected. People love passing on good links in their blogs. On a traditional site people have to beg for links. But even though blogs make it easier to get links, you still need good content to get good quality links and repeat visitors.

Content is still king on the Web, whether it is a traditional site or a blog.

Rands has an interesting (but over a month old) blog entry about Incrementalists & Completionists. The basic idea is that there are two types of people, the Incrementalists like to get things done quickly, but not always in the best way. The Completionsists like to do the the right way and like to do things the right way, but its not always quick.

I like the basic idea but, like usual trying to divide the world into two doesn’t really work. Most people are somewhere in the middle and switch back and forth depending on the circumstances. Whats important is when you are operating an an Incrementalist way that you keep in mind the Completionist picture. Make sure that the incremental changes you are doing are leading to some complete solution. When you are thinking as a Completionist make sure you can implement the solution in an incremental way.

Seek the Middle Way.

I’ve been waiting for this one. You can now get RSS feed of your rental queue and new releases. Very cool.

Found via a post in The RSS Weblog.

I want this Bottle Opener/Fridge Magnet. It looks good and it’s very functional. Never again would I have to fight with the gadget drawer when looking for the bottle opener.

There is an interesting thread going on in the service-orientated-architecture group.

Based on this thread I’m going to stop using the term “SOA” Everybody seems to have their own definitions for it. Here are some sample quotes:

From Patrick May:

If a distributed system uses a
standard means of registering services, looking up services, and
accessing services and it decouples clients of a service from details
about the implementation and location of that service, then it is
using an SOA.

From Sean McGrath

SOA (if it is worth anything at all) is a paradigm shift EAI-done-right
as opposed to EAI-V1.5. The paradigm
shift involves embracing asynchrony and reliable messaging substrates,
embracing protocol-oriented integration
patterns, embracing homogeneous message-passing “APIs”, embracing
event-oriented programming, embracing
the notion of explicit transaction boundaries, embracing the notion of
semantic interoperability, embracing
the notion of business-oriented system design in terms of data flows,
data transformations and service
choreography.

From Anne Thomas Manes:

I recall using the term “service-oriented architecture” back in the early
1990′s to describe DCE and CORBA-based application architectures. And if you
look at all the documentation about DCE, CORBA, and other RPC-based systems,
the name given to the object/procedure that serves RPCs is “service”. Even
database systems are service-oriented.

With all these varied views of what SOA means, i think the term has lost its usefulness.

This has also been recently blogged about by Rich Turner.