the price of promotion...

The way it is...
Recently a number of my colleagues have started work blogs. Topics range from advice, events, fixes, work-a-rounds and discussing and promoting products. Ir seems like a win-win situation. The company gets some free marketing and advertising. The blogger can get some information out there in a non marketing way. The reader and (potential) customer has the opportunity to develop a connection with someone who works on the project.

The world turns...
I can see how this would work in an open source project. Major contributors have their names out there and are publicly recognized and acknowledged by that particular community. However, I work at Embarcadero, and we're a private company. We don't publish any code, associate people with products or even make public our employees - unless you're a part of the executive team.

So, working in a private company, no one outside of the project group will understand my contribution and those outside the company won't even know to associated me with the project. All of this seems to boil down to an unread and lonely blog.

Whee, it's free!

So apart from the potential cathartic experience of writing for an unknown public, what is the point of me blogging versus writing in a journal? My quest: How to get noticed?

Without doing any research or putting any thought into a plan, here are my ideas:

1. Get people with popular blogs to link to mine
2. Write really interesting and/or useful things
3. Post pictures rather then just write
4. Send my blog to everyone I know

And now for something completely different...

In case you're interested, the product I've been working on for the last few years is called PowerSQL. It features a very powerful SQL editor. I promise you, this is not just another pretty editor. it's useful too. We're a dev shop that focuses on writing useful applications that help you work with and manage databases. This means we're constantly writing, running and executing queries. With PowerSQL, we're able to do it all better and faster then ever before with such helpful features as real time SQL validation, content assist and a customizable formatter.

All good software developers should eat their own dog food and at Embarcadero, we're no exception. While PowerSQL is just about to release, work is already underway on a couple more amazing products that are going to revolutionize your dev environment. PowerSQL will help you write those queries and work with the database.