Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Who would have thought that humping a gorilla would be the red button?

Let’s review the illustrious career of the Vladville blog offending the audiences worldwide:

• The SBS Show thong..
• Creating a gaypile category dedicated to the partner community struggling with common sense..
• Ending 20+ podcast shows with Andrew Dice Clay..
• Ending 2+ podcast shows with a lewd remark..
• Tampering with private property at the airport..
• Dozen's of posts reflecting how Microsoft QC is pounding our business into the ground – Microsoft never even sent me a single Cease & Desist letter!
• Hijacking the index page of our corporate site to congratulate a college football team for winning a national championship.

And those were ALL fine! But the straw that broke the camels back was apparently a guy humping a stuffed gorilla. Not like I was in the running for Ms. Congeniality award with this blog but come on, THAT couldn’t have been the most offensive post I’ve made!

So today, at the advice of my counsel, I'm moving my personal posts over to my personal site www.vlad.net. What was brought up, and what I agree to an extent, is that Vladville draws a much bigger audience than just my IT friends and people that don't get the inside jokes or that have never met me might be severely offended by what they read / hear / view here and since I as the CEO represent OWN there was a feeling that there is not a thick enough border between Vlad ™ and Own Web Now Corp. I disagree with that one but lawyers are there for a reason – to keep you out the court room so I'll take the advice  and move over. In a way this is a bit of a triumph, that I've been able to go out and meet so many people and consider them friends enough to let them in on all that goes on here. Not that it will change, I'll just put more questionable posts over on vlad.net from now on.

This won't be followed by 500 one-line posts nagging you to sign up for junk so you can watch me talk to myself; It's merely note on whats going on and why as I've always been completely honest about what I do. So if you're my friend, hop on to vlad.net. If you aren't, this place will suddenly look a lot more professional LOL, you likely made a typo.

Today has been a strange, strange Monday. I’ve been swamped over the past week working on Shockey Monkey now that the major work on ExchangeDefender v3 has been completed. And not to hit Microsoft again but god it’s great working on my own software instead of mitigating mistakes made by someone else. Organizationally, we’re about 90% done with all the service packs and upgrades and things are finally running as expected.

So what does an IT service provider do when everything is running smoothly? Try to break it of course! So today I spent most of the day planning this weekends global maintenance window for OWN. In a nutshell, we will crash the entire network, including the NOC, including monitoring, including failsafes, including redundancy, including backbone links. We’ll go down for about 5 minutes, removing OWN and every system in it for about 5 minutes. Why? Well, for one nearly all backend management systems have changed. And as much faith as we have in our systems ability to recover from single or even multiple failures we do not have a guarantee or anything other than our blind faith. And since we’re not a church but an ISP, blind fiath ain’t what the customers pay for. Cross fingers, plan twice, pull plug once

Other than that – more fanmail about VladCast. I get it, you like it!

I’m often surprised that people can guess my mood by reading my emails and blog posts (hint: they are nearly always wrong) but today has been interesting. I’ve been swamped as of late and because I haven’t blogged for a few days people emailed to ask if I’ve taken a ghost writing gig over at Susan’s blog. There are a few Angry Vlad posts on her blog, and no, neither influenced by me. Heh. Three bad nights on a single web/sql server and she gets a case of Vlad’s… wuss    

As for what I’m up to – lot’s of coding and planning. Today I’ve been porting over the new interface upgrade for Shockey Monkey, opening up the mobility API for the mobile agent and just planning the flights for World Wide Partner Conference and New Orleans. This weekend Katie and I are off to Dallas to watch our little empire burn down to the ashes and hopefully emerge as a beautiful phoenix. Go ahead, try to sell that one to your wife:

Vlad: Great news. We’re going to Dallas to watch the network go down and autorecover. And I’ll take you to Six Flags!

Katie: Cool.

Vlad: Really?

Note: If you’re one of our customers and would like to watch please let me know by Wednesday (security reasons), at Dallas Infomart from 3:10 – 3:30 AM (thats EST time, this Sunday).

Wow, what a response. Thank you, thank you, thank you. As of 1:00 PM EST the VladCast #2 has been downloaded 10,372 times, nearly 1/5 the audience of the SBS Show. However, the feedback loop has been through the roof, the VladCast folder has 519 messages in the folder, granted a number of them back and forth between me and the audience thanking for feedback, etc. Care to see the feedback?

The Good

“Loved it – your voice energizes people and its great to hear your passion for all this again”

“I heard the first one and thought “Great, more complaining” but the second one knocked my socks off. I forwarded it to my staff and will make this a SharePoint link”

“Awesome Vladcast Vlad    – should have you streamed with my breakfast news before the weather and after the traffic.”

The Bad

These comments don’t deserve to be quoted, if you’re too stupid to hit stop when something does not interest you and you have enough time to waste my time by complaining about something you willingly both downloaded and listened for five minutes there is nothing I can do for you. As Jay-Z says “If you don’t like my lyrics you can press fast foward“

I did however get a decent amount of bad feedback that I will try to work on and improve:
– Not in iTunes yet
– Flash player sucks
– Slow down I can hardly understand you
– Board / wiki to disuss the show
– Mailing list to announce new shows
– Way to contribute / sponsor the show
– Needs intro music / datestamp
– Want to promote it, give me a logo
– Needs guests

Boards/forums suck because they close content, if you wish to discuss you’re welcome to post a comment. Guests are not what the show is about. 

The Funny

“That was perhaps the best podcast I ever heard. The first five minutes sucked but the last 5 seconds saved the genre”

“Exciting. Exilirating. Your voice was so fast.. like you weren’t breathing at all.. I was hoping a heart attack was coming so I wouldn’t have to hear your hateful dribble ever again. I hope you die next week.” (funny because it was written by a friend)

“You suck – at any length of the show.”

I’d be putting it lightly if I said that I was more than surprised with the success of the podcast considering it hasn’t been blogged or linked or marketed anywhere else. It confirms my suspicion though, that when content is awesome people share and forward on the links and thats why so many people tune in. The feedback and message counts are surprising as well, far more than I ever got with the SBS Show.

So if you heard #1 and thought screw #2 I hope you give it another chance. #1 was just to clear the air and announce it, there was no content in it at all. #2, I hope it proves differently.

So what are you REALLY doing?

This has come up more often than any other question. What’s really behind the scenes, whats the master plan, etc. Well, as you know from my many, many, many posts the contributions in the SMB community and even larger ITPRO sense have been down. In any given forum or board or group or setting less than 1% of the audience actually participates. Whats worse is that probably half of that 1% is not really contributing anything of value but just distracting and flooding the channel with a sales message.

I’ve talked to people over the last 2 years and I got two messages:

– I just don’t have the time (ok, great, see ya)

– I just don’t know how to contribute and I’m not a good writer like you.

For a moment lets ignore the scary notion in which people equate my writing with something more than a drunken chimp on a laptop. What these people are actually saying is that they have something they want to share, they have things on their mind, they know that others would benefit from their experience, opinion, expertise…. yet they don’t want to compete with me or Susan. Again, let’s for a moment ignore the solid gold mansions that Susan and I have built from our enormous proceeds we get from community paying for all of this content.

Last year I was presenting at the blogging conference and I wanted to share the podium with a fellow video blogger. And as he closed down his presentation he sent a very clear message:

I love doing this. This is fun. If you don’t know how to video Blog, my name is John, I will teach you how to video blog!

So.. I can’t teach you how to write. It’s clear that I can’t do it either. But what I will do is create a system and throw some exposure to the people that are willing to podcast and video blog. Everyone has something they want to share. I know you do. I’ve talked to thousands and thousands of people, all of em remarkable in some way. But none of them do this. Why?

I’ll tell you why. The SBS Show took 2 people, 5 hours a week and an hour here or there to organize, setup, record, edit, distribute, market, etc.

The VladCast took less than 10 minutes. Start to finish. So we’re not nurturing leaders and sharing – well, I’m gonna change that.