Friday 19 August 2011

About this blog - 5

It has been suggested again that I should open up this blog and allow anonymous comments so that EG-IT staff can voice their concerns about what has gone, and still goes, on in the department.  I do understand, but I am determined that this blog remains ‘open and honest’ and I feel that anonymous comments could potentially jeopardise its credibility.

The format of the blog seems to work well.  It carries a guaranteed ‘right of reply’ and only contains material that I have personal experience of and can validate without the need to call on (and thus potentially compromise) others.  Despite over 10,000 hits so far, I have not yet had one request to correct anything that I have written.  In ‘pull’ mode, it is unobtrusive and only read by those who are interested in it.  Also, it is ‘low maintenance’, taking up no more than an hour of my time per month. 

Someone expressed concern that readership of my blog was declining, but they need not have worried.  After the understandable initial peak (and of course its blocking from the corporate network), daily hits settled to a fairly constant level for a few months, but have in fact increased slightly recently.  The average is around 50 a day, with it increasing to 80 or 90 just after an update and then dropping steadily until the next update.  I think the lowest figure for a day I have ever seen has been 14.

The blog has certainly met one of the original objectives in providing information about what happened to me to those who were interested, but only time will tell if it stops anyone suffering the same fate as I did at the hands of Patrick Naef.  Certainly the alarming attrition rate of Patrick Naef’s management teams over the years has slowed down considerably during 2011.  I would not dare to claim any credit for this but, surely by now, Patrick’s managers pay more interest in what he gets up to than they did in the past.  I think the phrase is ‘the vulture has had his wings clipped’.