…the InformedNetworker.Com? Let me explain by telling a story. I’ve been a computer geek for a long time. I’ve been an internet geek for almost as long. Along with all this overloaded geekiness comes a desire to read about geeky things - e.g. geek news. The original source for such news for me was Slashdot. But Slashdot could be very annoying. While stories could be submitted by users they could just as quickly be quashed by “the editors.”

When I learned about Digg I moved over wholesale, and haven’t ever looked back. When I started reading it seemed like every story was for me, but as Digg grew in popularity and my experience in the professional computing sector grew - the number of Digg stories that interested me shrank and then shrank again. I realized that the audience over at Digg was more consumer focused - I was looking for something more geared toward Information Technology professionals. And that is where the InformedNetworker.Com comes into play.

The Informed Networker exists to serve Information Technology Professionals by offering news on topics IT professionals care about selected by democratic vote. What exactly defines articles of professional interest? Thats a great question to which there is no definitive answer. Should we care about The Pirate Bay? What about the iPhone? Yes, we are interested in articles on SANs but are DAS too low-level? Many of these decisions will need to be made by the readership. My opinion is that these topics are of interest to the IT Professional and while we won’t be spending a lot of time on The Pirate Bay or the iPhone it may be worthwhile to occasionally make ourselves aware of what is occurring in the bittorrent world (e.g. how our users are utilizing that precious bandwidth of ours) or remind ourselves that DAS is still utilized in many situations and can be a viable solution under certain circumstances. Finally, my goal is not to make this only a resource for those with high-level corporate concerns managing large SANs or hundreds of workstations. Rather, this site should (hopefully) cater to the interests of a wide IT professional demographic. From the IT Pro who works out of his house to the CIO and everyone in-between.

What about this blog? Hopefully this blog will serve several purposes:

  • Official Site Blog - I’d like to keep everyone informed on the latest happenings right here.
  • Interview Source - I’m looking forward to the opportunity to interview various individuals within the industry and here seems as good a place as any to post the results of those interviews.
  • Article Source - I’d also like to occasionally write articles which (might) get published on this InformedNetworker concerning technical issues.