Can you hear the  solitary bugler playing Taps across the cold, forlorn blogging graveyard, just as I am making a valiant effort to rejuvenate my blog?

GigaOm reported this week:

Blogging is on the decline, according to a New York Times story published this weekend — citing research from the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project — and it is declining particularly among young people, who are using social networks such as Facebook instead.

However,

according to the figures used by the New York Times itself, blogging activity is actually increasing, not decreasing. And as the story points out, plenty of young people are still blogging via the Tumblr platform, even though they may not think of it as “blogging.” What blogging is really doing is evolving.

… So what we really have now is a multitude of platforms: there are the “micro-blogging” ones like Twitter, then there are those that allow for more interaction or multimedia content like Facebook, and both of those in turn can enhance existing blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. And then there is Tumblr, which is like a combination of multiple formats. The fact that there are so many different choices means there is even more opportunity for people to find a publishing method they like. So while “blogging” may be on the decline, personal publishing has arguably never been healthier.

I like that final observation … that personal publishing has never been healthier.  So, as I rejuvenate my blog, I will also try to leverage Twitter and Facebook to engage people out in my corner of cyberspace.  If you are so inclined, feel free to come along for the ride.

Tonight I was honored to participate in a delightful dinner at Hotel Monaco in San Francisco, hosted by our friends from PwC.  Ironically, the first topic of conversation around our table was started by Danielle Butke, whom I have known for several years.  Back in June, 2006, I posted on this blog a less-than-flattering photo I took of her taken at the Catalyst Identity Management conference.  I later posted a better photo, but apparently, Danielle has been the subject of a lot of ribbing over the years from her PwC colleagues because of those photos, so she requested tonight that I remove the photos from my  blog.  I am pleased to report that all photos of Danielle have been successfully removed from this blog and my Flickr account.  All that remains are mysterious frames where Danielle’s face used to grace the pages:

But around the dinner table, we agreed that I needed to replace the photos.  We chose Rex Thexton, PwC Identity Management guru extraordinaire, to replace Danielle on my blog.  So here is Rex on the left, striking his best “Velocity” pose. 

Plus, for good measure, on the right is my Oracle colleague Joe Palastro, who happened to be sitting next to me and somewhat reluctantly agreed that I could post his photo.

Sorry about the the grainy photos, but what more can an iPhone offer?

Thank you, my good friends, for a delightful evening and memories!

Here is to a great year ahead of us!

I have added a new feature, “Source Doc”, to the Discovering Identity blog.

I frequently come across source documents on the web that are relevant to the Identity Management / Information Security community. I don’t have time to blog about each in detail, but want to provide a way to announce that I have found the documents and provide a way to easily find them again.

A new category “Source Doc” has been added to the blog, so these documents can be easily selected via the “Select Category” drop down list box.  They can also be found by searching for key words.

My previous post is an example of a Source Doc post.  It references a presentation I stumbled across this morning.  I hope you find it useful.

I have begun to experiment with methods for integrating this Discovering Identity blog with Facebook and Twitter, using the Wibiya toolbar, which appears at the bottom of the screen.  This is a WordPress plugin, which was easy to configure and install.

Feel free to use the toolbar to become a fan of our Facebook page and join our Facebook community.  You can also use the toolbar to join my Twitter conversation.

Please let me know what you think.

Note: for those who see this on the blogs.sun.com version of the blog, please visit us at DiscoveringIdentity.com to see the Wibiya toolbar.

Will it work this time?

Testing with the iPhone WordPress client.

In my previous test, I created a post using WordPress for iPhone.  Bird Feeder didn’t post a tweet.  Let’s see if this works.

The previous post, the Dixon Family Christmas Card, was the one-thousandth post on the Discovering Identity blog.  Many thanks for following, visiting, commenting, and otherwise supporting this ongoing investigation into the science and magic of Identity Management.

Thanks to  Charleston Primary School for a great photo.

I just added a Firefox plugin that:

Adds a button to Firefox which starts a new Windows Live Writer blog post prepopulated with content and title from the current web page. Blog the whole page, or just selected snippets. …

I started this post using the new plugin.  Pretty cool.

Yesterday, blogs.sun.com celebrated its fifth birthday!  Thanks to Linda Skrocki, our fearless leader in the Sun blogosphere, for pointing out the very first post on blogs.sun.com.  It has been an honor to participate in this important part of the Sun culture of innovation.

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