About a month ago, I began in earnest to renew my commitment to blogging.  Since then, I have been much more diligent in posting to this Discovering Identity blog.  Yesterday and today, I made a few long-overdue adjustments to the structure of the blog.

I added the following buttons so visitors can more easily post links for individual blog posts to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, with the option of using Buffer to delay the post to a later time if desired:

You can now link to the social networking sites I pay attention to via icons on the sidebar:

A couple of months ago, I started sharing some photos on SmugMug.  The SmugMug photo bar in the right sidebar gives you a glimpse of some of the photos I have shared.

It’s almost 3:00 AM. In a moment of insomniac epiphany, I found the meaning of life …

… in a Non Sequitur sort of way!

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, “InfoSec Site”, to the Discovering Identity blog.

I frequently come across sites on the web that are relevant to the Information Security community. I may not 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 “InfoSec Site” 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 InfoSec Site post.  It references a useful Data  Breach reference site.  I hope you find it useful.

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.