Brainnovate

This is the first post in a series I am going to call “Growing this Blog.” Essentially I plan to periodically chronicle the progression of Brainnovate. I am not so egotistical to think that my little blog will reach great heights, but if it does, I figure it sure will be useful to people to be able to go back and see how I got there.

I kicked this blog off two weeks ago today, and it’s been interesting. After a few relatively placid posts I decided to kick it up a notch with a highly opinionated (and maybe not so well researched) article on how CMS platforms are bad for Innovation. It was like a calling out for the Drupal community… generating a bunch of backlinks, pingbacks and comments. People were polarized- some agreeing and some disagreeing. Only a few took it personally.

This also sent a flood of traffic to my new blog- barely a week old when I wrote the post! Wow, in a way its been like going from zero to 60 25 mph in one week. Its amazing how strongly people reacted to a blog with fewer than 10 posts total.

I have learned a couple important lessons:

1. First it pays to be opinionated. Pro bloggers like Michael Arrington know this, although you risk your credibility when you do it. Arrington has been called the “Fox News” of the blogosphere more than once for his drama injected reporting. Yet people keep reading and he has an astounding 800k RSS subscribers. He must be doing something right.
2. If you want to get people involved in a post, involve a programming community. This I already knew- which is why I did it. For some reason, writing code seems to engender an amazing loyalty and passion. A lot of people, once beyond the basics of a given language, tool, or framework, put a stake in the ground and are willing to step up and defend it like a nation defending their homeland. This is true even if the tool is not optimal for the described use case.

Thats all for now on this topic, we’ll circle back in a couple more weeks and see what has happened.

Only one day after launching, Brainnovate (this blog) has climbed into the number one slot for the search “Brainnovate” on Google. One of the reasons I chose this name for the blog was because it is truly unique, and only had 3-4 competitors for the term. Hopefully this means additional SEO will come just as easily!

I am excited. I have wanted to create this blog for a long time, and today my ideas are going to come to fruition. Stay tuned for the launch announcement.

Since Brainnovate is brand new, here is a synopsis of some of the things I plan to write about:

• Interesting startups
• New products
• Innovation
• Reviews of interesting websites
• Ruby on Rails as an Innovation tool
• Online Marketing
• and a smattering of other topics

Welcome to the new blog by Scott Miller. A blog about innovation and brainstorming… figuring out better ways to do things with technology and a dose of web 2.0. You are reading the obligatory “hello world” post, so it’s time for Scott to step back into first person and talk to you directly…

I am excited about launching this blog- finally I have staked my own corner of the web 2.0 blogosphere! I also blog over on the “Optimize It” blog at Vertster.com, but this seems much more fun. Here, I only have to talk about testing, landing pages, and statistics when I want to.

If you join me on this little experiment called “Brainnovate” you will get to learn more about me- some of my various projects, and more importantly, how we can all embrace something I call “brainnovation.”

In a nutshell, Brainnovation is a way to come up with a better mouse trap- through agile brainstorming and innovation. Something funny has happened in the last few years (the web 2.0 years.) New tools and technologies have come along that make it easier to come up with interesting new ideas, and cheaper than ever to bring them to market.

So I invite you to join me, as I illustrate that which I do know, discover more of what I don’t and converse with you, my new reader!