Welcome to Girly Anti-Geek’s debut of the new and improved “Tuesday Geek Feature” where Grandy features her post on one geek a week. There is so much that you all have to offer, and I know you do address things in your respective blogs, but Grandy has about 3 more readers that maybe want to know a little bit more about each of you.
It is my purpose to single-handedly reveal the true identities of all you online geeks (aka really smart people) for the masses so we can all know you on a more more personal level.
For my maiden voyage, I went to Matt Stratton. You’ve seen him around these parts as he is quite often in my comments (don’t think I didn’t notice Matt) and always either participates in my craziness, or has advice to give. Matt takes beautiful pictures! You should really check them out.
Readers, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Matt Stratton.
Your Blog(s): My main blog is Good Old Rock (http://mattstratton.com). It is my catch-all blog, focusing on photography, technology, and occasional personal updates.
I also have a very infrequently-updated family blog with my wife, which is http://strattonlife.com.
How long have you been blogging?: My current blog is a “port” of my LiveJournal, which I started in 2001. I first registered the name mattstratton.com in 1997, so I’ve had my own domain since then. And I built my very first homepage in the mid-90s (I haven’t been able to find it at Archive.org, so I can’t give you the exact date). So technically, I’ve been blogging for about eight years, although before then, it wasn’t called “blogging”.
What kind of “Geek” are you?: I’m a very generalist geek, in many ways. Among the areas I believe I focus on, geek-wise, include the following?
Photography - I can get VERY obsessive with my photography, in terms of the gear and the process. Plus, the actual art of it, sometimes. In all seriousness, I consider myself an amateur photography geek - there’s still a LOT I want to learn when it comes to lighting, for example. The folks on Strobist really put me to shame.
Improv - This isn’t very clear from my blog, but I am a HUGE improv geek. I have studied improv at The Players Workshop of the Second City, and Improv Olympic. I have taught improv workshops for Yehoodi U, and am an occasional coach for The Flying Buttresses (although it’s been quite a while since we last worked together). I consider myself an improv geek because I tend to get REALLY hung up on the theory and process of improv and humor, and will bore anyone to tears who wants to talk about it with me. I’m definitely long on the theory and short on the talent, which makes me a pretty good teacher, however.
Technology - I spend my days working as an IT manager for a dot com, so I kind of have to be a technical geek. I get very excited about silly things like virtualization and high availability. A great example of my technical geekiness was illustrated a few days ago, when Joel Oleson, who is known as one of the most influential and important people in the world of Microsoft SharePoint, started following me on Twitter. That was the highlight of my week, easily.
Are you a Geek Offline?: I think I’m fairly geeky offline, but I suppose it depends upon what you mean by that question. I consider myself to have slightly above-average social skills, although, as I’ve already mentioned, I can go off into very in-depth discussions with people on the topics I love to “geek out” about. My wife would probably tell you I am a geek offline, although I think it’s all relative.
What’s your favorite thing to do when NOT blogging?: When I’m not blogging, I like to work on my photography, play with my dog, watch TV, and (weather permitting), ride my bike. In true geek fashion, when I started biking, I got very obsessed with recording my rides and plotting all of the statistics about them - even though I rarely went back to LOOK at those statistics.
Okay, I guess I *am* a geek offline.
Who is your target audience?: I’m still working on defining my target audience - my problem is that since my blog is very broad, I have multiple possible target audiences, which makes it difficult to attract any of them.
For my “tech tips”, my target audience is NOT the hardcore geek - it’s what I call the “softcore geek”. The person who likes to use technology but doesn’t have the knowledge or energy to really dig deep, but needs some help tweaking their everyday online tools. A great example of this was my post about Facebook security, that explained how to filter out “who can see what” on your Facebook profile. This has been my most popular post to date. Ever. For my photography posts, those tend to be targeted at my friends who are into photography and tend to ask me questions about how I accomplished certain things in Photoshop, etc. I don’t consider myself enough of a photography expert to attract a lot of “random” audience for that.
For the personal updates, my target audience is simply my friends and family. I started blogging (aka LiveJournal) originally to keep from having to tell the same story over and over again to my friends and family - so I find my blog is a nice way to continue that. Although I have been using it a lot less for the personal updates lately (keeping that more towards our family blog). I’ve also found that my personal updates, especially the ones about our infertility issues, have been quite popular with my wife’s support network.
How do you generate traffic to your site?: Most of my “good” traffic comes from search engines - since my blog has been around for so long (in one form or another) and has SO many entries, I have some pretty strong Google juice on quite a few keywords. This doesn’t tend to generate recurring traffic, of course, but it gets people TO the site.
I also participate in Entrecard and Adgitize, both of which drive a lot of traffic to my site, but I’m still determining the value of that traffic. Through Entrecard I have definitely started to build a network (of which Grandy is a great example) of other bloggers who I now read regularly and have become regular readers/commenters on my blog.
I think the most valuable method of bringing in new, regular readership is to provide high-quality content, but then make sure people know about it. For me, this has been a combination of SEO, networks like Entrecard, and commenting on other blogs with valuable and insightful comments. I also have a link to my blog in my email signature and use that link in my status messages on Gtalk and Yahoo Messenger.
Oh! I also promote new blog posts (that I think will be of interest) on Facebook and Twitter. Twitter has definitely turned out to be a mechanism by which I have obtained some regular readership.
Tell us one “secret” or “tip” you can share with us non-geeks who are still learning: Keyboard shortcuts are your friend. The “windows” key had a load of great uses, for example. If you press Windows-D, it will minimize all of your windows, showing your desktop. And Windows-L will “lock” your workstation (assuming you have a password) which is helpful to keep co-workers from coming by and sending dirty emails to your boss under your name. There are more, but this is a good start - I’ll have to write a blog post about the rest!
Tell us more about “YOU”: I recently moved to the suburbs after ten years of living in the city of Chicago. I love the following things: pickles, my dog, my wife, awesome camera gear, the Chicago Cubs, and Italian Beef sandwiches. I really should work out more and lose weight, but since nobody’s offering me lucrative modeling contracts, I’m having a hard time getting motivated. I love helping people with their tech questions, and not just because it makes me feel smart. I’m always willing to field questions, although my ability to answer them will depend upon how much work is blowing up in my face. But I’ve found that the questions people ask me usually turn into awesome blog posts, so always feel free to send ‘em my way!
Thank you, Matt. Thank you for EVERYTHING you contributed to this post. I only hope my post has done you justice.
