A year ago I was in Phoenix, Arizona when I found out that my blog, The World According To Mitch, was selected by BizTech Magazine as one of their 50 IT blogs you must read. It was quite an honor to be recognized by my peers.  I was in Montréal, Quebec this year when I was informed I had been selected again for 2012, one of a select few to repeat. Again, I would like to thank everyone involved in making this happen. It truly is humbling, and knowing that this year readers were invited to vote made it all the more special.

The world has changed tremendously since I started blogging. In 2001 my blog was actually targeted email articles, to be replaced in 2003 by my first website, www.e-mitch.com. IT was only in 2005 that my writings would be codified into an actual formal blog, although a few peers and mentors had to twist my arm. They twisted harder when I left Montréal and told me that if I wanted to succeed I had to build my brand.

The process of building my brand began then and has continued to this day.  It continues on my blog, on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and at every event that I speak at.  It is the advice that I pass along to every fledgling IT Pro just starting out – build your brand, it will eventually pay huge dividends.

I want to thank the editors and readers of BizTech Magazine for once again seeing fit to honour me this way.  I hope that between The World According to Mitch and the Canadian IT Pros Connection I will continue to deserve your readership!

In September I was honoured to discover that BizTech Magazine had recognized The World According To Mitch on their list of 50 Must-Read IT Blogs from BizTech (Sept. 7, 2011).  Several weeks ago I was contacted by Ricky Ribeiro, BizTech’s Online Content Manager asking if I would be willing to do an interview about blogging and the IT industry.  I was delighted to do so.  On Sunday the interview was published.

Must-Read IT Blogger Q&A: Mitch Garvis

Sometimes it amazes me that I have come so far… I remember when I first started blogging, and who was responsible for it (there are two people).  I saw one of them in the cafeteria this past week, and I had drinks with the other in December.  When they told me to start (and then told me to publish at my own site rather than the MITPro site) I could not see the value… but I trusted and respected both of them, so I started.  I see the value now, and every time an up-and-coming IT Professional asks me for advice on how to get noticed, I have the same advice for them that Rick and John had for me… Build your Brand.

As hard as it may be to fathom, I remember starting out wondering who would care about what I had to say.  I also remember thinking that a few little articles would not earn me a lot of credibility.  I was probably right… but I have now been blogging for seven years, and The World According to Mitch (the third incarnation of a blog that was born in 2005) will celebrate its 300th article this week (if my Editor approves the complete rewrite she assigned me on Thursday).  We have had over 100,000 visitors, and a plethora of comments and conversations (many of which, unfortunately, were lost in the numerous moves over the years).  I am amazed every time someone refers to my articles as authoritative, and appreciate every single visitor.

Last week was the first time I ever referred to myself as a professional blogger, but I suppose I am.  I do not get paid to blog, but do get paid to do what I do in part because I blog.  I love doing it, and was not surprised by the envious cries of ‘How do *I* get a job like that?’ The answer is simple… build your brand, build up your library of articles, and most of all make sure that you absolutely love writing (It helps if you are good at it)!  I do… I always have, and thank my high school English teachers for that daily,

If I am the luckiest man in the world it is because I have an amazing family, I get to work with amazing technologies, and have an amazing job that affords me the opportunity to speak to and interact with some amazing people.  If someone were to ask me what are the qualities that make my blog successful I suppose it is the combination of my vast life experience and travels, combined with a love of life, a passion for technology, and an understanding that talking about high-level subjects does not mean you have to talk over peoples’ heads.

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t know enough about it.

–Albert Einstein

I often hear from people who stumble across my blog who say “Wow… I have no idea what you are talking about, but it sounds really interesting.”  I do not dumb my articles down, but I do try to explain high-level concepts in clear, concise terms.  I have been asked to explain concepts such as Server Virtualization to non-technical audiences before, and I do… however you also have to know who your intended audience is, and speak to their level.  My technical articles would be useless if I wrote them for non-technical people.

The truth is that most of my articles will be easy to understand by anyone, but without the prerequisite knowledge of the subject matter they would not be able to do anything with them.  Occasionally I hear from someone that ‘Wow, I read your article, and I was actually able to understand what you were talking about!” That is because I make things as complicated as they have to be… and no more so.

I will continue to write as I have, and will aspire to do better.  I will try to continue to write about topics that I find interesting and relevant… that goal seems to have served me well over the past seven years.  Thank you for reading. -Mitch

Last week a tweet came across my Twitter feed from Amy Babinchak congratulating me on being one of the fifty must-read IT blogs.  I had to turn to Bing for the details.  It turns out that BizTech Magazine published an article titled 50 Must-Read IT Blogs from BizTech.  The honour comes complete with a badge that you can add to articles and e-mails (and I suppose business cards and letterhead and maybe even storefront signs).  It looks strikingly similar to the one attached here!

I have been blogging since before it was fashionable, and since before it was called blogging. If you were on my mailing list in the late 1990s and early 2000s then chances are you would receive my writings periodically in a mass e-mail. I assume that these helped me find my way onto numerous spam lists, and I only wished there had been an easier way for me to share my opinions with so many people.

I feel like Sally Field in 1985 (You like me… you really like me!)… I was surprised and humbled to be mentioned in the same article as some of the companies and people whose blogs made up the list.  My friend Sean Daniel definitely deserves to be there (sbs.seandaniel.com) and the Tenable Network Security people who make Nessus is a no brainer, along with people like the CTO for EMC (Scott Lowe) and Hitachi Data Systems (Hu Yoshida).  A number of VMware employees made the list (Steve Jin and Duncan Epping) which is great to see, as did several Microsoft, Cisco, Citrix, and cloud bloggers (which certainly demonstrates a trend in the industry).

The World According to Mitch is all over the map; it is because I am truly an IT generalist with a great many interests.  It is easy to say ‘Mitch must be working with System Center Essentials this year because he posted three articles on it…’ but they may be intermingled with posts about virtualization, clustering, laptops, and travel.

As I wrote in a recent article (that will actually be published next week) The World According to Mitch was named temporarily (four years ago) because I had to change the name (I was no longer the president of MITPro, so The President’s Blog didn’t work), and because the movie The World According to Garp was on TV at the moment when I was prompted to enter a name.  Some (my mother, actually) thought it was an egotistical name, but it really fits because I write about a myriad of topics about everything from my point of view.  Who knows?  I might keep it.

Thanks again to the folks at BizTech Magazine for the recognition… I hope I can continue to blog and deserve the title!