Blog Name: I’m Not Actually A Geek [link]
Blog Author: Hutch Carpenter
Blog Tagline: N/A
First Post: Feb. 9, 2008
Status: Active
RSS Feed: Full Feed

A bit about Hutch Carpenter and I’m Not Actually A Geek

Hutch refers to himself as a reformed banker with a handy dandy MBA who is more interested in the social aspect of the web through the functionality of applications in relation to business. Currently he is trying to figure out what his next direction will be after leaving BEA Systems where he worked on their suite of Web 2.0 applications

From a Design point of view

As you can see from the graphic of the blog above Hutch has gone with a three column presentation for his blog with the content area in the middle section. Currently his blog is hosted on the Wordpress.com domain rather than a hosted domain of his own. While this is usually a good way for people to get started blogging I would suggest that if he is looking to make this a serious endeavor that he consider migrating to his own domain before investing too much more effort. The reason for this being that as you build your brand and reputation it gets harder as time goes by to move all that reputation and link juice that one has collected to a self-hosted blog.

The design of the blog is fairly simple but for me the theme doesn’t somehow match up with the personality of what Hutch talks about in his posts. The other problem I have is that the page and content feel too compressed in on itself. While there is good separation of the sidebar content I feel that the content area doesn’t have enough breathing room. Additionally while it is good to indicate items that are hyperlinks I find that with the current design everything is sporting the hyperlink underline and I feel it really distracts from the look.

Besides that the only real problem I saw from a design presentation point of view was his use of the tag clouds. As you can see from the graphic it also suffers from the heavy use of hyperlink underline and makes it look really crowded. As well the Category Cloud just plain doesn’t work as what words are there are cut off and you get the feeling that there must be some that are just missing.

I do like the the fact that quoted sections are easily recognized as such and still readable.

From the Content side of things

Hutch is one of the few bloggers who occupy my Tech Thinkers folder in FeedDemon and that is simply because he write posts that much of the time make you stop and really think about what his writing about. He isn’t one for writing fluff pieces and doesn’t play the typical Techmeme regurgitation game that many bloggers who have been writing for even longer than Hutch has.

The thing I really like about his writing is that Hutch isn’t afraid to take a contrary point of view even with ones that are very popular. If he feels that a point of view needs to be questioned he is more than willing to do so but not just to be difficult but because he truly believes something is being missed or is wrong. He also gets involved in the comments made on his post which I consider to be an very important thing for any blogger to do but especially for those that are trying to promote serious conversations about what they believe in.

Hutch also makes good use of graphics within his posts which is really nice to see but unfortunately due to the design of the theme he is using I don’t think they do the post as much justice for making points as they could.

Overall Opinion

As I said Hutch’s blog has a permanent place within my Tech Thinkers folder and I look forward to every post he writes. While he might be a relative newcomer to the tech blogging scene I think he is going to do very well. As a matter of fact I think that any number of the big blog networks out there would do well to keep an eye on him as a future staff writer.

FriendFeed Likes Compatibility Chart

This chart is courtesy of Felix over at #comments who put together the code to let people find out who they are compatible to on FriendFeed based on post ‘Likes’. I include this partly to let you see who else likes I’m Not Actually A Geek as well as for a bit of fun.