Long-term readers of this magazine may remember a regular feature entitled Webwatch that we ran what seems like eons ago. At the time, Web 1.0 was a pretty zippy place with wide-eyed pioneers gambling and mostly losing millions of pounds while us System i people kind of quietly got on with it. Seven years ago, the internet still had a kind of novelty rather than being part of the furniture as it is today. To this end, Webwatch featured all kinds of weird and wonderful IBM midrange-related sites. Many have fallen by the wayside, while others soldier on in their own indomitable way.

Of course, one of the things that has changed since those heady turn of the century days is the inexorable rise of the blog. Although keeping a diary is as old as writing itself, it wasn’t until  the end of 1997 that Robot Wisdom website editor Jorn Barger coined the term ‘weblog’. This was shortened by one Peter Merholz around 18 months later who jokingly turned the word into ‘we blog’ which, in turn, became ‘blog’.

Since then, blogging seems to have taken over the world. For instance, US blogger megasite Xanga had only 100 online diaries in 1997. In 2005 it boasted over 20 million. Nowadays, everyone has got into the act including businesses aiming to spread their message and, indeed, this magazine has run tutorials on how to set up a corporate blog. But what of the System i community? Has it embraced the blogging phenomenon? I thought it was a good idea to resurrect the Webwatch concept and find out.

The first port of call had to be iSociety, the System i aficionado ‘club’ promoted by IBM and its associates ( http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/isociety ). Looking through the list of members, one immediately comes across Angus The IT Chap ( http://www.angustheitchap.com ). Angus is is a pseudonym for Trevor Perry, a US IBM System i consultant and strategist and his blog is wide-ranging, to say the least. Over the 30 days that I reviewed, ‘Angus’ covered System i education and training, how System i departments should market the benefits of their servers to rest of their organisation and beyond, an anti-Windows skit in the style of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, converting S/36 applications, phishing and more.

But that’s not all, Angus has brought his mates along for the ride. The site also features fellow System i consultant Larry Bolhuis’s musings on, amongst other things, his daughter’s driving mishaps and how they relate to decision making in the data centre, shoddy customer service, rubbish dentists and yet more driving derring-do in midwinter Michigan. Although not as prolific as Angus, these are well considered and quite lengthy entries, most of which conclude with a System i-related observation.

And it doesn’t stop there. A group blog called Graffitti Wall brings together System i-related entries from a ‘gang’ of 25 occasional and not so occasional contributors. The Wall features some pretty hard-hitting stuff about the state of play of the platform, so one can only hope that the powers that be at Big Blue read it now and again. There are a number of other features on Angus The IT Chap, but I will leave you to discover them yourself. Recommended.

Trevor Perry and his chums at Angus The IT Chap are not the only bloggers listed by iSociety. Chris Whisonant, for instance, is a fairly prolific blogger with a penchant for Domino on System i. His two year old site ( http://cwhisonant.blogspot.com ) features a good deal of handy technical tips and he dishes out advice to his readers. On my last visit he offered some useful insights into upgrading System i hardware and he was gearing up for a trip to Boston for Lotus Developer 2007, which for Domino fans should be a good read if his review of last year’s show is anything to go by.

Also worth a mention from the iSociety list is Aaron Bartell’s oddly named MowYourOwn.com. Apart from being a useful technical blog, Bartell’s site offers free System i tools users such as email program RPGMail and a chart generator for RPG applications.

The System i Network is always a good port of call and the site has run a number of blogs mover the years ( http://www.systeminetwork.com/isnblogs ). At the time of writing, the site featured three active blogs, the first of which, 3X to i5 Flashback, celebrates 25 years of System i NEWS magazine and is written by industry guru Roger Pence. Next up, we have Bill Blalock’s Exploring Eclipse RCP (rich client platform). The rich client concept is thoroughly explored here and the blog also makes a great introduction to the subject. Bringing up the rear we have Max Hastings’ From Here to Modernity blog, a journal of the application modernisation experience which has generated a fair amount of response from its readers.

Another blog worth reading is iSeries Addict ( http://davidandkelly.com/iSeriesAddict/index.php ) by Colorado-based David Vasta. This is a bit of a must for fans of both System i and Linux. In fact, Dave loves Linux and has some very interesting points to make about what he sees as the lack of progress that IBM is making with its iSeries Access for Linux offering. He also turned me on to the Ubuntu Linux distro that’s gaining traction at the moment as an alternative to the versions from SUSE/Novell and Red Hat. On top of that, he has some withering things to say about Microsoft’s Vista OS.

Now, if you were to have a look at all of the blogs mentioned so far in this article, you will be struck by the fact that they are all written by Americans. True, sometime System i NEWS UK contributor Paul Morris, a Brit, actually started the ball rolling with the System i Network blogs a couple of years ago, but as a nation we seem to be lagging behind. In fact, its hard to find a UK blog that has more than a cursory relation to the System i. If you know of any, please get in touch.

However, the System i blogosphere is not completely dominated by the States. There are quite a few System i-related blogs from around the world, although few of them are in English. However, one English language site from far-flung lands is the by India-based Ahamed Ali Rizwan Ahamed at http://www.rizwan.in. Quite apart from his writing on the System i, Java, Eclipse and the like, his photos of a recent trip to Sri Lanka are enough to brighten up any miserable March day back here in Blighty.

Seamus Quinn is the editor of System i NEWS UK.

This article originally appeared in the March edition of  System i NEWS UK magazine.