It seems that of late their is a bit of a fashion to post a list of 9 things that you've learned since becoming a blogger. So here are the nine things I've learned since I started blogging back in July of 2012:
1. Swearing generates pageviews. The more swearing, the more pageviews.
2. If the MoD's annual budget was £5 and its annual requirements were to buy just one cup of coffee, with milk and two sugars, it would somehow find a way to fuck that up.
3. If the Internet defence community spent as much time working out how the three services could help one another by working together as they do pushing interservice rivalries, then Britain would have an enviable wealth of information and ideas about co-operation to work with.
4. Its is still underestimated just how much the economy and public will affects defence and defence spending.
5. Much of the defence world, including politicians, service chiefs and some of the private providers, lives in its own little bubble seemingly ignorant of the fact the rest of the commerical world routinely deals with (and solves) the kind of commercial problems that people often complain are "not as easy as you think".
6. Britain has probably wasted more time and more money trying to reduce procurement costs through collaborative programs with large overseas partners than it has saved, largely due to the inability to pick appropriate partners in the first place.
7. The post that takes you five minutes to read probably took five HOURS to write. Blogging tends to be far more time consuming than you'd imagine, especially without a staff of researchers backing you up like a commercial media organisation can afford. As a broad rule each paragraph represents anything from 10 minutes to an hours worth of work, including research, typing, proof reading and editing.
8. The reality is that short articles frequently out perform large articles in terms of pageviews. Given the amount of time and research required for some of the bigger articles, efficiency often significantly favours the shorter work.
9. There is no money in blogging. Blogging has to be a passion, otherwise it will become a ball and chain.
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