This week, Stephen Foskett’s Virtual Field Day (VFD4 to be exact) was in Austin. One thing I noticed right away is that I didn’t know most of the delegates. I think I upset some of them, but in all honestly I was so excited to see that. This week I added 8 new blogs to my RSS reader:

• I have a new woman in tech to follow (y’all she is the real deal..if you are working with vCenter you want to follow her).
• I’m now following an old-school data center guy that gets down to the detailed  nitty gritty about virtualization.
• Following the best-named blog ever – www.wooditwork.com, you should too if you want to keep up on the latest from VMworld
• Now following someone who blogs alot about a competitor, and also lots about VMware and storage.
• Following someone else with a very similar profile, except he has an endorsement from someone I really trust. 🙂
• Following someone with a definite Cisco bent, and gets way in the weeds on VMware and NetApp
• Following someone who is super thoughtful in his analysis (seriously, go look what he wrote about VFD4)
• Following yet another blog with great analysis and deep dive posts.

So lots of awesome new bloggers. Stephen never ceases to amaze me with the talent he finds. Yáll know I am really big on remembering our past. When we started blogging at EMC, I knew there were people who had been doing it for a while already with whom we needed to connect. So some of us did! And now, as those of us who started the big wave of storage industry blogs have moved on to jobs with so much responsibility that we can’t find the time to blog anymore – there is a new class of kick-ass bloggers here to carry on the torch!

So, how do we connect new to old, to keep the continuity going? I think Tech Field Day does an amazing job of finding new talent. Subscribe to these guys, follow them! There are some new folks podcasting too….my new fav is this one from a group of super smart women!

I think we have to follow them, engage with them, and promote the hard work they are doing! Remember how important that was to us?

I think the next post I write will be how I find new people to follow – there is actually a formula. And trust me, the new social media agency tools won’t help you in the storage industry. More soon!