dead blog walking at 20

Twenty years ago I started writing this blog. Over 3,600 posts later, it’s still my main tool for making sense of my work and the world.

Only a few months after I started blogging, I heard Tod Maffin, a Canadian digital journalist, on CBC radio state that blogging was dead — already! But I saw my blog as a tool for work, and not necessarily a way to make money, so I marched on — dead blog walking.

What has my blog been good for?

• A very big business card.
• A way to connect with other professionals.
• A retrievable storage area for my thoughts and ideas.
• Getting my thoughts out as ‘half-baked ideas’ for future use.
• An easy way to answer many questions without writing out my response again.
• It’s the core of my sensemaking with personal knowledge mastery (PKM)

Just the other day I had a comment on a 2007 post — DIF Analysis — calling it, “a timely reference that popped up as part of an AI-driven conversation”.

Last year I said that I hoped that we see a return to more people blogging as they realize how much surveillance capitalism and the platform monopolists are robbing from citizens and civil society.

“A knowledge worker is someone whose job is having really interesting conversations at work.” —Rick Levine (1999) The Cluetrain Manifesto — and that’s what blogging is all about.

• The next PKM workshop starts on 8 April.
• I will be discussing my 20 years of experience with PKM at the European PKM Summit on 22-23 March 2024.