nineteen years of blogging

“A knowledge worker is someone who’s job is having really interesting conversations at work.” —Rick Levine (1999) The Cluetrain Manifesto [and that’s what blogging lets you do, from anywhere]

Today marks my 19th anniversary of blogging here. This post is #3,566. I note that on my 5th anniversary I mentioned that I had started ‘micro-blogging’ on Twitter. Fast forward to November 2022 and I asked in whither Twitter if it will survive its new owner and CEO. I am still on Twitter though having more and often better conversations on Mastodon. The train wreck that Twitter has become reinforces the value of this blog and the open covenants on which it is based.

Lilia Efimova was my inspiration for building the personal knowledge mastery framework and in summarizing her PhD thesis she had this insight on the nature of conversations through blogging.

Weblogs provide a possibility for an occasional interaction rather than support constant conversations. They are not particularly suitable for goal-oriented conversations, but provide a fertile ground for exploring ideas, especially those that cross topical boundaries or where the interests of others are not known in advance.
Participation in weblog conversations contributes to developing ideas and relations that often cross boundaries and exclude intermediaries. —blogging practices of knowledge workers (2009)

In 2004 Lee Lefever won a competition for the best pitch about blogging, “By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company – context that can profoundly affect decision making.”

I hope 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.

The Perpetual Beta series summarizes the core ideas I have blogged about.