This day six years ago I started blogging here with a quote from T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland - V. What the Thunder Said". Looking back I think there are worse ways to start a blog :-)
I had been publishing at e.g. a Telenet business blog (thanks to Tom De Bruyne) and a group blog called Toink (thanks to John Baeyens) but eventually I started my own more or less by accident. There was a Mozilla bookmarklet called "blogthis" that allowed you to publish by highlighting a text, then pushing the "publish" button. This simple technique helped me avoid one of the Big Questions back then: which blog platform should I pick? There were literally thirty of forty to choose from back then. BlogThis automatically posted to Blogger/Blogspot, the Google blogging platform. Couldn't be easier.
Another Big Question for wannabe bloggers back in 2004 was: What should I blog about? I had no clue, and to be honest I still don't have a real focus, but when I saw how then-Yahoo employee Jeremy Zadowny was doing it (blogging about whatever came across his mind), I thought to myself: I could do exactly the same. Just dump links, quote other posts, gradually add images as the Blogger/Blogspot platform evolved, and after a few years my bnox.be domain didn't point to my corporate website, but to my blog and not much more.
And now my blog is helping me gather my thoughts for what might become a book about the impact of social media and cloud computing on business processes. I'm using the tag "conversity" to organise them. I'm not sure if it will actually end up publishing this book but it's nice to have some kind of a public archive of all the stuff I come across. Twitter Search kills its own archive after 1,5 days or so, meaning everything you say on Twitter is dust in the wind. Facebook is a) not public and b) automatically owns everything you upload to their platform - and I'm a bit uncomfortable with that.
But I always get far more feedback on both Twitter and Facebook so since a couple of weeks my blog posts are relayed to Twitter (using Google Feedburner) and to my Facebook profile (using Facebook's Notes feature). We'll see where all this thinking aloud and archiving in public gets me. The important thing is: I still enjoy blogging. After six years I'm finally starting to find my own voice.
By the way, my two initial blogging triggers are still around:
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