Old Fashioned weblogs are surprisingly rare nowadays. Even sites that are classed as blogs are very often just highly targeted to a specific audience with the long term goal to make money or to prove a point of some description.
When I started a blog, way back in 2004, it was genuinely a dear diary type of thing mainly about fencing but grew and changed with what I was doing and was a huge part of what I did in the IBM Lotusphere days.
Since then lots of people have trailed off and stopped writing, but I’ve still kept it up. And even though it’s had times when it was on hiatus, it still brings value to me and the reason for this slightly self indulgent post is to explain why.
- I am not a content creator and like everybody I go to the internet as my first port of call for most things. but how do I feed what I have learnt in the real world back? this blog is that. So that things I learn I can share and maybe help someone else.
- I keep control of my content. Social media has to a large extent been the downfall of the traditional blog, why go to this effort when there are massive platforms that will curate and promote your content for you. And most people I know have used a single social media platform as their main personal or professional promotional area. I think this is an incredibly short sighted and naïve path, As we’ve discovered with things like Twitter, they can go in a new direction and suddenly you’re left on a poisonous platform, also companies like LinkedIn are known for dumping old content that you have spent ages on as they try a new thing, I don’t want to loose that effort and history on someone else’s whim.
- Background, as a person with a professional presence this is an easy place for people to find me. Clients or individuals who want to see what kind of person I am, and it can back up assertions I might make on my suitability.