I’ve been reflecting about this blog over the Christmas and New Year break. I started it, unbelievably, in September 2005 just ahead of the RBI Editor’s Conference on the 22nd. The original purpose was to illustrate a point: that self-publishing using blogging software was powerful, was here to stay, and was a significant threat or opportunity to our journalists.
It was great fun blogging the event in real time and I think it made its point.
Afterwards, though, I decided to keep the blog on and change it’s purpose a bit. That purpose is written in the sub-heading: “charting the road from paper to digital publishing”. What I have tried to do, with mixed success I suspect, (and certainly at times with erratic effort) is to highlight in short posts what I consider to be significant developments which will have some kind of impact on the journalists and editors of RBI (and other b2b publishers).
Over the past three and a bit years the technology of the web has changed a great deal and for a long while I have been using Google Reader as way of keeping up with events and I found the “share items” functionality an incredibly useful way to very rapidly create lists of linked posts which I think of as important or noteworthy. Mostly I do this as I don’t have much more to say in a blog post on the subject, though sometimes it is just to save time, as the amount of ground asking to be covered grows and grows.
Lately I’ve also been trying out Twitter and have started to use this as a way of highlighting interesting posts or web pages and I now find I’m in a bit of a dilemma. Do I start using Twitter alone? Do I use Google Reader alone? Do I use a combination? In reality I will use both for some time to come, I think, as they are both useful but in different ways, even though the result with be fragmentation of a kind.
I think now the blog has outgrown its original purpose; there are now a large number of my colleagues much more knowledgeable about the web than me and so there is little point in me trying to continue to post in the way I have in the past.
So from now on I’m going to use the blog to post longer pieces on the implications of what I see happening in the technology space and I’ll rely on Google Reader and Twitter to create bread-crumbs pointing to the sites or posts which some may find interesting or relevant.
I’m going to broaden the scope out slightly, too, to encompass changes in the social and corporate landscape which are being wrought by the changing technology (looking back, I post about this quite a bit already, so I may as well come clean!)
I’ve already rung the changes with a simpler, cleaner new look and I’ll be looking for ways to improve usability and functionality in the future.
Anyway, hope you enjoy reading the blog as it develops in 2009 and a happy New Year to one and all.