A short personal history of blogging

In 2003, blogging was well on the way to becoming mainstream. The 6 internet years since feels like a lifetime ago.

If I think back to the beginning of my career in software development it really blows my mind how little information I had access to. If I was trying to solve a problem; I would ask my team mates, I would search through the thick tomes of  technical books we had in the office, I would search through AltaVista and Google and if I was really stuck I would trawl through the vast labyrinth that was MSDN.

Blogs changed that habit. Suddenly there was a medium where people could easily talk about topics that interested them. Developers flocked to it, because more than anything it was a great format for creating reminders of how to solve various technical problems. It was about 2004 when I stopped using MSDN, because all the useful information I needed to get my job done was coming to me, unfiltered via blogs. I dabbled with a few of the early blog engines and settled on BlogX (the precursor of DasBlog) then moved to WordPress. I was blogging on the now defunct www.1succeeded0failed0skipped.com and I got hit by one of the major problems of self hosting – I had a hardware failure and lost the site and all its contents.

It was also about that time that I realised that as a consultancy, a blog was possibly the best conduit for showcasing the extraordinary talent contained within. Before blogging there were only traditional channels for letting consultants communicate publicly; conferences, whitepapers, and analyst interviews. During one of our Community Days – I floated the idea of creating blogs.conchango.com – the idea was met with absolute fear by the management – at the time the idea of letting the average employee have the same power as the official Marketing & PR folks to shape, effect & promote the official brand of a company was quite rare. The fear wasn’t just on the side of the management – the consultants were also a little fearful – because everyone had read some of the high profile stories of early bloggers being fired by their company for publishing “inappropriate” information.

In the end it took 6 months of persistent badgering and the creation of a corporate blogging guidelines document (well, wiki, because I had introduced those to the company too) that bloggers had to adhere to. So it was on the 28th of October 2004, that the first Conchango blog post was published. My first blog post was published a few weeks later on the 9th November 2004.

A lot has happened to the world of blogging since 2004; it crossed the chasm and changed the face of mainstream news and media. A movement appeared that thought writing full essay style blogs was too onerous and micro-blogging was created – probably the best example of this is tumblr. This notion has evolved further and the current “fittest” implementation is Twitter. Again I was an early-ish adopter – finding out at about it at a conference in Las Vegas – I started tweeting on April 30, 2007. There seems to be a growing consensus that Twitter is causing a large reduction in blogging. I actually hope Twitter is reducing the number of low quality blog posts. People who still have big ideas and big stories to tell don’t seem to be able to condense them into 140 characters.

Five years later I decided it was time for a change and this has become my new home for blogging, so update your subscriptions from my old blog if you are still interested in reading my thoughts on technology and software development. You can also follow me on Twitter, if that’s your bag.