5.17 Five+ Years Blogging

I’m an incredibly lucky guy. My life changed because I blog and when I work to engage in conversation. After 5.17+ years of blogging it should be easy to write this post. Then writing has never come easy for me. Still, when my blog buddies Jim McGee (6) and then Ross Mayfield (5) and now Ton Zijlstra (5) remembered they had a blog birthday I thought.. wow time really flies. We could grow old blogging. Actually, I believe blogging is more likely to keep you younger, more curious, more willing to learn.

Blogging has seen more than 2000 posts over five years from me, and helped me:

Build a personal network of remarkable people for me. Whether blogrolls, or what’s in my newsaggregator, more recently in Facebook or on Twitter; the collection of people that have my attention have never been more interesting or more global.

Continued to frame how I look upstream for research, for innovation, insight. The trickle of information has become a flood. My RSS tracking has moved more to terms, searches, bookmarking sites etc. I remain interested in thoughtful input from the edge. I try to find new sources.

Learn more about my readers. More recent tools are just now starting to enable me to see and understand who they are. Examples mybloglog, twitter. I want still more of this and I’m working to make what I view, who I visit etc more visible. (It probably is to Google, it may be much more useful for my friends in some aggregate form). It’s also one of the reasons I was so keen on Skype to begin. I could finally afford to talk.

Continue pushing product development boundaries for the Enterprise, for KM, for marketing & sales. My blog has been my testing ground. My templates were always done by me, widgets trialled etc. It’s getting easier and easier, and the upgrades and power one has now are more than ever.

Taught me that my best blogs are often top of mind. Don’t do the fact checking, just write and then fill in a few links. You cannot predict sometimes what’s hot. You can write to get noticed; in the end originality pays off.

My Journey (year by year approximate):

5+ years ago (2002): Nobody introduced me to blogging. I ended up with a blog because I wanted to create a dynamic website without the work I’d done in 97-2000. Radio Userland buttons on sites got me blogging. Thanks Dave Winer! I started a Radio blog. I abandoned it when I wanted something that would do more to my designs. Key was the newsaggregator. I continued to use Radio just for that for awhile. I saw it as a powerful new platform and wanted to become proficient (expert enough), and push the boundaries of the technology. I saw opportunities for KM, Organizations and Marketing.

5 years ago (2002): Called my Blog Unbound Spiral. (ideas accelerating or spiraling. and a conversation place or inquiry). I was on MT – movabletype… inspired by the wonderful original developer community that was there. (They lost that community unfortunately). Wrote about things that interested me. In many cases my blogging here still remains a mix. Back then I was interested in identity, innovation, communications, collaborative spaces, social behaviors etc. At the core I’m a strategist and marketer keenly focused on the future and new products.

4 Years ago (2003): I continued my blogging, enjoying the Conversational Blogging and its transformation to a Jazz Community, even as early as in 2003 exploring ways to put Execs on Blogging Steriods, examining Identity Circles and its implications for our digital identity.

In 2003, I also discovered Skype within a few days of their initial launch. I decided it would change the world. I felt strongly, it fit early warning indicators I’d seen for years in Scenario planning workshops I’d run. I felt “free” and “more intimate” conversations would change the world. I focused almost all my blogging on spreading the word, pushing them to new features etc. I became the “Skype evangelist”. I put skype on blogs, I got SkypeMe buttons done, argued for Voice Messaging, and they ran my “billions n billions” of minutes served for a long time.

3 Years ago(2004): I kept blogging on and off about Skype. I was also heavily into early social networks, I went through the cycle of feeling Social Networking is Broken in the form they existed, and started sharing thoughts on a Social Networking Manifesto. I was also exploring the Online Presence Spiral and Mobility. Like Skype Plug-ins, I tried them all. I developed a guide for SkypeCasting. I left behind plenty of suggestions. Some outspoken. I also began looking for more community blogging opportunities. Still I was learning the more focused you are the easier it is to influence the future. I found myself at conferences meeting face to face with people I’d connected with and read from around the world. With many of these we still today keep trying out the next new thing.

2 Years ago (2005): Actually Jan 2005 I launched SkypeJournal. Inspired by Doc Searls and Linux Journal and long before InsideFacebook or similar. We hit some big numbers for a blog. I wanted to build an independent community for Skype Developers. We reached the world with a “What’s your Skype strategy?” And I was no longer the only one writing on it or contributing to Skype Journal. It kept growing rapidly, and I found consulting came from competitors while we tried to help build a developer community. Then Skype’s sale in Oct. 2005 to eBay broke my interest and evangelistic fervor. I began looking for other pastures. My blogging on Skype Journal became a trickle. During the year I’d often posted 3 times a day. It was a go to place in a category VoIP which blogpulse showed was driven by Skype. In those days Skype Journal was right after Skype. I took the complaint calls too. (Note today SkypeJournal lives on still written by Phil Wolff and more recently by Jim Courtney.)

1 year ago (2006): I found myself on an adventure in India with a zillion hours a day startup. I though I was going with a blog agenda too. Deeply passionate about the product and opportunity I never got the opportunity to really build the community for it. The communications was well ahead of the product. Unfortunately the bugs got in the way of giving it to users. I learnt a lot about agile practices. I should have been blogging them.

Today and the last few months: Always encouraged, embraced, inspired by, driven and humbled by the trust and warm friendship of many of my early blog buddies, and many new people I find myself interacting with thru my blog, it is something I’m really relishing again. While I’d hoped to be doing a VP Brand2.0 job 18 months ago (I’d been doing bootcamps prior to that with Dina) it was fairly natural to fall back towards Brand2.0 evangelism. Unlike five years ago when I discovered blogging (companies were fearful) today they are overwhelmed by the content and increasingly exposed. Today it all starts with listening; listening to what customers say, write, do, etc. It always was. It’s just today it is explicit, travels at warp speed and isn’t something you are ever going to control.

Coming to grips with this new world is a process not a prescription. It is not achieved in a day and must be designed by the organization.

More Observations and Daily Toolkit:

I live with social media. I learn faster than you; well maybe not you if you are reading this. I hang with a group / loose network.. that learns very fast. I tend to track across a few categories. VoIP, Innovation, KM, Social Software (blogging, wikis, community), Marketing, PR, Behavior (user, etc) Strategy. I watch more small companies than I do large one. I test out stuff. At this point I am incredibly quick to see the flaws and the opportunities in what many are doing. Then I’ve done more learning than most; just by doing over years.

I just renamed my blog to “Stuart Henshall’s blog”. I’ve made sure I am both visible and fairly easy to find on the net. stuarthenshall or stuart_henshall will usually find me. I still love the idea around Unbound Spiral, however, I’m not just about ideas. I like to put winning strategies into practice. Beer wars, and coffee share wars taught me how to beat the competition. And five years of blogging has changed me too. I came into it… very much believing Kevin Kelly’s rule.. information wants to be free and the more you give…then sooner or later it will come back. I’ve given away hours and hours of my time particularly to small startups. I can look to sites, point to features and say.. that came after this blog post or a conversation with them. On that score.. it will come back it’s not clear. It certainly came back as intangibles. It hasn’t helped my wallet very much. So my learning is to be smarter and yet still push for what’s next.

Blogging, my sense of community and network has opened the opportunity for a new business model. I’m pleased that blogging has resulted in doing business together with with many of my best blogging buddies and readers. I’m convinced that the “core” of these networks no longer needs to be a buffer or barrier to rapid deployment of smart nets. I’ve talked to many others. I know that together we field better teams than the most expensive consultants. It’s cools to know you have that type of backup going into anything.

What needs to change.

I need to go to more companies with how I, Mosoci and our remarkable network can help them.

I must go back with Dina and focus Mosoci and it’s site so it is less a beta blog platform and a quicker, sharper, this is what we do. And we do a lot! And we need to expand the Mosoci circle of friends, colleagues and partners.

I still love the quote. “a small number of people can change the world”. I have the philosophy that take the square root of the number of people in your organization (that want / are interested in social media) and you can change the organization. I sense that we are closing in on the point where the blogosphere represents the square root of everyone on earth. That means we have, and will change the world.

After five years I think blogging (think outlets for self-expression, communication etc. so include all forms) makes the world a better place. The flow of communications has never been more efficient many to many. Are attention never more precious.

If you’ve read this far I appreciate it. Please leave me a comment. Challenge me in ways that I can think about going forward.

Tagged as: bloganniversary, blogbirthday, Blogging, blogiversary, brand2.0, collaboration, onlinecommunity, socialmedia, socialsoftware