Eight Years of Blogging

I posted my first blog on August 22, 2002. So, I’ve been blogging away for eight years now. My first blog was The Innovation Roadmap Travelogue. This was done in junction with a business effort called The Innovation Roadmap. The travelogue theme was the result of the thought that innovation is a journey and that I would report on my observations along that journey. In 2004 I started the Innovation Commons Network. It was an open collaborative effort to develop the principles of an innovation commons. Thirty five people joined in this collaborative blog. I realized that I read a lot and usually wrote book summaries and analyses for my own use, and in 2005 I decided to share these with the public in The Illuminated Innovant. In 2005 Anne Durrum Robinson died and I set up a blog to commemorate her life. Five people contributed to Anne Durrum Robinson . I used Blogger for all of these blogs.

I starting blogging as a part of my business effort but quickly switched to trying to add to the commons. When I became aware of Ning, I decided to switch to a social networking model that would include a blog. In September of 2008 I started Insights-Intelligence–Innovation using the Ning platform. One hundred forty six people joined this collaboration.

The switch to the Ning turned out to be a very bad decision for me. I thought that Ning was a member of open web movement. That turned out to be false. Less than two years into my dark age with Ning, Ning stopped making the platform available for free seriously impacting me, but also damaging the noosphere. I called it the dark age because there is nothing left. No history. Ning even prevented (apparently) the Internet Archive from archiving the content of the networks. (Wayback Machine). It’s as though two years of collaborative effort never existed.

I decided to return to the Blogger platform that I was familiar with, and created Insights-Foresight. This is now a personal blog where I will follow my own interests. I have eschewed a collaboration for the time being. Blogger is still free and is now owned by Google. I am wary of Google as it expands its reach and scope, so I don’t know if I can trust it or not. (By the way, Google is an it, not a person.) I was able to capture all the blog content manually from Ning this summer before Ning offered belatedly tools to export content from their platform. I also exported all the pertinent content from my other blogs on Blogger and added that content to the new blog with publication dates the same as the original material. In the meantime, I am exploring other platforms for collaborative efforts.

Over the eight years of blogging I have posted 553 entries. Activity has varied with time as I tried to find the best way to use blogging for myself, my business and the noosphere many are trying to create.

I tend to write about a lot of topics, but as you can see below, the subjects have been highly focused on innovation, commons, future and complexity.

I am disappointed with readership of this blog (only 128 visits over the last month) because I think I have a lot to share. However, I will continue to post to the noosphere, and hopefully increasing the value of the commons.