Hi. I am back in the blogosphere, after a break of a few months. For those who may have thought that I am one of those trendy guys that see blogging as ‘so much 2007…’ and therefore have moved to twitter or ‘online streaming’, no, not at all. Although I do have a twitter account, I am not yet accustomed to using it.
Recently I saw some reports about abandoned blogs. The New York Times wrote that, ‘According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.’
I do not fit in this category yet, because my last post was on August 9, so that is 110 days ago.
Well, anyway, I am now starting up again. In the meantime, at The Broker website we have seen quite a lot of blogging. In the few months of my absence in the blogosphere, we have done a lot of group and conference blogs, for example from the DSA conference in Belfast, the conference about knowledge democracy in Leiden, and from the opening of a new centre of excellence about the communication of sustainable social change at the University of Massachusetts. First time Broker resident blogger Thea Hilhorst is still going strong, and we have new residential bloggers Janelle Ward about social media and cartoonist Quique. And, recently and still running, we had a discussion blog about Europe’s international role and about the financial crisis.
And, last but not least, there is quite some discussion going on already at the pre-conference blog about Strategy and complexity.
There is one special reason for this restart: I have stopped writing the bimonthly editorial on page 3 of the Broker magazine. Some may be happy with that, others have told or emailed me that they miss some ‘guidance’ through every issue. That is why I have decided to pick up blogging again, and dedicate some of the posts to explain why we have chosen the specific topics and the angles in the articles.