Corporate Blogging Goes Mainstream – Happy Bloggiversary elsua!

Remember when people used to claim that blogs are dead and how more and more social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the like, were taking over our social activities both inside and outside of the firewall? Well, it looks like the trend may be turning around, as I have mentioned elsewhere on the blog some time ago, and it seems that corporate blogging is becoming more and more relevant by the day within the corporate world and beyond. Now, I don’t expect this blog entry to become, once again, another metablogging article on detailing why blogging is good and why it’s something worth while looking into; that’s something I’m about to get started working on with both the wonderful Megan Murray and the insightful Bertrand Duperrin. We will be sharing that piece of work shortly… Not to worry. What I wanted to do with this entry today though was to share a little bit of a celebration, since i realised, earlier on this week, how I have missed both of my bloggiversaries with my internal and external blogs, respectively. Ouchie!

Yes, that’s right! Way back, in 2005, on October 10th, I started this external blog over here to talk and share some further insights on the stuff I was learning related to Social Computing within the Enterprise, along with KM, Communities, Learning and a bunch of other topics. I guess it is just too bad I missed the 5th year bloggiversary on what it could have been a rather special date: 10-10-10, marking that same 5th anniversary! Oh, well, I guess that’s what happens when you are having fun and time flies without you noticing it much really! hehe

Over that period of time I have been having a couple of blogging breaks, here and there, just coming back from perhaps one of the longest I can remember. But in between, I have been putting together 1,169 blog posts, having received 3,460 comments so far, which I guess is not too bad either! It gets even more interesting though, when I realised I had missed this bloggiversary that I, too, missed the one from my internal corporate blog, which I got started back on December 3rd in 2003, and where I have already accumulated 2,747 blog entries with 6,466 comments, which, now that I come to think about it, is *huge*, for something that I started more or less as an experiment to see where it would take me in my journey to learn more about social software, social networking and blogging in particular.

All in all, it means that elsua has now been blogging for over 7 years, with an accumulated total number of 3,916 blog posts and 9,926 comments altogether, averaging, 559 blog posts per year, which, I suppose, makes up a pretty good convincing case of what blogging in general has meant for me all along: an indispensable knowledge sharing tool with which to share my views, my opinions, my key learnings, a few other insights, a few lessons learned, in short, my passion with all of you folks out there wanting to listen to my ramblings around all of these topics related to KM, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Learning and Communities. Thanks ever so much for being there all along and for sticking around! It’s meant a lot to me over the course of the last few years and hope we can make together another 7 & 5 years, respectively, blogging away!

You may remember how in the past I have mentioned how blogging is perhaps one of the most powerful and compelling Personal Knowledge Management, a.k.a. PKM, tools available out there nowadays. Something that I have always agreed with two of my favourite KM Bloggers: Bill Ives and Harold Jarche. And that’s exactly how I feel about my own blogging, whether internal or external. That opportunity to have a voice, an opinion, on whatever the subject matter, and share your knowledge and experience about it is priceless! No matter what! No matter how many social networking tools you use, there will always be a place for your blog as part of your personal brand. You may blog at a rather specific date or time of the day, or perhaps blog every so often, if you are so inclined. The interesting thing though is to always come back to the blog.

It will still be there when everything else is gone! It will be there when you delete your Facebook account, when you decide you no longer need to make use of LinkedIn, or when you find out Twitter has done something with your networks in there that you don’t feel very comfortable with anymore, etc. etc.. Yes, your own personal blog will still be there! That’s why, to me, whether things have continued to be rather busy and hectic or not, or whether I make, more or less, continued use of social networking tools, I always try to make time to drop by the blog and share an insight or two. Probably, I didn’t succeed very well in the last blogging break I took, since I didn’t manage to post much. Yet, here I am, about to enjoy my last working day for this year and prepare for an upcoming long, extended holiday break and already thinking of ramping up my blogging frequency quite a bit to catch up with everything that I have been wanting to talk about or share some thoughts about what I have been exposed to over the last few weeks.

Blogging, to me, has become my own personal learning space (As my good friend, Amalio Rey, would probably have put it as well) with an opportunity for everyone else to dive in and engage in the conversation(s) I may have started then and perhaps make them even richer. Or just, basically, move on. It’s become my own exhaust valve at times, and, as such, somehow I feel, right now, that it’s about to explode with the several dozens of articles I would want to share across. So I better keep up! The interesting thing about corporate blogging that I have always really looked forward to is, eventually, applying a key concept that I have been exploring for a while now through other social networking tools, mainly, activity streams, but which could be equally accurate for blogging as well, which is that one of narrating your work (That Dave Winer first coined a few years back and blogged extensively on it as well at a later time) or nowadays “Observable Work” (#owork) that other incredibly smart folks like Jim McGee, Brian Tullis and Greg Lloyd have been talking about lately.

Indeed, there are probably very few social tools out there that would be such a perfect candidate for observable work other than blogging; it provides you with that opportunity to share your thoughts, to have an opinion, a voice on how things are going around you, your projects, tasks or initiatives you have been working on, teams / networks / communities you have interacted with, new experiences you would want to annotate down, so you don’t forget key learnings you can apply at a later time, new opportunities to connect with other people who you share a common passion or interest with for a particular topic; in short, what I have mentioned above as my own Personal Knowledge Sharing (a.k.a. PKS) system that one has become so dependent on it that, when you are not blogging, you feel that something is missing; like an integral part of you is not there anymore, like you are naked!

That’s why I am really looking forward to the holidays, amongst several other things, of course; because it would give me an opportunity to come back to this blog properly, as I feel it deserves, because all along I have always acknowledged that if it weren’t for this blog, and my internal one, too!, I would have never made it this far inside the company I work for: IBM. I would have probably left a few years back already, but I guess my blogs had something else to say, because the last 3 major projects I have been working on in the last 7 years have always come along my way thanks to my blogging, thanks to that inner urge of wanting to share that passion across, because, blogging, too, can help you land, eventually, in your dream job.

Still think that corporate blogging doesn’t have a place within the social networking tools landscape? … You may need to think again!

Happy bloggiversaries elsua!!