24 years later

In 2001, in a world still reeling from the events of 9/11, and still personally suffering the aftershocks of my Dad’s death a few days later, I put finger to keyboard and typed my first blog post. It was one of the most consequential decisions of my life. It changed the entire direction of my career. I would not be a university lecturer, nor a digital trainer, nor a consultant, if it hadn’t been for that decision.

The post itself is, as the young folks say, cringe.

But I’ll never forget that moment of typing something I wanted to write, and pressing publish, and seeing it online for the world to read. Every single thing I’d published since my student days had been through layers of editors, deciding what I could and couldn’t write. The magazine I was working for had a website, but you could only “push to live” – publish – twice a day. Oh, and us print folks weren’t allowed anywhere near it.

The power of one click publishing

And that dawning realisation that I was using a tool which had more publishing power than the big, expensive website we were charging people for, was dizzying. I love publishing, and have done since my first photos were published in my school magazine a decade or so before. That I could do it myself, that I could choose what I wrote, and have it stand or fall by its own quality was, frankly, intoxicating.

It would change my life. And, as I wrote last week, that same technology would change the world.

Admittedly, it wasn’t this blog – that would follow 16 months later. But I couldn’t let the day slip by without marking the occasion, even if my wife is mocking me mercilessly for doing so. But I’m only a year away from having blogged for a quarter of a century. That’s almost incomprehensible. My Dad died when I was 29. In five years, blogging will have been part of my life longer than my father was.

It will, probably, be the thing that defines my working life more than anything else. And, you know what? I can live with that.