We were asked to introduce ourselves so here goes. I first learned about blogs when I left a large consulting company in March 2004. Blogs had been under my radar screen up until then. I had been involved with implementing enterprise knowledge management systems and portals for large organizations since the early 90s. Prior to that I was involved in technology-based learning systems beginning in the early 80s. In the 70s I was an academic, a psychologist who did research on the effects of media on cognition and learning. Now in March 04 I found the possibilities for blogs, as a part of the next wave of knowledge management and learning systems, very exciting to me. Actually, the reverse has become true, as blogs are now much bigger than KM and Enterprise 2.0 could totally transform KM.

I started my blog, Portals and KM, in May 04 as part of background for an article on blogs for Portals Magazine. I live in Cambridge, MA and joined the Thursday blog discussions initially led by Dave Winer at the Berkman Center. I am became hooked and wrote a book on business uses of blogs with Amanda Watlington. I started interviewing business bloggers for the book and kept going until my co-author said it was time to stop at 70. The conversations were great and it was too addictive. Jim McGee and Kathleen Gilroy in our FAST Forward blogging group were part of this, as were an artist, a winery owner, a restaurant owner, a maker of wooden signs, and many other businesses and non-profits.

In the beginning, my blog covered knowledge management and multiple uses of blogs and now it also looks at web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0, primarily but not exclusively, from a business perspective. I can see the writing has evolved from blogs as novelty to blogs as mainstream. Writing the blog has become part of my routine and many new relationships have come through it. For the last two years I have felt the need to have a post every day, or should I say the compulsion, but advance posting helps. It has also changed my professional orientation and I speak a lot on blogs, and now web 2.0, to a diverse variety of groups and find this energizing. I also consult with clients on these topics through several partnerships

I started writing about music and food in my blog on the weekends, and now art. This has opened up a new set of people to meet through my blog. Then I added blogging about my friends’ favorite places to eat in their cities to my weekend writing, and added some of my own. I was once asked why do this when there are so many food sites. Here is my response, Restaurant Reviews – Why I Blog Them. It is part of my feeling toward the blog as a personal knowledge management. Almost anything I really want to remember, and possibly share, on the work side or the entertainment side goes into my blog. Recently, I reengaged in creating art, mostly charcoal and ink drawings for now, and plan to start an art blog in 07.