7 days in

Turns out writing a post every working day is hard. I know this, but doing so again has certainly reminded me of the fact. I am in awe of people that can keep posting thoughtful work, day after day, year after year. Our friend The Gentle Author for example is a peerless chronicler of London life in a time of great change.

Anyone that follows me knows that I spend a lot of time on Twitter. I don’t feel bad about that. Back in 2004 I worried some that I spent too much time blogging, but eventually realised that because blogging is a research tool, a publishing tool, a sales and marketing tool, a great way to foster community, and a lot of fun I should just get on with it. RedMonk made its name as a research firm that jumped in quickly with new media approaches. When Twitter became part of the mix, RedMonk was on it early. Many of the same benefits that blogging had provided also accrued – Twitter is many things, but it is not a waste of time. Today pretty much the entire industry analyst business is on the social network too. Having immediate feedback from the smartest people in the world is not surprisingly rather useful in the research business. With nearly 22k followers, many of whom are practitioners, if I have a question about a new technology I can invariably find someone with experience of the tooling or method.

Yet there is no doubt my long-form publishing has declined over time, in quantity, and I am afraid, in quality too, as i have done more and more in 140 characters. Time spent running a developer event space, while fun and incredibly useful in building my knowledge base and network, also negatively impacted on my ability to write in longer form. I am not running the space any more, but I hadn’t managed to get back to blogging.

I decided a few days back that I needed to change that. To treat writing posts like exercise in fact, like the press ups I do every morning. To remake that commitment to myself and my community. It’s not always going to be easy to write something of value – I always have more ideas than I can capture. But Monkchips the blog is back. I hope that you’re enjoying it. Let’s see how we do, shall we? Please do comment if you find anything interesting, if you agree or disagree.