I was sure I will never write a blog

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It has been about 13 years ago, that a good friend of mine tried to persuade me to get myself an email account in order to communicate with her in some other part of Europe. It was 1994, I was 20 and I had just started my studies in computer science in multimedia. Even though I signed up for one of the most innovate studies existing in Europe at that time, I had somehow a strong hesitation when it came to new tools which did not immediately reveal their usability to me. So it took my friend about 6 months until I finally approached our university's IT admin to set up my account. Since then roughly about 10,000 emails have left my outbox and today of course I could not live without emails anymore.

But somehow, this inner resistance regarding new fancy-but-senseless tools remained to a certain extent. So all the hype about blogs and Web 2.0 left me extraordinary unimpressed. In fact, I considered most of the blogs I have seen in the early days to be stunningly irrelevant, boring and basically a waste of time. Who the heck should keep track of all the stuff which is written out there and how on earth should one filter the relevant needles in the haystack? I decided to leave this to the professionals, trusting that journalists would provide me with filtered, condensed and up-to-date destillations of blog articles whenever there was actually something important posted in the world out there. As far as I was concerned, I had better things to do.

And well, I still have of course. Intrestingly enough however, today I ended up working in Knowledge Management at the United Nations Volunteers, so I cannot avoid to concern myself with any tools and ideas which support knowlede sharing and exchange. And therefore - after quite a long time in which I tried to ignore that I actually SHOULD concern myself with Web 2.0 tools for professional reasons - the wave finally broke over me... After participating in a 3-days workshop of the Knowledge Management for Development Network in Zeist, Netherlands this week (http://www.km4dev.org/) and especially some lengthy discussions with Christian Kreutz who shared on our train ride back to Germany his experience about setting up his own blog after a similar time of resistance (http://www.crisscrossed.net/), I decided to start my own. Just to see what will develop out of it...

Comments

Christian said…
Dear Johannes, congratulation for your decision and I am sure you will not regret your decision to start a blog. :-) I am going to subscribe to yours right now. It is really amazing how this KM4DEV workshop make me think about a lot of things. Looking forward to continue our discussions online and offline! Best regards Christian
23 June 2007 at 16:44
Michelle Stryk said…
Johannes,

Do not resist the force because eventually you're bound to succumb to it. :-)
26 June 2007 at 08:03
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