Happy Turbo Blogging Anniversary To Me

A quick blogger’s note: I just realized today is the seventh anniversary of the Turbo blog.  I “officially” started blogging on July 11, 2005 with a post entitled “Standing Up in the Earthquake.”

It started thus:

Here’s the deal: I’m your new IBM blogger. I know your purchase order didn’t mention anything about getting a blogger, but one of our recent market research studies indicated that you wanted one, and I happened to be standing in a hallway in Armonk with a red target painted on my forehead. 

And yet, even as I was whimsical about this new pursuit, I also took seriously (if jokingly) the potential implications of somehow crossing a line somewhere (remember this was still the early days when peeps were regularly getting fired because of what they were blogging):

As for my day job, you can read my bio above, and I’ll likely be writing more about what I do at IBM here in future posts. However, I keep pretty current on the Blogosphere, and the average life expectancy of the corporate blogger has recently dwindled close to that of the average fruit fly. I figure that now that I’ve started blogging, I’m out of here within the next few hours. 

It seems a few hours has quickly evolved into seven years.

There are a lot of great things about having made this investment in time and energy, but I’m realizing quickly that the best thing about having done this is that I have a record of musings from those past seven years, observations about everything from golf to economics to the business of technology and topics beyond.

Though I was going out on a bit of a limb when I started, I also recognized the blog could potentially create a wealth of other new opportunities.  Opportunities to have my posts syndicated to other vehicles (which it has), opportunities to meet new people (which it did), and even opportunities to travel to far away lands and write about what I saw (which it also did).

But mostly, it gave me the opportunity to exercise my God-given talent of writing, a skill for which I am and have always been most grateful and for which this blog has given me a steady platform for its practice.

So happy blogging anniversary to me…and if you’re still reading this, thank you for sticking around.