I wrote the very first post on our very first blog on 14 July 2005. It's been enormously satisfying ever since, but time moves on and now I'm striking out on my own blog - Unusual Attitude - still under the Flight umbrella of course.
When we set up this blog back in 2005 it seemed an incredibly daring thing for us to do. Flight is ultimately part of one of the world's major publishers - Reed Elsevier - and we're highly answerable for what we publish, internally and to the world. You can barely imagine the agonising that went on inside the company as we contemplated whether anything as risky as this new blog stuff was a rational thing for us to do.
Well, we did it. And everyone else did too of course. It's been successful in terms of attracting visitors and a life-enhancing experience for the journalists who've most enthusiastically contributed. I've been told by at least two members of my loyal community of fans that I'm not competent to hold down my job - and even that was quite invigorating.
But we learned something about multi-authored blogs. Back then it was a great way of getting the thing off the ground because it meant that busy writers didn't have to contribute every day, as there was generally at least someone who would. But the flipside is that when everyone is busy then nobody is worried enough about looking after the blog that day. And a neglected blog is a dead blog as we all know.
So you'll have seen my colleagues Graham Warwick, Steve Trimble and Rob Coppinger all now blogging individually and with great discipline. I'm joining them - please come and take a look.
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