New Starts and Looking Forward

Right. No more excuses. There are only so many times I can sharpen and rearrange my metaphorical pencils.

This is my first blog post for 2012. Or, to put it another way, my fifth blog post ever.

It’s dedicated to the weekly blogging club which Dan Slee suggested setting up to encourage lapsed bloggers to get back in to the blogging habit. I think it was originally intended for #localgov, but has expanded into a blogging club for people in the UK working in or with public, charitable or voluntary organisations. The idea is that blog-clubbers post something once a week – on anything that takes their fancy – and that they do so by midday on Thursday, using the hashtag: #weeklyblogclub

As I write, two excellent posts have already been submitted by Sarah Lay and Louise Brown, and Janet Davis has dedicated a page on her blog to #weeklyblogclub. I’m a bit anxious as, unlike me, they obviously know what they are doing. That said, a bit of the magic blog dust might just rub off on to me if I stick with it.

I’m using the ‘optional theme’ for this week, as suggested earlier today by @weeklyblogclub

I mentioned that this is my first post this year, and that I have blogged four times previously. All four were in December 2011, and three quarters of those were on New Year’s Eve.

I don’t really count one of them as it’s just me grumbling about Twitter being down “for maintenance”. Twitter’s collapse came at the point I had finally plucked up enough courage to write something – anything at all – and Twitter was my chosen subject. According to The Tokyo Times it “coincided with midnight celebrations in Japan, when people were sending more than 16,000 tweets per second”. So at least there was a good reason.

I’m glad I wasn’t completely put off – some people actually seem to have read one of my earlier posts about Twitter tools and found it useful. Several have even suggested some more tools that I’d never heard of. So I’ve ended up learning something as a result of sharing, which is nice.

I think the point I’m trying to make is that blogging is my new start for 2012 (or at least one of my new starts). I’m very conscious that what the inexperienced me writes here will still be around when the more experienced me looks back at it, and I will probably cringe. But I can live with that as long as I’ve learned along the way.

I really hope that you find some of my posts worth reading and I’m looking forward to many conversations with you.