I started writing Work Matters in June 2006. Diego Rodriguez (of Metacool fame) and I were teaching a class called Creating Infectious Action, and Diego convinced me that — if I was interested in infectious action — I ought to start blogging. Diego also correctly pointed out that I liked to write and seemed to have a short attention span, and thus was well-suited to blogging (an accurate observation). I also got great early encouragement from Guy Kawasaki, Todd Sattersten, Kent Blumberg, and Gretchen Rubin. My first post (more accurately my second post, I think I deleted the very first one, which was just a short welcome) was called Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal and was a response to an article that questioned the value of brainstorming — I was motivated to write it because academic researchers have taken such a narrow view of what "brainstorming effectiveness" means that it reflects severe ignorance of how and why brainstorming is used by real experts in real organizations.
I knew that Work Matters was getting close to a million page views, but didn't expect it to happen so fast as this blog averages about 800 page views a day, but yesterday's post on my trip to Singapore and suspect HR assumptions apparently struck a nerve aa almost 5000 people visited yesterday (the most ever, I think). To be precise, Typepad statistics indicate that Work Matters has as of this moment 768 posts, 2863 comments (thank you!), an average of 822.60 page views per day (thank you), and a total of 1002748 lifetime page views.
I would like to thank everyone who has visited and commented on this blog and helped me in hundreds of other ways. But I would especially like to thank a few readers out there — especially Rick — who have figured out that I am prone to producing typos and often unable to see them, and for taking the time to point them out.
I am not completely sure why I keep doing
this, but it is fun, I have learned an enormous amount from the
comments that people post and email me, and as 55 year-old guy with an
increasingly bad memory, it is a great place to store all sorts of
stuff that many readers aren't interested in but help me (like the list
of 150 or so books that I like). Who knows how long I will keep doing this, but for now, I am still enjoying it a lot.