It's time to close this chapter of my blog and begin the next one. Here I'd just like to thank Steve Gillmor for bringing me to InfoWorld on a mission to explore the blog medium and to reinvent publishing. And I'd like to thank InfoWorld for granting me extraordinary freedom to pursue that mission. I think I've used that freedom well, and made good progress in the right direction. But along the way my interests broadened beyond InfoWorld's enterprise IT charter, and I began to overstay my welcome. Take a look at this page for example. Scroll to the bottom and you will see that one of these things is not like the other. A video of a lawnmower? What's up with that?
To me it's all part of a pattern. I use commonly-available technologies in unexpected ways to tell stories that make connections, distill experience, and transmit knowledge. Jay Cross nailed the reason on his blog the other day: I'm "infected with Stewart Brand's memes." Of course, most of us who hang out on the leading edge of technology are similarly infected. So I wind up preaching to the choir. That's fine, and I'll keep on doing it so long as we all find it worthwhile, but I also aim to connect with a lot of people on the trailing edge, many of whom have yet to subscribe to an RSS feed, publish a professionally-oriented blog, or compose a new service by stitching URLs together. I hope that Microsoft will help me to take these ideas to the world in a big way to the benefit of all concerned. According to the comment thread attached to my announcement, many of you agree. So, let's do the experiment.