The IT Skeptic celebrates five years of blogging

The first post on this blog appeared on 16th May 2006. Five years have flown by. Please allow me the indulgence of reflecting on those five years.

On the 16th I was on an airplane en route to doing the keynote for the itSMF Denmark Spring Conference (and what a great conference it was: great people, great logistics and great venue. I'm pretty sure the content was great too though since it was mostly in Danish I can't say). It was the first time I have spoken ABOUT the blog, which seemed an appropriate way to spend the birthday.

I'm happy to say that the IT Skeptic "brand" has matured to the point where I get such invitations. I'm extremely grateful to those who do the inviting. So far they have all been in wonderful locations. More importantly I see them as a validation of all the hard work of 1000 posts. Right now I'm writing this from Oslo Airport where I'm finishing a three day "celebratory" holiday spent wandering Scandinavia on trains. Well there have to be some rewards and money clearly isn't one of them.

On that note I'm still totally reliant on old-fashioned consulting in Wellington to keep my son in school and the bank out of my house. Those of you who have delusions of potential internet wealth I urge you to read my post Internet I gave you all the best years of my life. I don't do this for the money.

So I must do it for the gratification and I get that in plenty. Ego gratification, intellectual stimulation, good fun... all the selfish rewards. Just as important are the altruistic rewards:

  • sharing information
  • stimulating debate - testing that everyone can really justify their position, and perhaps changing a few
  • providing a forum for people far more worthy of a voice than me
  • knowing I've influenced all the well-meaning people driving ITSM to do a little better when standards slip or efforts are misguided
  • exposing those who really aren't acting in the interests of anyone but themselves
  • standing up for the consumers of ITSM when no-one else will give them a voice
  • correcting fuzzy or deluded thinking wherever I find it
  • floating a few new ideas

There were times I got despondent or ran out of steam so I'm glad I'm still here. The sole reason is all the great support I've had from you the readers. I'm having so much fun that maybe together we'll go another five years

Comments

Keep up the good work

Keep up the good work - your words are important!

Congratulations

Five years is a lot of time. Few people have the persistence to go on for that long and still say meaningful things. I salute you and look forward to new insightful posts in the future.

the best may be yet to come...

Skep,

Five years? Ever since we came out of Foundation Class, put 90 pounds of air in the tires and stepped on the accelerator it's been a wild ride, and I have enjoyed the banter with you and your readers.....

but now that we've made it past the End of the World, I suspect we'll be going into overdrive.... virtual service infrastructures, mysterious cloud computing, and value networks with wicked organizational and technical complexity. We're entering bat country my friend.

Blog on.

John M. Worthington
MyServiceMonitor, LLC

Congratulations!

First and foremost - Thank you.
And, congratulations.

Cary

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