In the Boulder County Business Report, a local paper, the current issue lists bloggers in the area. (No, I wasn’t on the list, although I do have a higher number of average visitors per day than others on the list.  Hey, you can’t be everywhere all the time.)

One of the blogger names caught my eye, someone I worked for over ten years ago, at U S WEST.  This manager has since moved on to several startups and is now a respected thinker in the area of network security and software convergence. In reading his posts (which are steeped in technical slang and is Greek to even me, with a background in high-tech), I wondered about what people did before blogs.

We all have ideas and opinions on things we are passionate about. Would this manager have walked down the hall and had a 20-minute discussion with a colleague? Or would his advocacy and musings in the technical arena have come out inappropriately in a meeting about project status? Or been squashed all together, only to show up in a nighttime dream? 

What happened to all of our original (or maybe not so original) thoughts before blogging became mainstream? 

Seth Godin speaks to this aspect of blogging–as just one original thought turned into a post enhanced by another post and another and another. And hey, I mused about this before reading Seth’s post. Yes, you can have original thoughts that are enhanced by someone else’s original thoughts, in parallel.

I’m grateful to be blogging, to have a place to explore and create more, out of fuzzy inklings and half formed phrases in my head.