This blog is an introspective look at the blogging experience. Last Friday I posted my 100^th blog post. I have written one every work day and they have been posted every day except once when my wife just forgot to post it.

The process of writing a blog every day is a really good exercise for somebody like me. We have so many different clients at CCG and we get pulled into so many different business situations with different issues that I find that I know a little bit about almost everything in the telecom industry. Some things I know a whole lot about, but on many topics I feel I am a thousand miles wide and an inch deep, meaning I know the basics about a topic, but there is much more that I can learn.

So writing this blog has been a learning opportunity for me. I have read books, read thousands of web articles, scoured Wikipedia and talked to people who I consider to be experts. When I write about most of the topics I end up knowing more than when I started, and for a consultant that is not a bad thing.

Not all of my blog posts are factual and some are just my opinion. When I first started the blog I tried to avoid opinion pieces, but then I came to realize that I have strong opinions about some of the things going on in the industry and I decided to let my opinions out of the box. This has also been a learning process for me, because before I can write an opinion piece I still need to think about the topic and do research, and I have found myself modifying my opinion a few times during this process. Certainly the act of thinking deeply about any topic is a healthy mental exercise and I actually look forward to the writing and thinking time.

After I had written 20 blogs I had a fear that I was going to run out of topics. I look around the industry and I don’t see anybody else writing daily blogs, and perhaps I am nuts to try to do so. A lot of industry blogs have posted a dozen entries in the time where I have done 100. I still don’t know exactly what that means, because in daily life I am not overly loquacious, but I seem to not lack words when I write. There may come a day where I struggle to find topics, and if that happens I will slow down. But there is so much going on in this industry that I just don’t see that happening for a while.

I am also a bit surprised by where the blog has taken me. I have spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about the future of the industry. The industry is undergoing more changes right now at a faster pace than ever. Companies are changing, technology is changing and products are changing. Trying to figure out where this is all headed is an interesting exercise. I am sure I going to be wrong about a lot of my predictions, but right about others. Certainly there will be new inventions that will change the landscape in ways we can’t imagine today and that will trump any current predictions. As an example, a decade ago it would have been nearly impossible to predict the impact of social media and there will be the new equivalents to Facebook coming.

I find the Internet of Things to be the most interesting of change of all. The idea of filling our environment with little sensors and tiny computers to give us a different interface with our environment is fascinating and exciting. I have read science fiction books since I was a pre-teen and it is amazing to see us on the cusp of so many of the things predicted in that genre.

I have found myself writing about the cable industry a lot more than I expected, but that is where all of the action is happening. I don’t think anybody expects a future where households buy the huge bundle of channels in the same way they do today. There are too many market forces pushing on the industry to change. But I’m not sure anybody really knows where it will end up in a decade.

I thank my readers for dipping in from time to time to see what I have to say. My volume of readers had grown continually and just watching the blog tools is an interesting thing to do. I can see how many visitors come to my blog each day, and I know how many articles they read (but not who they are). One thing I know now for sure is that the telecom industry shuts down on Friday afternoons and very few people read the blog then.

This is a blog for telecom carriers and it is meeting all of the goals I originally established. It’s making me stay current. It’s helping me understand the issues in the industry. It’s letting me think about the future of the industry and then turning around and making that process relevant to my friends and clients. So, at least for now, I see the blog continuing, so stay tuned.