20 years of blogging: what it has been for, what I have learned, what has changed, what remains

I almost missed the date, and at one point I even thought that this anniversary was last year. But it was indeed on May 14, 2005, that I published the first article on this blog.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to do with this date, knowing that anniversaries, like all other imposed celebrations such as the end-of-year holidays, are not really my cup of tea.

But several months ago, while having coffee with a loyal reader who wanted to meet me “in real life,” we brought up the subject in conversation and he convinced me not to let the opportunity pass. After all, with LinkedIn overflowing with narcissistic posts that reek of navel-gazing to the point of nausea, I’m entitled to my two minutes of public introspection once every 20 years.

It’s not just 20 years of writing, it’s a much richer experience and a lot of things learned.
When I started this blog in 2005, there were no social networks, no podcasts, no generative AI to suggest drafts. Just a keyboard, a desire to take a step back, and the intuition that writing could help me think better about work.

Today, when everything seems to be moving faster, summarized in bullet points or viral posts, I wanted to mark this moment. A short pause to take stock: of what these 20 years of writing have taught me, of the place this blog has taken in my journey, and of the reasons why I continue.

20 years, really?

This blog was originally the result of my curiosity and the geek in me.

The media was starting to talk about the blogging phenomenon, and I wanted to see what it was all about. I think what interested me most was setting it up and getting my hands dirty to see what it was like.

A few years earlier, I had launched a personal website based on the same principle, which I had developed myself with a real back office and a database, at the cost of a lot of hard work, but I wasn’t unhappy about moving on to something more polished and professional.

Once the site was up and running, I was very pleased with myself, but the question arose of what to do with it. The idea of doing nothing with it and just enjoying the satisfaction of having set it up appealed to me, but in the end I decided that since no one was interested in my life (and anyway, at the time it wasn’t fashionable to talk about your life in the hope of becoming famous and attracting brands), I would talk about my interests and professional activities, namely management and HR.

At the time, it was WordPress 1.0, the self-hosted alternative was called Dotclear, the trendy platform was Typepad, Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist, there were only a few French people on LinkedIn, and Viaduc, which would later become Viadeo, was the leader in professional networking in France with Alain Lefebvre’s 6nergies.

It was a different era, full of amateurism, DIY, carefreeness, and kindness. 

But to be honest, I was convinced that it wouldn’t last and that I would get bored with my little personal media outlet before winter. 

Wrong: 20 years and 2,771 posts later, I’m still here, despite two breaks due to a bit of weariness.

And, to my great surprise, I’m more here than ever.

What 20 years of writing have taught me

If one thing is certain, it’s that without this blog, I wouldn’t have had the same career. I’m not talking about success, but about trajectory.

I started out in my core areas of management, HR, and collaboration. Through reading and interacting with other bloggers, the tech side eventually emerged, and it was thanks to this blog (or because of it) that I made a career shift into this field.

Over time, and through the topics I was called upon to cover in my professional life, my editorial line gradually broadened to include subjects that took root and stayed, while others were much more fleeting.

But this blog has had one virtue: it has allowed me to think out loud, connect ideas, learn (a lot) through the exchanges and comments it generated, and refine my thinking. It’s been a kind of laboratory for my thoughts. I am convinced that without it, I would have remained more vertical, in my silo, without really seeking to take an interest in what was going on around me, and I would have missed out on many things and people.

In a way, it also taught me a lot about myself by allowing me to explore new areas without constraints, by giving me the right to make mistakes (the best way to test your ideas is to share them), and in the end, I think it helped me to become the person I am today and to assert my ideas, my convictions, and my positions.

This weekend, just for fun, I fed ChatGPT an extract of all the URLs of my articles so it could tell me how it saw me through my writing. Narcissism, you got me there…

Well, it had a bit of trouble, so I limited myself to the last 10 years, which meant it missed my “Enterprise 2.0” era, which was the subject that really boosted my reputation.

Here’s what it said (this is the only AI-generated text you’ll see here).

“Here are the key ideas and dominant editorial themes that emerge from a representative sample and overall analysis of your corpus:

I then asked him who I was as an author, to which he replied:

JI must admit that I really like the concept of “architect of modern working conditions, at the crossroads of people, operations, and technology.”

But I would be very curious to know what you think about all this.

What blogging has changed for me

I cannot stress enough the importance ofhaving your own space where you are only accountable to yourself, where you are the sole editor, where you are not subject to the dictatorship of algorithms and, above all, where you retain ownership of your work. I can’t thank my friend Michelle Blanc enough for telling me one day, “Your writing is your property and your blog is your home. Never give it to a platform that could disappear overnight or take it for itself. Share links, but don’t give away your writing.”

This forced me to discipline myself and impose a routine. Keeping up the pace isn’t always easy, but you also need ideas. I already had a culture of keeping up with current events, which blogging forced me to reinforce and even industrialize, and I’ve come to appreciate the benefits in many areas.

It’s also interesting to see how far you’ve come by rereading old articles, to tell yourself that sometimes you had the right vision and understood everything before everyone else, and that, on the contrary, sometimes you missed something. But that’s how it is when you deal with so-called emerging topics: you break new ground, you try to project yourself, to explain, to popularize, sometimes you get it right, sometimes less so, but at least you try and others benefit from it.

I also sometimes smile when I reread old articles and realize that the style is much less professional and doesn’t suit me at all. But you have to put yourself back in the context of the time: it was a new medium, we were trying to find a style, and everyone was feeling their way to find their path and their voice.

I know people who have deleted much of their history, but I refuse to do so: I accept it and it shows how far I’ve come.

I can also congratulate myself for having quickly launched an English version. There’s nothing better for improving your language skills than writing long texts in that language almost every day.

This also had another benefit: it opened me up to a new readership and allowed me to develop a truly international network of peers.

This had another corollary: the opportunity to speak at numerous conferences in Europe and North America, meet wonderful and interesting people, and even win a few awards: Best Enterprise 2.0 Thought Leader at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Best HR Blog by the ANDRH, ranked among the 100 people who are advancing the French web by 01.net…

End of the narcissistic sequence.

But perhaps the greatest satisfaction I get from this blog is that it has allowed me to meet a host of interesting, passionate professionals, many of whom have become friends, even though, to my great regret, many have since hung up their pens.

Thank you to Anthony Poncier, Luis Suarez, Susan Scrupsky, Sameer Patel, Claude Malaison, Michelle Blanc, Emmanuele Quintarelli, Rachel Happe, Oscar Berg, Jacques Froissant, Andrew McAfee, Fred Cavazza, Damien Guinet, brothers Carlos and Manuel Diaz, Jon Husband, Stowe Boyd, Richard Menneveux, and anyone else I may have forgotten, for all the exchanges and moments we shared.

And finally, I won’t forget the number of professional opportunities and clients that this blog has brought me.

What now? Is it still relevant to continue writing in 2025?

This is a question I am often asked, and one that I ask myself as well.

The landscape has indeed changed significantly, for better or for worse.

For the better, there is a proliferation of platforms and types of media, social networks, podcasts, and videos that allow everyone to find what they are looking for, either as a producer or as a consumer.

For the worse, there is a dumbing down that affects all platforms. Of course, there are and always will be things of excellent quality, but alongside that, what a lot of rubbish there is! And I’m not even talking about behavior. Of course, as someone recently reminded me, we shouldn’t have expected it to remain the little bubble of well-educated intellectuals that it was back in the day, but to fall so low… Even LinkedIn is no exception to the rule (Hey LinkedIn, didn’t you get lost along the way? and My new Linkedin hygiene).

One day, I may have to write something about my current relationship with social media, but I’m starting to think that my Twitter feed (um… X) is much better than my LinkedIn feed. That says it all.

So yes, users are primarily responsible, but ultimately, social media just reflects society. I even think that it’s in the DNA of these platforms to get enshitted over time (Why can’t we be anything but disappointed by social networks?). That’s why it’s important to have your own “home”.

But that’s precisely why the personal, reflective space of a blog has a rare value that I appreciate even more than before.

There’s also one thing I miss: comments. Loïc Le Meur, once nicknamed the pope of blogs, said that “blogs start conversations,” and it was true. Today, conversations have deserted blogs and landed on social media, where, in my opinion, they have become greatly impoverished.

I also know that LinkedIn penalizes the visibility of people who post links to external content rather than writing on the platform, but I don’t care. I have no desire to be dependent on a platform or contribute to its business model by producing content for them or giving them material to train their AI. So I accept that I am much less visible than people who produce bullshit, but native bullshit.

So the motivation remains, even though I know that there will be other breaks, but as long as the curiosity is there and I remain faithful to my rule of writing what I think and not what people want to read, I don’t see what would make me stop.

People also point out that it takes time. I want to say that it’s more than just bombarding LinkedIn with narcissistic posts all day long. What’s more, I’ve always had a habit of spending my days jotting down all my ideas and thoughts, enriching them, so in the end, I have a ton of potential articles that just need to be refined and formatted. That was actually the idea behind this blog: to take all these ideas jotted down somewhere (currently in the Notes app on my iPhone) and develop them further into a finished product.

Do I want to try new formats?

Video is really trendy, and I tried it during COVID, but it’s too cumbersome, restrictive, and time-consuming if you want to do something of quality, so I quickly realized that it wasn’t for me, especially since I have a deep-rooted culture of writing.

Someone suggested I make “shorts” on YouTube to accompany my articles. I’m still trying to see the point, but if I ever do, why not? If you have any ideas, I’m all ears…

A book? That’s still something I’d like to do one day. I’ve tried a few times, but it hasn’t worked out, sometimes because the publisher wanted me to say the opposite of what I thought, sometimes because they thought a best-of compilation of my blog would do the trick (thanks for respecting my readers). And I also see a problem: when dealing with emerging topics in rapidly evolving fields, the time between writing and publication is, for me, far too long for the book to be up to date and relevant when it comes out.

Bottom line

So that wraps up this article celebrating my 20 years of blogging, and naturally, for this occasion, I did the thing I dislike most about social media, especially professional networks: talking about myself.

But I promise I won’t do it again for another 20 years, so you can rest easy until then.