This Blog

Around this time of the year I like to post an item about this blog and its origins and purpose, so I repeat my post of 2008:

This blog was established as an internal effort within P&G in 2003. It replaced a newsletter that I had run since the late late 70s that covered new technologies and analytical methods, then mostly in supply chain matters. Later it acted as a means of spreading the word about corporate artificial intelligence methods.

Once we discovered blogs, the newsletter was naturally replaced by an internal blog in 2003. It also acted as a way to keep visitors to our innovation centers up to date on new ideas. I also used it as a means to show vendors that we were promoting their innovations internally. We grew to hundreds of reads a day, very good for an internal technical blog. Relatively little commenting occurred, but I got many private inquiries. This fit with the expectation of Procter corporate culture.

It eventually led to a much broader use of 'Web 2.0' capabilities. Executives chimed in and it led to a number of innovation speaking opportunities. It acted as a part of P&G's Connect & Develop program, pointing employees to outside opportunities.

I created this parallel public blog in 2005. Internal posts were sometimes cross-posted here when they did not contain confidential material. When I retired earlier this year, I continued blogging publicly. Some of the posts here are also still posted internally, depending on their relevance. If anything, the internal blog was more technical than this one, since I could cover the specifics of projects.

Blogging books say it is good to focus when you write you blog. This blog covers what I am most deeply interested in, so it is not focused. I don't advertise and write mostly about what I am passionate about. Posts often help me formulate my own thoughts about a topic. I write to people with like interests. Business intelligence, retail innovation, data mining, visualization, modeling, sensory, analytics and emergent tech are typical areas of coverage. Readership is growing weekly though comments are still low.

This blog also works because of a number of external correspondents I have with vendors, industry and academia. Many from my industry innovation days. Send along things that you think might fit into my interests and I will pass them along.

Looking forward to continuing this. Comments please. I'm an active consultant in the topics above, and well as in blogging and other Web 2.0 areas. I welcome private inquiries, my address is in the top left sidebar.