My friend and colleague John Patrick posted a very nice story about my new blog in his own patrickWeb blog. To me this is about as close to an official welcome to the blogosphere as there can be. John was one of the first people I knew who had his own website, and he started his blog before anyone called it by that name. I remember that a few years ago John was talking about blogs as one of the most powerful forces driving the future of the Internet. I have to admit that at the time I was incredulous. As I told John, the only reason I took his comments seriously is because of his incredible batting record in calling The Next Big Thing in the IT industry.
And what a record John has had, not only in identifying what's going to be hot, but in organizing the efforts within and outside IBM to make sure that his predictions come true. In IBM, John is legendary as the person who first brought to our attention the growing importance of the Internet and of embracing the open standards that were emerging around the Internet. He organized IBM's first Internet Technology group, and with his team built IBM's first web site, in what feels like a different lifetime, but was in reality only 1994. In December of 1995, John joined me in putting together IBM's Internet Division, and we continued to work closely together through the years, until John "retired" at the end of 2001.
If you look at John's weblog, you will see that he uses a cute graphic to introduce each story. For his "Irving's Blog" story, John uses a baseball motif, and later on in the story talks about my love of the game. So, there seems to be a certain harmony as I write this entry about John's blog, while watching the Sunday afternoon Mets-Yankees game on TV.
More on baseball from time to time in future posts.
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