A good friend of mine (and a social computing guru), David Tebbutt, has a round-up of his own. Literally. It starts with him getting a job as a programmer with NCR in London on 3rd January 1966… and the last line says:

2004-     : Blogger (and user of all manner of social software)

Blogger and user, I love it… I first encountered David in December 2004 at Online Information conference [link only to this year's version]. Well, he saw me first as I was delivering my first ever presentation about blogging at a major conference. A couple of days later, I received a very nice email from him. We started a conversation (how predictable!) and have carried on ever since. In January 2005 David came to one of our blogging bootcamps for journalists and had his blog set up by beginning of February. I do like his introduction on the first post:

Thirty years ago, it occurred to me that as long as there were people around, they would need to be able to communicate with each other. And, the more effectively they did it, the more successful they would be. This is still the focus of my life.

This reminds me of somebody’s favourite line about things staying the same at a faster pace than ever before… Professionally, David acts as a sort of sanity-check for me. There is much hype being generated by some genuinely amazing trends and tools and it is hard to pick the ones that will continue to evolve and revolutionise many of the areas that are now under much pressure from them – media, publishing, marketing, PR, communications, information management etc. Being able to follow these developments with someone who has been doing this for the last 40 years is priceless. Thank you, David.

Since this is the season for getting emotional, let me say that I am proud and privileged to know David and to have the benefit of his knowledge and experience. And the good news is that there is more where those tremendous 40 years’ came from so watch this space.

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