In 1998, when nobody was talking about digital transformation, I took over one of the first digital media in Spanish about technology and the Internet, DiarioRed.com. At that time I programmed the pages in HTML, received the articles from about thirty contributors, and then manually laid them out. I was sending newsletters via a desktop program to our thousands of subscribers. The allure of the early days of the Net was a lot more cumbersome than I’d like to admit, but it was still amazing nonetheless. Since then it has rained a lot. In 2001 I set up my first blog, more experimental than anything else, and in 2005 my personal blog. At the same time I was developing web technology products (what we now call SaaS) and managing the technology and business model transformation of a company in the content and social media industry.
Many years have passed, and yet launching a blog still seems prodigious to me. The fact that it has become a relatively everyday occurrence does not detract from the fact itself. The ability to create and distribute content, until recently within the reach of almost no one, has become commonplace, and the driving force behind that change was blogs. Today perhaps the blog has been relegated to a second level by the rise of social networks, which after all benefit from the same ability to generate content from users. But that doesn’t detract from its interest, in my opinion it increases it.
And yes, launching a successful blog is much more difficult today: you need to work on the SEO, social networks, advertising (sometimes), refine the content and make it of higher quality and a host of micro strategies, which turn what I did in 98 into child’s play. But it’s still extraordinary. And that’s why I’m launching “this changes everything” (I’ll explain the meaning of the name shortly), which is a professional blog about that abstract term “digital transformation” and in which I’ll basically talk about all my professional concerns, the subjects I teach at IE and the technology landscape in general. If you’re looking for a hyper-specialized blog, you probably won’t find what you’re looking for here. But I hope it has some interest for a few. If I could get what Kevin Kelly said about 1000 true fans I’d be satisfied 😉
Here we go.
