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I chose it to create exactly that torment. 

It also marks seven years since One Man & His Blog began. 

Strangely, I suspect it began much the same way this is being written now - sat at my desk at Estates Gazette, typing away. Of course, back then I was typing into Blogger (Typepad, WordPress, Tumblr et al weren't around yet). These days I'm on self-hosted MT. Back then, I was a section editor of the magazine. Now I work in editorial development accross the whole company and for half of the life of this blog now (!), I've been professionally working at the intersection of blogging, social media and journalism. 

I've got married, nursed my mother through terminal illness and travelled. I've provoked blogstorms and live-blogged and been cited in textbooks about bloggers responding to news events. 

But most of all, I've retained my passion for what I'm doing. I've been blogging for over 8 years now (this wasn't my first blog), and it's still a central part of how I live my life. The rise of "personal publishing" - a phrase much used in the early days of blogging, which has since fallen out of common currency - was something I had been waiting for, without realising it. Even as a child, my first instinct when I created something was "how can I publish this", and from a photocopied news-sheet for kids on my street via the school magazine to college newspapers and professional journalism, I've followed that instinct all the way.

And the opportunities for personal publishing just keep growing. This blog is now just one node in my wide involvement in social media. I converse on Twitter and share on Flickr, and maintain relationships on Facebook and keep up with what friends are reading in Google Reader. I run other blogs, and have conversations with other communities through them.

This world continues to change and evolve and that excites me. As long as I survive, this blog will celebrate its tenth anniversary and beyond.

Thanks for reading. I hope you continue to find my experiments in personal publishing enjoyable. :-)

Movable Type 5 is out now, and I'll be writing about it a little in a few days, but I won't be upgrading this site to it until a few key plugins have been updated, too. 

I owe a big "thank you" to the guest posters who filled in for me last week, while I was rambling around the Cornish coast. My three vigorous volunteers were:

Thanks, guys!