With the new year we are beginning a new phase in the history of Big Men On Content. Before we make the transition I’d like to reflect on the last seven years.
Marko Sillanpää and I joined Armedia the same day in 2007. Over the next few months we spent many hours arguing across the conference table, in IM, email, phone and graffiti on water towers about the future of technology and content management. During one of our more heated debates one of our co-workers suggested we shut up and put it online. In November, 2007 the joint blog was born.
Calling the blog Big Men on Content was more about poking fun at ourselves and a commitment to not taking it too seriously. Since the founding we have tried our best to follow a few central ideas. Chief among those is to treat the site as a vendor neutral platform for commentary. We have never hidden the fact we both now work for vendors. In fact one of the greatest compliments we get is when someone tells us they can’t tell we work for vendors because the opinions are as unbiased as we can manage.
Both Marko and I have gone through a number of life changes, personal and professional. We both moved to EMC and enjoyed a few more years working together but life moves on and last year Marko joined Hyland. We work to be neutral but neither one of us is interested in biting the hand that feeds us – or the other author. This has made it more difficult over time to talk about the things that interest us (which are often tied to our work) and not create the appearance of a conflict of interest for the other.
After struggling with this we toyed with the idea of just retiring the blog or one of the other running with it. We could plod along as we have but neither of us has been happy with the progress of late. So that brings us to the current plans.
After seven years, rather than shrinking we have decided to grow the Big Men On Content. The goal is to move editorially from a two-person opinion blog to a multi-contributor site with content from experts across the content management ecosystem. We will continue to post individually and curate the site but it will be a channel for many voices and not just two.
To help guide this revitalization a soon to be announced third person will be joining the BMOC as co-curator and editor. Over then next few months you will see both guest posts and other regular writers added to the rolls. BMOC will continue to be a completely non-profit, vendor neutral forum for sharing individual experience and opinion in technology with a special focus on content management. We write here because we are genuinely passionate about what we do and feel the more we talk about the industry, the stronger it is.