I’ve been blogging since 2003 (since 2006 on this blog). I don’t blog to get noticed, to be internet famous, or even to advance my career. I use blogging as a reflective practice, as a way to think and “work out loud“. The input (positive and negative) that I get when I openly share how I work through problems at work, in my life, or things that just really, really bug me – that helps me refine my understanding of all these things. That’s worth way more than a silly Klout score.

I don’t follow any “social media rules”. I don’t stick to the current agreed-upon-optimal-number-of-words-in-a-post, or the best time of day to post, or the most sticky words to include in my content so I can punch up my SEO. I don’t care. I think all of those rules are for people who want to get noticed, not people who want to do.  I want to interact with real, interesting people….hopefully people who don’t agree with everything I say. I want to learn, reflect, and then build awesome things.

What’s always been amazing to me is the people who actually *read* what I write. People who are founders in the practices that I have built my career upon. Jay Cross was one of these founders. He said he invented the term eLearning (and there has always been a story there………….). He definitely was opinionated and driven and smart.

And nice.

He was always nice to me. Like the time I was all fired back in 2010 when I came back from the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I thought all of the social media experts were posers, and wanted to see a conference by and for real practitioners. And Jay commented and said “how do we make that happen”.

I admired Jay so much. I quoted him in many grad school papers, as well as internal presentations I gave in the early days of social media at EMC. He focused on learning…and figuring out how all these easy-to-use technologies could help people learn faster, do their jobs better.

He was also very straight-forward and didn’t take nonsense. I like people like that. JFDI already.

Jay passed away unexpectedly Friday. I didn’t know him all that well. The last time I saw him was when Up to All of Us was in Austin. I feel sad I didn’t stay better connected. I want to reconnect with a few of my edupunk mentors, but I feel like if I did it right now it would be creepy and morbid.

So safe travels Jay. I can only imagine what you’re getting your hands into now. You’ll be missed.

You have to listen to the words of this song to understand why I included it.