Last dance

I’m approaching my one-year anniversary. On Father’s Day (June 19, 2006), I wrote my first blog for The Telegraph.

I had already written just about every other kind of story for the newspaper – sports, features, editorials and even taken a few photographs. Just last week, I celebrated my ninth anniversary as metro columnist. By this time next year, I will have written my 2,000th column for the Local/State page.

But blogging began as a venture into this brave, new world wide web.

I’m still finding a lot of folks don’t know what a "blog" is or what it’s all about. I find myself explaining it even to those who have computers. While the blogosphere has become its own culture of sharing thoughts and information, not everyone is tuned it. Not yet, anyway.

There aren’t a lot of rules when it comes to blogging, so anything goes. It’s a medium that appears to be defining itself as it goes along. And I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing. But I will say this: It is changing the face of journalism.

Anyway, I made a verbal agreement to blog for a period of one year. Now, that time has reached the end of the line. And I’m going to move on to other writing projects.

Four columns and five blogs a week has been quite a load for me – more than 200 columns and 265 blogs. As many of you know, I also do between 75 and 100 speaking engagements a year, so I stay pretty busy.

I tried to make my blogs read like mini-columns. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes they didn’t. But with a blog to write every day – they don’t call it “Daily Gris” for nothing – we had a joke around my house: If anything happened, no matter how obscure or trivial, we all chimed: “It’s a blog!”

It has been a lot of work. For the most part, it has been fun, too.

Thanks for being loyal readers. You can still read my columns at www.macon.com