As usual I am faced with the daily guilt that I have not blogged for a long time. Microsoft Word is increasingly a stranger to me ( I have to write blogs out first I’m afraid, I spell like a designer). And I think I am maybe in danger of writing a blog about blogging.

But there is no question, despite having countless interesting topics to write about (interviewing for digital media heads at Glasgow School of Art, the think tank at DOTT Cornwall, the everyday battle to improve awareness and use of design and the vast amount of effort being spent in keeping my classic car running), this last 12 months have been about social media, immediate and fast, and not the self important indulgence of the blog.

I was always a hypocrite about blogging, only occasionally writing and hardly ever reading them, unless one of the many brilliant people I follow on Twitter pointed me to a particularly interesting commentary. I simply don’t have time to digest it all, and that is where Twitter is so effective. I can track what people follow in a way I could never do on my own and get real excitement from being part of a community that cares about similar issues (design, technology and customer experience).

It’s a marketplace of knowledge and information. In exchange for a few (occasionally bad tempered) insights into what I do and the interesting aspects of projects I’m involved in or any other not very profound thoughts, I get to be followed by people who can reuse what I write and I can get access to great examples and insight. That insight is often invaluable, notifying me to trends, events, research and anecdotes, that make me look smarter. Brilliant.

Facebook is a very different story, one which is social and where I can broadcast gigs of my band, how far I run and what nonsense my kids have just sprouted. The two media, and audiences, only rarely come together.

So my Web 1.0 experience may be stumbling to a halt. I have been meaning to upgrade my web site for months and planning to reignite it with opinion and anecdotes from the cutting edge of design thinking. But in capturing and reflecting the anxieties, excitement, successes and learnings that come to me every day in this amazing job I have, Twitter and Facebook capture and communicate in real time.

Of course, one factor that does reign me back is the fact that I work for a big and successful company who understand the internet extremely well. The story of “Cisco Fatty” has become famous through out the tweetersphere. A successful Cisco applicant wondered on Twitter if she should accept the fat cheque but be bored in the job – Cisco saw it straight away and suggested they would make the choice easier for her.

So everything I write is open to all, including my own employers. At first I thought this might be limiting, if only because I have always felt it important to challenge technology and tell people when they have got it wrong, whether through poor usability, inappropriate applications or over spec’d and not human focused. But I think the discipline of responsibility of what you say only improves the quality, and possibly the impact, of what you tweet. And sometimes you get interestingly positive results, such as when the head of brand at Cisco discovered I was in the company by reading my blog!

But at the end of this piece I am beginning to realise that writing more than 120 characters, and taking time to explore, develop ideas and lay them out in front of people is still going to be valuable and I will have to, from time to time, click on the Word icon and return to paragraph, page and even chapter. There is a lot to talk about in design and technology and despite coming up to 30 years, I am still battling with technologically minding people who don’t see the value in design and do not embrace it till too late, with tragic and wasteful consequences. But that’s another blog…