Well, not me exactly – Take the First Step is one year old today. Having a weblog was harder than I thought – I underestimated both the time required to write an intelligent post and the difficulty of making an impression on the blogoverse. But my only real regret is that I didn’t start earlier.

When I started Take the First Step, I hadn’t really considered myself a good writer. But it turns out that while getting inspiration for a good post is hard, the actual writing isn’t – and it gets easier with practice. Over the past year, I’ve become much more adept at writing on demand.

I’ve learned by following blogs in my RSS aggregator. And while you don’t need to write a blog to consume their output, writing makes you an active member of the community rather than a passive observer.

I’ve also learned that old news really is old news. I used to archive RSS items in a link blog and in NewsGator. But I now believe that it’s more effective to search the right blogs when needed rather than keeping items around just in case. Or maybe I need a smarter archive capability in Outlook.