Happy Blogiversary to UsHappy Blogiversary to Us

Today is the one-year anniversary of the launch of No Jitter. A lot has happened in the 366 days since No Jitter went live; the world looked very different on December 9, 2007, and everyone's approaching this New Year with much more dread than we expected would be clouding our horizon a year ago.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the launch of No Jitter. A lot has happened in the 366 days since No Jitter went live; the world looked very different on December 9, 2007, and everyone's approaching this New Year with much more dread than we expected would be clouding our horizon a year ago.A year ago, Nortel stock was selling for more than $15 a share. Now it's under a buck and the company's future, not surprisingly, is uncertain.

A year ago, if you'd told me the worst screw-ups of the Bush Administration had yet to manifest themselves - heck, if you'd told me that same thing four months ago - I'd have said you were crazy.

If you'd told me layoffs would be happening across the industry, and that even Cisco would be making cost-cutting moves like closing for four days over the upcoming holidays, I might have believed it - business cycles do happen - but the news wouldn't have carried the weight it does now.

But we've learned some things in the year since we closed down the still-much-missed Business Communications Review magazine and hung out the No Jitter shingle. One is that we were probably right to close BCR; hearing that the Christian Science Monitor, U.S. News & World Report and who knows how many smaller publications were going all- or mostly-online has convinced me that we weren't being rash in getting rid of the print magazine. We're all still sad about it, but the move from print to electronic publishing is too big for most of us to fight.

And going on line with a blog/in-depth feature combination site has enabled us to do things we couldn't do with a monthly magazine that ran on a six-week production cycle. When Lou D'Ambrosio resigned unexpectedly as CEO of Avaya due to health reasons, thousands of readers flocked to our site, the biggest traffic day of the year. Readers came by the thousands and commented by the dozens and in sharp tones when Allan Sulkin criticized Nortel's analyst outreach; when I floated ideas like "Microsoft should buy Nortel;" and when Siemens was finally acquired by the Gores Group private equity firm. But what's especially warmed my heart is that consistently, the biggest draw to the site have been the in-depth features: Sulkin's annual market update, Miercom's lab tests, articles by consultants like Steve Leaden and Brent Kelly-in a word, BCR articles. Features that run to 2,500 words and beyond, abundantly illustrated with network diagrams, market trend charts and other geeky graphics of the kind that used to adorn the old print magazine.

This confirmed what we always believed, which is that our audience is made up of people whose intelligence commands respect, and who need lots of information, well-written and clearly presented, giving them the most accurate picture of a communications industry that's changing more rapidly, and in less predictable ways, than has been true in years.

So No Jitter's mission for 2009 is to do what we began doing in 2008, but more of it: More fostering of community; more blog posts with more timely coverage of an industry facing critical challenges; and more in-depth analysis of the technology and business challenges that you face in your jobs.

No Jitter offers you, the enterprise communications industry community, a place to come together, as well as delivering (I hope) a wealth of provocative, interesting and useful ideas and analysis around which to gather. I am indebted to everyone who gave us a strong start this past year, especially our lineup of tremendous bloggers and feature authors, many of them the same people who made BCR a trusted information source over the years. And I'm grateful to those of you who have made No Jitter a regular stop on your rounds of Web-based information sources. Together, I hope we can make the site even better in the coming year. Please keep telling us how we're doing, and especially how we could be doing better.

Meanwhile, join us in celebrating: