I often get asked why I decided to write a blog. The answer unfortunately is not that I felt I had anything so important to say that I needed to share it with my 10,000 closest friends. Rather, the reasons were quite selfish - I wanted to learn.

I write a blog for the same reason I experiment with social media like Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, Linked-in, Dopplr, etc. I do it to learn-by-doing -- what the academics usually call "experiential learning."

For me, learning is a lifelong passion and commitment. One of the best things about my job and the business of Thomson Reuters is that I am genuinely interested in and curious about our customers, their businesses, the technology we and they use, the world our journalists document, and so on. My learning curve remains steep and I feel that the day I dementedly decide that I have learned everything worth learning is the day I should find another thing to do. Take this as a personal rejection of the sentiment attributed to that early and infamous head of the US patent office who declared that everything worth inventing had already been invented.

Like everyone else, I learn in a variety of ways. I learn by watching others; I learn by reading; I learn from teachers. However, I also believe that one of the most effective ways to learn is simply by doing.

Imagine it is the early years of this century and the CEO of a major information provider with 2500 journalists was beginning to hear a lot about blogging and the phenomenon of citizen journalism. Now imagine that he wanted to really understand what was going on; what were the motivations of its early adopters; what were the implications for media companies, or even just, how do you do it, what tools are needed, and who would care?

One common approach, taken from the standard-issue CEO toolkit, would have been to request the Head of Strategy, Business Development or Editorial to study the landscape and report back her conclusions, replete with powerpoints and acronyms. Another, more expensive approach would have been to hire a McKinsey, Bain or other management consultancy to author a comprehensive report. A third, closer-to-home approach would have been to create an account on one of the multiple services that offer blog hosting, and just start doing it and see what happens.

I chose this last approach and what you are reading today is my third generation weblog. Along the way I have learned a lot from members of this community who interact with me and offer their comments; I have learned about what this small audience finds interesting or not; and I have learned things about myself and perhaps the motivations of other bloggers.

There is also a lot I have not learned by doing it myself. I haven't gained a birds-eye view of what others are doing; I don’t have a clue about industry size or economics; and I haven't discovered the ultimate answer of what hybrid media will emerge. However, by experimenting myself I have thought more about these issues and read more third party blogs than I otherwise would have.

I would not rush to advocate the teaching of neurosurgery by neophyte experimentation (better to await a later stage residency). However, there is much to recommend learning-by-doing -- especially the confidence that comes from knowing you can do something yourself rather than just trying to remember what some brilliant consultant said it was all about. To quote the departed (not so dearly by many) Defense Secretary, Don Rumsfeld, we can cut down on the things "we do not know we do not know."

I hope this helps to explain why I began to blog; why I continue is a story for another day.