The early days of blogs and blogging

Let's start with some insights. It is believed that the first openly published text was written by a college student in Pennsylvania, the US in 1994 [1]. At the time, it was a part of a personal homepage that included short posts and links to websites and personal work achievements.

Few like-minded individuals followed this kind of approach and these posts were referred to as online diaries, only later they were named weblogs and mostly covered quite technical subjects, as the authors at the time were primarily keen users of IT and programming.

Only years later the public writing pieces on personal homepages were named as we know them today – blogs.

As blogging became more popular, numerous web tools appeared to help people curate their blog reading lists or market their own blogs. While 2002 was a particularly big year for the blogosphere, with the arrival of WordPress in 2003 (the most widespread freely available blog platform to date), the simple publishing of one's thoughts with a wide outreach to international readers caused a flood of small authors of all interests to set up their own blog space.

The begging of the CEF blog and its value-added today

For years, our partners have continuously recognized our good practice in playing the role of a knowledge hub. After being invited to present our work at the World Bank-led Second High-Level Meeting on Knowledge Hubs in Seoul, Korea in 2014, and receiving praise for our expertise and skills in being knowledge brokers between knowledge providers and knowledge seekers, along with numerous requests to share our expertise, it was a logical next step to launch our own blog and share the knowledge and experience with our partners on learning and knowledge exchange. This was in November 2014.

Going through different stages, we initially defined ourselves in the blog as a knowledge hub. Following the World Bank’s definition of a knowledge hub, this is an institution that has developed the capacity to capture, package and share knowledge in a specific sector with domestic and international partners to accelerate reform processes. Our blog is a crossroad of providing insights on a variety of topics, in one way or another connected to learning. It:

• Brings an additional understanding of how learning and knowledge sharing can spur changes in the reform processes
• Provides a platform for exchanging views and experiences
• Gives a start to thought-provoking reflections
• Encourages discussions to initiate changes and
• Puts inspiring individuals, teams, approaches and ideas into spotlight.

Being committed to our unique role as a knowledge hub, we pay particular attention to identifying individuals who can build upon and replicate the knowledge acquired at our learning initiatives. We have introduced our approach to learning to change agents in the region so that they can share their knowledge with others.

As the CEF grew, so evolved its focus. Today, we share practices as a leader in applying people-centered learning approaches and holding the know-how of becoming and being a learning organization. We support other institutions to become learning organizations and knowledge hubs. Our focus is on supporting learning and knowledge sharing in public financial management, tax policy and administration, central banking and cross-cutting areas of leadership for managing reforms, and data and analysis for designing policies, with domestic and international partners to accelerate reform processes.

CEF blog in numbers

Seven years after our first blog posts in November 2014, we made an overview of our blog outreach and how it had evolved throughout the years. We came up with quite interesting facts and figures.

In the first few years of its existence, the CEF blog posts were quite sporadic, accumulating only a few posts per year. As the organization grew, so did the number of its connections and experiences to share, as well as the CEF staff able and willing to contribute their thoughts. So the blog editorial that had started as a single-person activity slowly needed more capacity and soon a team was set up to gather, organize, digest, and publish the messages and experiences of internal and external partners.

Since the launch of the blog, we have accumulated over 80 entries, which on average is around one blog entry per month, not counting the summer months. In total, we have published over 100,000 words. Roughly two-thirds have been contributed by the CEF staff members, while the rest have been drafted by international experts, CEF partners and friends, and authors from different partner organizations from South East Europe and across the world.

The number of views of a particular blog entry has also changed throughout the years and can be linked to the development and use of social media, where such writings are additionally exposed, which have almost exploded in the past few years. The outreach is also linked to the amount of social media awareness, flexibility, comfort, and activity of the author, who can easily double or triple the amount of idea-hungry readers.

For the summer reading break, when the editorial team was on vacation, we made a special compilation of the most-read blogs for you. With the long winter evenings coming our way, we invite you to lose yourself in the maze of the CEF blog and let us know which entry is YOUR favorite.

[1] www.webdesignerdepot.com