January 2, 2008 marks the 1 year since my first post on The Hot Iron titled Communication and Resolution. Well, my very first post was my test Hello World post a couple days earlier on December 30, 2006, as I set a goal to get the blog setup and running by the end of ’06. In either case, the world has had the opportunity to read The Hot Iron for a year.

And what a year it has been! Where I set out to write on topics swirling in my mind on business and technology, I added book takeaways, a focus on domain names and took several tangents, many inspired by surroundings here in the Windy City. The Hot Iron is my personal blog, though it generously took on the same template as the Web site for my Internet consultancy Dunkirk Systems. As much as I tried to keep The Hot Iron personal, being an entrepreneur makes that nearly impossible, and I intertwined experiences and anecdotes from my daily work.

So here I am 237 posts later. Where I have seen many year-end recaps of posts by many bloggers, I chose not to pour through all and rank them. Some posts that stick out include the one on German domain names, as I received comments with insights from German nationals; the post on the Web sites of my current and former Chicago Alderman as I heard from the sitting Alderman himself (yes, I verified the post was from him!) and the one questioning the rebranding of Delta Airlines, which was quoted on an airline industry blog. The lesson I learned is if you write it, it is out there, and you never know who will read it.

However I am more intrigued by the 410 comments I received. Many were by people I knew prior to writing the post, but more and more came from people I did not know at the beginning of 2007, some I have gotten to know outside of the blog and a few I have met in person. Comments mean more to me than my Feedburner subscriptions, especially when you hear from people who have no idea what the little orange icon means and visit the site on a regular basis.

Now onto 2008. Thanks for reading, and here’s to more “hot” two-way communication.

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