A couple of years ago, when Sourcing Innovation (SI) published it’s 6,000 post, we explained why it would be appropriate for all [to] hail the GruntMaster 6000, and that was because Sourcing Innovation had been publishing continual, never-ending, free eduction on Procurement, including best practices and technology, for over 18 years! With the slashing of the Spend Matters archives in their last site revamp before the Hackett acquisition (which recently resulted in Spend Matters being laid to rest), SI provided the largest open archive of such articles on the internet.

Now, with Spend Matters gone, SI takes the mantle of both longest running blog and largest open archive on the internet in Procurement with approximately 6,700 posts published to date. The lone member in the vicenarian club. It hopes it won’t be the last (as Procurement Insights recently turned 19), but as we recently lamented (on the loss of the Enterprise Irregulars last decade), where once there were close to 200 voices in the late 2000s heyday, very few remain.

While a new group of hopefuls have taken up the mantle with regular LinkedIn publishing and newsletters (and hopefully pre-publishing and archiving on their own sites before all their content belongs to MUSK, ZUCKERBERG, NADELLA, and ALTMAN), time has proven that, for many, a decade is quite hard to maintain and two decades almost unheard of! (Still we wish Joël Collin-Demers, James Meads, Tanya Wade, Tom Mills, and other upcoming notables from the new crop all the best and hope that their dreams of doing this for 20 years come true.)

Regardless, since we’re not getting any younger, our advice is to suck up as much content as you can while you can before it all gets paywalled behind the big analyst firms and greedy social media platforms (where it’s almost impossible to find anything older than a few weeks and where non-premium members have their content relegated to the dank archives of the internet). Just because the Big Tech Cos are trying to push the Age of Retardation upon us with their Artificial Idiocy, that doesn’t mean we have to accept it!

Learn free! Buy hard!