Blog launch

Six months ago I wouldn’t have considered starting my own blog. Having since written a few blog posts for the Acumen Fund blog (a few of which were cross-posted at NextBillion.net) and seen a real response, and now that I actually have an RSS reader that I check every day, I’m of a different mind. My feeling right now is that blogs are likely to be the new center of gravity for fresh, authoritative, and interesting content on the web. And they have significant potential to take a bite out of journalism, publishing, and plain ‘ol web sites. For example, I’ve been putting off getting a new credit card, since my card expires next month. I wanted to research online. Type “credit cards” into Google and you get a lot of industry sites without a lot of objectivity or depth. A blog search got me some seemingly objective answers in about 5 minutes.

My saving grace is that I’m quite confident that no one, for now, is reading this blog. At the same time I know that everything published online is essentially permanent – so I should try to get off on the right foot. For now I’m expecting this blog will be reflections on the nonprofit world, philanthropy, global interconnectedness, fairness, making change, and general reflections on marketing, sales and communication. I’m in no small part inspired by Seth Godin – both personally and by his blog – and while I hesitate to reference a blogospheric icon as an inspiration, what I love most about Seth’s blog is that he seems to see the whole world through a unifying lens of marketing, creating valuable customer relationships, and making positive change. I’m beginning to see that same level of unification and interconnectedness in a lot of areas, so I figured I’d take a stab at blogging about it. My hope is that blogging about these things will help me to sharpen my thinking, will improve my writing, and will force me to turn observations into (could it be?) insights. At the same time I’m fascinated to see if people will start reading, commenting, and furthering the conversations I hope to start, and maybe someday forming a tribe that cares about these ideas. I’m assuming that the focus of my blog, its themes and direction, will emerge over time, and I’m not going to work too hard to confine myself to a specific set of topics for now.

So, here I go…wish me luck.