OK, It's A Brain Exercise

OK, it's a brain exercise. I have at times in the past looked for a rationale as to why I keep this weblog up. It is, I am beginning to realize, a circular question. Why and how are fundamental and motivating questions for me, having a healthy dose of curiosity and this weblog is a means of satisfying that curiosity. So my latest rationale is that it serves as my form of intellectual aerobics class.

Actually, blogging provides cross-training activities which grow over time. First there is reading articles on science, economics, and the world of web 2.0 in an endeavor to self-educate myself. Each pathway of discovery taken provides other pathways in a seemingly never ending expansion. Then as my own means of intellectual weight training I decided that dealing with one idea at a time was not enough. Consequently, I try to combine two or more ideas in each post and end up with some new pathways.

Next is learning all of the new Web 2.0 equipment like weight machines. This is where I have been the worst slacker, having dabbled but not nearing the potential. My latest sojourn in web 2.0 experimentation was my Squidoo Creative-Destruction page. Truth is that now it is just a grab bag of links and needs to be modified to communicate a specific perspective. That is often true of data found on the web it seems. All too often this weblog focused on the end-user aspects and remains lazy about learning the basics of what makes all of this possible.

Finally there is a ever growing desire to communicate and connect. That aspect has seen improvement. That was not a goal at the beginning, and I am still not seeking to rack up a thousand contacts to claim world-wide popularity. I do though have intellectually like-minded contacts across the globe. That again creates more pathways. This is where my own personal paradigms have seen transformation, like the transformed 98 pound weakling at the beach, I have had new worlds open up to me. The "writing" aspect of blogging is becoming increasingly important. This particular post has had a number of corrections and re-writes. A few posts have had unexpected results like being put on the international stage with International Web Star Is 15 Seconds Of Fame Off And On or being featured in an Answers.com inquiry at Coming Up With The Answer(.com) But Still Looking For The Questions.

Lately, I have been going over my past posts to see what I have learned. This weblog has had me thinking about economics, creative-destruction, fair use, collective-intelligence and other many-to-many/one social interactions and entropy to name some. The trouble is that there are so many pathways to take, not to mention those that were passed by. Two come to mind that seemed to have a good deal of untapped, at least by me, potential - PopTech and NITLE. Some others have been added to the del.icio.us, diigo and StumbleUpon social tagging systems.

Now I find myself with so many potential pathways for inquiry and contemplation that it is beginning to be a bit overwhelming. So my plan is just to grab on to something and putting it through the paces.