Blogging about Hardship to Ease

Blogging about Hardship to Ease is a new path that I recently took in collaboration with hal786 on BloggersUnite. The path is new, but as happens so often a number of connections to other paths became apparent. My original intent was to try to write something that fit the theme of the day.

Every person's life matters. We should share their stories, to bring ease to their lives, or know about how they got from their tough life to ease.

Trouble is that my Myers-Briggs in INTJ and I am not personally that good at the pull-the-heartstrings stories. I am though impacted by them and seem to find others that are so gifted and incorporate them into what I am writing about. I recognize the importance of imbuing stories with feeling to create greater connections.

The path hal786 asks us to travel on is a personal one of individuals sharing stories with other individuals, but the commonality of those stories helps bind us together. These stories are like the cells of a living creature in that they have life on their own, but they are able to bring a greater and more complex entity to life. These stories are what some have called the "small pages" of the Internet.

I got the idea of uniting "Small Pages" discovered on the journey from Aira of the blog It'll be alright.

It seems a small thing, I know. But the net itself is made of small pages, like mine and like the web pages of the over 10 thousand bloggers part of the Bloggers Unite. Ten thousand stories and thoughts for giving voice to 40 million refugees, for making known an association that help people for real. And to put in practice an expression I read on the Refugees United’s page and – with its simplicity – seemed to me such fundamental: spread the world.

Another important aspect of this blog has been serendipity. Now I am using the word in a very broad sense, it seems though to best describe the aspect of not only finding connections, but having those connections flow towards me without calling. It is what helps me find new connections. The most recent example is that yesterday my niece sent my wife the YouTube video Children Full Of Life. The video tells of the importance of storytelling as a means of traveling a path from hardship to ease.

"In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates."

As in the video, the ability of one individual to tell their story of moving from hardship to ease allowed another to start their journey.

This is not my first journey along a path discovered through others demonstrating the impact that individual stories can have. SAUDADES SERENDIPITY from an Orkut friend in Brazil was another.

Ju teaches a very important lesson why people take up causes such as the Millennium Development Goals. It is not always to make massive political paradigm shifts, but finding personal ways to connect through countless small interactions for a better world. It is through the means of first defining ourselves as the path to redefining the world.

My interest is in how we move from the individual to groups and to society as a whole in expressing the story of hardship and more importantly the path to ease. I can see a similar aspect of hardship to ease in the efforts of people to overcome hardships in the world as is seen in the efforts of individuals in their own lives. We just have to be open to it.

• Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion
• Social Networking, Social Fragmenting, Or Social Hand-wringing
• Taking a Step Beyond - Personal efforts in meeting the Millennium Development Goals

Other Paths Showing the Way From Hardship to Ease

The web journey of this blog has taken many paths and a recent one was agreeing to participate with fellow blogger hal786, an English Muslim girl who writes After Hardship Will Always Come Ease, in her BloggersUnite's event HARDSHIP2EASE DAY which takes place today 23 September 2009.

According to hal786:

The goal is to help bring ease to people who've suffered hardships in life, by sharing their stories and writing stories of how someones life went from bad to good/hardship2ease.

Being ignorant of such matters, I did not realize that the words come from the Qur'an. As is my habit, I did some web-searching to learn more. The blog Far From Home provided greater insight. My sense as an outsider is that this is a very important part of the Muslim tradition of which our Western culture has very little idea. It also strikes me as a very personal idea of finding ease within ones self. The underlining of the quote below is mine.

"With every hardship, comes ease. Verily, with hardship comes ease." (Chapter 94; verses 5-6)

This refrain, echoed twice, stress upon the sometimes "hidden" blessings within a given burden or hardship. In the ordinary words of mortals, "In every dark cloud, there is a silver lining." Sometimes, we are too weary, too burnt out, too depressed to see that "ease", that silver lining. After all, when surrounded by darkness, it is not easy to "see." Usually, we understand the "ease" afterwards and therefore make the mistake that the ease comes after hardship. But note the stress in the refrain of the word "with" which indicates that the ease comes hand-in-hand with the hardship. (Once again, the duality that I was discussing in an earlier note kicks in.)

Another source was Islam.Online.Net Thinking Over the Verses of the Qur'an
Many people read the Qur'an, but the important thing is, just as Allah states in His verses, to ponder on each verse of the Qur'an, to draw a lesson from that verse, and to improve one's conducts in compliance with these lessons.

Those who read the verse [For truly with hardship comes ease; truly with hardship comes ease] (Al-Inshirah 94:5-6), for example, reflect upon it. They understand that Allah creates ease with each hardship, and therefore, the only thing they have to do when they meet a hardship is to put their trust in Allah and find the ease that is with it. Allah's promise being so, we see that giving up hope or being stricken with panic in moments of difficulty is a sign of a weakness in our faith. After reading this verse and reflecting upon it, our conduct will go in line with the verse throughout our lives.

I can't help but find it interesting that my last post on this blog dealt with perception and this blog post deals with concepts arguably beyond perception. When BeyondPerception writes of dunya it brings to my mind the Buddhist concept of samsara. Similarly Far From Home above speaks about duality. The concept of "With every hardship, comes ease", also extends to others. This seems to me to be a concept common across all the major religions. It is not merely a matter of how we see the world, but how we take what we see and the shared story we create to make our world.

Verily, With Hardship Comes Ease (Surah al-Sharh,94) posted by BeyondPerception

In the end, love means wanting the best for that other person. But I truly think love shouldn't end with our family and friends, it should spread to everyone, even a stranger. As result, if you have this type of love for everyone, you should genuinely only want the best for them.

The dunya is ephemeral. Change is inevitable and nothing, including this world is permanent. Relationships will always change, feelings will continue to change and it is all because it is God's will. "Allahu Alam" (God knows best). He knows what's best for you even though it may not be in your favor. All we can do is love one another and pray that Allah will bless all of us with goodness in this life and the hereafter.

I thank Allah for making me stronger in times of tribulation, for removing anger from my heart, and turning my negative emotions into peace.

Here is a wonderful youtube video passed along from another xanga member for those going through hardship. JazakAllah Kairun :)

Privacy versus Authenticity Keeping My Online Personae Straight

I have often alluded to my "real life/day job" when writing for this blog. This blog started out as an experiment and as part of that experiment it was decided that it would be kept separate. One, to see how it fared completely on its own without outside assistance, and two, to keep my "real life/day job" uncomplicated with personal viewpoints. Being in public administration means to a large extent that you put your opinions on the backburner and respect the democratic process that put those making the decisions in power.

Because of personal and policy changes at the "day job" my virtual and more openly idealistic online persona, which was borne of this blog, is now getting short shrift. My day job has its own online persona and is getting benefit from what I have learned during my sojourns into the World of Web 2.0 through this blog. The separation still exists, but now more tenuously. It is also getting harder to maintain because while I still have some desire to maintain the private space there is also a sense of being inauthentic or at least fragmented.

There are points of connection and it is possible to discover one of my online personae through the other, but so far nobody has seemed to have noticed any of them. Do I want to make them more obvious?

Blogging to Save the World from My Laptop

One topic I keep repeatedly going over is why I blog. The basic reason was as a learning tool, which I learned was readily shared with others, which I found I enjoyed doing. My other blog was created in part to apply what I had or was learning to a worthwhile cause.I picked the Millennium Development Goals because I was impressed with the cause and the people who are associated with it. It also provides the maximum potential leverage for my efforts - blogging to Save the World.

Now that brings up the potential of being labeled a slacktivist because my BrianDRPM persona does all of its activism online. The trouble, if you can call it that, is that the more you explore, the more you get drawn in by the good work that is being done by so many others. I do find my conflicted about so many doing good works on-the-ground while I merely provide some minimal support through this blog.

My real life/day job persona does have the potential of doing some good for the community for which I work, but I do think about leaving city government after retirement (which is not that far away) to perhaps work for a nonprofit. Yet I can't help but thinking that Web 2.0 will play a larger role in non-profit activism in the future. Even from that perspective there is still a great deal to learn but fortunately many to learn from.

Those internal conflicts aside, it does seem that Web 2.0 is not only taking a greater role in defining activism, especially global activism, but the this online global activism is redefining or reformulating how we use Web 2.0. So the question seems to be, how do we make Web 2.0 an optimal tool for the causes we wish to support and how do we use it do define our own roles in those efforts?

The efforts of one of my Orkut friends and the person who was essential in putting together the Stand Up and Take Action Against Poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals campaign in India is summarized below.

He is also competing in the India Yahoo UnCannies and has been nominated under the online advertising category.

Stand UP Take ACTION - social media for social change

View more presentations from Rupesh Mandal

I also checked out some of the competition on Alexa.com.

• Adultdost.com has a traffic rank of: 203,381
• Pixtelevision.com has a traffic rank of: 187,730
• Endpoverty2015.org has a traffic rank of: 268,934

Related Posts (from my other blog)

• Web 2.0 and Social Impact from the Ground Up and from the Server Out

• Updating Resources dgCommunities

Belief and Ritual Finding Common Ground Through Difference

My objective in creating this blog was as a learning tool for myself through finding websites of interest and organizing them for further study to create my own personal paradigm shifts. One of the main sources of interesting material continues to be TED. Recently, I have had a desire to go back to the original motivations for this blog and broaden my explorations again. This is done with the belief that it will help my gaining more understanding of the Millennium Development Goals dealt with in my other blog. Below are a collection of TED talks I found inspiring on a personal level.

Wade Davis: The worldwide web of belief and ritual
Anthropologist Wade Davis muses on the worldwide web of belief and ritual that makes us human. He shares breathtaking photos and stories of the Elder Brothers, a group of Sierra Nevada Indians whose spiritual practice holds the world in balance. Watch this talk >>

Stefan Sagmeister: Things I have learned in my life so far

Rockstar designer Stefan Sagmeister delivers a short, witty talk on life lessons, expressed through surprising modes of design (including ... giant inflatable monkeys?). Watch this talk >>

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Money cannot make us happy, he says -- instead, he looks to people who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

Watch this talk >>

Lessons Learned Lessons Applied

The new blog is still undergoing construction. Actually construction is not right because it is still in the design phase and undergoing is not right because I haven't done anything with it for last few weeks. This post is partially to get back on track.

While this current weblog has provided a number of lessons that can be applied to the new one, there is still the matter of deciding what the new weblog is supposed to accomplish and how to achieve that. One primary lesson being applied is that Milestones for the New Millennium is far more focused than this endeavor which tends to follow its own path of exploration.

The new blog is focused on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and the efforts of others to see those goals accomplished. The eight goals though still provide a wide range of topics to write about. Within each of those goals, is it to 1. End Hunger 2. provide Universal Education 3. ensure Gender Equity 4. ensure Child Health 5. ensure Maternal Health 6. Combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases 7. ensure Environmental Sustainability or 8. create Global Partnerships; there are both milestones to celebrate and millstones to rail against. The efforts of those supporting End Poverty 2015 will be prominently featured.

The concept, though, of overcoming all the world's problems for the thousand years before us is daunting. The notion that we will be successful in pushing the world's governments into meeting their promises by having people stand up is almost naive. It is still, nonetheless, worth supporting.

The Millennium Milestones blog is based on the premise that there has to be other avenues connecting the global perspective of the Millennium Development Goals with the individual activities of organizations and people working at the local level. There is also the "how" as well as the "what". This blog has explored social-entrepreneurship and the efforts of those trying to make the world a better place. There is the expectation that increased awareness will not command compliance from world governments but that their lack of commitment will inspire others to take matters in their own hands. It will be the day-to-day efforts of hundreds working through organizations utilizing new technologies that will lead us to fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals.

Getting Back To The Writing Desk

I stopped writing which is bad. It is not bad because the world has been denied my writing, but my not writing, my not partaking in the activity of writing is bad. It is bad because when I am not writing I am not doing anything else of particular value to anyone including myself. I also stopped learning when I stopped writing.

It is not that I don't have anything to write about. There are a number of drafts waiting to be developed and finalized. There is also the creation of a new blog. It is getting over that initial writer's blockage that seems to have built up since returning from China. Writer's blockage seems to be a more precise term than writer's block because it isn't a matter of a blank wall but overcoming those factors that weigh one down at the end of the day and making the time for writing.

The plans that I have made for my new blog require that I overcome my recent stupor. This post is the first step.

Creating and Re-creating A Blog Creating and Re-creating Yourself.

One of the resources that this weblog uses is Daily Writing Tips, which is listed in the left hand column under Blogging Roads Less Traveled. An important question raised by Daily Writing Tips is, "why blog"? They assert that having a blog can help your writing.

Do you have your own blog? If so, do you sometimes feel guilty about spending time writing for your blog rather than working on something which you consider more “worthwhile”? If you don't have a blog, have you ever thought of starting one? Perhaps you're not sure whether it would be worth the investment of your time and energy.

Here are Daily Writing Tips 5 reasons why blogging improves your writing.

There are five great ways that starting your own blog, or continuing writing the one you already have, can improve your writing.

1. You’ll get into the habit of writing regularly. Blog posts tend to be short and can be online as soon as you've written them: Very true, though my posts can get longer if I am dealing with an involved subject. The instant publishing can be problem because it is too easy, but I give myself the option to re-write what I have posted if I find mistakes afterwards or think of a better way to say something. Overtime, my need to re-write has been becoming less, relatively speaking. There are some posts at which I will keep plugging away before publishing them to read up on additional sources of information or because it just isn't sounding quite right.

2. Instant feedback lets you know how you're doing: As this is my personal learning web portal, feedback is not essential, but I have received some positive comments or obtained other forms of acknowledgement. Nobody has, however, given me either positive or negative feedback on my writing itself, which I would not expect for a blog as it is a different type of creature. Most times posts are judged on content and there have been posts claiming that blogs can ignore some of the writing rules.

As far as none at all feedback, that would be vast majority of this effort. So there is still the potential for this work to be boring, trite or over-done.

3. Having readers for your work is a big motivation: Even making a tiny ripple within the Internet was motivating and to some extent addicting. Having the opportunity to participate in the creation of a wave of change is also enticing. It also makes a difference who is reading this blog. In the early stages of this weblog I linked to anything having to do with paradigms that seemed to fit. One link was to the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant under PoetryExpress again under the left hand column. What was surprising was the number of visits from that site to this one. That was a big motivator in making the posts at least adequate in terms of writing.

FeedBurner also tallys how many times a webpost you have created or a weblink you have saved on del.icio.us or elsewhere is clicked. Overall, this weblog has resulted in 6,467 clicks back to the original site on 301 items. That means that on average 21 people found something useful in what I did at least enough to click the item. While that won't let me quit my day job it is still gratifying. The highest was 128 clicks for WHO, What are the key health dangers for children? I found the idea of being able to provide a helpful link to others appealing, in some ways more appealing than having somebody read something that I wrote. The trouble is that has now dropped radically. The average number of clicks for the last month as dropped to 19 clicks back to the originating site on 11 items. Why the sudden upswing and then sudden downswing is not something for which I have found an explanation.

This weblog according to Technorati's Dave Sifry has low authority, which is currently at 6, but it has some authority, which is more than I was originally expecting. The Low Authority Group is defined as 3-9 blogs linking in the last 6 months. Though admittedly some of the links are self-promotional for the blogs doing the linking. Again, my impact on FeedBurner has fluctuated. I began with zero, so anything would have been an improvement. My average number of subscribers has been 9, since I started this experiment in late 2007.

4. Your writing will improve. The best way to get better at anything is to practice. Writing frequently for your blog means your writing will improve: I do believe that this is true. The posts are becoming better than earlier posts. Do they make you cringe, when compared to your writing now? Enough that, every now and then, I will still go back to make corrections or do re-writes.

5. Blogs are an ideal medium for experimentation: Definitely agree with this one. It is part of the reason that this weblog has evolved into something more than was originally envisioned.

One form of experimentation suggested is using Bullet pointed lists. Creating a blog, especially this blog, involves both combining and expanding concepts and then distilling and summarizing them into a more concise format. Most blogs, in my view, depend to a very large extent upon the work of others or stories within the news. This weblog is no exception. There needs to be enough of a change though to make the post truly yours rather than just a rehash of somebody else's work.

What I found as fascinating as the fact that somebody was reading or clicking my stuff was where they were coming from - around the globe. According to Lijit, this weblog has had 227 page views in the last month, actually 393 minus the 166 orginating from Nanjing, China where I am staying. Most of these were within the United States but others have originated from South America, Europe and Asia. Feedburner indicated the same thing. The other aspect of this blog that has helped with international connections is learning different tagging and social bookmarking systems. Again, this weblog connects with others in South American, Africa, Europe and Asia.

Daily Writing Tips helps me to understand that there is a difference between blogging and writing. Yes, they are very much interrelated, but they are still also have independent aspects. One can write without ever touching a computer and there are technical issues related specially to blogging. While there are those who argue that they are even more distinct, the skills of writing can only make blogging better to my mind. This question has been asked before, but it's good to be reminded and look at the issue from a different facet. Whether you think it is worth the investment depends upon what you want to get out of it. It also depends on what you define as being a blog.

The Internet and Web 2.0 (presuming we see these as two different things) seems to keep re-inventing themselves, which often means re-inventing the terms to describe them. Web 2.0 seems to be in the midst of being re-invented as social media. Weblogs are now everything from personal journals to alternative news sources. At one time though, according to Jon Barger, who originated the term: "1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)

This weblog did not start off with the intention of becoming a blog in the current sense of the term. I also wanted it to be more than just an inert collection of weblinks. It was an experiment in collecting data and information from various sources within the Internet and organizing them for easy retrieval in such a manner that new connections could be made and a better understanding of various subjects could be obtained. The essential point was being able to generate new connections for deeper understanding. Its original intention was to be a learning tool.

This endeavor was started with the understanding that I was a novice. The old adage was to write what you know about. This weblog at least starts with what I do not know about and though there is much I have discovered, I continue to learn more with the focus being on new learning. Even within those areas of professional experience the decision was made to start with an empty cup and begin with a beginners mind. Then I found out that somebody was reading what I wrote and that started changing things.

So I definitely believe that this weblog has created some value for me, even if it might not be judged successful as a blog in the common use of the term.

Tell Stories and Improve Your Marketing, Your Mission, Your World

My last post was on making the pitch and having that pitch repeated by word-of-mouth. This post takes its lead from Anita Campbell's article on why its a good idea to Tell Stories and Improve Your Marketing through her Small Business Trends blog. There are important differences between pitches and stories. Strangers pitch to each other, people in a community create and share stories. This applies to change-agent organizations as much as it does to businesses. It is good if you can get your customers to delivery pitches for you, it is great if they tell each other positive stories about you. Ms. Campbell's article first appeared in OPEN Forum (which seems a pretty good description of social media on its surface).

T.J. Walker, a public speaking consultant to the rich and famous, wrote about the power of telling stories. Quoting the book "Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, he notes that 63% of people will remember a story from a talk or presentation, versus only 5% who remembered statistics.

He also said this: "Stories are not a luxury; they are the single most effective way to get your audience to remember your messages."

If you want your business to be memorable, and for your message to reach as many people as possible and persuade them to buy, learn to tell stories around your business.

Ivana Taylor, who will be featured in a future post on this topic of social media provided a comment by on May 29th, 2008

Amen Anita! Stories are indeed the most powerful (and FREE) marketing vehicle a small business can use. But getting to the story is sometimes really difficult because we are too focused on the “features” of our business than on the benefits. Here’s a helpful hint on how to get your story started.
- Think of an incident that served as a “eureka” moment. This would be a specific moment in time where you suddenly had a revelation of sorts or a moment where your passion was ignited. This needs to be a real moment in time

Going back to S.O.P. of combining ideas together, I found insights from a master storyteller, novelist Amy Tan, who tells her own story at a TED talk where she sets fire to the TED Commandments in the first minute, and rolls from there. Nothing catches the audience like a good intro. Stories well told will go beyond marketing and into clearing the pathways for beneficial paradigms.

Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide? Novelist Amy Tan digs deep into the creative process, journeying through her childhood and family history and into the worlds of physics and chance, looking for hints of where her own creativity comes from. Watch this talk >>

Getting Into Social Media While Having Been There All The While.

This weblog started off as an experiment to teach myself more about web 2.0 technology and as a means of educating myself in other areas of interest. Its impact on me has grown over time having opened up arenas of inquiry that I would not have considered in the beginning.

There has not been a predetermined pathway nor has there been any effort to keep to any pathway in particular. Different aspects of Web 2.0 have been tried, with some being let go and some retained.

One new pathway that this weblog has been pursuing implicitly up until now is social media. Implicitly, because it was not the original intent of this weblog to focus on connecting socially to other users. My admitted bias has been toward ideas. Ideas, however, only have life if they are communicated, and the source of new ideas are other people, so slowly I was drawn into social media. It has been to my benefit, but that would be getting ahead of myself. At first it was with a great deal of skepticism, but over time the potential of web 2.0 tools as a means of bringing about beneficial paradigm shifts has become more real for me. Implicitly, as well, because I have only recently created a social-media tag for this blog or my tagging systems. I have dealt with the subject, but only recognized it as having an ancillary and secondary role. Now it seems a great deal is being written lately about it in the blogosphere on Social Media and its supposed promises, limitations, and in some cases, its dark side.

The dark side come to those who put too much of their personal lives into their blogs find themselves virtually viscerated by the unfeeling masses. I have a greater appreciation for authenticity because of what I have learned through this weblog, but authenticity is different from personal confession. I choose to keep my day job/so called "real" life separate from this effort for a number of reasons. I have provided a photo of myself because hiding behind an avatar seems inauthentic, but that does not mean I have to share personal details or need to know that of others. I can be judged by my ideas and writings. Next comes its promise, mostly made by those in marketing and its limitations made by those who though they are riding the train and in many cases fueling the train ask themselves if by chance someone should warn others as to the possible consequences of the train going faster than we might be able to handle. A number of posts sit in Blogger limbo waiting to be completed on various aspects of this subject.

The ability of this weblog to provide pathways to new learning experiences has grown over time. A greater appreciation of various arenas of study, such as various perspectives on economics, design and marketing has occurred. This weblog makes making connections and seeing interrelationships ever more apparent. These interrelationships are now becoming more complex. Encapsulating a myriad number of ideas, organizing those ideas and now communicating those ideas to others, while others are doing the same with you, is all placed under the label Social Media.

What this all reflects is some concerns raised by some with more experience and creditability in the world of Web 2.0 that has to be contrasted with the growth that this weblog has seen regarding the expanse of connections spanning the globe and the depth of intellectual connections based on the insightfulness and breadth of ideas.

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.

Being Human, Working, Writing Stories, Being Human

My weblog recently featured two posts that together speak to a perspective that I have been formulating over time regarding the Internet.

The first was from this weblog's blogroll Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: McLuhan's web - Diigo Annotated His blog post has all the links.

diigo tags: mcluhan, writing, storytelling, blogging, marketing

My column in today's Guardian looks at Marshall McLuhan's second life as a prophet of internet media. A couple of my references had to be cut from the column for space reasons.

According to Nicholas Carr, "Reading, to put it simply, is a lonely pursuit, while speech is a social one." So what does that make blogging? Carr talks about sacrificing our shared, tribal consciousness and became locked into private consciousness. I have to believe though that the rise of individualism, as it relates at least the cognitive ability that would later be applied to the specialization of jobs in factories, came before printed text. I would go so far to speculate that cognitive individualism gave rise to the need for the printing press.

Kevin Kelly, one of Wired’s original editors, suggests that what McLuhan “was really talking about was the Internet—two decades before it appeared.” Paul Levinson, in his book Digital McLuhan, argues that McLuhan’s ideas help explain the “dynamic of increased and enlightened human control” that characterizes “our digital age.”

The internet doesn’t really fit into McLuhan’s “hot” and “cool” dichotomy. It is, as Scott Rosenberg wrote back in 1995, a “lukewarm” medium. It encourages participation but it also sucks up our attention and dominates our senses. When we gaze into a computer screen, we tune out everything else.

Are we becoming part of an electronic tribe when we tune into the computer screen and tune out from everything else or are being confined to our own individualistic and to a great extent self-created web identities or is it a fusion of both.

That would depend on how we use the web to communicate because that is what the Internet basically is, a form, a medium for communications. Which raises the question, what is the purpose of that communication? That brings up the second post from Seth Godin.

Which comes first (why stories matter)

via Seth's Blog by Seth Godin on 4/1/08

Most of the time we do the work. The work is our initiative and our reactions and our responses and our output. The work is the decisions we make and the people we hire.

The work is what people talk about, because it's what we experience. In other words, the work tells a story.

...if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you're living it.

The story creates the work and the work creates the story.

It is both the work and the story that makes us human. The story more so, because it is what we use to connect with each other. There are different ways of telling the story and different means of telling the story. Millions have chosen the net and web 2.0 as the most viable means. The loss is when we stop telling our own story and let the machine define us rather than the other way around.

Write Like A Blogger, Though Not Necessarily Like This Blogger

It has been almost a week since I did a post for this weblog. The real life/day job reality has been more demanding. It has not only meant a decrease in the number of posts, but it has served to make hollow my resolution about improving my writing. To be honest, my problem is that I often write these posts late at night after work and my internal self-editor often works on a 2 to 3 day delay. So looking over past posts after a week or so, I find "advise" instead of "advice" or "principals" instead of "principles" and other errors. Past posts attempting to justify typos don't really resolve anything.

This though raises the question, why even worry about it? As this is not a professional weblog serving any viable business enterprise and it has limited range within the blogosphere compared to so many others, why worry?

For me, what is of importance is that this weblog is a learning tool and one means of demonstrating understanding is being able to communicate that understanding.

Seth Godin's Blog back on On April 7th provided some other insights. I am, however, going to start with the questions he ended with.

What would happen if every single high school student had to have a blog? Or every employee in your company? Or every one of your customers?

I would imagine that many would look like this one, not in terms of the details, but as thousands of small pools connecting to others with 4 to 6 active readers, 1 or 2 clicking a link or 3 or 4 visitors a day. Others would be far more socially-oriented than this blog or have particular expertise but the vast majority would have limited reach and be linked together through multiple degrees of separation. They would though be connected. This weblog's best used link, which was to the World Health Organization website on children's health issues, got 128 clicks according to FeedBurner. While a minor number in world wide web statistics, what happened to those connections, was there a cascading benefits effect? If every high school student had a blog could the voting age be lowered to 16? So while the writing of this weblog has only minor effect by itself, it does add to a larger conversation that can have great impact.

Seth Godin provides a number of ways of achieving this through his advice to write like a blogger. Only bulleted summations of his main ideas are here (which are pretty much bullet-oriented already) along with my comments, more can be found at the original link.

You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger:

1. Use headlines. Which I do, coming up with them is part of the fun. I don't know really know how well they work though.
2. Realize that people have choices. blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.
I can agree with this for the most part, but it all writing is summarized and bulleted how does anyone get any depth of knowledge from the Internet?
3. Drip, drip, drip. Bloggers don't have to say everything at once. We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time.
This one I definitely agree with especially using the Internet as a learning tool. I am continuously building upon what was written before
4. It's okay if you leave, include links
   
For this weblog the focus is on the links. The weblog posts are intended as a narrative thread to organize the knowledge in an understandable manner.
5. Interactivity is a great shortcut, reading your email or your comments makes it easy to stay relevant.
This weblog claims no expertise, only the offer of sharing what is discovered and hopefully learned from.
6. Gimmicks aren't as useful as insight. If you're going to blog successfully for months or years, sooner or later you need to actually say something. Same goes for your writing.
Meaning that blogging and writing are two different things. This is something I want to explore more.
7. Don't be afraid of lists. People like lists.
Like this one?
8. Show up, waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
9. Say it. Don't hide, don't embellish.

Still Tinkering Still Learning

One thing that needs to be admitted is that my editing is still not as good as it should be. Not that this is 'serious writing' by any means, but it is a goal to improve all aspects of this weblog experiment over time. A past visit to DailyWritingTips provided me with 34 Writing Tips That Will Make You a Better Writer. All of them were good suggestions though some hit home more than others.

"1. Daniel
Pay attention to punctuation; especially to the correct use of commas and periods. These two punctuation marks regulate the flow of your thoughts, and they can make your text confusing even if the words are clear."

"34. Pedro
Edit your older articles and pieces. You will notice that great part of it will be crap, and it will allow you to refine your style and avoid mistakes that you used to make."

The last suggestion is particularly true, and I have gone back and made some corrections. The writing of a weblog, I am discovering is not just a matter of the 'writing' though. There is the behind the scenes aspects of formatting and design. There is also the power of the web to connect and how we best do that. Spending some time at the WC3 school has taught me a few tricks such as figuring out why the TED videos weren't working properly (missing the back slash on the embed closing tag but turns out it can get even more involved) and how to get this blog's links to open in new windows starting on Wednesday, December 19, 2007. I always thought having to click back to be a pain.

The last focus is how to continue organizing all of the information that is being gathered and incorporated into this weblog. The original idea was to create repositories in which to place links with common themes. These were easy as links could be placed within them with two or three clicks of the mouse. The three methods tried were public Ask.com folders [Social and Economic Paradigms], Google Notebooks [Science Pathways] and the shared Google Reader [Innovations, Insights, Integrity]. Then I learned more about tagging del.icio.us, blinklist, ma.gnolia and diigo. I have written before about how viable the different systems are for using tags to interconnect with others. I still have a preference for del.icio.us though using diigo in conjunction seems to work well. Diigo as said before allows me to concurrently post at least the initial tagging on all of the tagging systems that I am now using. What I especially enjoy about diigo are the webslides [Creative-Destruction]. Now I have started to combine the repositories and tagging together. Creative-Destruction is both an Ask.com public folder and a web-slide list from diigo.

The question that I am now contemplating is what is the best method of organization. A recent post Breaking Through The Paradigms With Science connected with a number of different links to a Science Magazine article, external links of related subjects and past posts of this weblog. That is a good deal of information and tagging alone merely accumulates similar information, sometimes it arguably makes sense just to tag the post itself, since it contains all of the relevant information, but the chances of somebody picking up on my post compared to a Science article are pretty slim. There are some blogging tips from Jon Barger (putting aside other issues) which I can agree with and to which I have at least to some extent aspired follow.

"1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility."

So far I still have more links than posts though according to the original philosophy behind this weblog it could be better. These posts should be designed as the narrative thread which organizes what is an ever expanding knowledge base and to help forge my thoughts. Others with more experience and knowledge have also taken this approach. From John Hawks weblog of the Change Is At All Levels The Question Is How Fast? post.

"I started writing this blog for two basic reasons: first, because there are some really interesting issues in paleoanthropology that are not well covered in the mainstream science press, and second, because I needed a good way to organize my notes.

It turned out that the solution to the note-taking problem also made a nifty solution for writing about interesting issues -- blogging software is one of the best means of content management around. It became very simple to take notes on things I was reading, punch them up with a bit of information and context, and blog about them. In large part, what you see here are my own notes -- the very ones that I use to write my research papers and books."

This weblog remains primarily a tool for learning for myself but do I find that I enjoy creating and maintaining this weblog far more than I had envisioned.

Blogging as Self-Experimentation

Marginal Revolution: Blogging as self-experimentation

I have fallen way behind in reading Marginal Revolution and am spending the evening catching up. Also not having any input into the discussion until I get a bit more macro-economics in my head. Instead I am just reading to learn. Tyler Cowen's thinking, however, expands often times beyond economics and provides more general insights. This one, from way back in February of 2007, I found especially true.

Blogging as self-experimentation Seth Roberts writes:

“Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation,” Tyler Cowen wrote me. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. He explained: “Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people’s work differently, who you find yourself liking more (and less), etc. I believe those effects [of blogging] are often quite striking.”

Tyler Cowen adds,

"Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy. All you bloggers out there, or spouses of bloggers, what effects do you notice?"

In truth, I don't blog in the usual understanding of the word, I write more for my own education than trying to teach or convince anybody else. This weblog is an expression of interconnected self-reflection and quest for knowledge. I can agree with everything Professor Cowen says but then this weblog was intentionally created with those goals in mind. The responses from the various bloggers who participate in the discussion was interesting. I have collected them for a closer look to see what they offer and how they present themselves. They seem to cover a wide span of thought.

Self-Reflection thru Interconnection Self-Reflection thru Writing

Although this is definitely still a work in progress, I finally have a better notion of what I am trying to accomplish with this weblog. Despite having made pronouncements a number of times, the definitions remained vague and tenuous. This weblog is a vehicle for interconnected self-reflection.

Having lost the second incarnation of this weblog has made a difference. One is realizing how bad some of the writing had been. I need to realize that what is in my head is not necessarily what is on the page. To help with this, I am linking up to Whitesmoke and to the Paradigm Online Writing Assistant. Another realization brought on by self-reflection is that even though only a very few persons at best are reading this, I am still concerned about the quality. The mere act of externalizing some thoughts with only the chance of them being seen still creates a need to ensure that some level of quality is maintained and enhanced.

Still another realization is the truth behind Hugh Macloed's writings and of the Gaping Void video on Being Creative. It is the knowledge and experience of the person behind the blog or website that makes the difference, not the bells and whistles. Of course there is still the need to get the knowledge and experience in putting together the bells and whistles which is its own form of design and art. My newbie discoveries have not surprisingly done by others and better.

One self-realization is that at one level the writing has nothing to do with the web. It is the writing itself that is an exercise in self-reflection as a form of mental self-definition. The interconnected component of this endeavor allows me to connect with a wide range of other sources having a diversity of ideas and perspectives. It is again the individual behind the writing and who has the good or bad ideas, whether by web or by print, who is important.

Although not at the level of establish writer, the exercise does afford the novice some of the same insights. I ran across this article from the Los Angeles Times.

In Topanga Canyon, watching, waiting . . . writing - Los Angeles Times

I sit and write in the face of chaos because that's my job. How else would I be able to feel pain for those who suffer the results of fire and the anxiety that stirs all kinds of emotions in my gut? I need a flow of words to understand my own feelings, and to reach out to our neighbors in Malibu and to those in danger to the north, to the south and to the east." Al Martinez

This is by a professional writer in the midst of an ongoing tragedy but the concept applies to anybody trying to find their place in a constantly changing world. Now the fires have abated and people are starting to rebuild their lives. A very informative report on the fires can be found at the blog serendipityoucity, found previously by this site, which is an excellent example of some of what this weblog is trying to achieve. However, to get to the real heart of a matter for our own understanding can take the skills of a good writer.