HeartBeat

Habits, links and smart and stupid bloggers...

Good habits are as easy to form as bad ones. – Tim McCarver
Yeah, right. – Susan Lucas

Anyway, Mayfield Venture Capital Firm's  Managing Director Allen Morgan at  Always On's Stanford Innovation Summit (thanks to Renee Blodgett for her post on this ) talks about two types of bloggers:

"--the smart ones who reference interesting data and link to an event or activity
--the stupid ones who try really hard to write something that makes sense."

Whew. It was hard trying to be a smart one and include seven links to interesting data in two sentences. Think I'll go back to stupid anonymity, although I know from experience life isn't supposed to make sense.

Why blogs matter...

I've been designing greeting cards  for five years. Here is what I do. I make one of my photographs as good as it can possibly be, then go searching for significant words that will combine with the image to make the whole much greater than the sum of its (two so far) parts. That's the front; the back is as carefully planned. When the thing is done, I hope the person who buys the card will be just as thoughtful writing the inside, perhaps inspired by what I've created so far? When someone receives the card, now a collaboration, I imagine (hope) they realize it's embedded with all this energy. Art is like that. I don't receive a paycheck every week for skill and talent applied according to someone else's specifications. My heart is in those cards. A gift from the self-employment fairy. It has truly changed my life.

Why blogs matter? I'm not the only one. Seems organizations, cultures and individuals are opening up– and finding out it's better to be open. This is about communication, conversation, trust, peace, grand creativity and commerce. It's a good time to be alive.

Boom

I used to joke that I had a million friends. Being a boomer, whenever I had an original thought it quicky became apparent that at least a million boomer peers had it too. The upside to sharing the planet with those pesky interlopers was the implied comraderie in our numbers. But what our numbers didn't support was genuine one on one –much less one on one million– communication. That avenue was controlled by media, publishing and marketing powers who limited what we bought, watched, read and thought with accuracy only profits would allow. So I abandoned the million friends idea and settled for a few close ones.

Look at us now– blogging. Idea by  idea, we share opinions, hints and mentorships. Search an author, Anne Lamott or Dan Zadra, say. Or an artist – Damien Rice  or Rod Cook– and find a million friends who share that particular interest and offer a whole lot more. Age, race and gender barriers succumb to open exchange with these newfound millions. Bakerina introduced me to Duane Keiser who led me to sell my daily posting photographs for a cause. Cary Tennis  advised, "make a major choice to live in a lively, provocative city, one that will teach you things you can't learn in the suburbs, one that will bring out parts of your personality that you want to bring out, one that will nurture you in ways you want to be nurtured and discourage you in ways you want to be discouraged." Seth Godin sends me all over the internet for good ideas without a consulting fee. The list goes on and, blissfully, on. Thank you all. I now have a million friends, and they share. This changes everything.

Nice to meet you. Have a donut.