This blog turned ten years old a couple of weeks ago.

Looking back at how I used to blog back then I see that it was mostly comment on current events.

My first post was about a book – How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. I think I still have that book somewhere, although it may have been one of the many that I parted company with during the course of four house moves since that time. Of course, if I really wanted, I could buy it again, and start reading it within minutes thanks to the wonders of pervasive internet retailing and e-books.

In the intervening years there have been several lean periods, where the only posts have been automated linklogs from delicious – as far as I can see I started doing that in January 2004, so the basics of lifestreaming are pretty old now!

I started on Moveable Type, but migrated to WordPress in May 2004

These days most content here is aggregated from other sources: links I have captured, comments on other blogs, tweets I have made; but I still think there is a place for the personal site, often with blog-like features. The role of a site like this is still, I think, to be a personal hub, reflecting the flow of online engagement, learning and co-creation.

Here’s to the next 10 years!

Image by MastaBaba via Flickr

…the length of time since I left this blog fallow.

It’s not as if I am not doing interesting things, far from it, I am busier than ever at work, involved in the many things that a head of IT has to get involved with in a small/medium organisation with a significant focus on web engagement and rich information-based analysis.

But that’s the problem – I am very busy doing stuff which can’t really be blogged, and I haven’t been making the time to reflect on what I am learning to the degree that can be abstracted and anonymised into a public blog post.

So this post is a reminder for me, a call to action about the things that I should be finding a bit of room for.

To try and get myself into the groove, I’ve started re-visiting some good posts from others about the writing habit – these from Chris Brogan are a great start.

Neil McIntosh seems to be having the same problem:

Why the secrecy? Lots of folk write lots of stuff about this business, after all. Trouble is, the business of blogging about the intersection of technology, [and a particular profession] and social change is one that’s dominated by academics and consultants; people who make their living from advising. They’re free to discuss whatever they like and, indeed, it’s good for their business that they do, because they are in the knowledge business, not the delivery business.

It’s a seductive world, because it’s about ideas, not the more difficult business of implementation. The latter is less about the heroic individual, and more about the unglamorous world of meeting rooms, progress charts and compromise.

Some of things happening at work would have been good to blog here, not least because blogging is part of my reflective process, part of how I learn from action, but they are things which contain far too much information about what we are up to – sometimes nothing especially exciting, but as Neil puts it it’s frequently either too dull, or to messy, to expose.

I’ve tried anonymising by generalisation, but that is a lot of work, and usually takes all the impact away from the issue.

Perhaps the answer is one of focus – perhaps if I set a particular frame before work that I am looking for things that I can write about then the ideas will emerge?

When I set that blog up, I was planning on attending a training course in June on Managing Successful Programmes (MSP), leading (hopefully) to the practitioner certificatation. MSP is the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) approach to ensuring the success of major change programmes.

I’ve set up the other site as an online learning diary, and a central place for various notes. To support the blog there is also a wiki for more long-form notes.
Unfortunately the course I was attending has been withdrawn for June by the provider. Looks like I shall now go in October. Inevitably my motivation to go through the pre-work has been somewhat reduced, however I shall continue to post over there – I’m finding lots of ways to introduce key elements of the MSP approach into day-to-day work.

This should also mean that I have a little more online time to keep this place up-to-date!

The two things that put me off Qumana before were its inability to post via a web proxy (not tested this time), and the lack of control over the HTML it was creating. The second thing has been fixed now, with a "Source View" tab.

Things I like

The drop-pad – this makes it really easy to grab links and bits of content as you work and park them in a scratchpad for blogging later. This was the key part of the workflow that Earl Mardle described.

The writing interface is really clean, with the minimum of interferences to get in the way of the words you want to write, and really clear, so you can review your words easily. Being a beta there are a couple of funnies – for example "Insert Link" and "Align Left" seem to share the same keyboard shortcut as described in the menu (actually it applies "Insert Link") – but those are trivial things that I’m sure will be fixed in the release version.

Integrated speeling chocker – definitely a requirement for those fast posts!

Things I don’t like

Unless I missed it in my exploration of the configuration, there is no way to post to your blog as draft. For me this is the killer feature-lack that makes it difficult for me to integrate Qumana into my preferred workflow. I can see an argument that says this tool is for creating fast posts, but I’m sure that many people would like the ability to post in draft. If nothing else, this makes it easy to capture thoughts when they happen, for later access and editing from another computer.

There’s another reason that I would want a "post to draft" facility, which is more to do with my specific blog setup – I make use of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to create tags on my blog, and this requires access to the online WordPress editing screen. If when you read this post it doesn’t have any tags, that’s because I’ve only just posted it and haven’t time to go into WordPress and add them. In fairness to Qumana, this is not something they could realistically accomodate as a specific requirement because it lies outside the XML-RPC interface to WordPress, however a "Post to Draft" feature would enable it. And of course, they do include an easy shortcut for inserting Technorati tags "the normal way".

Things I don’t really care about

A key part of the functionality of Qumana is the ability to easily include adverts in your posts through the close integration with Adgenta. As this isn’t something I particularly want to do on my blog (unless the ISP fees go up!) then it isn’t a selling point for me – nor did I test this aspect to see how well it works.

Summary

A nice tool, and if it had the ability to post in draft I would probably use it. If that isn’t a requirement for your own preferred style of blogging, then give it a go!

Henceforth all original content created by myself and published on this website (including material previously published under different terms) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales License.

She’s taken on the challenge of documenting “Which personal development techniques actually work”, and amongst other things is documenting a self-experiment on the positive affect on mood obtained by abstaining from watching television news.

She says:

I’m not certain why this may work, but suspect that:

1) The bias of most news is depressing (eg an emphasis on crime, disaster, problems, etc)….(And yes, I know that the media can do tremendous good by highlighting poverty, disasters and destruction, but if in the end we’re all too depressed to respond, that isn’t, in fact very useful).

2) Most of this is illustrated with pictures (which people’s unconscious minds just lap up).

3) Watching television is known to induce an alpha-brain-wave, trance-like state

(the very same state in which it’s also easiest to create positive emotional change too).

4) I watch most TV news at night…which is also the time I think of for both myself and my students as being the most powerful for personal development and changework. (Something to do perhaps with tiredness after the day inducing that all-important alpha brain-wave state again.

Try it for yourself!

Updated link to Clare’s new location at http://www.selfworks.net/blog/doesitworkdiary/