I'm sure I'm being naive but it is my viewpoint that the primary responsibility of government should be public interest.

I am in the UK but we seem to get everything from the US, good and bad, sooner or later so this worries me.  Especially since we have no 1st ammendment rights to protect.

I Expect to Fail

Ouch!  That looks horrible when I actually write it down but it's so damn true I can't help myself.  Here's the reality, at least for me:

1. Most new things you do fail.  No shame in it.  Remember the mantra "80% of new businesses fail within the first 5 years"?  Strike out "new businesses" and substitute "most things " and then strike out "5 years" and make it "10 days" (or substitute another time period, it varies).
2. Better to try and fail than never try.  I learn from every single whack thing I do and my coding and writing skills get better every single day.
3. Pretty much everything I do leads to some kind of visibility either here or thru Google or somewhere else (it's good to be public).
4. I get really nice email from people all over the world about these efforts and that makes my whole day (example: A reader from Brazil sent thanks and a "hug" last week, I couldn't have been happier).
5. Something will succeed -- I just don't know what -- and by going parallel rather than serial I am optimizing my chances (IMHO)

The classical business approach is go deep and focus in one area.  I totally agree -- but how do you pick an area.  What I am really doing is applying lighweight parallelism and using that to test the waters.  When something gets a lot of interest then I go back and focus on it.  So, am I whacked?  Or does this make sense to anyone?

I found this just now, it is a follow-up to a posting on Jon Udells blog:

"And yet we need to respect the uniqueness and power of this new mode, in which groups are defined fuzzily and coupled loosely."

Gordon Weakliem responds:

"To me, the great thing about the medium is the loose coupling.  I'm not sure about the more explicit mechanisms for clustering & grouping.  As my interests shift and I discover new sites, I think you'll see my subscription list change a great deal.  One other final point that others (Brad Wilson comes to mind) have brought up recently is the crying need for RSS as the glue for this coupling.  David Mc Cusker is about the only person without an RSS feed who I remember to read regularly, and clearly, RSS is the enabling technology for Jon's entire experiment."

» Again this seems to point the way towards dynamic community building and away from (a majority of) managed subscription lists.  As I envisage BlogPlexes you would drift in and out of them as your own interests changed.  Because they are based around concepts and not keywords you "get nearer" or "further" from them in a natural rhythm that mirrors your own interest level (along with preferences you set in the tools).