Below Belief

Yosemite National Park in California is a special place. I was lucky enough to be there in November and stood to admire the view…

Hugh MacLeod is a genius. He writes gapingvoid and makes me laugh out loud at least once a day. I can’t pretend to know anything about the marketing or advertising industries but as a consumer I have a strong feeling that what he preaches about the future of “markets as conversations” is going to come true. Is already coming true. Read the Hughtrain to make sense of it all.
This cartoon is a favourite and for me, sums up the crazy dichotomy that most of us face in our working [and personal] lives. To be the wolf or the sheep? And the dreadful unhappiness that comes from not feeling comfortable being either…

My friend Simon has a theory that “blogging is a mating signal, so as
soon as you start getting it regularly the desire to blog goes down
massively”. I tend to agree. In fact I have to agree. That my blogging frequency and general desire to tinker with this site, has gone up recently, says it all.
Despite the acclaimed “altruism” of most bloggers, I suspect our over-arching desire is to be recognised, to be seen, to be part of the blogosphere, to be a part of anything, to be read and to be visited. We love to be commented on, linked to, tracked-back, blog-rolled, googled. We love people who don’t blog to find us and discover the medium. To discover what it means “to blog”. To feel the awkward-voyeurism of reading someone else’s journal.
I was astonished to find the other day that my embryonic photography site beautifulmood.com is doing about 12,000 page impressions a month. No one’s buying any bloody photos but I get a couple of emails a week congratulating me on a nice site, so it must have been worth it. My day job is as CTO for a successful travel website and we’re currently doing about 400,000 page impressions a day, so there’s a way to go yet.