Well it has been a year and this is my 272nd post. I set out to write a blog entry every day and even though I came up a few short, I have enjoyed organizing my thoughts and working on my writing in 2010.
Thinking about why I do what I do, or what I plan to do in the future is unavoidable (for me anyway) as the calendar changes to a new year. The blog posts I wrote this year were adequate notes to myself about what I was thinking at the time, and the fact that 4,000 other people found my posts interesting enough to read is flattering.
So what to do in 2011? I have no plans to become a journalist, so I am not looking for a scoop or to break a story. I do think I could put more effort into some bigger writing pieces that further organize my thinking into actual arguments. So in the weeks ahead I am going to pick a few main themes and start to develop them into longer essays that argue a particular point.
Here are some possible subjects based on the number of entries I made this year organized into broad categories:
Tech Marketing (113 entries): I write a lot about this because my company helps large tech companies with sales and marketing. I think the changing role of the salesperson is worth spending time thinking about with Google and Facebook on one end of the spectrum because they really have no salespeople, and Salesforce.com on the other end spending 50% of revenue on salespeople. I don't know how this is going to work out but it sure will be interesting to watch.
New Media (51 entries): My second most written about topic is new media. To me New Media is the decline of the newspaper, publishing, and TV we grew up with and the rise of blogging, micro blogging, social media, and streaming media over the Internet. We live in a very interesting time and the creative destruction of this sector is one of the things that makes it so interesting.
Politics (47 entries): Next in line is politics - mostly in the US, but invariably overlapping with the rise of China as a world power. The big question of course is whether or not the US will stay on top and how many wars will we start as we struggle with our identity.
Economics (44 entries): Finally economics. In the world I want to live in, those that create the most value get the most rewards. It does not take long to see that right now getting rewarded is often disconnected from value creation. Will my pollyannaish view of the world find its way into reality, or will Goldman Sachs continue to gobble up everything for themselves?
There is one other subject that I find very interesting and that weaves throughout all of this: demographics. We often define people in groups and evaluate the relationships between the groups based on our understanding of the average within that group. This tendency prevents us from seeing the real picture. The growth rate of a nation's GDP or even the GDP per capita does not tell us very much. The unemployment rate in the US is around 10% -- but some sectors cannot find enough workers and others have 25% unemployment. If you are interested in this subject, read this from Foreign Affairs. Sure there are well over a billion people in China, but half of them are subsistence farmers who do not participate in the economy.
I am looking forward to digging in on these topics during 2011. As always, your comments and thoughts are appreciated.