It’s hard to chart an alternative course for my life had I not started blogging, because every significant event in my career during the last ten years has come from this form of writing.

My connection to 800-CEO-READ came from an author who found my blog, saw my love for business books, and thought I should know that the nexus for the industry was less than 20 miles from my home. His introduction led to my first position at the company as a blogger paid to write about business books and continued for seven wonderful years.

When I left 800-CEO-READ in 2009, blogging directly led my to my next pursuits. A tweet from an editor in Spain connected me to the world of literary scouting. My renewed blogging about the future of publishing led to a project with the awesome folks at O’Reilly. My clients for book development have all come to read what I am about and what I believe and the conversations start at a much richer point.

As Hugh says in his new book, “Freedom is Blogging” and I couldn’t agree more.

It has been interesting to watch what has happened since I moved over to TypePad.  My audience has dropped dramatically.  I get about 7 page views a day now and there are 43 of you reading through Feedburner. 

I am not particularly upset about it.  If I wanted to build the readership again, I would need to start writing every day.  I have found that really hard to do with all blogging I do for 800ceoread.

So, thanks to those of you who are still visiting.  I will trying to keep it interesting from time to time. 🙂

I am at SXSW this weekend.

I’ll give you my thoughts on the happenings over the next four days.

The first panel I am checking out the Beyond Folksonomies. They spent the first half of panel talking very philosophically about tagging (Zzzzz). The interesting parts include:

• The other 99.5% of the world is not using tagging. (All of us forget that).
• Mary Hodder from Dabble (video bookmarking) says their users look that two things to determine what they will watch – tags and clip length. This is unique for photos, audio, and video. Text search can do pretty good on blogs, but other forms of media can really benefit from tagging.
• More people need to think about uses. Do we need a 45th social bookmarking site?
• If you look at the folder structure on someone’s computer, they are using folksonomy already.
• Folders are hierarchical, and tagging is better because it is flat and can show multiple relationships.

Tags: sxsw2006

Scoble is trying a little game. He is telling everyone to put “brrreeeport” into their blogs. It is partial a test to see how long it takes for the search engines to notice. It is also your way to get listed with all the A-listers and break down the gates.

I thought I would play along. You can follow the brrreeeport progress over on Technorati.

It seems my alma mater continues to make very rash decisions about things they don’t like.

Marquette University has suspended a student and removed their scholarship after they wrote comments on their blog about a professor and the other students in his/her class.

The Marquette Warrior has an excellent write-up of the entire series of events.

The student’s comments were careless and crude, but they did not justify the actions the university has taken.

More reasons to say no when Marquette calls looking for donations.