This Blog's 4th Anniversary

Well folks today is my blog's 4th anniversary. I was thinking of a good way to commemorate this grand occasion, but nothing comes to mind... Anyway, you readers are to be congratulated too - a good portion of this blog is to connect with you all - sharing what is in my head as well as hopefully giving you some good resources and telling some stories for where SPACE is going and the precious people that we are moving with.

I ran across this post a few weeks ago talking about the motivation behind blogging and I think it is a valuable analogy.

When you set up a blog, you are moving into the horizontal city. You are putting yourself -- your passions, your ideas, your beliefs -- online, and by doing so you make yourself linkable. People can see you. They can point to you. They can talk to you. You're a citizen.

At first it's just like moving into a new city in the real world. It's lonely. You don't know anyone. Nobody talks to you. But after awhile -- just like in a real-world city -- you start meeting people and having conversations. You leave a comment on someone's blog, or you link to one of their posts. Then they come to your blog to see who you are. The momentum builds and before you know it you are a member of a community -- maybe several communities.

It's like moving to a city in other ways, too. Putting yourself online is not without risk. You're more vulnerable -- to criminals, stalkers and the merely boring. But it's no different than a real city: you take on more risk but you also enter a thriving metropolis, bursting with opportunity and ideas.

Sometimes people say, "So what? I already live in a city. What's so great about the horizontal city?"

...the web runs on our collective passion. When you put yourself online and make yourself linkable you are making your passions explicit, linkable and clickable. Because of this, the people who find you and point to you tend to share your passions.

On the web, your "hit rate" of interesting people is much, much higher than it is in the real world. How often in the real world do you meet people who truly fascinate you? If it's more than 10 percent of the people you meet, I'd say you are very lucky.

But on the web, your "hit rate" is much higher....

And that (I say to my non-blogging friends) is why blogging is a big deal.

So thanks to you readers for reading, commenting and connecting with our collective passion - mobilizing students for mission. Your input and interaction here makes it so much more fun and interesting so please keep engaging. May this blog continue to be one of the many mediums for helping all of us mobilize students into leaders that burn for humanity.