NSB-Project

Yesterday I was approached by a former colleague who had volunteered with me on a CPR Sunday project we did for the American Red Cross and the city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in November, 1991.

Her goal was to create a new community service project or event for New Smyrna Beach, Florida.  At this point it is just a dream and I agreed to help her get it started and planned.

DrM-Resources has set-up a collaborative project page and is posting discussion questions to start the brainstorm.  After watching Julie and Julia, I believe that the evolution of this community service project/event would be a good candidate for a blog, focused on the positive and on overcoming challenges.

The blog could both document the planning and be a resource to others considering taking on such an event.  CPR Sunday was based on a successful event held in California and the NSB-Project could be the start of a series of projects/events to benefit communities throughout the USA and the world.

We are at the planning stages and have only two people actively registered on the collaboration web site so far.

Bloging and Writing--A Success Story (and a fun movie)

Bloging can certainly lead to writing and publishing, and for Julie Powell, it led to both a book and a movie.  I saw Julie and Julia for the first time today courtesy of Netflix.  Wikipedia.org has an entry about the movie and there is a blog that looks like the one in the movie.  The book is available from Amazon.com.  (I certainly enjoyed the movie, by the way.  Thanks, Julie.)

I started this blog on August 10, 2009.  One of my original goals was to have the discipline to do a daily blog that will allow me to begin publishing.  I have several partially completed books and, like Julie Powell in the Julie and Julia movie, I wanted a more reduced time-line.  Julie Powell focused on "365 days and 524 recipes".  I was more open-ended and, as a consequence, do not have as focused a product as Julie's blog.

I've had some feedback from friends which have helped me clean-up my blog entries and conversations with these friends and more have given me lots of ideas to post in this blog.  Every day I ask myself what I'm going to write about and the day always brings something forward.

I never know how many people are reading the blog and I post entries which can help anyone who reads it.  It is helping me to maintain my focus.

My plan is to look at my blog when I have 180 or so posts (or more) and to see if there are related blogs which could be chapters.  I'm not sure how much editing I'll need to do and we'll see.  I am an electronic publisher and can publish my book whenever I think it's ready.  So far, that "being ready" has been a challenge.

I looked at the summary of my blog--seen at the top of each page--and believe that my posts are delivering on the intention presented in that summary.  I'm glad to see that Julie Powell has a success story from her bloging efforts.  That holds more hope for me.

Ninety-first post to this blog

When I began this blog on August 10, 2009, I was committing to a daily post of reflections and ideas.  As I write the post tonight, I notice that this is the ninety-first blog.  One or two days had two posts, especially if I missed the midnight deadline for a post.

I want to write and publish several books.  A few are in various draft forms.  One of the purposes of a daily blog was to have the discipline of writing.  Indeed, another possibility for a book is to combine the daily blogs once I have enough of them written.

Reflection on daily thoughts and activities has been very worthwhile.  I don't know who is reading this blog and I refer to it in various posts and websites.  The process also allows me to make connections between activities and reflection that I might otherwise miss.

Sometimes I wait until almost 11:00PM to make my entries.  It seems that it takes that long sometimes to focus on what I want to post.  The good news is that throughout the day ideas for the blog are percolating in my mind, waiting for me to write them down.

Today has been an unusual day.  Lately I have been involved in contacting business professionals around the world to find people who want to work with me in enrolling language learners in a new, affordable, online language learning program.  I have been asking for people who are interested to contact me and have been responding to their e-mails with information.  There were fewer e-mails today and I find myself challenged to find innovative ways to encourage business professionals to check-out the programs and the business opportunities associated with them.

I need to explore new ways to connect with people who can and who want to benefit from the language learning these programs make available.  Anyone with any ideas, please comment on this post.