What's this blog really about?

August is when school starts again for me, and the end of July seems like a reasonable time to reflect on the status and goals of my blog.

As it turns out, I have been making a lot of posts about politics recently, but that is not my MAIN intent with this blog.  My intent is to post as an observer -- of life and culture and things that interest me.

As you can see on my About Me page, I am not a member of any political party, but I have expertise in a lot of leadership, scientific, social, and cultural realms.

I know about research and analysis, with over 40 academic journal, conference, and book chapter scholarly publications. 

I have worked in journalism, tourism, and fund raising. 

I interviewed hundreds of politicians, scientists, and opinion leaders during my journalism career, and have some cool journalism awards, including "story of the year" and "best enterprise reporting."

I have owned and operated a business. 

I have worked in a strict chain-of-command organization. 

I have had some great bosses who were true leaders and role models, but I have also had superiors who couldn't think their way out of a cardboard box. 

I have psychology training. 

I teach courses in journalism, media, management, and marketing. 

I am much in demand for my critical thinking ability (among people who value critical thinking).

Given all this background, when I look at an issue, I evaluate it not just based on "gut instinct" but rather on "how does this compare to the lessons learned from other similar situations"?  I have a solid ethical and conceptual foundation from which my evaluations flow.

Given all of this, I have been looking for a place to express my perspectives, as part of my professional presence and personal brand on the web.

I tried Facebook notes, but they were limited to Facebook members.

I tried a LiveJournal blog (years ago), but now that it is Russian-owned, with terms of service NOT translated into English, I have deleted it.  Plus the LiveJournal culture was anonymity, and I was not looking to hide my identity.

I tried a Tumblr blog, and although the interface is nice,  Tumblr is kind of a weird place (not that that is automatically bad), and also mostly anonymous.

I tried a Wordpress blog, a platform that gets a lot of attention among bloggers, but which I found to be klunky and not at all intuitive to use.

For now, this Blogspot site is feeling comfortable.  It has an easy interface, good tagging capability for search engines, ability to schedule post times, and reasonable analytic statistics.

I started this blog last fall, took a break this spring, but resumed posting this summer. July was a record month, with 442 page views (plus however many look at this post before the end of the day July 31) which is up from 393 in June.   Since the beginning, I have had over 2,200 page views from readers in at least 10 countries.

United States	1647
France	216
Germany	154
Taiwan	44
Ireland	9
Netherlands	8
Russia	8
Austria	7
Canada	5
United Kingdom	4

Since I teach social media content marketing, here are a few of my standard procedures:

• Each post gets a notice on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Tumblr.  Some people who read my posts are simply friends and contacts from these platforms, but many also find them through the label/keyword/hashtag function that drives search engine results.

• The blog post, and each of these social media notifications go up at a time people are likely to SEE then, rather than have them scroll off their news.

• And I do my best to find photo illustrations for the posts, which are shown get more attention.  I either use my own photos or pictures from the web with rights clearly labeled to allow reuse.

So...I'll look for stuff other than politics to post about, but as crazy and dysfunctional as American politics is right now, expect it to stay in the mix.