At a bloggers panel at a conference recently one of the guests, when asked for his number 1 piece of advice for new bloggers said: stay focused. Pick a topic you know about and stick to it. This is good advice. This won't, however, be that kind of blog.

This blog will, I suspect, meander as my attention does, covering both my interests but also my life, to the extent that I consider it worth sharing. It won't be a personal diary or anything like that, but I'll undoubtedly talk about travel, Burning Man and psytrance along with politics, (sub)cultures and social media for social change.

I've had several blogs before and none did I do a good job committing to. But as I preach the importance of blogs and blogging in my day job as Digital Marketing Strategist at international citizen-sector organization Ashoka I began to feel increasingly that I really should do a bit more of it myself. Having recently instigated a monthly conversation on twitter amongst social media for good proponents and practitioners in at least five countries the #4change organizing collective has also kicked off a new group blog which I'll be contributing to at least a couple of time a month. My goal here is to post a couple of times a week, at least initially, and see how it goes.

Context: I'm an Australian living in Washington DC. I'm progressive, and deeply committed to the democratizing potential of the internet. I am a burner and a doofer. I was married last year to the love of my life, but inspired largely by the need to secure her a visa. I love traveling, music and people. I'm happy to mix work and play here as I believe we're all best served by being our whole selves the whole time rather than segmenting our lives into arms-length parts.

Image created at Wordle.net.