As I’m fond of saying blogs are good for making things happen indirectly etc.
But journalists seem to have a problem getting their head around it. “Indirectly” is too foreign to them. They’re too used to living in the “directly” universe.
Well it’s not just journalists who make that mistake. And I have a feeling we’re realising more and more that the immediate cause-effect way of thinking just doesn’t cut it for complex systems. I never had a business model for this blog, I just started blogging because I was curious and I pretty much blog when I feel like it. I try not to blog when I don’t feel like it. (I currently have a policy of not blogging about when I’m not blogging. I find that “expect light blogging” thing a bit narcissistic).
But the longer I do this, the more I realise that this blog pays off for me in lots of indirect ways. And I’ve had two or three very juicy projects given to me by people who have never met me before. They feel they know me well enough from what I write here, and the odd Skype chat, to trust me with some serious work for serious money. That’s when I realise this pull-not-push world is real, not some intriguing theory.
(For a journalist who really gets indirect, I continue to recommend John Kay on Obliquity.)