Over the last week or so my thought piece to news flash ratio has shifted a bit and the posting volume has decreased somewhat, largely because my personal situation has improved such that I can pursue a number of things I'd had on hold for a long time. For instance, my economics studies can actually proceed (The things I study fall into two categories: things I want to know…which I pursue obsessively…and things I need to know…which I learn as much as I need to know and stop, but will work on before the things that are purely desire-inspired. Economics is in the second category).

My list of need-to-knows is growing. My sense of things is that the ground beneath our society is shifting, and most of us don't know enough about what we're ACTUALLY doing to judge how this shifting will affect our institutions. I think that needs to change. There's a lot of things I feel need to be understood from the perspective of your standard human and presented as such. I happen to think I have decent analytical and writing skills. I happen to think I can do this for a couple of subjects. Setting up to better enable the presentation of that perspective is one of my self-assigned tasks.

The trick is, though your standard human can understand just about anything that's presented clearly, even an exceptional human can't absorb and analyze everything that need be understood…that means a guy like me isn't going to be able to cover all those bases. So starting early next year, I'm going to be looking for folks capable of helping me.

I'm not talking a group blog; this is where I flex my ego. It's mineminemine. I'm talking about helping talented folks set up their own "practice"—web space is cheap and I may just lend people some to play with until the get their approach and/or subject nailed down because I don't intend to get nuts with this. And to be truthful, I'll be looking largely for Black folks (Black folks, I might add, who share my feeling that the term "blogfather" is absurd). I feel regular ol' Black folks' perspective is underrepresented in editorial space.

There's some technical and design things I have to think through, and I have to figure out where to look and how to make folks understand I'm not looking for thought clones.

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On a totally different subject, I am totally looking forward to a get-together of bloggers that is developing. The idea was floated by Donald at AnziDesign a while back, and at this point it looks enough like it's going to happen to mention it. It's an eclectic crew that's assembling and Chicago is high on the list of locations but as long as it's not at a ski lodge or something I'll be in there. We're not talking seminars or anything like that, just hanging out with some interesting folks, not all of whom I'm familiar with but most of whom "happen to be" Black, or women or gay or some combination thereof. Those who I am familiar with I am impressed with.