Quick Update

Over the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time working on projects that were completely unrelated to business/investing, but that I’m fairly excited about. In that time I’ve allowed this blog to just languish because I have always expected myself to write long, complete thoughts when I update. I think that compulsion comes from too much time as a journalism student, trying to perfect a story before submitting it. From now on I’ll try to focus on shorter, more shoot from the hip articles.

As an update for what I’m working on right now I’m focused primarily on two projects. One is a soon to be beta released reimagining of ASBConnect.com that will allow high school leadership classes to keep records of their projects, search them later (future years when new kids need ideas), and share them with other schools. I feel like a lot of leadership students have great ideas of events/projects to do at their schools, it’s just that the ideas get lost quickly and are never shared across geographic areas. We’ll see how it goes.

The second project is a ‘problems database’ and is still in heavy development. The basic idea come from my belief that a lot problems reported by the news are reported and then forgotten as journalists move to the next story. There needs to be a way to keep track of problems, figure out their underlying causes, see how problems relate to each other, and then try to find the solutions. I believe that journalism is a game of attention and it is focused on ’symptom’ style problems rather than digging in and really finding underlying causes of those problems. Don’t get me wrong, journalists do the best they can but rarely do they get rewarded for depth over speed. The incentives are just against it in an era where first gets all the hits. I’m curious to see if there is a way to change the incentive, even if only in a limited area.

After reading those two descriptions, it seems like my projects are very similar. Makes sense, I’m the main creator of both, but we’ll see how they actually turn out. I’m going to do as much as I can to let the users dictate where they go and let the solutions grow organically.

Oh, and thanks @holdenpage for getting me back writing again. Your blog was a good reminder that I needed to write again.