As Isabella mentioned in her last post, we are both busy women with active lives that include and lately seem to preclude keeping up our blog here.

Aside from our personal blogs, we’re also taking care of our clients, and are involved in other projects of our own as well, leaving our flagship blog waiting at the harbour to be loaded with content cargo and information passengers! Yet it’s more than just being too busy. When we said that Alphablogs isn’t giving us what we need – we meant it isn’t giving us back what we need to make us want to keep up with the postings, so we applied some of our own advice to ourselves. Make it fun, and make it real.

My experience in producing weekly radio programs is useful here. (Even if it was long long ago when the earth was cooling.) I’m not talking about the technical radio part – I want to talk about the experience of producing. I can contrast two experiences, both with CKUA. One was a program that involved edited interviews with artists, broadcast on a weekly basis. The interviews with artists, the putting together the weekly program, the sending it out for broadcast: all that was great. But I felt more lonely being in the “communications” industry than I ever had in any other type of work. I think it may have been related to pouring my work out onto the impersonal sound waves, expanding into space until eventually disintegrating into the emptiness of the void. (A mite dramatic, but you get my drift.) Even my friends didn’t listen to the shows. And I was never in contact with anyone who did. The other program was also weekly, but was just plain fun. Why? because I enjoyed working so much with another broadcaster. We spelled off each other, and just winged it with readings and music, laughing and letting it be as natural as possible. So I didn’t have that sense that little or nothing was coming back, because it was created in joy and fun. If people listened, that was great, but the act of creating it was already a good “give-back”. That’s what we’re going for here now at the Alphablogs blog.

As Isabella mentioned, we aren’t marketers, per se, yet we do know how to market, and are experienced in that realm. We just want everything in balance, in integrity and in harmony with the direction of the world today. Sustainability, honest human relationships, truth, beauty, you know… all that.

I had a great talk with a publisher friend the other day who said that we are really only making projects, it’s not actually running a business like widget sales (oh hey there are such things as widgets – but they’re virtual), but rather a series of fascinating and interesting projects. That model works very well for me.

Loving everything that Isabella mentioned about connection, creating and nurturing community, democracy of open source: all that and more is a beautiful way to see how we are flowing in this environment, what we value about it and what we need to keep in mind whenever we are engaged in any of our projects.

I tend to wax on theoretically, but here are the old brass tacks:  I’m with you, Isabella, on the weekly conversation posts, the Oct. 18th check in, and the SEO tasks too.

Within that aspect of our goals, I remain flowing in this electrified environment. And in keeping with something else we discussed, about integrating many of our online activities, rather than holding them separated,  I’ve just added the alphablogs feed to my tumblog: My Electric Persona which includes my Twitter feeds and my Carol Sill personal blog.

What do you think? Is it better to have separate identities online, or to integrate them? I think there is a purpose to a certain amount of privacy, but what are your thoughts here?