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Happy New Year
Another Year Over And A New One Just Begun
John Lennon
I don’t often do this kind of post …. but 2017, well - what a year it was … and sadly 2018 is not going to be much better. (Don’t let the New Year’s Eve’s Blue Moon fool you!) This is not to regurgitate all of 2017 - plenty of people out there that will do that for you - but rather a time for reflection on the future. For me it will be one word - FOCUS. 
I started that halfway through last year - but the culling continues. My focus has - and will continue to be - driven by the ‘People, Passion, Platform’ trifecta. What hasn’t happened is the removal of all of the other crud that fills up what little time we all have. People - will continue to be framed in my volunteer work for Defy and UC Davis - but is actually at the core of People First and the related projects such as Lost Identity - an initiative driven out of Mei Lin Fung’s People Centered Internet. We are also looking at
developing an app in conjunction with one of our partners. Passion - writing, connecting, sharing, talking, presenting … which will emerge in the three blogs below as well as white papers, presentations and books supported by sponsorship, patronage and good old contracts. Platforms - Merchant23, Ada and RAL are just three of the platform companies I am working with there are others that need to be either embraced or removed. … and that trifecta will be drawn through three web properties … And Another Thing is one year old, launched last year in conjunction with my colleague Graham Watson as an experiment to see if we could write a joint blog. After 340 posts, I think we can safely say that yes - we can keep up the flow the challenge for this year is to work out how to broaden the readership. Beyond Bridges, where
you are now and the oldest of these three sites, will be used to offer point/counterpoint argument, observations that surround boundary conditions - such as posts like this which I promised to come back to … though I wasn’t really expecting it to be a full blog transition. Example topics that have emerged just in the past week include Border Towns, Poverty In California, The Salton Sea and Lake Havisu, Prisons, Beer - these and others like them will roll in the next couple of weeks. I think as these and similar posts emerge, it will become clear as to what the connections are. People First which we launched in 2017 will continue in its current format and focus …. after all, we are only just getting started there.
On a final note, what of Social Media?
I pulled out of Facebook over three years ago. Not one regret. No action needed (unless I go back to develop a wider audience for the work described below. All the other social platforms where I have a presence with the exception of Twitter sit there like ghosts in the ocean. No time sink there. But in Twitter land, there is definitely room to cull. So, as of today only the following accounts will be monitored and grown. And Another Thing - @AndAn0therTh1ng - www.andanotherthing.co - a couple of chaps riffing on the peculiarities of the world. Beyond Bridges - @JGPhilpin - www.beyondbridges.net - this site has been up and around for a while. The first post came in September 2010 and since then has taken many different directions - both in topic and appearance. The content focus is changing again. Going forward, for now, the posts will be a celebration or commentary on ‘difference’, ‘commonality’ and ‘connections’ … you will get the drift. In terms of appearance, nothing different for now, I recognize that some of the CSS is broken in places and as that gets discovered it gets fixed. The big change will likely happen when Matt Mullenweg pushes the button on Wordpress 5 and specifically Gutenberg is released. - hopefully in the next 3 months (ever the optimist). People First - @TheBusEquation (it used to be @All_ElseFollows - but the business equation has emerged as the FOCUS of the initiative, so much so that a couple of books have emerged in my mind, with one already in progress.) - www.people-first.net Fractals - @Fractals - www.philpin.com Stuff just gets auto-posted into these spaces and curiously the following at @Fractals is 3 to 4 times that of my other twitter accounts!
I am suspending these :
The Taxi Chronicles - the anti-Uber thread - if people don’t understand why Uber is bad for them - why should I care? I just will never use them. Nor should you. But we live in a free society. Just Good Music - self-explanatory The 50th … an experiment that was centered on Hawaii … just seems that Hawaii wasn’t interested. Comments on all three of these topics will occasionally be posted into one of the three core posts ( primarily @AndAn0therTh1ng ) SaveSave