The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Explaining the Nov. gaps/Big PeoplesForum.com News/My thought processes

I went on a blog-promoting mini-rampage yesterday and today, and in the process came upon some diary and blog review sites. Rogue Reviews says that if they see gaps in the updates, they look for a "plausible explanation, such as a vacation or an emergency". After reading their scoring sheet (and others), I determined that my main weaknesses are design (obviously), and gaps. I looked at the little November calendar and realized it was even gappier than I thought.

I've already explained one gap-- the power outage of Nov. 6-8, but I let the more recent gaps go unexplained. There's a reason, too. What happened is that my company, PeoplesForum.com has hired a new CEO, replacing me. I was the one who hired him, or at least the one who moved the idea through its paces. Anyway, in the past two weeks, the transition has started taking hold, which has meant extra energy being devoted to that for a while. We spent a lot of time preparing and planning the announcement to our membership and the "changing of the guard"-- which went about as smoothly as we could have hoped. That preparation and planning work was going on during the Nov. 11-14 gap, and then we actually announced and put the transition in full gear during the Nov. 16-18th gap.

The reason these explanations didn't get posted in a timely fashion is that I didn't want to "leak" the big news here before the members at PeoplesForum.com found out-- mostly because I didn't want them to find out from here. Web communities are sensitive things, and I wanted to be sure the change-over went as smoothly as possible, part of which involves doing the announcement right. The announcement was last Monday the 18th, and I had a lot of other stuff I wanted to get posting here, so I didn't get around to breaking the news. Until now.

In the end, I don't think I did the greatest job with the actual content of the announcement, but it was safe. It could have been a lot more enthusiastic, and a lot less cautious and defensive...I just had a hard time figuring out exactly what to say and how to say it.

One of the things that both running for president and and running a web community have instilled in me is a deliberative process that guides my writing and message posting, and to a lesser extent, my speaking. Most of the time, I think pretty hard about the words I use.

I'm not going to get into trying to dissect the parameters of that process right now, but the basic guideline, I think, is a desire to be clear and unmistakable in my communications. One of the reasons is that I live with a fairly constant filter, which operates under the theory that anything I say can and will be used against me in the court of public opinion.

So far in my 6 years of publishing my thoughts online, I've posted probably 1,000 pages or more of my words, and it's all "on the record". Between now and 2008, I'll probably post another 4,000 pages worth, or more. I also hope to write a few books between now and then, probably adding another 1,000 pages. These are pretty wild guesses, but I think if anything they might be low estimates. That is 6,000 pages of stuff (and thank you in advance for reading all of them) that some reporter someday could shove in my face and ask me to explain or justify. I try as hard as I can to take this into account in all my words and actions-- it's actually been a very helpful self-improvement tool, which I'll talk about more someday.

It didn't help, however, with my announcement on this big change. I guess it was just such a huge and strange change-- I've been CEO of PeoplesForum.com, which I co-founded, for 4 years. The guy who I chose to replace me (Dan Shafer) is indisputably more qualified, and having him at the helm is a great relief to me, in many ways. But it's still a huge and strange change in my life, and I think that explains why my announcement effort was a bit off. It was just hard to decide what I wanted to say.

I just realized that this amounts to another weak announcement of the Big News at my company, and I'm going to write up a rockin' and hoppin' one tomorrow and post it as its own enthusiastic message. This one's a bit too introspective to really be called an announcement. ;-)