8/3/10 – As I prepare to use this space again after a long absence, a quick note here is in order, so you know what to expect. I’ll primarily use this space for longer thoughts that I want to get written down. Primarily stuff about social entrepreneurship, music, books, business or culture. Especially when those areas overlap, but even when they don’t.
I use tumblr for sharing shorter stuff. I’m @jeffreymstern on twitter
You should be able to find me on other social networks too. But I use most of those to keep in touch with people I’ve met before – so if you are going to make a connection request, please send a note with it.
This is what I said when I started the blog, and it basically still stands too:
This is primarily a resource for myself, but open for anyone who might find it useful. To put a finer point on it, see this quote I’m cribbing from Aaron Swartz’s blog:
“As a social scientist, you have to … capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman. But how can you do this? One answer is: you must set up a file…
In such a file… there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this file, you … will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it directly to various work in progress. By serving as a check on repetitious work, your file also enables you to conserve your energy. It also encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be byproducts of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard in the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.
…The file also helps you build up the habit of writing. … In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and this, as they say, develop your powers of expression.” -C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination
“I like sharing my thoughts and I like hearing yours and I like practicing expressing ideas, but fundamentally this blog is not for you, it’s for me. I hope that you enjoy it anyway.” –Aaron Swartz, Raw Thought blog
business *is* personal 