I need to make two points in today’s post.

The first is about how great blogs are. My friend Jeff De Cagna (who bought me this domain and convinced me to blog) laughs a bit about how excited I am about blogging given my reluctance to join the fray, but I am certainly convinced now. I’ve said before that I love writing them, but I also love reading them. I track 18 blogs currently by subscribing to RSS feeds and reading them in my web browser (Safari, for Mac, with system 10.4 integrates RSS very nicely; I no longer need a news aggregator). It takes almost no time for me to read new posts, but I have expanded my knowledge so greatly. Because the culture of blogging supports linking to other blogs, the eighteen that I follow actually give me much broader access to information.

For example, one of my regular feeds is Chris Bailey’s “Alchemy of Soulful Work” blog. Chris is in the association community, and I like his writing. In a recent post, he referenced the blog of Tammy Lenski, whom Chris met at a conference. Tammy comes from the conflict resolution field (my own field as well), so I went to her blog, because it was called “Strategic Conversations,” which is a term Jeff and I used in our Executive Update article last spring on building strategic capacity.

Then Tammy had a post about what you see depends on what you look for, and it referenced an unbelievably cool optical illusion (on yet another blog!). Please go look at this illusion; it really is incredible. It really reminded me that there are always natural forces, that we cannot explain, that will impact your experience of the “truth,” which is the second point I wanted to make in this post. A point I may not have thought to make, if it weren’t for blogs.