Why blog?

My hangover is receeding and Carnaby Street is working it's hypnotic powers once again.

I've been thinking about the phenomenon of blogging and what has motivated me to finally start?

I have to admit that for a long time I was in the "why the hell would I feel the need to share my inner-most thoughts with a universe of strangers" camp. Having said that I've been quite an avid reader of a (limited) number of planning blogs for a number of years now - especially since starting at BBH and working with a bunch of seriously big thinkers.

So what's changed? I'm now in a new job and a very different role and I guess what's nudged me over the edge is to opportunity to aggregate and share thinking from the wider planning/marketing/comms/cultural landscape and figure out how to apply it to what myself and my team do on a day to day basis?

It's pretty daunting though. I think the thing that's stopped me from blogging in the past is the feeling of pressure to be insightful, entertaining and most of all the pressure to deliver the "new".

An old colleague of mine (who has a fine blog of his own) always used to take the piss out of me at BBH because I had a habit of circulating Guardian Media stories that caught my eye. How very archaic - using a news site as a source of information, and how quaint, using email to distribute what you've found!

So, I've got a clear philosophy for this blog experiment - as long as I find it interesting, it gets in. No faux intellectual masturbation and no aspiration to be the next Faris, Russell, John, Richard or Simon.