I think I reached the limits of what I described optimistically just a few weeks ago as my blended life. Lately, it is more of a blender. Quick update:

WestwoodBlog, the site I set up to get more involved in my town, really took off over the past two weeks as we had a town election and then town meeting. Lessons learned from all that will make a post of their own, but suffice it to say that facilitating a site like that is more involved than just turning it loose and hoping people will show up. We have now had over 1200 people access the site in the past month, with nearly 300 visits yesterday. At our town meeting, by a very close vote, we approved granting a liquor license to the Westwood Station development to encourage the Wegmans supermarket chain to locate here. I even managed to twitter about the meeting live.

My company, Spire, launched our new web product today after months of redesign and development. After thinking hard about our strategy, we finally moved away from the closed community model and are launching the site as an open membership site with the goal of growing membership by the order of 100K in the next year. My role is to keep the technology running and today that involved all of us going in at 6am to do the final deployment and make sure everything worked.

On the home front, Baby Marshall has hit his stride as a crying 2-month old who needs to be held a lot. Jason is now just a little over 2 and is testing his limits and our patience daily with his tantrums. My wife has her hands full each day as we hit "mile 20" in this process. I'd blog more about parenting, but that subject is covered ad nauseum in the blogosphere. We all have to find our own path and it is hard for everyone, in many different ways.

I signed up for and ran a 10K with about 2 weeks of preparation. Good news is that it got me back in condition and I was able to run a respectable 49:17. And I've been able to ride (and track, using my new Garmin GPS watch) my bike to work and home a few days.

I received two more architecture/planning books in the mail yesterday as well...now I just have to find time to read them and write about them like I did for Suburban Transformations. And of course I'm reading Richard Florida's "Who's Your City" now...and I've got to get through Bobos in Paradise so I can criticize it here too...

Finally, we are starting to move forward with the town Community Access Television Station. I'll have a lot more to say on that as it develops this summer.

So stay tuned. A few years ago I didn't know what to do with myself. Now, I should probably figure out what not to do!

Check out my other blog at http://westwoodblog.org. That site is more of a community information site that I used the blog format to create. We have a town election on Tuesday and I have been stirring up interest in the blog by getting the candidates to post. Additionally, I conducted 4 podcast interviews with the candidates for Selectman. It is a different approach than this blog--I strive to be a neutral facilitator--and I will have more to blog about here after the election as I believe this experience has taught me a number of things about the potential and limitations of new media in a small town.

Parents who tell parents of newborns to cherish these times as the best of their lives are seriously delusional. But, having been through this a couple of times before, I think it's more a case of amnesia. We don't remember much a few years later.

Maybe it is a result of sleep deprivation and the sleeping cycle. I vaguely recall, and now, re-experience, that for the first 3 to 6 months, we seldom sleep more than 3 or 4 hours at a time. My wife and I take turns...and our babies have been bottle fed, so I can do the midnight/2am feeding and then she gets 4am or so...and then we're awake at 6 anyway...but it is flexible. And it's not like we sleep through the times when the other person is feeding the baby. Sometimes I don't remember who did what the night before. And it all blurs into a stream of semi-consciousness anyway.

Maybe the amnesia is the result of positive reflection. As the kids are older, you look back fondly on the time when they were growing up? It is a miraculous process. But being in the midst of the process is no joy.

It is a different type of hard than people who are not experiencing it can imagine. We are fortunate to have wonderful, healthy children with no serious medical issues. And we are fortunate in our circumstances that allow my wife to stay home full time while I work at a company where family is valued and respected. We are fortunate to have had many friends offer help in many ways. But there is no denying the period of difficulty all parents must go through. And I know, from experience with our two other children, that this time will pass and we will forget what it felt like to walk through life in a bit of a daze. Before you know it, the crying baby is getting ready to start kindergarten. You don't believe that when people tell it to you...but it happens.

The newborn is like the winter solstice--it is the beginning of new life and new things--but it is only the beginning. There are months of dark and snow and cold to get through before the spring begins. And plenty of challenges ahead. The cycles rolls on and we must know that we can love the journey while we suffer the moment at times.

The New York Times story of writers "blogging until they drop," is the kind of silly story we worry our parents will read. Don't worry Mom, I'm not going to blog myself to death. But upon closer examination, the story did make me think about my own limited, idealistic perception of this field.

My first reaction, upon reading that people were working nonstop blogging was that this article was just another workaholism piece, about how bloggers are martyrcizing the fact that they like to spend long hours on their computers writing. But the blogging world described by the New York Times is very different from what I picture as I extrapolate my part time experience into what I would imagine a full-time effort would be. The article portrays blogging as a sort of "piece-work" world where hack writers compete to crank out technical and political drivel to feed a 24x7 news market appetite. Has it already come to that?

This seems so wrong, on so many levels. First of all, is immediacy really that important? I have subscribed to some of these high powered blogs and after a few weeks, my Google Reader is overflowing with stuff I have not read. It's just like email all over again. And if you go a few days or weeks and don't check...guess what? Nothing bad happens. When I need to find something, I will just google it and find a blog post from a few months ago and I'm good to go. Nobody needs the type of immediacy that the market seems to create pressure for.

Secondly, these people have a choice of lifestyle. As I wrote about in my Mash-up Life and Going Mobile, I have found the increasing amount of things to do and ways to be connected to be a liberating and empowering experience. I'm not a slave to technology; I find ways to use it to make my life better.

Finally, the big difference in my experience and the experience of the bloggers described in the Times article, is that I don't see blogging as an end unto itself. When you tell me, I could maybe make $70K as a blogger...why would I want to do that? If that's the best you can do as a blogger, you are in the wrong business.

I see blogging and other forms of social media as much more than an information technology. Blogs give us a platform to express our ideas and make connections between the ideas of others. It's a tool to share the ideas and insight that would otherwise remain locked inside, or would only be revealed within the limited scope of your work in a company. Blogging is a tool, not to become your main income source where you hope someday you can earn close to six figures, but to help you develop a brand, image, and reputation among geographically distributed peers. I don't have a master plan for myself, but I think for many, blogging will be one of the ingredients in creating a personal brand that makes them experts in the fields and amplifies their value.

The Internet today is not an information superhighway. It's not about who can find information the fastest or even become the channeler of information. It's really about connections and people. There will always be high pressure markets that generate rewards for those willing to sacrifice themselves for the immediate payoff. But they are missing the larger picture of why this phenomena is so compelling...of what is driving the demand for information. The unmet need is the need to connect with the right people at the right time and avoid the noise of information overload.

I produced my first Podcast last night when I interviewed Greg Agnew, a 20-year old Assumption College student who is running against three other candidates for selectman in my town of Westwood. Check out the 40-minute interview over at my other blog, WestwoodBlog.org.