Wise words.  Always nice to see something that love and thought has been put into.

Tech enables lots of amazing things, but retaining a healthy perspective on what's really important is critical.

Bored of blogging?

I'm a huge fan of @gapingvoid

A recent email from Gaping Void included this image, which resonated ...it's me all over.  Ask my Dad.

Yet...in a crazy busy life full of stimulus, physical, emotional and psychological, analogue and digital,  I've become bored with blogging.

Have I stopped thinking? No.

Have I stopped being inspired or challenged by amazing things I see wombling around the internet everyday? No.

Have I got lazy and stopped sharing things? No, I'm still sharing stuff in various forums, public and closed, I'm still aggregating interesting things in various channels - I've recently been joshingly called Yoda and an e-Librarian. I'm choosing to take those as compliments ;-)

I'm just not sure I'm inclined to spend ages writing about it any more.

I've only just logged back into Twitter after months of working in China and it not working.  Did I miss it?  Much less than I thought I would.

Have I developed ADD?  I don't think so, well not any worse than anyone else that works in advertising / media / marketing at any rate.

So is it the proliferation of platforms I have at my finger tips?  Maybe.

I need to play, to experiment, to observe behaviours in new and established platforms to learn, to inspire others, that's a big chunk of what I get paid to do. But personal posting strategy covering multiple platforms, multiple communities, multiple geographies and legalities is undoubtedly a headache.

I've fallen in love with China, I love the friends I made there, but they just can't access lots of things I might usually lean towards readily. Do I want to lose touch...no, do I want to continue to share and inspire the buddies I made, yes. Does it make me a better global marketer having a Chinese perspective. Definitely. So Weixin/ WeChat is added to the list of platforms I engage with regularly.

Maybe it's just that digital is growing up. It's still changing and creating amazing opportunities but it's more mainstream for many and so whilst I used to blog about emerging trends and user behaviours in digital / mobile... I'm not excited about doing that any more in the same way I was when I originally started my first blog in 2007. I guess 7 years isn't a bad stint. 7 year itch maybe?

Perhaps it's time to retire the digital treasure trove, consign it to the digital ocean bed and go back to my first true love...adventurous empathy - what makes people tick.  I'm not sure I'm ready to hit delete but I'm "consciously uncoupling" my "must write something" from my guilt agenda and to do list.

Back to juggling multiple identities, professional and personal, across multiple platforms then...Hello Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, Slideshare, YT, Vimeo, Soundcloud, G+, Yammer, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Weixin, Flickr, LinkedIn....etc then.

2014 - galloping into year of the horse

We're two thirds of the way through January already. How did that happen?

Sure, it's good news for those in the west who are trying to have a "dry" January after an excess of Christmas partying and good news for those of us in the east who having skipped the pre-Christmas slowdown we might be used to, are looking forward to the pre Chinese New Year equivalent.

Chinese New Year decorations go up for Year of the Horse.

Year of the Horse is galloping towards us, the decorations are going up around town, the people are emptying out of town noticeably day by day. And we still have nearly 2 weeks to go! 200m people are likely to be on the move around China over the next 2 weeks. Sure, of the 1.3b people here, that's a drop in the ocean but that's not how it feels if you are anywhere on the public transport system.

Christmas holidays for those that had them are already a distant memory, CES has come and gone bringing with it more focus on wearable technology as the personal data monitoring theme gathers momentum, and "computers" as once we called them get ever smaller, more flexible and more powerful.

CES is just the big shiny toy show for the gadget geek, but as its' name suggests -Consumer Electronics Show,...it's all about marketing really. Who wins in buzz makes share prices rise and fall.

Ray Kurzweil, Google's Chief Engineer, has a more long term view with a remarkable track record / ability for seeing (& in some ways defining) the future.  Shiny toys round-ups from CES abound, but 5 minutes reading Ray's latest prediction piece will be 5 minutes food for thought well worth indulging in.

Albeit, I'd then follow up with this piece from an ex-Googler who moved to China, which gives a good helicopter view of why China is an exciting place to work at the minute. I love it! I can't wait to see what the "mountain thieves" (Chinese copy-cats) make of the e-ink opportunities.