Hooray!  I have just migrated my Wordpress blog from the public hosting on Wordpress.com to self-hosting on Dreamhost.  A simple announcement would do, but as I put fingers to keyboard I found myself challenging my motives.

Why should I go to the trouble and cost of self-hosting my blog?

The reasons we givef for self-hosting a blog are usually technical.  We can control our themes; we can get better technical information from Google Analytics; and we can add advertisements. 

But none of the reasons tell us why?

Novice to expert . . . autonomy to competence to interaction

After a ponder, I think blogging is a good example of any skill.  At first, we focus solely on what we have to do. 

We jump in and are delighted that it is easy to set up and start blogging. And it is free. Great.

Once we get into it, we find there is a lot more to learn.  We realize readers won't come unless we make it easy for them to find us, and we start to dig into the skills of copy writing and search engine optimization.

And then the day comes that our traffic is respectable, our pagerank or our Alexa Ranking is better than our benchmarks, and our attention shifts from what we do to whom we do it with.  We've reached the magical point when our work is no longer about us.  It is about our readers.  More and more our blog posts are written out of generosity rather than selfishness, sometimes for a specific person and sometimes just to leave on Google the information that we know someone out there will need one day.  Maybe not today or even tomorrow, but one day.  We leave a trail for other people to find what they need with no thought of reward.

Now we come to care about our blog in a new way.  We want to write more accessibly. We want to use formatting to help people scan quickly and take up complicated information with ease.  We want Google Analytics so we are clearer about who comes knocking. We want to know what our readers are looking at and finding useful. We want to know where they go next.

We won't mind an increase in traffic; we are still proud.  But like all experts, it's no longer about us.  It is about the place between us. 

It's a strangely comforting place to be.

Do have a look at my blog and tell me what you think!

It struck me today that that's what psychologists do.

While we have our heads down working away at something, our psychologist is supposed to be queuing up some questions for us to think about when we have a moment.

Preferably questions that lead to action, opportunity, fun & companionship.

With my very best wishes for 2010.

Sunlight, space, freedom to concentrate on what I am doing.  I must turn the desk around though.

Xoozya is an evolving story of new work that I began writing earlier this year and put aside when I got busy.   Some of my friends thought I had moved in.  I didn't mean to deceive them but I was pleased of course as I was thinking and writing as I went, so to speak.

Do tell me what you think of it.

Hat-tip:  The picture is from Travis Isaacs via Flick.

You want me to take you here.

You are here.

Stomach-wrenching?

I know.  We will go together.  This is how we will network our way to business opportunity

Deep Breath Now!

Getting Started. . . by (: Petra :)(slow) via Flickr

Twelve months ago, in October 2008, The Guardian interviewed Chris Hambly and me on social media skills and 'unconferences'.  We tried to get over the huge generational gap in skills and the threat to large organizations who aren't keeping up.

Since this article was first published, we've seen a Twitter's challenge to the hiding of Parliamentary expenses, the realtime reporting of a plane crash in the Hudson, the earthquake in China and a terrorist attack in Mumbai, and the Guardian's use of an open data base to analyse the expenses data.

The Guardian republished its original article in June 2009. My name is still spelt wrong.  But I was pleased.  The original was published17 months after I arrived in UK thanks in most part to my membership of the Social Media Mafia.

Jo Jordan quoted by The Guardian about social media skills, unconferences and the impact of social media skills on the competitiveness of organizations.

Thank you for stopping by to look at my profile.

I am a business psychologist and I help people make decisions in context. 

In 2007, I founded Rooi to make the full breadth and depth of work & organizational psychology available to innovative organizations shaping their futures in a increasingly global, networked and hyper-competitive world.  We help groups and businesses collect and analyze data, make sense of their collective goals, and build strong teams.  We are at the forefront of using social media in buisness and specialize in bringing the psychology of game-changing work and business to your inbox.

We work from Olney which is a very pretty English town, handily situated between Oxford in the west, Cambridge in the east, London & the South East in the south, and Leicester & the Midlands in the north.

We are always happy to discuss with you whether work & organizational psychology would add value to your business and to direct you to services that match your needs.

Jo Jordan

July 2010