It was slow going this morning

Every morning there is rain it is increasingly harder to get up. It must be a getting older thing, or just a me thing. Ava on the other hand had no such difficulty, she was up with the first hint of light playing away with my face. I tried to remain in that wonderful world between sleep and awake, and every time I got close Ava would yell or kiss me, or poke me. She is also very good at stealing the covers. At any rate she was successful in her attempts to wake me, and get me resentfully to the kitchen to feed her breakfast.

So here I sit, studying about blogging. Believe it or not, creating a blog, a successful blog requires you to know a good deal about things that I have never really thought much about. Thinks like RSS feeds, I have one now, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social bookmarking (Yay StumbleUpon), tagging, page rank, contextual advertising, traffic statistics. That is a short list. I have been reading people like: WWdn: In Exile, Problogger, and The Blogging Experiment.

All of this studying is the first part of the plan toward creating my own brand. The first phase is this blog. This blog is going to be an introduction to me, and why I am branding myself. Not only will it be a vehicle to chronicle the journey, successful or not, to branding myself, but its also a glimpse into why I want to do this in the first place.

Never mind that this project is the result of many, many, people's suggestions that I really need to write a book, Aaron, Darlene, and Brian being notable for this, but so many others have pushed me to do something similar. Aaron is actually a professional blogger as well, he blogs at Square State. I get his feed and read what he writes as well. So, having all of this inspiration around, what else could I have done. I succumbed.

Thanks for the inspiration, people and the gentle nudges that have got this whole ball rolling.