Seemingly random unscheduled conversations on the street, in the market, and in the food court are key foundations of good blogging.
They serve as a form of editing for the ideas I write.
I thought about writing this post earlier today, and I should've when I remembered more about the conversation. My memory is weird, always has been - I have amazing long term memory, but poor short term. (I'm also notoriously bad with remembering names.)
I don't remember the exact points I took out of a discussion today, and I know they'll come back to me around Monday, and then I'll remember the conversation well.
In the market today, I had a fun and meandering conversation on a wide range of topics. One of them was my plan to write an opinion piece for an academic journal this fall on why I believing blogging is about to have an renaissance.
Very short summary of idea - blogging was huge in 2004 to 2008, became much smaller during past decade for various reasons, many reasons why blogging will surge, many new blogs that seek to monetize will fail, high quality blogs will rise in influence. Parallels to podcasts resurgence.
During the discussion, the two people I was talking with brought up a series of very good points of the challenges to blogging's resurgence. Some of which I'll incorporate into the piece. (Bad me, I sounded dismissive at one point when I said I had already thought of the point - cutting off the feedback, thankfully the feedback continued and I received some good ideas.)
One of the things I love about the Jackson Square food court is the wide range of conversations that can occur while eating there.
I can be discussing the legal system with lawyers, neighbourhood associations and engagement with Matthew Green (he's really the only politician I've seen eating in the food court) and his Exec Asst, the latest with members of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction speakers bureau, politics with Hamiltonians from all walks of life, McMaster campus life with students visiting the Hamilton Library special collections, and just life with people I've known since the 90s.
If you see me sitting in public, I have time to talk.
I need to work on a open source commenting solution for this blog - no third-party calls. My line written in 2010 about then Ward 1 Councillor Brian McHattie not being anti-student so much as pro-vote, it came from a discussion in the comments section of my Maclean's blog in 2008.
As City Council meets every business day until April, and I'm still trying to cover sub-committees, community events, and everything else I do, these (sadly) less frequent conversations will become critical to writing insightful blog posts.