The last post (for a while at least)

The few assiduous readers of LunchOverIP may have wondered whether I was abandoning the blog, given the paucity of my posts in the last couple of months.

Well, "abandoning" is the wrong word, but yes, I'm suspending LoIP for a while at least. In part, this is because my professional priorities have shifted in the second part of the year, and my work and travel loads have increased, leaving me with less time.

Mostly, however, I'm stopping because after more than three years and more than 1000 posts -- many of which are more akin to essays than rapid-fire notes -- I no longer find blogging a satisfactory instrument for organizing my thoughts, keeping track of ideas, trends and interesting novelties, and engaging in a conversation with readers and friends.

I've blogged passionately, and learned a lot, and "met" many compelling characters, but I've now started to work on a couple of new ideas, and while they will certainly include some forms of blogging, if or when they come to fruition, the blog is not the right tool to explore and develop them.

I have discussed this with a few people in recent weeks, and several of them have asked me "will you switch over to Twitter?", as if that were a kind of natural evolutionary path. My answer is no: I find Twitter mostly uninteresting and a waste of time and of that other precious and too-constrained resource: attention.

So, LoIP stops here. I will be spending the next months working on producing TEDGlobal 2009 (Oxford, July) and the Forum des 100 (Lausanne, May). I will continue to speak at conferences and host/moderate events. I will still blog occasionally on the TED blog and probably on the HuffingtonPost, and write stories for the publications I contribute to (list on the left-hand biographical notice). And then I will take time to read, to think, to discuss face-to-face, and to work on new ideas.

LoIP will remain online, so the articles archive (including the posts written by the several guest bloggers) will continue to be accessible, and the "comments" fields open, and the RSS feed alive (so that when I start blogging again, you will know).

Thank you for reading, and for commenting. Ciao,

Bruno