Disqus comments

I have been reading about Disqus for some time now and tried to give it a shot.

Disqus is a comment system for blogs which should make commenting here more interesting.

Please, try it out and let me know what you think. From this post on, new posts will use Dis qus.

Blogger is back, will I be back too?

Since mid-August I had been locked out of blogger.com. Today, after almost a week without posting, I found out that my login at blogger.com works again. No idea why, no word from the not so nice people at blogger.com.

Funny that this happens now, because I have been thinking about this blog and its future. What is its purpose and who my audience is or should be.

When I first started blogging, it was a way to keep friends and family informed, and it was relatively private. I had a robots.txt file which prevented google to list it. It was written in Portuguese. And I passed the link to selected friends and family.

The MBA changed the aim of this blog. It certainly changed the audience I had in mind for it. I still wanted to keep family and friends informed. Luckily, they are all smart and well educated, so it was possible to change the language to English ;-) This was necessary to include three additional groups of readers: future MBA colleagues,  potential employers and future MBA candidates.

I am happy with the results. My MBA colleagues, their relatives and members of the 2009 class of the Mannheim MBA told me they read this. My family and friends certainly do. And, if your google "Fernando Bresslau" you find this blog followed by my LinkedIn and Xing profiles.

But soon I will be definitely employed. And I have been far from the MBA life for a couple of months already. So the audience of my blog will revert to what it was before: family and friends. With one big change: more of my friends now don't speak Portuguese, so the language will continue to be English.

I will certainly blog about my new job, the industry and the trends. But this will be on a blog separate from my personal blog. I could be blogging, starting in February 2009, about the chemical, automotive or wind power, depending where I'll land. And I would then blog with the interests of the company in mind. But this is the future, let's see.

I was also thinking about the declining frequency of my posts here. Sure, I have a project at DHL Brussels which keeps me busy 8 hours a day, job search and career decisions get another chunk of my attention and other beautiful things in life also captivate me, Brussels is an interesting city.

I certainly have transfered much of my broadcasting to a new tool, twitter. Actually, twitter linked to my Facebook status, through which I reach most of my MBA colleagues. Interestingly enough, Luli Radfharer, a professor at the arts and communication school at the University of São Paulo, whose courses I took in 2002 and 2003, twittered about an article stating that blogging was passé. I kept in touch with Luli over all these years through our blogs at first, and now through twitter. And I can see where Paul Boutin, the article's author, is going. He has good observations on how blogging has emerged and developed, and what we can expect from personal communication (or broadcasting) in the near future.

I will continue to blog. But I suggest you to follow me on twitter or on facebook. I will certainly be more present there.

And if this article is a bit confusing, please excuse me. It has been a long day, a long week, a long month and a long year. Can't wait to go to Brazil on Christmas and take the whole month of January off.

Harmonica Masters' Workshops 2008

It was great to be in Trossingen again and feel kind of at home once more. I was very fortunate to meet several of my friends, listen to great music and see the first snow of the season. It was a great weekend, even though I am really, really tired.