Over the last month – in between all the other things I do – I have delivered five keynotes in San Francisco, Perth, Sydney, and Abu Dhabi, which has meant an average of over 2 hours each day on airplanes. This morning this sequence of keynotes ended, and I now have a bit of a break from speaking commitments.

One of the things that will be taking a lot of my time and attention is the arrival of my second child in the next week or two. Moving from a family of three to one of four is a big thing – I expect! Soon after we’ll head off for a holiday in Fiji to get over all the excitement and have a rest.

Other than that in coming months there will be lots of business building, including working on the Future of Influence Summit and related content, creating some new web properties, and putting energy into developing a couple of the companies in our group. Hopefully I will be able to keep up a reasonable pace of blogging along the way, at very least by spinning off part of the content from our reports and research…

Blogging is both rewarding and frustrating. I can get my thoughts out as they emerge and get immediate feedback and engagement. But it is always hard to find the time to blog. I would love to blog more, but client deadlines, event organization, hiring staff, and far more end up being higher priority. Someone asked me recently if I thought of myself primarily as a blogger. Since I usually manage from one to a few posts a week, far from it. It’s something I try to fit in to a very packed schedule. It’s now well over a week since my last blog post, and it’s very frustrating given there’s so much I want to write about.

I always have a backlog of at least 20 blog posts I want to write, including drawing on recent media interviews, content generated during events, book chapters from Living Networks, speeches I deliver, specific topics I’m developing, and far more. On top of that, I like to get engaged in current blog discussions on a timely basis when they’re of special interest. As such the frequent requests I get from PR and other people to cover things extremely rarely cut through.

One of the hardest times is travel periods, when I get intensely stimulated, but find almost no time to write, with email and current projects filling all available gaps between meetings and client work. I just got back to Sydney this morning after a few days in LA and Silicon Valley, and while there is much that happened on the trip I’d love to write about, including my client project on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, meeting Khris Loux of the extremely interesting JS-Kit, some very stimulating discussions with a strategy executive from a major handset manufacturer, catching up with Chris Saad of DataPortability and Faraday Media, and much more, the reality is probably just a fraction of this will get written up on this blog.

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We are currently hiring a new finance/ admin person. One of the impacts of online job classifieds is that it is far easier to apply, and so you get far more applications than when people had to write and post a letter. For another position we’re advertising, for an Extremely talented office/ events/ digital media assistant, we’ve received over 150 applications in the last five days – a few very good, and many just not worth looking at.

However there are occasional compensations for the work of going through many resumes. One application for the finance/ admin position included the following in her career history:

XXXXXXX Finance Service in China

(a professional financial consulting company, handling tax dodging sensibly and regular accounting operating for clients)

As an accounting clerk/ admin officer

Ahem.