One of my goals for 2007 is to Develop the Ricky Spears (Empower. Challenge. Advance) Brand. I wasn’t quite sure how to quantify this goal, since there will not be a point where I can say, “The Ricky Spears brand has been developed.” However, I did list several next actions and projects that would all play a part in developing the Ricky Spears brand. If I complete all those, then I know that I have made significant progress toward achieving that goal.

Many of those next actions and projects have to do with my blog. As of this morning, I’ve changed the title of my blog from “Ricky’s RAM Dump” to “Ricky Spears’ Blog.” The blog started as a place for me to post primarily about GTD related topics and the name RAM Dump was part of paying homage to the GTD methodologies. It didn’t do very much for developing the Ricky Spears brand, however.

I’ve also changed the tagline from “A little more information than you need…” to “Empower. Challenge. Advance.” The new tagline has been my own personal mission statement for a few years now, and it seems to be a natural tagline for the site. If you’re wondering where I got the previous tagline, it’s one of my catch phrases that I say quite often. Whenever anyone tells me something that I really didn’t want to hear, I tell them, “That was a little more information than I needed.”

I also needed a better way to track subscribers and other statistics on my blog. It seems that FeedBurner has this market cornered, so I wanted to move all my RSS feeds to be FeedBurner Feeds. I’ve installed the excellent FeedBurner FeedsSmith WordPress Plugin, which made all of that a lot easier. As far as I know, everything is working properly, but I don’t really have a good way to test it. I’ve been posting more frequently in recent weeks, and I plan to keep up a similar pace. If you find that your feeds aren’t updating in your feed reader, you may want to subscribe directly to the FeedBurner Feeds. Here are the links:
Ricky Spears’ Blog:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RickySpearsBlog
Comments for Ricky Spears’ Blog:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentsForRickySpearsBlog

This seems like a good time to thank all of you for reading my little blog here, and for your comments, encouragement, and other activity in the community around this blog. To me, this is what the Internet is really all about–it’s about PEOPLE, not information. I can’t have much of a relationship with information, but I can have great relationships with people, and I thank each of you for your friendship.