Comment on everything

It came to me in a flash driving down Route 61 recently on my way back from an assignment at my current day job.

In his great book “The Art of the Start” Guy Kawasaki has suggested when launching a new company that a mantra, a commonly repeated word or phrase, can be more helpful for charting the course of your new company than a lengthy and difficult to remember mission statement.

Guy argues the mantra should be mostly for members of your team, people who are actually part of your company and so will be helping to get things started.

It’s something to sort of keep everyone on the same page.

It is NOT a tag line, “a guideline for how to use your product or service”, something more aimed at the customer or end user.

In this case, however, as I quickly discovered with n10ah, I believe and hope the line will blur between users and members of the team in this service we call Hessinger Media.

If my vision is to work at all for the new network, it must be largely interactive. (We’ve seen that already with some of the great suggestions for topics we’ve seen already.) And I believe we will see more in the future when things finally get rolling.

But when I sat down and started to think about what I really hoped this network would be all about, I realized it was about comment.

Early on in n10ah’s existence I made a conscious decision not to censor contributors, to try to let them say what they wanted to say within the context of the discussion.

It was a difficult balancing act and one I still don’t believe I’ve mastered, but we’re just getting started and I’m hoping that broader choice of subject matter will get us where we want to be.

I want people to be able to use Hessinger Media, or whatever the service’s name will eventually be, both to share their own creations—writing, music, film, even helpful products, services and ideas—with the community and at the same time let others comment on what is shared.

But commenting is a catchall phrase to describe everything, commenting on your world, on those around you, on current events, politics, culture, science, you name it.

“Comment on everything” will be our battle cry. We hope that you will.