I was in Washington yesterday for speaking engagements, then on to Charleston tonight, but with time earlier today to photograph the city's monuments for the first time. Walking around the monumental landscape, it occurred to me: our cohort, inevitably, is passing away. If we're hoping to have an influence for good through our own generation alone, that influence will fade as we descend toward the inevitable.

Wanda and I have always hoped to have an influence for good far beyond the scope of our own work with people we may never meet, and in places we will never see. That's our mission. It requires a living tradition. But it also requires us to have that influence with those younger than us, not just those of our generation.

I've long sensed that we need to engage with all generations younger, but that need has never been so forceful as today. This, I think, might be a different way of "paying it forward": encourage those who will likely outlive you.

What is a personness? At its most banal, it's a concantenation and condensation of "personal" and "business." But it's really more profound than that. When you work for someone else, the questions are relative simple: "how can I, with the skills and knowledge I have, assist the company?" When you become a personness, it gets much more interesting.

You start by examining yourself for the things you're most passionate about, and the ideas to which you can make the biggest contribution. The "-ness" added onto your "person" means that you're searching for your own essence. Until you're in business for yourself, you might never have known this exploration.

"But wait," you ask, "isn't this a crass commercialization of our own identity? We're more than our work!" For two hundred years we have been, because we've been working for The Man in what could be characterized as a factory setting where we follow the rules and take orders. Of course we want to be more than our work in that setting!

But think back to almost all of history before the industrial era. The Fishers went fishing. The Farmers farmed. The Smiths were blacksmiths. The Coopers made barrels. The Hunters hunted. The Painters painted. And so it went. Our very identities bore the name of the trade or craft we plied.

And so it shouldn't be so difficult today, with all the employees being shed by the big companies, to think that maybe, just maybe, it might be a good idea to think of the essence of the things we love most and do best, and try to craft a life around them. Right?

You can become smarter many times faster if you collaborate with others. Last night, I was having dinner with a colleague after my two lectures at Pella's ProExpo in Charlotte. But before he picked me up, he called to say he was having trouble editing an InDesign file for a deadline, and would be late. His InDesign expert had moved on to other things, and he hadn't used the software in years. Fortunately, I use it fairly regularly, and was able to walk him through the issue over the phone in about 3 minutes, after he had already spent a half-hour trying to figure it out.

What if I build a "book companion" website online that summarizes each section of the book in bullet point format? Each section of the e-book would have Comment buttons. Clicking Comment in the e-book would take you to the "book companion" site where you could comment on that section, just like you're commenting on a blog post. Once you're finished commenting, just close the browser window and the book is still open underneath.

And just like a blog, anyone could see the comments from anywhere on the internet, so they could join the conversation even if they don't have the book. The "book companion" would be heavily laced with links to where you can buy the e-book online so anyone that doesn't already have the book can buy it if they like. The fact that the companion has an exhaustive outline of the book would be good because it gives them a great idea of what's in it without actually giving all the content away.

What do you think? Is this a good idea or not?

A. For the first few years, I didn't get paid for speaking. I had probably been speaking for close to 5 years before I got my first honorarium. Now, speaking is my primary source of income. So I'd suggest it's best if those early free-speech years occur while you still have another source of income.

B. Today, you're embedded in your profession with daily contacts with colleagues. Once you leave, you likely won't be. That means today's environment is a much more fertile seedbed for speaking contacts than retirement will be.

C. It's not just that having a job gets you more gigs... it also makes you a better speaker. Speaking is largely (if you're good) an act of story-telling, especially in your early years when you haven't built up quite so many riffs that are pure substance. If the stories you're telling are about something you did 15 years ago, that's often less compelling (and less current) than if you're telling about something that happened recently. Later on, once you're really well-known, people won't care so much if your stories are older, but today, they will.

A BlogOff compounds the benefits of blogging in several ways... so much so that it might be considered an important part of the still-mythical Web 3.0. Here's how a BlogOff works:

History

I was introduced to the idea of a BlogOff by Cindy Frewen Wuellner, who at the time was blogging with others at LetsBlogOff.com. Participants there blog once every two weeks (admittedly about lower-level ideas in most cases, but it's the process that's important.) They then comment and tweet their responses to each other's work. What I'm describing below is a robust enhancement of that idea... I'm about to try this new BlogOff method for the first time with some New Urbanist colleagues; we'll be talking about neighborhood retail.

Participants

BlogOffing is a team sport... you need at least one other blogger to participate. But the more the better, up to probably 20 or so, at which point it becomes unlikely that you'll find time to read everyone else's work. The basic idea is simple: you pick a topic and start posting. At the beginning, each blogger is laying out their base position and assumptions. Subsequent posts respond to their predecessors, and the whole thing becomes a big conversation. That conversation can run indefinitely, until you've thoroughly mined the material.

Linking

It's very important that each blogger link freely to the posts they're replying to. For example, while addressing another blogger, you might link to several of their previous posts as you lay out your responses. And if there are several bloggers involved, it becomes a very link-rich environment. With normal blogging, you're the primary promoter of your own posts, and it's unlikely you'll promote any one post more than just a few times, otherwise your followers will soon be saying "give it a rest, already"... or more likely, they'll simply unfollow you. A Blogoff amplifies post promotion in several ways:

• Others are talking about your posts, not just you, and the credibility of your post goes way up as a result because it doesn't come off as self-promotion.

• The links are fresh because, as the conversation goes along, other bloggers are linking to your posts from the most recent parts of the conversation.

• Because the other bloggers have different audiences from you, links to your blogs are directly reaching many people you do not know, and could not reach with your direct post promotion.

The combined effect is that there will be far more links to your posts that keep coming in for weeks or months, and that reach a far larger audience than you could ever reach on your own. Your readership should therefore go up... possibly way up.

Body of Work

A single blog post should be brief, which limits the ability to develop an idea. But a swarm of BlogOff posts on an issue by several bloggers extending for weeks or months can be a substantial body of work that many might find useful. If so, then you might consider putting up a site that catalogs the posts all in one place, where people can more easily see the entire framework of the conversation. Such a site might reasonably be expected to be cited by academics or the press, depending of course on the quality of the discussion.

Other Media

BlogOff participants are encouraged to discuss the BlogOff posts regularly with their Twitter followers. If they participate in discussion listservs, they may discuss the posts there as well. I do a fair amount of public speaking, and tell my audience about BlogOffs when it's appropriate.

Controversy

Conversations carry more passion and pique more outside interest if there is a controversy of some sort. So don't shy away from material over which there is significant debate.

Heritage

The idea of a thoughtful and continuing discourse goes back centuries, being carried on first by "men of letters" who corresponded (sometimes for years) on the important issues of the day. More recently, discussion listservs have served a similar function. The problem with each of these venues is that the material is generally inaccessible to the outside world until someone goes to great effort. Originally, that would involve tracing down all of the letters of a discourse from the two or more participants and publishing them in a book, which often happened after the deaths of the participants.

Listservs can be even more closed, with gatekeepers who control who can participate or even see the discussion. The reason cited is to protect participants so they can speak more freely without fear of outside repercussions, given that some are public figures. Listserv members on some lists are therefore prohibited from discussing the discourse with outsiders, and broadly accepted listserv etiquette holds that it's very bad manners to copy and paste discussions elsewhere unless you have gotten prior permission from everyone involved in a particular thread.

BlogOffs reverse this entirely. They make outside access very easy, and amplify the message to get the ideas out to a very broad audience. Listservs have their important uses; I believe BlogOffs will as well.