No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. But this has been a summer of big transitions — big enough that it will take several posts to cover it all.

Yet on this, my first day “back to school”, I want to share the simple observation that the value of “vacation mind” is vastly underrated. Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (don’t get me going on that book) doesn’t use that phrase precisely, but he does refer very eloquently to that heightened state of energy and creativity you enter into after you’ve been out fishing for a few days and have completely relaxed inside and out. Once your mind is truly “off” things…

…suddenly it’s able to get “on” things like never before.

I’ve experienced it every year now for four years running (after two-week plus summer vacations) and I can’t rave enough about it. I come back to an explosion in new ideas and perspectives that seems to drive me forward until at least Christmas.

There’s great juju there. I look forward to exploring that phenomena in more detail once there’s a breather. But there’s not going to be a breather for quite a while. After Brad Fitzpatrick’s and David Recordon’s Thoughts on the Social Graph set a wildfire last month on the topic of social network portability, and now with Marc Canter, Joesph Smarr, Robert Scoble, and Micheal Arrington publishing a Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web; and with Marc and Kaliya facilitating the Data Sharing Summit starting Friday…

…this new “school year” at the University of Digital Identity and Data Sharing is going to be a whopper. And fresh from vacation mind I’ve got a huge backlog of topics to write about. I’ll squeeze them out as fast as I can squeeze them in.