So here I am flying to Paris on Air France to do a training session (ahh, Paris in the Spring—flowers blooming, cafés, and cars burning in the street) and as I wait on line to board the plane a stocky bearded man looking red-faced and tired while he drags his two large suitcases behind him asks me if I’m on the line that’s boarding or waiting for my seat row to be called; I tell him the latter and he pushes past me, calling behind him to “come on and hurry up now”, apparently to his family. A short dramatic looking dark haired woman and two children hurry forward “Daddy is telling us to hurry” she advises them a bit nervously.

I recognize his face and British accent now—it’s Christopher Hitchins, the well known acid-penned leftist writer—once working for the Nation, but now a freelance after falling into disfavor with his colleagues after he supported the U.S. war in Iraq . No doubt he is on his way to Paris to cover the protests and labor issues, I assume.

Anyway, he gets to the gate and his suitcase is measured as too big to put on the plane. The suitcase’s wheels don’t fit into the little metal measuring cage.

“But the suitcase is designed for travel” Hitchins protests! The attendant shakes her head and says it is “a problem”…

I weasel my way into having a little chat with Hitchins by saying “well you can write about this in your article.” He flashes a smile and repeats “Yes, I’ll write about it in my article.” I move forward to the entry way, C.H. is still arguing with the attendant. I’m not sure how it was resolved (Though later chatting with him at the baggage pick up it turns out he’s just stopping in Paris on his way to Morocco to do a piece on their 50th year of independence)

So what does this little saga have to do with business research? Nothing, but as I’m getting into the blogging mode here—talking about what I’m doing and thinking as I’m doing it….it’s all part of this blog experiment and we’ll see how it all evolves…

All right then, but speaking of business research, I’m actually doing training for a large consulting firm meeting in Paris, on how to/when to use blogs in professional business research. I’ve also been compiling a listing of recommended/most popular business-oriented blogs. If you’d like to see the names of recommended business blogs previously published in The Information Advisor, and recently updated, send a note to me at robertberkman@gmail.com and I’ll email it to you.

(And you see, this is also a strategy on how I can find out who is subscribing to my feed, following up my recent post on that topic)