Yesterday got an email from Lt. Col. (civil affairs) who saw me speak at the global civ affairs conference in the summer of 2004 (which I describe in Blueprint). He's got both books, reads the blog and articles, and has been waiting for one of my columns to appear in the local paper, the Abilene something or other. Well, it did last week, to my complete delight, and now this guy's gearing up for a presentation to his church group, creating new readers. Then just now I get email from reader in Milford MA, who's long pushed the editor of his local paper to run one of my columns. Amazingly, it finally worked with the Pakistan piece (my darkest piece by far). So an interesting model: the blog sells the column and hopefully the column's spread creates a virtuous circle on other efforts to spread the thinking/vision, like the upcoming Fast Company piece. I haven't found the Abilene entry, but here's the Milford one. Update: I found the Abilene column: Nation building on our plate in Iraq.