My colleagues Mark Hanson and Therese Bartolini recently turned me on to a meetup group that I have totally fallen in love with — Content Strategy Seattle. I was bummed to miss the last event where Nick Finck, owner of Blue Flavor, spoke.

Vanessa Casavant leads a critique of USPS.com at a Content Strategy Seattle meetup on Aug. 11, 2010.

This month’s meetup, I was told, was a rather low-key event. About a dozen of us gathered for beer, snacks and a fun critique/discussion of USPS.com from an overall content strategy point of view.

These are my people.

Time flies when you’re engaged in a discussion and everybody understands what you’re talking about and where you’re coming from. Though content strategists come from technical, editorial and marketing disciplines, they all have the same goal — creating a comprehensive plan for our organization’s (or client’s) Web properties.

Though I’m pretty new to this whole scene, I did start reading Kristina Halvorson‘s book, “Content Strategy for the Web” a couple of months ago. I like what she has to say. And I like what the people such as Vanessa Casavant, James Callan, Scott Pierce, Misty Weaver and Ariel van Spronsen had to say at this meetup.

Now I have people to stalk on Twitter. Now I have blogs to subscribe to. Now I have more information to parse about this topic.

I won’t be a n00b for long.

I was in my buddy Pete‘s wedding this weekend. While standing around waiting to be photographed while wearing a tux in the sun, I got to thinking: in the age of the Internet, why can’t we share some of these photos immediately?

So, I pulled out my phone, shot a quick photo of the bride and groom, and posted it to my blog.

Voila. I got the scoop. I was the first to publish a photo of the newly married couple.

That was easy.

Then I really got to thinking:

• There’s got to be interested folks from out of town who couldn’t make it
• We could have livestreamed the ceremony and reception
• We could set up a Flickr group for folks to share their photos
• We could capture video clips and quick interviews with guests and share them online
• We could treat this wedding as a major media event!

Could these new online capabilities spawn an entirely new industry — a “wedding web content” industry?

All this helps prove my idea that content is all around us and all we have to do is capture and share it.

Starting over with an empty canvas. (Photo by pmo)

As far as this blog goes, I’ve been sitting on the sidelines for quite a while. I’ve been toying and tinkering with ideas a little too long and I haven’t posted any meaningful content for more than a year.

I kept telling myself that I needed to keep watching, learning and stealing from the best bloggers. I kept telling myself that I needed a water-tight strategy and execution plan before putting my content out into the world.

Well, I was wrong. I just needed a half-baked strategy and a fearless, flexible attitude toward the blog. I need to participate in the blogging community more, which means more reading and commenting on other blogs.

And most of all, I need to crank out good content on a regular basis.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that if I try to plan everything so perfectly, I’ll always be in planning mode and never in execution mode. Now I’m teaching myself to live in a perpetual mode of half-planning and half-execution.

Hopefully it doesn’t come across as totally half-assed.

Here’s the “plan” so far:

I’ve set up several platforms for posting content about topics that matter most to me: media, technology, communications, politics, hyper-local news from my neighborhood, restaurant reviews and work stuff. Here’s the breakdown:

• foleymo: Media (especially social media), technology and communications.
• The Torch Times: Libertarian politics.
• Seattle PostGlobe: Hyper-local news and events.
• Yelp: Food and restaurant reviews.
• Thinkers and Doers: Work stuff.
• MichealFoley.com: An aggregator to repost blog content from all these sites, as well as content from other web tools such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, 12Seconds, etc.

Of course, I reserve the right to alter or abolish this strategy at any time for any reason. Use as directed. Results may vary.