My first #ulog turned out to be not much more than a rant about how I was feeling. I think it was important to express but it wasn't the way I would normally express things, nor was it a particularly good representation of a first #ulog.

But there are nuggets in that article that I want to locate, unearth and polish up. You see, complaining about Steem seems so counter productive to me because Steem is in a really advantageous position right now, with so many boons over blockchains like bitcoin that they aren't even very comparable.

But we will get there. Right now I want you to walk with me ;p

Coming up to visit my family has been nice, today is the 4th of July and we have officially been here for one week. I had hoped to be blogging a bit more frequently, but I think things will settle down a bit as we work our way through the month.

We helped my grandfather and his club of optimists sell cotton candy and popcorn at the local parade last night, and were rewarded with some fireworks at the end of the night!

_{Take me out!}

This morning I got up and our loaner-dog Molly seemed like she really wanted to go out. I had a lot on my mind and so I headed out for a walk with her. The following pictures are all from our walk this morning.

Walking is good for thinking, and I started thinking almost immediately about my next post. Why am I so excited about Steem? What makes me so sure?

_{Lots of work ahead}

In my mind, the value of a piece or network of technology is in its usability. By that metric, I use active community as a proxy for a blockchain's potential. If there are a lot of active community members, I can start to trust a blockchains claims about technology, innovation and future development. If there are few users of a technology, it is hard for me to believe anything else about it.

New users that come from facebook or reddit will naturally compare the steemit platform to other such platforms that they are used to. To them, inconveniences like unequal distribution, questionable content and the lack of dictatorial corporate leadership are large warning signs about this budding social network.

They don't even realize what they are dealing with!

_{Would you know how to use this playground?}

Usability is a key component for retaining active users. And Steemit may be an 'almost there' social platform, but Steem is the most accessable and usable blockchain in the world. That's right, Steemit and Steem are two different things, and its important to qualify and understand the differences before we try talking about them.

Steem is an incredibly powerful graphene blockchain that allows applications to be built on top of it. Steemit was the first of such applications, which allows us to not only add our content to blocks in the chain, but also to visualize what other people are adding as well.

_{If Steem is our neighborhood, Steemit was the first house built}

Along the way, more new applications have been built upon the Steem blockchain. Sites like ulogs.org, utopian.io and dlive.io are incredible communities in their own rights, with their own purposes only marginally related to steemit, but born and bred of Steem. Sure, in our blockchain neighborhood we have had some stinkers like dtube, but the birth and development of dlive just proves that continuous and open development by an active community is one of the most beautiful things there is.

_{And trees. Open and active development and trees, these are a few of my favorite things.}

Some of you might not know much about blockchain technology. You might not be programmers or tech people or gamers or traders or technicians or engineers. But here you are, using a decentralized app to visualize my content locked into the Steem blockchain. You are proving right now that Steem is the most usable blockchain (especially for ordinary people) in the entire world.

The technical aspects are also incredible. 3 second transactions, zero fees and the most active transactions per second of any top blockchain keeping us around 1% capacity are some of the leading indicators for me that this chain is like nothing we have ever seen! A technological marvel that actually does stuff for regular people, I challenge you to name another chain that even comes close to Steem.

_{Each of us now is like that lead duck.}

Each of us are pioneers within the Steem blockchain. I am sure that years ago each caravan of westward moving pioneers had at least one complainer, someone that was sure that they would never make it, or that the world was flat or that the mountains were too big and everybody was going to die if they didn't turn back for comfort and facebook immediately. I imagine these people were relegated to the back of the wagon.

In this new journey we will, like generations before us, encounter problems, difficulties and challenges. Unlike previous explorers, each of these events make very good posts for us to document onto our blockchain. Each of us should solve problems, adding what we can and generally try to help the whole community. In this way we will each continue to grow personally as our community grows as well.

_{Time to head home}

Thanks for philosophizing with me! Please leave your comments for me, this is one of my favorite topics to talk about.

Love and Light to All!