It looks like we’re heading into a recession, and that has me thinking about the good times we enjoyed in Silicon Valley not so very long ago — which in turn has me offering a new “Perspectives” on KQED radio this week.

That’s the biggest challenge facing Americans today, writes Andrew Razeghi in a recent and thought-provoking San Francisco Chronicle editorial.

American lifestyles — and workstyles — allow for little but specialization at work and few interests, sports, hobbies or pastimes outside of it, he argues.

Partly, Razeghi wants to highlight the productive value of having ‘amateurs’ engage with a problem and seeing it from an entirely new angle. But he also points to the price we pay as a society in seeing narrow educational achievement and the 70 hour work week as badges of honor.

This week, in a not-so-veiled reference to the spectacular flame out of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, David Brooks makes clear the personal toll that a life spent as a ‘workaholic-specialist’ can exact. And there’s a cost to families, as well, as any child of over-worked parents will tell you.

It’s all a new spin on the ‘rat-race’ critique, of course. And it ties in closely with contemporary appeals to live life ‘slow‘ and with environmental critiques of capitalist consumer culture.

But what’s interesting — and new — is that Razeghi makes his appeal in terms of innovation. Great ideas, as much as cool gadgets and killer apps., he points out, tend to come out of left field. If American lifestyles barely let people get out onto the grass, let alone wander, that’s a problem for the future economic (not to mention political and psychic) health of the nation.

Daddy Dialectic is one of the parenting blogs I try to visit regularly. This thoughtfully provocative recent post — a utopian vision of what parenting in America could be — shows why it’s worth a look.

A fellow Palo Altan, Mike Lanza, has recently launched an interesting, web-based project.

Playborhood is dedicated to helping children live less structured, more play-filled lives.  It’s also all about making neighborhoods more family-friendly.  Both are issues I care about a great deal.

At a recent local Playborhood forum, run in conjunction with the excellent Parents Place, I moderated a panel that asked how adults can make their neighborhoods more play-friendly.

You can find some reflections on that theme that I posted at Playborhood after the event here .

Nearly ten years ago I wrote a fairly widely-noticed article for Salon magazine about online diarists — that tribe of early digital citizens who, in many ways, were the forebears of the modern blogger. Ironically, the thrust of that story was that the true pioneer diarists were getting out of the business — by 98, it seemed, the joy in digital self-revelation was gone.

Then came blogs. Diaries are not blogs, as Scott Rosenberg can tell you. But I’m sure that by now a great many blogging pioneers are also long retired. WordPress, this blog’s host, claims to look after 2.25 million blogs, but only 27 thousand of them bothered to post something today.

Still, I’m thinking I could use an updatable online home. I write about technology and culture a fair deal, after all. I’m interested in how we represent ourselves to each other digitally, why we do it, and what we tell each other about what we are doing. It’s a very long time since I had a home page of any sort (although you can find me on Facebook, flickr and LinkedIn). But there’s stuff to learn in doing this and there may even be a (very) few people out there interested enough to stop by and say hello every once in a while.

So here beggineth the SimonFirth.com blog.