The thrill of a clean page. The sound of the clock runing out on, “well, the cobbler’s kids have no shoes!” as a sound reason why I shouldn’t have a blog. The fact that there’s genuine news to report. For all sorts of reasons, today’s the day the blog begins.

So what’s the news? The book I wrote on “Higher Education in the US: What German Universities Need to Know to Recruit, Collaborate, and Compete” is now officially open for business. Clearly, this should be a good read for all of those folks at German universities looking to get the real dirt on the US higher ed market, but we like to think that it could be equally interesting to people universities around the world.

I haven’t seen an actual copy yet, but the nice folks at the publishing house say you can order it from them even before it hits bookshelves virtual and real around the world — if you speak German, you visit http://www.wbv.de, if you don’t, drop them a line at service@wbv.de.