I organize a lunch meeting every Thursday, and every Thursday I give roughly the same little introductory speech. We ding a glass at 12:30 p.m. to get people's attention and to get the meeting part of the lunch started. "I'm Edward Vielmetti, and I organize lunch." This first sentence evolved over a long time, and it's the right thing to say every single time I say it, even though people have heard it before quite a few times.
You're invited to lunch, by the way - the details are on the a2b3 lunch group page on Yahoo.
As part of the lunch ritual, we ask everyone at the table to introduce themselves and say a few words about who they are. For some people, self description is simple and direct; their job provides a simple hook to quickly identify themselves to a group of semi-strangers and answers as many questions as it needs to. For others, the description changes subtly and slightly over time, and can even be a dramatic shift as people decide that they want to be someone other than the person they were last month or last year.
It's OK to repeat yourself; indeed it's necessary. If you're building up a body of work, there's a constant need to refer back to themes that run through your writing or through the current state of the field you're covering and refer back to the recent or long-distant past to make it current again. Just be prepared to change your message as needed over time so that the repetition is not a simple mindless boring copy and paste of old text, but rather a way to approach a familiar subject from a new angle.
If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: repetition is the very soul of the net.
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