Happiness CCXC

Dec 31, 2008 | happiness

Fond memories, and a review of things I’ve learned during 2008 are on my mind.

Interesting how people plan for the new year

Dec 29, 2008 | blog

I’m catching up on feeds and have run across a number of posts and articles on personal plans, goals, or predictions for 2009.  It’s a good exercise, and one that I’m working on for this week as well.

However, I’m amazed (nay, dismayed) at the number of people who either do not understand what a goal should be or at the goal that they’re fixated on. Especially in relation to blogging.  There are a number of great posts around outlining what people are planning to do, but I’d like to see folks really focus their energies when writing them.

For example, I’ve seen a number of people taking about increasing their blog posting schedule, or about getting 100, 200, 300 RSS readers, or hitting 1,000,000 page-views.  This doesn’t tell me what they’re purpose is, however.  It doesn’t tell me why I should come back tomorrow to read a post. It doesn’t tell new readers why they should spend time reading their blogs.  This is simply a lack of understanding of what makes a good blog – in short, numbers don’t count. It’s about the quality of information rather than the numbers of clicks you can run through Google AdSense.

Another theme I’ve seen in some of these planning post for the new year are more lower-level task specific items rather than broad visionary goals for an individual. New or casual bloggers who are interested in growing their blog should look at things that bring value to themselves and their readers.  An example of this would be something like "Revise and rejuvenate my blog’s theme to reflect it’s focus, and for easier reading" would be better than simply wanting to "get a new blog logo".

These more far-reaching goals help us stretch outside our comfort zones for the year.  It gives us something to strive for, something to attain… hence "goals".  I hope more folks take the time and really go through a good personal growth exercise for 2009. It doesn’t have to take long, and if a person allows themselves an hour or two to really think about what they want to accomplish in one year – and what just may be possible in one years time, they may surprise themselves and really accomplish more than they think they can.

So good luck to you on your goal quest for 2009! Watch for my 2009 goals post in the next day or so.

Android Apps – Suggestions

Dec 26, 2008 | blog

'Suggestion Box' by disrupsean Ok, I’m getting antsy for a few good apps that I need or would like on my G1 Android phone.  I’m betting we’ll see some interesting new apps hit the Android Market in January when Google adds the ability to charge for an application.  I’d also like to make a few suggestions for some applications that I really need to have soon for productivity purposes.

Office Apps

The need for real word processing and spreadsheet applications is no joke.  An app that supports Word, Excel, and a couple extra file formats would be appreciated.  This is an application that I’d pay for.  Make it decent, include PowerPoint support as well – it needs to be a quality app.  Ability to save/load from SD is a necessity btw.

Adobe – Flash & PDF

’nuff said.

Video

A camcorder app would be awesome, but even better would be to see a QIK client released.  Is this too much to ask?

Onscreen Keyboard (psst Google, you listening?)

There are a couple apps that already include an onscreen keyboard, so why can’t the OS?  Alls you have to do is draw some buttons and feed the button presses through the existing keyboard driver – come on, it’s not that hard.  I’m surprised at all the existing Windows Mobile onscreen keyboard vendors – this is an easy market to jump into here.

Navigation Software

Here’s another good opportunity for some enterprising company.  Don’t get me wrong, Google Maps with GPS and 3G kicks ass, but when you’re out of data range – and when you really do need some navigation assistance – it really starts to show its deficiencies.  A good navigation software package like TomTom or Garmin’s would be quite nifty – and with the size of microSD cards on the market, not too hard to load up maps for offline roadtrip fun.

So these are some of the things that I would like to see.  There are tons more – do you have some suggestions?

Photo credit: disrupsean

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