For me, the new year has become meaningless; other than a convenient marker on the calendar, it’s simply another day. Nothing changes today from yesterday, this week from last week. Even the celebration of a “new year” loses any significance. Maybe I’m getting old. 😉
What does gain my interest in place of this, is the significance of thought. The posts where people talk about what’s important to them and what influences them. Reading about what they’ve learned in the past and how to leverage that in the future holds my attention.
For the most part, new years resolutions are simply dreams that we feel guilty about neglecting. They’re important to us, but we never set goals or milestones, and plans on how to achieve them. So the ongoing learning of life-lessons is of more interest to me than coming up with resolutions that are abandoned as quickly as I click the “publish” button.
There are some great people I’ve read, met, and worked with in the recent past that I am grateful to have found. I’m looking forward to meeting more, reading more, learning from more, and working with more in the near future.
Blogging; it’s a constantly evolving environment that constantly brings fresh voices to the forefront and allows others to listen, learn, and contribute as they please.
Well, It’s time I talked about what I think is going to be growing trends in 2008. I’ve been amazed at the trends in 2007, with the rise of micro-blogging, Facebook, and other social-networking and social-media tools. Seeing the interest, functionality and participation in these tools, to me, fosters ideas of how they can be leveraged in the enterprise. It’s been a great ride, and I believe a lot of this will continue into 2008.
So here is what I think will be some of the trends and events in 2008.
Social Network tools & platforms make inroads into the enterprise.
Public micro-blogging tools continue their growth.
The original “New Media” disrupter, the blog, re-emerges as the focal point of many individual and businesses.
Personal Branding gains more mainstream understanding and acceptance
Video becomes more prevalent as a social media tool for posting, sharing, micro-blogging, and more
More, simple, social media tools (SocNets) become available for business or professional networking
Microsoft and Apple continue to look more alike in their successes and failures.
The use of “bite size” media becomes an easy to use building block for the average person
Well, that’s it for now – not a big list, and probably not many revelations there. It’s probably more indicative of what I’m looking for and focusing on for the next few months anyway. Cheers!
The post went up sometime before 10am (Central Time), and Jeremiah Tweeted about the post on Twitter shortly thereafter. Within just a few minutes, there were over 20 comments on this post with people giving feedback and sharing their Twitter profile links, inviting others to follow them and join in their conversation.
Within three hours the comment count had climbed to over 160 with more streaming in constantly. This desire to interact, to connect, share ideas, and communicate is nothing new, but what followed on Twitter is the bigger story.
We can talk numbers, and its at least someplace to start. For example I found nearly 100 new people to follow, and about 80 people have chosen to follow my Twitter postings. Fellow Twitters had similar experiences today and in some cases doubled their follower counts.
However, what’s at the root of this enormous expansion in Twitter following is the desire to build community. To interact with more people, from different places and expand our peer networks. The numbers are simply a statistic to track, but the real important part is that I was able to find 100 or more interesting, intelligent, fun people that I wanted to add to my daily or weekly conversations. I’m also flattered to have so many people interested in what I bring to the table as well.
The net result for the next few days will be learning how to deal with a fire hose of Twitters, a constant barrage of information. Currently I’m trying to read as much as possible as it passes by, but I’m quickly learning to skim and watch for the topics I should read and not absorb it all.
The post itself is a great piece about why Twitter is a useful tool, and should be read simply on it’s own. But I bet if you go read the post, the comments will pull you in and soon you too will be a part of the community-building exercise that has morphed out of a good blog post.
By the way, at the time of this writing, there were in excess of 300 commenter’s, sharing and building their communities. Are you?
Where did my social media efforts get off track? That is something that I’ve been trying to understand these last few months. Whether writers block, or busy with work, moving, family time, or whatever; I’ve lost track of what I was trying to accomplish in my social media efforts.
This is rather troubling to me since I seem to have lost focus somewhere back in September. I’ve rethought my topics time and again, got sidetracked reading the feeds I thought I enjoyed, and failing to use the time I did have available to me to good effect. The result is that I’ve floundered.
This post is not a declaration of a new direction, nor is it a launchpad of new resolutions to do better or post more, etc… It is, however, a post about how blogging can get away from you, and how social media can be a bit overwhelming without a least some kind of plan.
Now, the plan thing really starts to make more sense. While I’ve been blogging for awhile (three years this month), I really hadn’t had a clear focus on the why of it all. Because of that lack of definition, I’ve started and dropped several blogs. I currently have three, two of which are languishing in the dim corners of my mind crying out for content.
Without a plan, you may wander like I have from topic to topic, trying to find inspiration that would drive me to write more, share more and have fun doing it. Two of my blogs are on things that I’ve always been passionate about. Snowmobiling and mobile devices. But even that hasn’t helped me post on a regular basis or create media to support the blogs and make them interesting.
What I’ve found in the past year and a half (or so) is that I’ve become very interested in topics that I’ve no training in, no previous knowledge of. However, they have pushed me to grow in ways that I never thought of and for that I’m grateful. These topics are personal branding and social media.
So, I’m just going to “hunker down”, as it were, and keep working my way through to where I seemed to be.
Interesting aside when I was trying to wrap up this post. Jeremiah Owyang had a great post in Some Conversations have shifted to Twitter today. I wrote more on Twitter in 4 hours than I had in the whole month of November on all blogs and social sites combined. More on that topic later, but it demonstrates how one event can change things.
Well, after wondering for several weeks how to leverage the tagging feature of WordPress 2.3, I’ve finally started using it. It helped to learn that Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer was fully supported for tagging use in WordPress v2.3.1 release last month.
The trick for WLW, is to use the "keywords" field of the post entry properties (shown below). WordPress 2.3.1 will pick those keywords up as the tags for the post.
While this isn’t the exact integration I was thinking of, it certainly allows me to use the internal tagging features of WordPress and also let’s me set tags to Technorati (and others) as well.
So now you’ll find two kinds of tags on nearly all my posts. I’d love to know if this is worthwhile to anyone or if it’s overkill.
And speaking of tags, blogging pal Steven Hodson has a post on tags today as well – but from a different perspective. Worth a read.
@MAC_Arms Pay taxes when you make your money, pay taxes when you spend your money, pay taxes when you successfully invest your money, pay taxes when you save enough taxed money to afford a house, pay taxes to live in your house, pay taxes when you sell the house that you paid taxes on to
Yup, taxes are criminal and we need serious reforms. I've always said that if you want to see a tax revolt, make withholdings illegal and have Americans write a tax check every payday. They'll revolt for sure. You don't miss what you never had.
Sen. @berniemoreno says voter ID and proof of citizenship are simply common sense.
“We’re talking about a very low threshold — identify who you are and prove you’re a U.S. citizen when you register to vote. I think we’re getting closer to
