I’ve been relatively quiet on the blogging front lately, for two reasons. Firstly I’ve been busily reading as much of Heath Row’s SXSW transcriptions as possible (thanks Heath!) – so I’ve been in Read mode rather than Write mode. But I’ve also been taking a good look at my goals for this weblog and deciding: where to next? Mostly for my own benefit, I’m going to summarise my updated goals here.
1. Write and publish one web technology analysis article per week on Read/Write Web. This has been my goal from day one for this weblog, but I need to remind myself of it now and then. What do I mean by web tech analysis? For example, check out my series of articles on the ‘Universal Canvas’ which I wrote in June 2003 [1], [2], [3], [4].
2. Web Design ‘learn by doing’: specifically create a new CSS design, starting from scratch this time; conduct XML experiments; play with Information Architecture concepts. In order to better accomplish these things, I’m thinking seriously about moving to Movable Type. Yes, another lemming about to jump – I hear you mutter. It’s not that I dislike Radio, actually I’m very fond of it and especially the friendly community of Radio users. But MT has some compelling advantages for web design – e.g. lots of 3rd-party plug-ins; easier to integrate CSS and XHTML-ize content; more dynamic (because it lives on the server rather than the desktop). Plus I’m already familiar with MT, because I use it to run my linkblog. Hmm, I’m still thinking about this – any advice appreciated.
3. Continue to write about wiki/weblogs in business environment and corporate web strategy. My aim here is to complement my ‘Real World’ job and flesh out ideas that I have.
4. Bi-monthly short story – first one due end of April 04. I want to write a series of fiction short stories this year, with the aim of entering one of them into a prestigious short-story competition run by a New Zealand Sunday paper every September. I’ve been eyeing this competition since I was a young whippersnapper and this year there should be no excuse for not entering it! I’ll probably publish my stories on R/WW, ideally to get some “Peer-to-Peer Editing” feedback.
So that’s an overview of my weblog goals in 2004. One of the main motivations (for numbers 1-3 in particular) is a desire to use my weblog more to enhance my career prospects, as well as using it as a creative outlet. Partly I want to prove to myself that I can accomplish all these things, but also I want to be able to point future employers or clients to my weblog and say: “Look, this is what I’ve done and therefore what I can do for you.” That’s the beauty of the personal publishing revolution, it enables me to drive myself forward both creatively and (hopefully) career-wise.
Of course I’ll do loads of other interesting things too…in fact I’ve got a cool idea I want to try out soon that isn’t related to the goals mentioned above. As always, stay tuned 😉
