It's the end of the year - almost quite literally. I've only got a few more hours to figure out what my personal goals list will be for next year, but I can at least publish my geek goals so that I'll have some public accountability as to whether any of these will be achieved in 2008.
Most of these are fairly open, too. My guess is that most of you will be able to adopt most or all of this list as your own. Let's make it a year to remember. Let's actually achieve some New Year's resolutions.
01) Log-in to my social networks more than twice a week.
Whether it is because of the copious amounts of spam on MySpace, or the unending piles of Pirate v. Ninja notifications on Facebook, I somehow can't bring myself to log into either one of them more often than a couple times a week. Interestingly enough, I'm finding that Twitter fills the gaps that I joined Facebook for in the first place. I wanted to be a part of Facebook so that I could communicate with interesting folks in my industry, but as my Twitter network grows, I'm finding that it is much easier to find folks I'm interested in talking to there, than wading through the hassle that is a web-based social network.
Still, there are benefits, like the centralized apps and mini-feed views, that are afforded from Facebook that you simply can't get out of Twitter. Having one spot for productivity and a quick glance at what my friends have been up to recently is something I'm missing out on.
I got my first new laptop computer in several years. Typically, I'm the sort of guy who will buy a machine that's a generation or two back because I love bargains, and most of the time it is good enough for what I do daily. Since joining up at Mashable and spending literally 12 hours straight on the computer every day, I figured it was time to upgrade. I got a Black Friday special laptop from Dell, a speedy little Vostro 1000. Unfortunately, it came with Vista, and I must say I'm slightly less than impressed with it.
On the other hand, folks with the Apple laptops are always expressing their condolences and telling me how super-great Leopard is. They're finally starting to wear me down. I want to be one of the shiny happy people now. The Hare Krishna act has finally worn me down. At some point next year, I suppose I'm going to need to drink the Apple Kool-Aid, and hope the increased productivity is worth the sack to my identity as a PC guy.
03) Set up a spam bot for Ron Paul
What does get the job done? Apparently setting up spam servers works. Got him all that campaign money. I'm tech savvy, it is the least I can do to help the old coot.
04) Get control of my personal brand.
Not only is my personal website under construction, but as I try out more social networks and lifestreaming utilities, I've spread my personal brand all over the Internet. I've got podcasts, domains, writings, tumblogs, linkblogs and RSS feeds scattered all over the internet bearing my name. I need to find one or two good utilities and a slick looking format with which to consolidate it all in a useful, user-friendly manner.
05) Invest in the next Google.
I see and profile, what, twenty, thirty startups a day? I should be able to spot the next winner out of this bunch. I wanna be a Web 2.0 billionaire (or whatever we end up calling the buzzword du jour next year).
06) Get my calendaring organized.
This is the one area of my life I'm still really sucking at getting migrated out to the cloud. I still manage my calendaring with a local exchange server that synchronizes with a copy of Outlook on my local machine, which synchronizes with my ancient Asus WinCE unit and my wife's video iPod. I really like Google's calendaring, and I know that sites like Upcoming and others are great. I just haven't found the one calendaring site that manages all my task list and todo needs as well as synchronizing with my ancient mobile devices.
I enjoy networking. I enjoy learning. I enjoy showing myself off as an expert. I even enjoy traveling. I should go to more conferences.
08) Fix my grammar errors.
I'm sure the regular Mashable readers can back me up here. WordPress doesn't have grammar correction like desktop based word processors, and thus many dangling participles and silly "its-it's" errors often slip past me. WordPress either needs to implement grammar into the SpellChecker, or I need to get more attentive to these errors. I don't care which one happens, but I'm tired of Suezanne always calling me out on my grammar errors, I know that[img src="http://sale-online.click/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/email-out-of-control1.jpg" caption="" credit="" alt="email-out-of-control1.jpg"] much.
09) Make the next blockbuster online video podcast.
It has been a minute since I've done any work in video podcasting. My last valiant efforts were before the rampant investment in video monetization firms. With YouTube monetizing, Revver paying out $30 CPM, and BlinkX boasting upwards of $60 CPM, now is the time to make something happen.
10) Get my email under control.