Embarking on “The Year Of Living Socially”
OK, I’ll start off with a confession: I’m not a very social person. Oh, not that I’m not friendly; I am, if you believe my wife, a very nice guy. It’s just that while I started blogging probably 10 years ago, and I signed up for both Twitter and LinkedIn early on, I haven’t really made a concerted effort to use any of those media ‘properly’.
I could blame it on a need for privacy, or being too busy with work, or a pathological need to go against what’s expected, but really, it’s just been laziness. I mix topics on my Twitter stream, I have been known to post about Star Wars and search engines on the same day to the same blog, and I let personal projects slip deadlines because there’s no client who needs to have it on time.
As a result of all this, I have a good idea of what all of these fantastic technologies can do, but since I’ve never really made a concerted effort to put them all into practice, I can’t really say how to use them to start from scratch. So this year, I’m setting myself a three-pronged challenge:
#1 — Really focus on just three content areas I think are important. They are cloud computing and social media, which I believe will be big in 2012, and intelligent search, which I’ve been championing in one way or another for a long, long time. (I’ll get more into exactly how I define each of those topics in future posts.)
#2 — Finally build a project I’ve been kicking around for years: an information aggregator that tames the information overload that gets worse every year. (The project has yet to be named, but I’ll talk about what it actually does — and solicit feedback and priorities — in a future post.) I will build this out in public, with deadlines anybody can see. I probably won’t open-source the code itself, but I will likely write articles and tutorials about the different technologies I use as I go along.
#3 — Implement best practices for using social media, including regular postings to Twitter and either LinkedIn, Facebook, or both. (I’ll do the analysis in a future post.)
So that’s the basic challenge, but I’ve set a few requirements that have to be fulfilled in order for this project to be considered a success:
First and foremost, client work can’t suffer; I’m a professional and if you’re paying me to do something, you take top priority. (Plus I have a family and they can’t suffer, so this will also have to be ‘the year of living within time management best practices’.)
Second, I’ll be using open-source and publicly available software, preferably cloud-based, unless there’s a good reason not to for a particular task, which will be a discussion in and of itself.
Third, all decisions, from what software development methodology to what search solution to use, will be made “in public”, so to speak, with analysis and conclusions out there for everyone to see.
Now, I’m human, so of course I’m going to make mistakes. (Hopefully this project doesn’t turn out to be the biggest one…) A lot of this — particularly some of the more “social” parts of social networking — are things I’ve never done..
But learning new things and turning them into understandable content is what I do. And if I may blow my own horn for a moment — something else I don’t normally do — it’s something I do really well.
So on that note, onward!
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