Resolutions for 2011

Here it is almost two weeks deep into the new year and I haven’t blogged about my 2011 resolutions. After careful consideration, I’ve resolved the following for the coming year.

• Never call out a number of ways to do something in my blog title, such as “7 Ways to do X in Social Media.”  It’s an annoying trend I noticed last year, especially in social media blogs.  Why 7? Does the author perhaps think I’ll be less interested in the subject if they only write about 6 ways to do “x”? Or maybe the author thinks that if I see that there are only 7 ways to do “x” that I’ll look at my watch and say to myself “Ok, I have time to read this.”  In either case, the title would be far better without the number.
• Write more about the architecture of successful social networking solutions. As my background is in software development methodologies, it should come as no surprise that I’m interested in methods for ‘engineering’ successful online communities.  At their heart, social networks are leveraging technology to facilitate the communication between members of a community that have always taken place. They have the capacity to bring together geographically dispersed members in ways that could never be done without technology: interested in collecting green ceramic soap dispensers but don’t know of any other people that share your passion? No problem: create an online community to trade them. There is real science behind successful social networks, and I’ll be writing more about it this year.
• Use fewer parenthetical comments in my blogs. (A nice resolution, but ‘fewer’ is a relative term.) The habit is probably a vestige from writing paper books and articles where I would use a footnote to offer a more in-depth explanation than seemed warranted in the paragraph, but footnotes in a blog seem…anachronistic.
• Track my predictions for 2011. Unlike some authors who throw out predictions and then hope you don’t remember them, I’m planning on tracking the predictions I made a few weeks ago and following up on them periodically.  They all relate to initiatives I find interesting (well, the serious ones anyway (darn, and not one paragraph ago I resolved to do fewer of these)) so I’ll update my predictions as major events unfold.
• Tweet more often. I find compressing a compelling thought down to 140 characters a frustrating experience.  If you want me to kick out 500 words on a subject, I can sit down and do that in a heartbeat: If you want me to condense the concept down to a dozen or so words, I have to think about it for a while.  And often fail to find the right dozen or so words (I suppose I could just do multiple connected tweets, but that seems like cheating (and so much for that previous resolution)).

By the way if you want to follow me on Twitter, it’s @davehiggins1—but then most of you already knew that, since the only reason you are here reading this blog is that I posted a link to it on Twitter.