Will R. links to and summarizes Dave Pollard's "Ideas of the Year."#

You need to read the full post, but here are the highlights:

  • There are no rules in the "blogosphere"
  • It's more important to be first than best
  • Focus on a few subjects and address them profoundly and creatively
  • Social Networking will allow us to build deep relationships, collaborate on awesome projects, find the next president.
  • Blogs could be the platform for a proxy for each of us as individuals, our electronic filing cabinet and electronic identity
  • The abandonment of 80-90% of blogs is a positive phenomenon
  • Blogging is increasingly a platform for achieving mainstream recognition
  • The culture of blogging is evolving faster than the technology (Note: Sound familiar?)
  • Blogs, like diaries, are a substitute for intimacy
  • RSS is blurring the distinction between blogs and other me

Dan Hon is still annoyed this year at a few things.#

Waiting for public transport, especially when said public transport is advertised as a quick and convenient method for travelling through town using a picture of a businessman looking at his watch. While presumably waiting for his bus to arrive.

The fact that my mortgage consistently fails to be completely paid off for some inexplicable yet unrectifiable reason each morning.

Ryan McGee writes about resolutions and a New You.#

If human nature tells us anything, it's that we as sentient beings can have all the objectively compelling evidence possible and yet will still only act when we convince ourselves a particular course of action is right. Sometimes we concur with the popular evidence, as in, "You know what? I should lose a bit of weight. I should call that old friend I haven't seen in months. I should look for a new job." Or your own personal conclusion flies in the face of all known forms of logic: "I think a large pepperoni pizza per meal will melt these extra pounds away. I should call everyone who's never called me and tell them to f#ck off. I should stay miserable in my dimly lit cubicle until downsized."

In either case, one and one person alone makes these decisions. The reason most resolutions are not adhered to, thusly, is because all too often they initiate from an outside source, which can appropriate itself into what looks like our own opinion, only to be shattered by the cold harsh light of five weeks later, when you're flailing like that fish in the Faith No More video on the treadmill in your new $120 sneakers below your $40 shorts below your $18 t-shirt below your $10 headband wondering how in the blue hell you ever got there. And then you go and have buffalo wings and wash them down with 18 beers and wipe your chin with the headband.