Directionless post about goals

This item has also been posted at The Uncanny Broadcasting Brain Blog. I'm posting it here because it references The Mighty Introvert.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I'm most interested in writing, particularly writing that can be published on the Internet. One of the focuses of this blog is to examine the creative process, both from the point of view of the creator as well as the consumer/reader/scanner.

Despite my aspirations to make a living from my writing, I've spent most of my time during the past six months making user-generated content. My creative journey has following the following path to date:

1) Attempts at writing and publishing fiction - one story published at Aphelion
2) A lot of articles for Helium.com (over 100)
3) Eight articles at Triond.com family of websites
4) My two blogs
5) Guest posts at The Thinking Blog, The WWW Observer, Dumb Little Man, and SEO 2.0.
6) A bunch of social news/media/bookmarking stuff with StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, ShoutWire, and Sphinn which has led to me making a number of on-line contacts - great people, all of them.
7) Some participation in Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog communities, although I've been neglecting them of late.
8) I'm part of Maki's Team Marketing Network, which may lead to some interesting projects.
9) I'm writing a weekly column about the Web for one of my local newspapers
10) One other article for a print media trade publication which will hopefully be published in early 2008 (fingers crossed).
11) Ongoing Squidoo experiments

There's no doubt that I've been learning a great deal and that my writing has improved during the past year but I'm feeling... dissatisfied. I feel like I've been taking a shotgun approach to the Web and writing in general, but I haven't really been aiming consistently at any one thing. I'd like to make some income off of all of this (and I am making a tiny bit, probably close to $300 this year from a variety of sources), but I'm still looking for a least one significant income stream. Maybe in 2008. :)

If I'd been able to read the recent posts by Maki and Muhammed Saleem (Read Before You Play) on social media about three months before they came out, I would probably have done things quite differently this year. Would have I been any further ahead? I really don't know. Maybe it's just as well to learn things gradually through trial and error then to have the knowledge handed to you by some maven and then, just like opening up a faucet, money would gush out.

Oddly enough, this rather sparse article put me on the track to Digg and many other social media wonderment. This other article about promoting your own work at Digg caught my attention for awhile, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone knowing what I know now.

In fact, I was disgusted enough with these articles that I wrote my own, mainly because I didn't want people to get too disillusioned or waste too much time submitting huge volumes of their work at the social news sites and then having their @sses handed back to them. I hope it goes #1 in that Helium category so people read it first and get some realistic idea of what to expect from self-submitting rather than reading the current #1 article. But whatever.

I'd summarize 2007 as being a time of experimentation and getting grounded in various social media and user-generated content platforms.

I hope to find some better focus in 2008 and increasing my earnings, primarly through freelance or column writing gigs. I'd like to earn $ 2,000.00 (US or Canadian) by writing and on-line ventures in 2008. I don't know if that's acheivable, but it's certainly possible.

I'd like to establish The Uncanny Broadcasting Brain Blog as a solid, dependable read and a good source of information. I'd like to get the subscriber count to at least 150, we'll see how that goes.

I'd like to take The Mighty Introvert further by developing a community for introverted social media practioners (or, to be honest, anyone interested in social media) to share ideas and do great things.

Oh, and I'd like to win at least $10.0 million (but I have that same wish quite frequently.... :) )

Finally, I will make more use of graphics, images, and pictures in my posts in 2008.

So, here's to the fast-approaching end of 2007 and looking foward to 2008. Cheers!