I have this innate prejudice against best of lists. Somehow, rounding up the best of the previous year, decade, century, whatever – it seems a bit like planning for yesterday. Especially with the trouble we seem to be having moving with the pace of a technologically enabled culture, I’d prefer to break the old forms and do some declaration for the next cycle.

I’m not into making resolutions – they’ve never worked. Everything I’ve ever quit, I did as it was needed rather than at an arbitrary date. Every project I’ve ever started has begun when its time came, rather than at the beginning of a given quarter. So, with that aside, here are some things you can expect to see me look toward in 2010.

I’m going to be connecting with people. I spend a lot of time mentioning, linking, drawing riffs from others. If we’ve already got some kind of connection (even if it’s just trading blog comments) expect me to try to expand on that. If all I’ve done is retweet you, expect some comments and so on.

I’m launching a few new projects. In the beginning of February (the 2nd, to be specific) I’m launching an online novel called The Dowager Shadow. Its story has been a work in progress for almost six years, but the principal writing is still going on. It’l be an interesting journey. I also may be reworking and relaunching Why, Read The Manual! – but we’ll see about that one. Its final form has yet to be decided, and I may be asking for collaboration from some of the people I’ve been connecting with over the past year.

The focus of this blog will narrow. Like any good blogger, I’m eventually choosing my spin. I’m well aware I can get rather random sometimes – it’s not been the best for my traffic. I’ve been looking over the posts that have caused the most stir (cough-anonymity-cough) or illicited the highest number of comments (hack-twilight-hack). Naturally, I don’t want to be so easy to pigeon-hole as allowing myself to be defined as “the digital manners guy” but there are definitely benefits to picking your angle. I can’t say with finality what mine is. Nor do I want to make the decision final. But it’ll get easier to see what I’m writing about s the theme becomes visible.

In any case, the point of this exercise is to make sure you know I’m sticking around. I’ve a lot of work to do, and a lot of it relates directly to my continued work here. The blog itself is slated for a total redesign beginning in January, so expect some landscape changes unless you’re using Google Reader or some such. I promise; no Thesis. The new theme will be one hundred percent Unspeakable Media faire, I’m still too cheap to spend anything but my time on design.