2006 was a good year and it’s time for me to lay down some goals, resolutions and changes this new year.

1. Goodbye existing RSS feeds, hello new RSS feeds
I’ve completely reset my warm, comfortable RSS reading list. All day long, in fact, I kept checking to see new posts … that were no longer there.

Since March 20 2006, I averaged following 185 RSS feeds and personally skimmed through over 150,000 posts marking 14,717 as ‘publish’ed. In a new directory and database I installed a fresh reBlog install for 2007 and am now looking at this:

I’ll be resubscribing to some of the 180+ feeds I was subscribed to in 2006, but I’m going to try my best to add primarily new voices, new feeds and new sources to my daily reading list. I also reset the Hmm front page blogroll.

Nothing against the many sources I enjoyed in 2006, but I’m not the kind of guy who likes staying in comfort zones and coasting along for an extended period of time. I like to keep doing new and different things, experimenting and exploring. You’re welcome to make your case for why I should resubscribe in 2007 below either by comment or trackback. Tell me what you will be doing differently in 2007? What will be new about you/your site? If the answer is nothing, then this is your opportunity to make a post like the one I’m making here and share.

Along the left hand side of the homepage (location subject to change) you’ll see my OPML file for 2006 and 2007. As of this writing 2007 I have only two subscriptions, one for here so I can monitor how the feed looks and the other is the next item I’ll be discussing.

I’m also working on a public shared reading list experiment that you can get involved with (keep reading for clues) and help influence what I post about here at Hmm in 2007. This means even if I’m not subscribed to your blog, there will be a familiar and easy way for you to submit posts you’d like me to skim/read.

2. Virtual world (MMO / MMORPG) focus changes
In January of 2006 myself and several others started a group blog called VTOR (Virtual TO Reality) to cover the virtual world landscape. We chose to use the new freehosting service from the people behind Blogexplosion called Blogcharm. Within days of launching the service, unfortunately, the BE owners announced they were selling the entire service and from there Blogcharm never really got much attention and the service went from new to bad to miserable.

It turned out to be a horrible move starting our blog at Blogcharm, especially over the last 60 days when the hosting has had numerous site outages, so we jumped to our own server. The VTOReality site migration is now complete and the new group blog is available at vtoreality.com on a server that is dramatically faster. We’re hosting on one of our dedicated servers. The RSS feed was being served by Feedburner so existing subscribers don’t need to update their links.

I’m looking forward to some exciting developments in virtual lands in 2007 and hope to be contributing even more than in 2006. I started out 2006 very involved and after summer things kind of tapered off. I downsized my virtual land holdings in Second Life so I’ll be starting lean and mean in 2007.

3. Removed sharing links
I’ve removed the digg, del.icio.us and sphere links at the bottom of each post. While I considered these convenient and useful for readers in 2006, those who use these services can use bookmarklets from these services if they want. These links just seem redundant to me any more. Maybe I’ll change back to thinking it was a good idea, but they’re gone for now.

4. Hmmcast — video or audio — five days a week
Vlogging here I come!

One of my 2007 goals is to publish at least one originally created video or podcast every weekday, save for holidays. They won’t necessarily all be related just like text posts here. Some might be short clips, others longer with higher production value. Expect screencasts, one on one commentary and more. This starts today and now below (on a holiday too, oops):

That video may be more of a strange vignette, but my experimenting and exploration will come into some sort of regular production (or quit after a serious concerted effort). Yeah, guess I’m saying the Hmmcast will be a regular production, which is what I alluded to in my last post and have wanted to do for quite some time now.

This will be replacing the bi-monthly most hmm-worthy posts. I liked the concept but it’s kind of out of gas in the current format and want to try something different.

5. Back in Black Labs
Many of the new experiments we’re working on related in some way to Hmm will be listed in a new labs.makeyougohmm.com. You can poke around there now and see some of what’s happening behind the scenes, away from the RSS feed and website. This isn’t some promotional thing, it’s a place for us to play mad scientist together and check out stuff. You will be a part of this, if you want to be.

I probably won’t write posts about all these lab experiments, but you’ll note a new category called “labs” which is bound to follow some of these experiments. One of the things I want to do a better job at in 2007 is making things being worked on and experimented with behind the scenes a little more publically accessible. Also will allow me to get feedback from you about ideas you might think would be cool more fully developed for here or related sites.

6. ???
This list could go on but I’m going to leave it there for now. Tease, tease. Hopefully you’ve noticed most of these personal and site goals lean towards creating more original content. I’m not planning on getting too far removed from commenting on news and what other people are saying/doing, what’s happening in tech, and ultimately things that make me and hopefully you go hmm, but I do want to focus more on producing and publishing a greater amount of original content in 2007 than in prior years, if that’s even possible with my frenetic schedule. We’ll find out in 12 months, won’t we?

Look around the site, leave comments and if you like, get involved here in the many other creative ways to be available throughout 2007. Thank you for reading and supporting this site with your time and energy. It’s contagious.

Did this post make you go hmm?

Maybe Related Posts (plugin generated)

• Launching VTOR the Virtual TO Reality blog
• Blogimplosion
• How to migrate existing feeds to Feedburner (Apache)
• Warning the Blogrush is on and isn’t degrading gracefully
• To have full RSS feeds or not?
• RSS Feed popularity increasing