A Year In Review

Father Time. Sculptor is John Flanagan (1865–1952). Photographed in 2007 by Carol Highsmith (1946–), who explicitly plaed the photograph in the public domain.

A Year In Review

I am writing my thoughts freehand right now. I am thinking about the last year I have been blogging. It has been an interesting and useful experience. I learned a lot about myself and my own inclinations.

I rather enjoy writing. This blog has probably improved my writing considerably. I try to write every single day of the week for at least a short time. I also try and read every day.

This blog reflects what I have been reading; these are most, but not all of the authors I have written about.

Business: Chris Andersen, Paul Hawken, Gary Hirshberg, Jonathan Pond, Jack Welch, and Muhammad Yunus

Children's Literature: Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, Dr. Seuss

Classic illustration and comics: Hokusai, Lynd Ward, Winsor McKay

Comics: Sergio Aragones, Will Eisner, Neil Gaiman, Hideyuki Kikuchi, Tony Millionaire, Alan Moore, Osamu Tezuka, Marjane Satrapi, Joann Sfar, Craig Thomson, Bill Willingham

Fantasy: Toby Barlow, Michael Chabon, Steven Erikson, Robert E. Howard, Diana Wynn Jones, Ellen Kushner, Ursula Le Guin, Martin Millar, Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, Ekaterina Sedia, Sherri S. Tepper, Terri Windling, Jane Yolen

Horror: H.P. Lovecraft, Brian Lumley, Edgar Allen Poe

Internet/Computer: Paul Krug, Don Tapscott, Jonathan Zittrain

Poetry: Charles Bukowski, Kahlil Gibran, Mary Oliver, Rumi, Diane Wakoski

Science Fiction: Paolo Bacigalupi, Iain Banks, Tobias Buckell, Peter David, Cory Doctorow, David Drake, Joe Haldeman, Charles Stross, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer.

For some reason, I remember the titles on the books on clean technology more than I remember the authors; Here are a few of them:

Apollo's Fire, Cradle to Cradle, Freedom From Oil, Green Investing, Natural Capitalism, The Clean Tech Revolution

I like to think how we invest our money and make choices in technology will affect our future tremendously. Invest responsibly and green. Take the time to think about a different future; a cleaner future. One of the futures I like to imagine is turbine powered future; wind, wave, hydroelectric, biofuel turbines, solar turbines, and turbine engines.

Another theme in this blog is visiting a variety of places in New York that have to do with comics or books, the Queens Central Library, the Strand Bookstore, Housing Works Used Book Cafe, Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, the Puck Building, the Jacob Javits Center, Midtown Comics, Forbidden Planet, and Roger's Time Tunnel, and The McGraw Hill Building. Often this coincides with specific events like The Day of Dialog Between Publishers and Librarians, The Book Expo America, New York Comic Con, and the MOCCA Art Festival.

I also write about social networking a bit. I have stopped focusing on gaining traffic through sites like Entrecard, Stumbleupon, and Technorati. Instead I am focusing on networks that are more interactive like Twitter (microblogging), Fuelmyblog, and Blogcatalog all of which have built a set of tools for dialog as well as thumbnail images. I think three sites is about all I can handle for social networking.

I try to include images of authors or images that are literary in nature when I post to my blog. I also sometimes include Youtube videos of authors speaking or short cartoons like Felix the Cat, Superman, or Popeye.

For a while I tried advertising on this blog, adsense, and projectwonderful but I realized it was not worth it for the amount of time spent on the ads. I think that for the most part it is very hard to make money blogging. This blog turned into a noncommercial blog.