Here’s my plan for the new year:

1) Divert 90 percent of the energy and time spent on Facebook and Twitter in 2009, back into this site.

I will continue to use both mediums and others that may emerge, but I definitely fell victim the comment trap last year to extreme detriment. Posting pretty much anything on Facebook or Twitter will elicit a comment. Silly as it sounds, this really mattered at one point for me.

Websites, even really successful ones, net a paltry number of comments relative to their readership, but that is not a shortcoming of its design. That is the design. Most people lurk. If someone is moved to comment, they do. So it goes. If you want quick note of sympathy, it’s easy enough to find on Facebook. Sometimes that’s an appropriate solicitation. Other times, it’s a distraction.

To me the most important edge of a journal based web site over FB and Twitter is the persistence of the entries and the categorizations of material. Related entries appear in some kind of context and remain for people who might want to find them days, weeks or months later. This is very difficult on FB and Twitter, which hinges on right-now-oh-my-god-I-just-missed-it. All too often that turns into gee-what-the-hell-was-I-looking-at-anyway?

See Facebook and Twitter are made for  sharing personal details with your friends and family, which is great, but seriously how many feeds and status can one person follow before feeling like a zombie staring into a ceaseless stream of text? Even when you really like the person at its source. The ultimate arbiter of material: randomness. And that’s fine. For a little while.  Sooner or later I find myself wanting more. Maybe I can’t get everything I want, but I can at least put out more of what I’m looking for into the Universe.

In the end, I’m a writer–not a tweeter. While I have no expectations about competing with the comment machine that is Facebook and Twitter by concentrating here–I will always need a mechanism for sharing a thought longer than 140 characters and not subject to a usage agreement that tends to shift with the global warming vs. global cooling debate.

2) Finish a draft of the oft mentioned but unfinished manuscript that began in December 2006 by July 2010.

Four years is enough time. Seriously. All that matters at this point is having something down, even if it looks like pig vomit spewed across the page. I spent way too much time trying to “get something right” that was never even close to being done in the most elemental terms. So I’m finishing this draft even if I spend all of my vacation days, nights and weekends to do so. Which might be what it takes, actually.

3) Promote The Last Track.

More on this very soon.