I’ve reached my 200th blog post.  It’s been a long road to get here, but the journey has been worth it.

Where I’ve been:

During this past year, I have done a lot of growing in my blogging and presentation skills.  I have written articles on personal networking and personal marketing plus several posts on technology and DIY. 

This last month I committed to becoming an iPhone and Mac OS X developer.  It has been a while since I last programmed a Mac, but it’s coming back to me.  The iPhone is something new for me.  If I had only known that the iPhone would be such a productive tool, I would have gotten one many years ago.

Where I’m going:

My interests haven’t changed from what I’ve been sharing over this past year, but they have expanded.  These days my attention has been directed toward podcasts, video blogging and podcast production. 

In fact, I have already arranged to do an informational interview with local expert Matthew Beckwith  to learn more about what it takes to be a podcaster.  Matt’s site is PodcastStockton.com. 

I have also started collaborating with a colleague, Donal Scully, on my blog.  Starting this week, he will be acting as my editor.  We’re talking about the possibility of creating another blog that has a more general theme based on local news and events.  I see Donal’s role expanding as a contributing editor. 

I’ve also been doing lots of reading, so I plan to write plenty of book reviews.  We’ll see how that goes.

Please provide your feedback:

If you have any suggestions regarding topics you would like to read (or hear) about, please give a comment in reply to this post.  I’d love to hear from you.

Many times, I wonder if I say too little or not enough.  When I was in elementary school, my teachers would tell me to write in more detail.  They would say I had not written enough detail.  I should be more descriptive.  In high school, my teachers would tell me to be more succinct.  I was giving too much detail.  In college, some professors would tell me to write in more detail.  At work, I would hear about making sure I was using the write information for the intended audience.  Of course, I was to keep the written documents short.  “Just the executive summary if you please,” would be the cry.

So here is the dilemma, am I writing too much or not enough?  It seems like no matter which way I would write, someone would always want it different.  So, what is a writer to do?
» Read more: Are my blog posts too short?

I recently joined a blogging community called Problogger.com.  This is a group of bloggers that range in experience full time proffesional bloggers to bloggers who are just starting out.

There is a section in the Problogger forum to invite fellow bloggers critique your blog, so you can improve and produce a higher quality blog.  The feedback I received was » Read more: Being critiqued is hard to do

One of the goals I have for my blog is to be visited by someone from each of the 50 United States.  Tracking this data has been easy with Google Analytics.  My blog has been consistently visited by people from 45 states.

» Read more: Google Analytics and Internet Demographics

The first exercise in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is to write an elevator speech for my blog.  This has been a little challenging for me because I never though of trying to describe my blog to someone in an elevator speech before.  But this is a great exercise to try and put in words what this blog is about.

The short elevator speech:

Wes’ Words of Wisdom teaches through sharing life lessons learned.
» Read more: An elevator speech for my blog