I wanted to get blogging practice back into my routines and at November 23rd last year I set myself the goal to post at least one post every day.

The summary above says it all: I sure kept my promise!

I’m glad to reach this day. It’s proven me difficult at times to be able to post something every single day. Mind you, holiday-season was right in the middle of it all, weekends are often spent outdoors and some days I’ve been working so hard that I’m actually too tired to post something worthwhile. Even now, after finishing a full days work of finetuning a video I’d rather lay in the bathtub and relax than writing this.

Nevertheless I’m glad I did it. It has helped me to write more, to start searching for interesting things to tell, to notice interesting articles by others and to kick-start 2010.

Now the hard part will come. I can finally stop referring to my quest by adding numbers to the title and it will be harder to notice for you and me to see how much I’m actually writing.

Therefore I take this opportunity to make a new promise: I will publish at least one post each day from Monday to Tuesday, untill March 1st. Anything posted on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays is my gift to you.

I’m counting on Gerrit to encourage me tomorrow, to keep up with my writing (see comment here).

Some of the features I like and use often:
- different views on the same content;
- full screen mode (no other windows visible);
- import .pdf in a project.

And today I discovered a new one:
- a screenplay mode.

The screenplay mode uses some presets, such as “Scene heading”, “Dialogue”, “Shot”, that you can select which translates the text you write into a page lay-out suited for screenplays.

So far, most of my video work were projects without a clear scenario. For tomorrow’s client project, however, I took the classic approach and created a scenario first, using Scrivener. And it really helped to structure my ideas and streamline it into a document that I can use while filming tomorrow.

I’m convinced that I can do a lot more with Scrivener, but even for the few features I use, this piece of software is worth more than €30,02 ($39,95) for a licence. Go try it for yourself (Mac only!).

(about the number in the title)

It will be Pedro’s motto this year, inspired by Henriette, and I’ll join him.

I’m serious! Today I’ve been figuring out how to include epic stuff in my weekly routines to make sure I start doing what has always been so close to my heart: creative writing.

(about the number in the title)

I only missed two Saturday postings, which I compensated on the following Sunday and I posted twice on December 18th and today, which adds up to a total of 35 blogposts in 33 days. Complimenting myself for the first half and encouraging myself to keep up the good work.

(about the number in the title)

While doing that I noticed many blogs are a neglected space. Several people link to sites from their Twitter-profile which haven’t been updated for a year or longer. Is Twitter the only reason to blame for this?

Last week I felt disappointed with the amount of writing by what I have labeled as my tribe: people that I’ve known for a longer while and have met face-to-face (roughly speaking: the Reboot-crowd). This is the category in my feed reader that I check on a daily basis, but less postings means less inspiration.

On the positive side I guess you could see this as an oppurtunity as well. Less posts leads to less overload leads to more attention for those who DO blog. However, I’m convinced everyone has stories to tell that are longer than 140 characters, so I’d like to call upon everyone to keep/start sharing your stories. It feeds me

(about the number in the title)

(about the number in the title)

That said, I’m a bit uncertain how I can speed things up. I really like creating short video’s and love doing interviews for my In Full Flow-project, but am now at a point that I’d like to earn money doing this.

I’ve been thinking a lot what I would love to do and where video can add value (and people would be willing to pay me for my service). An ‘ideal project’ for me would be to take part in projects as a project documentary maker, especially when you’re dealing with a change process. Change in people’s minds is hard to capture, but if you record interviews with the people before and after the project, film some of the meetings and discussions during the process and edit that into a project-documentary, I’m convinced that you can summarize the process and results more convincingly than in writing.

But so far it is still an ‘ideal project’. I’m still looking for an opportunity to take part in a project with that role…

(about the number in the title)

In case you’re wondering, missing a day isn’t catastrophic for building routines:

“Missing a single day did not reduce the chance of forming a habit.”

My biggest concern is my Dutch (company) blog. I started it in 2005 when ‘I’ became ‘my own company’. For whatever reason(s) it never became a serious place to write for me, resulting in few posts and huge gaps in writing. Keeping up two general blogs appears to be too much for me. (Gosh, I’m jealous of all those Anglo-saxons that don’t have to worry about serving multiple linguistic groups.)

So what to do with skallagrigg.net? One thought is that I drop the name Skallagrigg for my company. It is a difficult name to spell and pronounce (especially for Dutch) and although the story of Skallagrigg resonates in my core values, the book’s values are perhaps not the most important in my work.

I think it’s time to bring either a clear focus to my company site, choose a theme to write about (more essay style than blog), or switch to a more static representation. I’m thinking of using an URL with just my name (my company = just me).

I’d rather use this blog as my thinking space, than any other space. It is no coincidence that I challenged myself to post on a daily basis here, and not at skallagrigg.net. This is where my tribe can follow me (and support me). Only a few in my tribe speak Dutch, but they can all understand English. Maintaining a similar space in Dutch has proven to be unsatisfactory with too small audience.

I haven’t decided on anything and I’m very curious what you think of these ideas.

(about the number in the title)