We bought my brother a vintage 1944 Underwood typewriter for Christmas.  I hadn't played with a typewriter in probably 15 years, and it was bizarre trying to write something on it.  I never realized just how much the text I put down tends to change and rearrange itself as it flows out of my head, thru my fingers, and onto the screen.

As I write something I jot down a couple of words to capture an idea, write a sentence or two about them, go back to the beginning, drag paragraphs around, and delete entire sections.  My workflow is flatly impossible on a typewriter.

I realized that if this typewriter was the tool that I had to work with there's no way I'd be generating as much content as I do.  It's just far too time-consuming and requires far too much planning in advance to generate a polished final product.

So I'm back in the land of Lincoln and Wild Rod's Senate Seat Emporium ("The lowest price for all your legislative needs") this week and next for Christmas Vacation.  I'm really enjoying hanging out with friends and family that I rarely get to see these days, relaxing in the exotic subzero weather, and desperately looking forward to moving back.

One thing that hits me every time I travel is that my blog tends to suffer because my posts are generally pretty long, which causes me to spend time researching, proofreading, etc, etc.

Twitter is kind of nice for the shorter thoughts, but only for ones that can be contained in a single sentence.  It doesn't work well for something like this post, for example, which requires several sentences to capture.  It kills me every time I have to chop a thought in half to fit it into that stupid 140 character limit.

So I've decided to start segregating my thoughts and fitting them to the appropriate mediums.  Single-sentence thoughts ("United Airlines deserves a quick and horrible death") go to Twitter, slightly longer thoughts (like this one) and videos go to my blog, longer ones that have typically gone to my blog and take a few hours to put together (like Predictions for 2009) will be posted as essays, and thoughts that take more than a couple of pages to express will go into books.

In other words, thoughts of varying complexity should probably go to different channels.

This seems like the kind of problem that should already have a readily available solution, but the recent introduction of Twitter and micro-blogging have proved that we really haven't figured it out yet.

Every year I enjoy writing a post with my predictions for the next year.  It's a nice way to empty the old thoughts from my brains so there's room for new ones.  Plus I leave a trail of blog posts so I can see how my thoughts change from year to year.

In retrospect I've realized that each year tends to have a theme or two, and that the hardest part about making accurate predictions for a given year is identifying the themes that will drive it.

In 2007 the driving themes were social networking and online entertainment.  In 2008 the themes were distributed and mobile communication, with a dash of cloud computing sprinkled on top.

The theme for 2009 is almost absurdly easy to identify:  the economy.  If you thought 2008 was about the economy, just wait for 2009.  You truly ain't seen nothin' yet.  A deflationary black hole is sucking all of the money out of the economy and we haven't even seen the impact yet.

Every time I hear somebody talk about how the market has bottomed and the economy is starting to improve I mentally picture them in this position:

So if we're talking about the economy and you see me chuckle, you know why.

Hope is a great mindset to have and a fantastic slogan for winning Presidential campaigns apparently, but it is not such a great lens to view reality thru when you're trying to make money.

One of the innovations I'm really looking forward to from a personal standpoint is the ability to do personal reverse auction on the Net.  I think they'd really be handy when it comes to picking up bargains after deflation has ravaged the country for another few months.

In case you're not familiar with reverse auctions, it's where you place a bid for something and let sellers find you, instead of sellers posting an item for sale and you placing a bid with them.

Seems simple, right?  It should be, but we don't have the infrastructure for it.  In order for this to be a universally useful function it needs to be baked into the Web stack.  Right now, it's not.  The method for publishing your wishlist doesn't exist yet, and then there's the little issue of how people will discover your wishlist--Google won't cut it. 

RDF and linked data provide a perfectly wonderful way to discover these reverse auctions eventually, but that's only part of the equation.

I have a problem:  I love Web 2.0 startups and software as a service, and I have been using them.

On the face of it, that doesn't really sound like a problem, does it?