I was driving home on a poorly lit highway last night when I had an interesting experience. It was a clear, but dark night and there weren’t many other vehicles traveling on the divided highway. There was one car driving fairly close to me, a few hundred meters ahead. I was mentally multi-tasking about some creative project as well as my visit with an old friend, when the car ahead of me slowed down while its brake lights lit up. Instinctively I began to slow down as well. I wondered what was going on and then, to my right, a hulking black shape moved from the shoulder of the road down the bank to the side of the road. Even though I couldn’t see it clearly, I knew it was a large animal of some kind. Based on the road signs I’d seen on this highway, I concluded that a moose had crossed the highway. The driver in front of me had seen it, slowed down, and avoided the animal, which lumbered on by. The driver ahead of me slowed down even further, so I passed his or her vehicle and continued on my way home to my destination.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered moose in this area, but it was the first time that the vehicle before me saw it first and slowed down. By his or her actions, that driver gave me a signal that danger was ahead, which allowed me to react. I might not have seen the moose in the dark and, truthfully, I didn’t get a good look at it, but I received enough information to react accordingly. The annoying thing about moose, of course, is that they are sometimes hard to spot even in good conditions because their colors tend to blend in with local scenery. However, moose are huge and heavy. You wouldn’t think they would be easy to miss. However, plenty of people collide with moose each year, so I’d say they aren’t always easy to see or else they aren’t always easy to react to. They pack a huge wallop when you collide with them so it’s always best to avoid them.

Here are some observations from this incident:

• Moose are big
• Moose can be hard to see, even in good conditions, unless they are extremely close by
• Sometimes the person ahead of you will see the moose before you do
• If the person ahead of you slows down, you need to slow down, too

Let’s put this into an even more generic set of statements. I’m going to remove the moose references as well:

• Sometimes big things that can have a huge impact on you aren’t easy to see
• Sometimes someone else will see the big things happening before you do
• If they, like you, are also a stakeholder in some kind of activity or experience, and they react, maybe you should, too - even if you can’t see what’s really happening
• You’ve got to keep your eyes open all of the time and you’ve got to know the terrain

Good little lesson for a Sunday night drive. And it didn’t even cost me a car.

Here are some interesting blogs that I’ve been reading lately that I haven’t mentioned or linked to you. They are definitely worth checking out:

DCR Blogs (witty, informative, and full of link love)

The Legion Abstract (devoted to the super-hero team the Legion of Super-Heroes)

Read/Write Web (full of industry goodness)

Bow. James Bow. (author and insightful commentator)

How To Split An Atom (another cool industry-related blog; cool design)

Publishing 2.0 (about the (r) evolution of the publishing industry)

Money Relations (well-written blog about finance)

The Thin Red Line (interesting framework for book reviews)

The Big Bald Blog (Impact Marketing Technologies blog)

Blogger Unleashed (not the best written from a grammatical point-of-view, but very interesting reading)

Ominous Comma (funny blog and the comments section is just as witty!)

Note:  if you want a way to find a bunch of interesting blogs, you can check out Alltop.com.

Whether it’s a sign of my deranged genius and a bored blogosphere, I don’t know, but my Squidoo lens about Beef Stroganoff is growing in popularity. The Lens rank is 7659, which is a lot better than 300000. I guess this means that 7658 Lenses are more popular. Or better. Or less nutty (no, that’s not true: I’ve seen some of the more popular lenses and some of them are odd, to say the least).

I’ve added a link where you can actually buy Beef Stroganoff mixes via Amazon.com (I’m almost tempted to try it, myself) or you can buy the I Love Beef Stroganoff T-Shirt.

Humor me and check out the lens. Please? Even if you’re a vegan or a vegetarian.

No cattle were harmed in writing this post or making the lens.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m most interested in writing, particularly writing that can be published on the Internet. One of the focuses of this blog is to examine the creative process, both from the point of view of the creator as well as the consumer/reader/scanner.

Despite my aspirations to make a living from my writing, I’ve spent most of my time during the past six months making user-generated content. My creative journey has following the following path to date:

1) Attempts at writing and publishing fiction – one story published at Aphelion

2) A lot of articles for Helium.com (over 100)

3) Eight articles at Triond.com family of websites

4) My two blogs

5) Guest posts at The Thinking Blog, The WWW Observer, Dumb Little Man, and SEO 2.0.

6) A bunch of social news/media/bookmarking stuff with StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, ShoutWire, and Sphinn which has led to me making a number of on-line contacts – great people, all of them.

7) Some participation in Blog Catalog and MyBlogLog communities, although I’ve been neglecting them of late.

I’m part of Maki’s Team Marketing Network, which may lead to some interesting projects and cool blog ideas.

9) I’m writing a weekly column about the Web for one of my local newspapers

10) One other article for a print media trade publication which will hopefully be published in early 2008 (fingers crossed).

11) Ongoing Squidoo experiments

There’s no doubt that I’ve been learning a great deal and that my writing has improved during the past year but I’m feeling… dissatisfied. I feel like I’ve been taking a shotgun approach to the Web and writing in general, but I haven’t really been aiming consistently at any one thing. I’d like to make some income off of all of this (and I am making a tiny bit, probably close to $300 this year from a variety of sources), but I’m still looking for a least one significant income stream. Maybe in 2008.

If I’d been able to read the recent posts by Maki and Muhammed Saleem (Read Before You Play)on social media about three months before they came out, I would probably have done things quite differently this year. Would have I been any further ahead? I really don’t know. Maybe it’s just as well to learn things gradually through trial and error then to have the knowledge handed to you by some maven and then, just like opening up a faucet, money would gush out.

Oddly enough, this rather sparse article put me on the track to Digg and many other social media wonderment. This other article about promoting your own work at Digg caught my attention for awhile, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone knowing what I know now.

In fact, I was disgusted enough with these articles that I wrote my own, mainly because I didn’t want people to get too disillusioned or waste too much time submitting huge volumes of their work at the social news sites and then having their @sses handed back to them. I hope it goes #1 in that Helium category so people read it first and get some realistic idea of what to expect from self-submitting rather than reading the current #1 article. But whatever.

I’d summarize 2007 as being a time of experimentation and getting grounded in various social media and user-generated content platforms.  Working on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, particularly the top tier.

I hope to find some better focus in 2008 and increasing my earnings, primarly through freelance or column writing gigs. I’d like to earn $ 2,000.00 (US or Canadian) by writing and on-line ventures in 2008. I don’t know if that’s achievable, but it’s certainly possible.

I’d like to establish The Uncanny Broadcasting Brain Blog as a solid, dependable read and a good source of information. I’d like to get the subscriber count to at least 150, we’ll see how that goes.

I’d like to take The Mighty Introvert further by developing a community for introverted social media practioners (or, to be honest, anyone interested in social media) to share ideas and do great things.

Oh, and I’d like to win at least $10.0 million (but I have that same wish quite frequently…. )

Finally, I will make more use of graphics, images, and pictures in my posts in 2008.

So, here’s to the fast-approaching end of 2007 and looking foward to 2008. Cheers!

Tamar’s uber-post about 2007 Internet Marketing highlights

A negative but humorous look at introversion

Rumor spreading (or viral marketing) techniques

Everybody wants to rule the blogosphere (Tears for Fears, anyone?)

Quotations from Douglas Adams, who must know where his towel is by now

Intriguing document about how to create a unique blogging experience

The perfect site for those of us not wanting a C-3PO to translate for R2D2

I can’t remember if I linked to this SEO article already, but I thought it was so cool that it deserves another link

And finally, although this isn’t a link… may cool heads prevail in Pakistan. Today’s news will be devastating to many. The assassination of Ms. Bhutto was a reprehensible act which not only killed her, but a number of other individuals. I do not know much about Pakistan, but I cannot understand what good purpose would be served by this act of violence. My condolences and sympathies to the people of Pakistan during these difficult times.

First of all, I hope everyone has had a Merry Christmas, Hanukah season, Annual Materialistic Gift Consumption Day (trademark pending), Turkey Day Phase II, or whatever you want to call this time of year.

Secondly, as I continue to formulate my plans for world domination this blog, I’ve decided to try a little experiment with a key word combination.

Like many of us living in the blogosphere (remember, I live here), I read Courtney Tuttle’s keyword sniping article with some interest. NB – I found the link to Courtney’s article from Blogger Unleashed’s niche blogging article.

So, just for fun, I thought I’d try to find a keyword combination that seemed to meet Courtney’s three main criteria:

1) Over 200 queries/day

2) Less than 1 million existing pages

3) They have some kind of value to an advertiser

I used the free version of WordTracker to do some quick searching. I tried to come up with something that I knew a little bit about. Amazingly enough, after a few keyword searches, I came up with one that I wanted to try:

Beef Stroganoff

So, it’s a bit unexciting, and not necessarily that healthy for you to eat, but WTF. Beef Stroganoff it is.

So, being a bit cheap (plus too lazy to fully read Court’s excellent article), I took a simple approach to creating a new web page for this experiment: I used Squidoo. It’s cheap, relatively easy to use, and it’s designed for linking. My goal here is not to make money (although if some worked its way into my wallet, I wouldn’t say no). My goal is just to test the basic premise of Court’s idea as simply as possible just to see if I can get to Google’s first page of search results. Plus it’s a way to track some recipes – I do have a hankering for the stuff.

Here’s the link to The Beef Stroganoff Pantry at Squidoo – please have a look.

The monetization aspects would basically revolve around selling cookbooks, I guess. Although I was surprised to find out that you can buy Beef Stroganoff mixes at Amazon.com. That was a bit frightening at first, but if anyone could sell this, Amazon.com could.

So, that’s the new experiment. I’ll let you know how it goes.

P.S. Beef Stroganoff Land, the premier family entertainment center for beef dishes, opens in 25 years. Life memberships on sale soon!