43 Things I might want to do this year

Information Outlook, Feb, 2006 by Stephen Abram

43 Things is a cool site. It's ideal for tracking and working on your personal progress to learn new things. I like to think of it as tracking play. Remember your goals for the day as a child? Build a fort. Make an ashtray out of the batch of clay you found by the creek? Climb the cliff in the park. Every time you did something on your mental daily goals list you learned something and felt a sense of accomplishment. You grew.

The basic concept of 43 Things is that "people have known for years that making a list of goals is the best way to achieve them. Why is that? First, getting your goals in writing can help you clarify what you really want to do. You might find you have some important and some frivolous goals. That is OK."

This Web site gives you space for 43 entries on your list. Not every item needs to be earth shattering. Learning is incremental and you can grow a little bit at a time and suddenly realize you're competent in something new. With this site you can discover from others registered on the site the many options of what you can choose to do as well as find others who share your interest. It's a way of engaging in life itself. The goal of the site is to let you make your list, edit it, get inspired and share your progress. As you achieve a goal you've listed you can click on the "I've done this" button and share a story about how you did it.

This site appears to be ready-made for those of us learners who like to engage in self-discovery and tracking our progress. I think that we're a profession of inveterate list makers and love to tick off our accomplishments. So here's my suggestion this month. Beware: this could be a yearlong or lifelong project! I want you to go to 43 Things (See the URL in the sidebar), register and list what you want to accomplish this year. You can make it private or share it with others. Just try it! Can't think of 43 things to do? Here are a few suggestions of simple things to try:

1. Take a digital picture with a camera and/or phone and download it to your PC.

2. Register at Blogger and start a blog. Post every once in a while and add a photo.

3. Register at Bloglines and aggregate your blog and RSS subscriptions into one reader. Check out what other blogs align with your interests.

4. Look at Facebook and see the next generation of social networking.

5. Set up a Flickr account and post a few of digital photos online. Tag and annotate them.

6. Look at LibraryElf and see the potential for personal library tools.

7. Check out LibraryThing and catalogue a few books from your personal collection.

8. Register at MSN Photo Album and build an album to share with friends, family, or colleagues.

9. Check out Myspace and see how this service has become so huge globally.

10. Have some fun with the links on the Generator Blog.

11. Download Firefox and compare it to Explorer and Opera.

12. Research bookmarklets and try a few.

13. Revisit Yahoo! and remind yourself why it is visited more than Google.

14. Learn about iFILM and viral video.

15. Get a PubSub account and start searching the future.

16. Make a map of all the countries or states you've been to at Visited Countries.

17. Experiment with some sound and picture search engines like Podscope.

18. Try some new Web search engines like Exalead, Wink, Gravee, Clusty, Mooter, Kartoo, etc., or others you can find at Search Engine Watch's list.

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19. Learn more about visual display tools like Grokker.

20. Check out Google Base and see what the fuss is all about.

21. Register with NetFlix and rent a movie. Learn how to deal with streaming media.

22. Get a Del.icio.us account and play with social bookmarking and tags.

23. Play with Blinkx and learn about searching TV shows, video and podcasts.

24. Try MovieFlix too. There are plenty of free movies here to learn to do this.

25. Set up a Google Picasa account. Post a picture and then edit it.

26. Download an MP3 file to your PC, laptop or phone. Try iTunes, LimeWire, Kazaa, or eDonkey. Look for something that's not music too.

27. Listen to a podcast. There are quite a few about library issues, too.

28. Find your home and your office on Google Maps.

29. Check out your local public library's website. You'll likely find some cool stuff like talking books for that long commute, or classical music collections, or eBooks.

30. Change your ring tone so you don't jump when everyone else's default ring goes off.

31. Visit the Google Labs site regularly.

32. Set up a personalized Google or My Yahoo! page

33. Play with JibJab.

34. Play with Wikipedia. Edit an entry, feel the network.

35. Play with Copernic and extend your searching.

36. Play an online multiplayer game.

37. Take an e-learning course from Click University.

38. Choose any of the above and add your own goals. Include some fun things, too.

I could go on about this forever! Many of you will have already tried a number of the above. They're easy and mostly free. By trying some you may find a serious business use for it too. Many of these sites represent some pretty basic Web and technology skills that will be necessary to survive the next few years. Even if they don't help you at work, they're great party talk, too. This past holiday season I asked every teen and college-age friend and relative I met about the way they used the Web, and many of the links above were tools and services that they considered essential to their lives. It's your entry into the new world of next-generation coworkers.