Read A Year in Marginalia by Sam Anderson (The Millions)
The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain. 
This is a phenomenal way to do a look back at a year in reading. I’ll have to consider how to pull it off for myself this year.
 
Read My personal roundup of 2019. by Rachel Andrew (www.rachelandrew.co.uk)
Twenty years ago I saw in the Millennium, at home recovering from flu. My daughter was a toddler, I had no money, and was just beginning my career in web design. I had no idea what building websites would lead to, or what the web would look like 20 years on.
Some great lists of CSS related resources linked here.
Read SSRN 2019 Year-End Review (ssrnblog.com)

A lot of things have changed over the years at SSRN. We joined Elsevier and have a lot more resources to do a lot more things; but your paper’s journey through SSRN remains the same. We remain steadfast to support you the researcher to share your research faster and allow everyone in the world to find your research more easily.

Growth. SSRN now has over 900,000 papers from over 442,000 authors and the number of downloads grows daily.

Read Check out my year in Pocket! (Pocket App)

See how much I read in Pocket in 2019, including the most popular articles I saved and more.

Chris, you read a ton this year and made it into our top 5% of readers. That’s an impressive amount of knowledge gained.

You read 676K words in Pocket. Equal to 9 books.

Pocket badge that reads "Top Reader - Five Percent - 2019"

I bookmark a lot of things with Pocket, but I don’t feel like I use it a lot for reading. I’m surprised that I archived this many pieces.
Replied to In the year of our blog 2019 by Clint LalondeClint Lalonde (EdTech Factotum)
Thought I would join in the year end fun with Tannis, Martin, Tony and others and put together a year end review kinda blog post. Funny. I’ve been blogging about edtech since 2007, and I don&…

Most of the convo, if any, seems to happen on the socials vs comments left on the blog these days.

The sad part of this is how painfully limiting the conversation can be on social with the character limitations and too many issues with branching conversations and following all the context.
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 12:51PM

By the numbers

I’m curious what things would look like if you similarly did an analysis of Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Where are you putting more time? What’s giving you the most benefit? Where are you getting value and how are you giving it back?
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:01PM

I still find blogging one of the most professionally satisfying things I do. It is a powerful thing to feel like you have a voice.

–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM

2020 will also bring a more concerted effort on my part to both amplify the women in my network who blog, and both comment and refer back to their blogs. To use what they write as a starting off point for my own posts more.

–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM

And I am planning on cutting back on my personal use of social media (easier said than done) and want to try to return to using my blog more than Twitter for sharing.

certainly a laudable goal!

It helped me a lot to simply delete most of the social media apps off of my phone. I scribbled a bit about the beginning of the process back in November and there’s a link there to a post by Ben doing the same thing on his own website.

More people are leaving social feeds for RSS feeds lately. I’ve recently started following Jeremy Felt who is taking this same sort of journey himself. See: https://jeremyfelt.com/tag/people-still-blog/

Kudos as well to making the jump here:

In part, it’s what prompted me to visit your site to write a comment. (Sorry for upping your cis-gendered white male count, but 2019 was a bad year, and hopefully we can all make 2020 better as you’ve indicated.)
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM

Some thoughts about Media Diets prompted by Paul Jacobson

Replied to Keeping track of my media diet by Paul JacobsonPaul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)

This idea of tracking my media diet really appeals to me:

Just like last year, I kept track of almost everything I read, watched, listened to, and experienced in my media diet posts.

Jason Kottke

I follow a few people who do this too, sometimes pretty publicly. I’m not sure that I’d want to share everything I consume, but I do like the thought of capturing, and aggregating everything.

I’m just not too sure how to pull it all together, if I were to do this.

There are a few parts to having a media diet:
1. keeping track of it all quickly and easily;
2. going back to contemplate on it and deciding what may have been worthwhile or not; and
3. using the above to improve upon your future media diet instead of consuming the same junk food in the future.

I try to use my own website (cum digital commonplace book) to collect everything quickly using bookmarklets from the Post Kinds plugin or RSS feeds from popular media-related websites (GoodReads, Letterboxd, reading.am, etc.) in conjunction with IFTTT.com recipes to create private posts on my site’s back end. Naturally, not all of my posts are public since many are simply for my own reflection and edification. Usually logging the actions only takes a few seconds. Longer reviews and thoughts typically only take a few minutes if I choose to do so.

The hardest part may be going through it all on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis to do some analysis and make the appropriate adjustments for the future. (Isn’t it always sticking with the adjustments that make it a “diet”?) Fortunately having all the data in one centralized place does make some of this work a lot easier.

Having lists of what I read online has definitely helped me cut out all click-baity articles and listicles from my information diet. It’s also helped me cut down on using social media mindlessly when I think about the great things I could be reading or consuming instead. Bad national news has also spurred me to read more local news this year as well. Those interested in some of these ideas may appreciate Clay A. Johnson’s The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Comsumption, which I read several years back.

I experimented with eating and drinking posts early last year too, and the nature of posting them publicly was somewhat useful in losing about 10 pounds, but the work in doing it all did seem a bit much since I didn’t have as easily an automated system for doing it as I might have liked. Now I do most of these posts privately. Definitely having the ability to look back at the ton of crap I’ve eaten in the past week or month does help with trying to be a bit healthier in my choices. I look at posting photos of my food/drink to my own site somewhat akin to dietitians who tell people to use a clean plate for every meal they have–the extra work, process, and clean up makes it more apparent what you’re doing to yourself.

As I’ve written before about posting what I’m listening to, showing others that you’ve spent the time to actually listen to it and post about it on your own site (even with no commentary), is a great way to show that you’ve got “skin-in-the-game” when it comes to making recommendations. Kottke’s awesome recommendation about listening to the Seeing White Podcast has way more value if he could point to having spent the multiple hours listening to and contemplating it, the way I have. The situation is akin to that headline and link my friend just put on Twitter, but did she think the headline was cool or did she actually read the entire thing and wanted to recommend her followers also read it? Who can tell without some differentiation?

Lastly, I keep a “following page” of people and feeds I’m following on a regular basis. Put into broad categories, it makes an easy method for periodically pruning out that portion of my media diet using OPML subscriptions in my feed reader.

In the end, what you feed your body, as well as what you feed your brain, are important things to at least keep in the back of your mind.

 

👓 The Best of My Media Diet for 2018 | Kottke.org

Read The Best of My Media Diet for 2018 by Jason Kottke (kottke.org)
Just like last year, I kept track of almost everything I read, watched, listened to, and experienced in my media diet posts. In...

👓 A Look at my Blogging in 2018 | Greg McVerry

Read A Look at my Blogging in 2018 by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)
Inspired by Chris Aldrich's post on his 2018 review of blogging I decided to take a quick peak and see what my productivity looked like this past year. Overall I posted 4,449 times from my website. 2, 529 from my Known site (where I migrated to in December) and 1,920 times from my old WordPress sit...

👓 2018: a year in gratitude | Mark A. Matienzo

Read 2018: a year in gratitude by Mark A. MatienzoMark A. Matienzo (Mark A. Matienzo)
This year was largely complicated and often felt like a massive garbage fire to myself and my crew. I didn’t accomplish a number of my goals and was inconsistent about others, so recapping awesome things I did doesn’t feel appropriate and also happens to be a soft reminder of either failure or things not going as planned. I also tend to hate “best of the year” lists but I find them helpful to remember about where I found joy or the ability to connect to something outside of myself. I suppose this is an attempt to reconcile those things, or perhaps more in line with the end of year spirit, a way to articulate gratitude to the people and things around me that impacted me.
Interesting, but I’m not sure how this rates for cross-posting to IndieWeb News…

👓 The end of 2018 | Oh Hello Ana

Read The end of 2018 by Ana Ana (Oh Hello Ana)
This may be the first time that I am writing a year review before the year actually ends so it is a good sign. Also, It’s really hard to create blog post titles so I decided to go dramatic. I had a couple of goals for this year. I wanted to work on my wellbeing, do a talk at a meet up, go to the g...

👓 2018: A year in review | Andy Bell

Read 2018: A year in review by Andy Bell (Andy Bell)
<what-a-year>
It’s safe to say that 2018 has been a jam-packed year for me, both personally and professionally. I’m going to reflect on this year in this post and also look forward to 2019. Let’s dive in!

👓 2018 in numbers | Adactio: Journal | Jeremy Keith

Read 2018 in numbers by Jeremy Keith (adactio.com)
I posted to adactio.com 1,387 times in 2018
An awesome and quite beautiful annual update here. I can’t imagine that I posted as much as Jeremy (or wrote as many longer posts in particular), but I do know that my posting velocity has increased since I began using my own website in preference to all other social media several years ago.