Well, 2005 is coming to a close, and like the end of any year, it is a good time to look at what has happened and what the goals for the coming year should be.

Clearly, the top priority is my finances. I have to make sure that there is enough bread on the table. Beyond that there are the all the political issues, how to move the political dialog to more responsibly address the needs of all people, and not just the rich and powerful. Then, there are more specific personal goals.

David Weinberger points to Ethan Zuckerman’s BlogAfrica 2005 Quiz. I actually knew the answer to one question and guessed the correct answer on four other ones. By the sounds of it, I’m doing pretty well. Ethan created the quiz to encourage people to think about what they really know about Africa and if it isn’t all that good, which I suspect it isn’t for most of us, to read Global Voices. So, reading Global Voices is on the to do list for 2006.

Howard at Smart Mobs points to Librivox via Dave at Scripting News. Librivox is a volunteer effort “to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet”. A group of volunteers have been working on recording poems. It is much easier and quicker than putting together a whole book or even a chapter of a book. I recorded Daffodils by William Wordsworth. I put it up on one of my other sites. So, another goal will be to do a bunch of recording for Librivox.

Over on World Changing, Jamais Cascio writes about koulamata’s machinima entitled ”The French Democracy”.

Jamais writes that Koulamata “has done something truly remarkable: he has taken computer game characters and told a story with clear social relevance, demonstrating that machinima has the potential to be much more than a medium for dancing orcs and artistically-exploding jeeps.” My friends from the Dean campaign and from Greater Democracy talk a lot about people being able to create and distribute their own new media and the political implications. For me, learning how to make good political and socially relevant machinima is another one of the goals I would like to achieve this year.

Then, there are all the discussions about Citizen Journalism. Dan Gillmor has become a Berkman Fellow and is starting a Center for Citizen Media. That, and Jeremey Hermanns’ recounting of Alaska Airlines flight 536 has helped put Citizen Journalism on a lot more people’s radar. So, another goal is to get The Stamford Independent off the ground.

Finally, I would like to do better at my blogging, on lots of different fronts. I need to keep up better on a wide variety of blogs I read as well as write more and better material here on Orient Lodge as well as for other blogs. All that said, I know how resolutions go. Many years ago, I made the paradoxical resolution to break every resolution I make. I suspect this year won’t be substantially different.