Catching Up: Best of Previous Years: The Current Plan

For seven years, from August 2003 to August 2010, I maintained a private newsletter in which I shared news clippings, jokes, links to videos, and other random (mostly but not all entertaining) items with friends.  Starting in June 2007, I began a series of posts, in this blog, that mined that newsletter's archives for items that still seemed significant three years later.  I continued with that until August 2009, at which point I got too busy with other things to continue in that three-year lookback process.

I found that process useful.  It reminded me of things I had forgotten, showed me how some perspectives had changed (for me and also for others), and preserved a link to good material from the past.

In the meantime, though, I have altered my approach to some items that I used to post in that private newsletter.  Starting in March 2007, I began tapering off on entries in the private newsletter, posting items on Facebook instead.  Since November 2009, I have been posting interesting clippings from various articles (mostly news and science-related) in a separate blog hosted on LiveJournal.com.  Also, at least for 2010, I compiled a single list of what I considered the year's best online videos.

For some reason, August seems to trigger a retrospective urge (see above).  It is August again, and while I don't expect to get underway for another month or more, I do want to start to revive that previous lookback process.  What I'm going to do, at least for my review of items posted in 2007 and 2008, is to stick with the approach I took in August 2009:  I'll summarize a whole category of items in a single post containing what I consider the best of the year.  Hopefully I'll wrap that up by the end of 2011.  Then, starting in January 2012, I'll review the situation and decide how I feel about all this -- how much time it takes, how much benefit it seems to confer, what seems like the best approach, etc.