It's been a busy start to the new year and I'm a little behind on where I wanted to be with the pre-work for this Saturday's kickoff of my first Blogging 101 workshop.

I have high hopes for the quality of the content and I'm currently sitting elbow deep in a slew of interesting statistics, techniques, lists, tips, and other assorted useful bits of information. Getting it all tied together into something coherent is a wonderfully frustrating exercise.

Granted, it also doesn't help that I keep popping off on research tangents and being interrupted by other things--welcome things like visiting friends and slightly less welcome things like bringing work home. But, the work is related to the non-work stuff, like this Blogging 101 workshop, so it all balances out, I suppose.

The various circles of friends I'm in have provided some great ideas about what they'd like to learn about in a Blogging 101 workshop. There are the very expected ones like "How to get traffic", "What platform to use", and "How to make it pay." There have also been some very insightful ones--like "How to deal with trolls" and dealing with privacy and safety.

If there's something you'd like to suggest, comment! If it doesn't make it into this workshop, it'll most certainly be fodder for a Blogging 201 workshop later.

This first one is made possible by the wonderful people from the DC Bloggers Meetup. RSVP for the event here.

For those of us who've been around for two decades or more, it should come as no real surprise that the past ten years are seen as the worst decade in 50 years.

According to a recently released set of poll results from the Pew Research Center, a full half of the people surveys say their perception of the oughts was negative (in comparison, only 12 percent saw the 80s as negative).

Yeah, it's been kind of a crappy decade by a lot of standards. But it's also had some pretty amazing things happen.

Our technology and ability to share ideas with one another has continued to expand at a ridiculously fast rate. If at the end of 1999 you had described a service like Twitter to someone, they probably would have laughed at you. If you had shown them an iPhone or Droid (seriously, check out the latest augmented reality stuff), they'd surely tell you it was a prop from some sci-fi film.

And the ways in which people can get together to do good? Mind blowing. Just this month I watched Alyssa Milano raise over $75,000 for a charity in the space of two weeks. Almost all small donations from myriad fans who follow her on Twitter or other webby ways.

In the coming decade, there's nothing to stop any of us from reaching out and making a difference. The barriers for that have dropped to almost nothing. Worst case scenario? You go to a library or a friend's place and use a computer there to throw together a quick website using Google Sites and get the word out through any number of social networking tools.

There is no excuse for not working toward the change you want to see.

Go out and do it. Don't just hope the next decade will be better. Make it that way.