Year-end Status Report: failed to watch any TV once again, but otherwise kinda freakishly good

I've had crappy years and I've had good ones. 2007 was one of the latter, despite the fact that I once again seem to have flunked my cultural literacy test by being oblivious to anything involving sports, politics, pop music or TV (there's a show called "Ugly Betty"? Who knew.) What can I say? I've been busy. Here's how the past twelve months went and how the next twelve look:

• The Long Tail: Won the Loeb Award for business book of the year, I got included in the Time 100, and the hardcover kept selling. Coming in June: the paperback edition ("The Longer Tail"), with two new chapters (including the one most requested--Long Tail Marketing) and a bunch of updated stuff. I did more than 250,000 miles of traveling for speeches this year, which was both gratifying and also too much. Next year: less, while I work on...
• FREE: My second book is scheduled for Q1 2009, but you'll see elements of it coming out in different forms earlier than that. I've started giving speeches about it, including this one at Nokia that has been getting some attention. This blog will shift towards FREE over the next month as I start cranking on the writing.
• Wired: A great year. Won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, and set records for circulation, revenues, newsstand sales and web traffic.
• Family: Expecting the fifth kid in a week or so and the oldest is still just ten. Very, very noisy, but also very, very fun. I'm figuring that at least one of these kids is going to want to build robots with me, right? Speaking of which...
• DIY Drones: This site, which I set up on the Ning social networking platform, was the beast that ate my weekends and nights this year. Not so much the site itself, but the huge amount of programming and hardware hacking necessary to build five working UAVs from scratch. It's been nearly twenty years since I was last a real programmer, and it shows. Fortunately a lot of people were there to help me, and so DIY Drones emerged as a way to return the favor. We showed up everywhere from PBS to the Economist and Make Magazine to, er, the police blotter.
• BookTour: A good start, but we haven't set the world afire yet. We launched the site in July and have been building to a critical mass of book events and users since then. We've learned a lot about the fragmented and low-tech world of the book industry, which we're doing our part to help, and heard from a load of authors about their frustrations in marketing books in an age when publishers do little more than print and distribute. Towards the end of the year, we decided to switch strategies and embrace a distributed model on social networks. We'll see the fruits of that in the new year.
• GeekDad: This became an official Wired blog this year, which meant that it was no longer something I could do from airports in-between flights. So I handed over the reins to Ken Denmead, a civil engineer who volunteered to blog for the site and then blew me away with his energy, organizational skills and hardcore geekdaddery. So now he runs the site day to day and I mostly just read, admire and wish I had more time to do all that cool stuff with my kids. 

Comments

[Dane Cao]

Glad to learn that your 2007 is a great year. Gladder to hear your 2008 is gonna be even more exciting.

Happy holidays,Mr Anderson.

And you are going BIG here in China too...

(I find it intriguing a high-profile intellectual like you would care for shows like "Ugly Betty".)

[MK]

Nerd alert! - You gots a typo in your GeekDad update: "This become (became) an official Wired blog this year."

[Chris Anderson]

MK: good catch! Fixed
Dane: You slightly missed the point. I didn't watch any TV this year at all, and was only told about Ugly Betty by my 12-year-old neice last week on a tour of Conde Nast "fashion closets", which apparently figures in the show. She couldn't believe I didn't know about it. I just used that an excuse to have a picture of a cute nerdy woman in my post.

[Emon]

Congratulations on all the success! May 2008 bring you even more! Just downloaded your talk at Nokia World and will be watching it on my iPod.

[Maria]

I think it's because you don't watch TV that you get so much done. People are always telling me that I obviously have too much time on my hands (too productive), but they would too if they would just abandon all that wasted time in front of a television.

[Brad V.]

I'm fairly up-to-date on news/politics stuff, but only because I read various blogs and websites - not from television. I do remain happily oblivious to sports, celebrity news and many shows on primetime. In fact, I was surprised to hear over the summer that the Chicago Bears won the super bowl. Considering I live in Chicago...

[Irene]

Congratulations on a spectacular year that bore fruit from earlier efforts and budded new ones. Having fun with the kids takes priority!

[Shivangi]

Chris,

I really liked your book The Long Tail. Read the first few chapters when a friend lent it to me, but decided I had to buy my own copy was it so freakin' good.
I am delighted that you're coming up with The Longer Tail. Though now I am feeling a little cheated. Of course I want to read about Long Tail Marketing. Its a subject thats of interest. But would I buy the book for two more chapters? Maybe I will because I liked it so much. But I don't see how books that print their "updated" editions, appeal to their initial readers. Shouldn't these new chapters be made available individually, without having to buy the whole book, for the benefits of those who have read/purchased the first edition?

[Peter Howitt]

Hi all,

Just a quick note to say that we are going to try to get a derivative word from the long tail into the dictionary. Tailcasting = broadcasting the long end of the tail!

Wish us luck.

Best wishes
Pete
www.tailcast.com

[kabin]

thanks...
Kabin
Konteyner

[gadgets]

Thanks for including Cheerful Givers in your recommended list. Will be great to spread the good word -- and perhaps gain a few more Cheerful Givers in the process.