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Inquiring minds want to know: What were the most amazing, profound, surprising, or even whacky things you’ve learned over the last year?

Here’s an entry from Jeanne Dininni, at Writer’s Notes:

To say that I learned a lot blogging at Writer’s Notes in 2007 would be an understatement. First of all, 2007 was my first year of blogging; so that should tell any experienced blogger on the planet that my learning curve that year was steep! There were so many fascinating things simply waiting to be discovered, so many skills to master through trial and error, so many wonderful people to meet, interact with, and do my very best to emulate, so many ideals to live up to, so many technical hurdles to clear—and yet it has all been so much fun!

January

I didn’t start blogging until the end of January, 2007, so I’ve chosen my very first post to express my first lesson learned: Opportunities for Writing Online Abound. The lesson I took away from my earliest experience with blogging was an appreciation for the vastness of the internet and the incredible opportunities it could afford for connecting with the world, with information, and with people. And as my online experience has grown, so has my appreciation for this amazing world of cyber-opportunity.

February

In February, I learned a tough lesson, expressed in Second Lost Blog Post. My lesson: the importance of saving a backup copy of each post before clicking “Preview Post” or “Publish Post.” There are times in every blogger’s life when she blinks and poof! her post is gone—exactly where, no one knows. I like to call it the farthest reaches of cyberspace—wherever that might be! Since then, I’ve learned, at the very least, to copy and paste each new post into MS-Word before attempting to publish it—just in case. In fact, today I do this with comments, as well, since I’ve lost many a comment on my own blog and others’ when I didn’t.

March

A Salute to My Fellow Writers—With Links! represents my growing respect for the importance of my peers—the writers and bloggers for whom I attempted to create an encouraging, inspiring, and informative environment that I hoped they would enjoy. Though as yet a bit unsure of myself as a blogger at this point, still attempting to find my voice, and thus perhaps slightly over-enthusiastic in tone—I had certainly learned the lesson that my readers were my blog’s raison d’etre. (That one’s for you, Robert!)

April

In April, I learned that writing one post in a month will not grow a blog’s readership! MarketList.Com: A Very Comprehensive List of Writing Markets was my attempt to make up for all the posts I didn’t write during that month. Perhaps I thought that if I found a resource which was comprehensive enough, it would make everything OK. But it didn’t, really. I knew I didn’t want to do that ever again! And I didn’t—though there were a few more sparse months before my lesson was fully learned. (My most recent lesson learned from April, 2007: If you only write one post in a month, that’s the one you’ll have to include in your “Blogapalooza” post—whether you want to or not!)

May

Google Alerts Can Help You Detect Misuse or Abuse of Your Work was the result of my growing curiosity over just what might be happening to the work I was selling at the time through the Constant Content website. Buyers are more or less anonymous at Constant Content, which means that a writer doesn’t often know where her work will be published once it’s been purchased. I delved into and experimented with Google Alerts, teaching myself how they could be used to help me find my work—and also to find out which buyers were abusing the rights they’d purchased. Very enlightening lesson!

June

In June, I learned just how easily a writer can lose credibility and/or authority with her readership, how quickly a reader’s respect can be forfeited, and how a single carelessly handled word or phrase can sometimes send a reader packing. Fortunately, I was able to learn this crucial lesson from the reader’s vantage point rather than the writer’s . I decided to share what I’d learned with my own readers in A Simple Word that Sucks All Authority Right Out of Your Writing.

July

During July, Failure-Tolerant Leadership for Writers and Others grew out of my earlier article, Failure-Tolerant Leadership Makes Good Business Sense. This adaptation was the result of my growing realization that failure-tolerance is as important to the writer—and, in fact, to anyone—as it is to the businessperson, simply because success is rarely an overnight phenomenon, but usually requires plenty of trial and error (aka, “failure”).

August

In August, 2007, I decided to enter the ProBlogger 31 Days to Building a Better Blog group writing project, with my post: Magnetize Your Blog: Always Reply to Comments. This post grew out of my increasing awareness of just how critical commenters are to a blog’s value and how easily they can be made to feel unappreciated and ignored. I learned that it’s absolutely essential for a blogger to show appreciation for comments—at a minimum by the simple practice of responding to them in whatever way is most practical based on the number of comments that blogger receives. I learned this firsthand, by having a few of my own comments ignored, while others’ comments received replies on various blogs. So, I decided to share my lesson with others in this post.

September

Through penning my satirical post Alienation ABCs: Alienating Bloggers through Content or Alienating Bloggers through Comments, written in response to a tag by Yvonne Russell, at Grow Your Writing Business, I learned to articulate, in an entertaining way, the things a blogger shouldn’t do if she hopes to remain in the good graces of her readers and fellow bloggers. Looking at the topic from this perspective made it a fun way of communicating a serious truth.

October

Google Page Rank—At Last! was my exhilarating response to the fantastic news that Writer’s Notes had finally achieved PR 3, after nine months of existence. My lesson learned from this—albeit a little later—was that, as delicious as my newly-acquired page rank had been, that’s precisely how devastating would be its subsequent loss just one month later. Yet, I also learned to take this disappointment in stride, realizing that my blog still remained as valuable as it had ever been—and was in fact gaining traffic—despite my loss of page rank, and with it many of the paid posting opportunities that had previously been available to me.

November

In November, I read a post at Liz Strauss’s Successful Blog called Positively Me. In response to that post, I prepared My Journey to Becoming Positively Me, which was actually a reworking of an inspirational piece I had previously written but never published. The piece fit so well with Liz’s topic that it seemed practically made-to-order, requiring few changes. That’s when I learned just how similar the experiences we share can be—each comprising a part of the universal human condition—though the specific details that spawn our individual life lessons may differ somewhat.

December

Joanna Young’s Writer’s Wish List group writing project at Confident Writing was the inspiration for my December post, Inner Resources for Writing Success in 2008 and Beyond. This project inspired me to delve deeply into my writer’s psyche to learn which inner qualities I would need to be successful in the coming year. This was a wonderfully creative intellectual exercise—inspirational and motivational to both my readers and me—an exercise designed to put a writer into the perfect frame of mind for stepping boldly and expectantly into a brand new year…a year of new beginnings…and new successes.

These are some of the lessons I learned during 2007, my first year of blogging. And now I stand ready…eagerly anticipating the new lessons that lie ahead in 2008! I can hardly wait!

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So what’s it all about?

Friends, if you’ve written about it at your blog in 2007, then you’re invited to join us for this special edition of What I Learned From… Care to share with us your favorite/ best/ most controversial/ strangest, etc. posts? (You get to pick one from each month you’ve been blogging in 2007.)

Well, don’t just sit there like a bump on a pickle; click the link, check out the simple instructions, and jump right in! Get your entries in by Sunday night, January 13, and I’ll publish them all right here at Middle Zone Musings.

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