Am slowly getting back to a working groove, but really won't be fully back til Monday once everyone's out of the house and back at school. Don't know about you, but I've been using some of this down time to not just reflect on 2007, but also about where I'm looking to go in 2008. It's both easy and hard being an independent, and a priority for me this year will be to deepen many of the relationships that I built in 2007, and that's already happening in the first few days of the new year.

I'm also trying to find a better way to balance all the proprietary consulting work I do for clients along with the public things I do that keep me visibily involved - conferences, blogging, podcasts, etc. With all the back and forth with my recent posts about whether the Facebook phenomenon is good or bad for blogging, I've really got to consider this more closely and see if FB can help me manage that balance. All suggestions are welcome!

Ok,enough self-reflection - time to move on to the scripted part of this post. I've been off the blogs for most of the break, but have seen a few year-end summaries, predictions, etc. I could spend a lot time doing the same, but I've decided to do a photo review instead. Others have already done the same - really liked Jeff Pulver's photolog post - and I'm doing mine in two parts.

Over the course of 2007, I've mostly been using the Nokia N93 and Nokia N95, and that's what these photos were taken with. The fun part of being an indie is attending a variety of events - some are very analyst-centric, and some are very media/press-centric. I'm a bit of a chameleon, and work out of both camps, so I get to a wider range of things than a straight-up analyst or journalist would get to. And sometimes I get to go to things just because I'm a "blogger" - although these days I'm not really sure what that term really means.

This is especially true since I'm based in Canada. Most of the industry people my paths cross up here are only focused on the home market, whereas I try my best to keep on top of the U.S. as well. So, this is one of the few blogs where you'll see a healthy mix of what's going on in Canada as well as the U.S.

Whatever - listen - I'm just one guy. I don't have a company sending me places - it's up to me to make all this stuff happen, and I'm grateful to have been able to see so many things in 2007. I can only hope that the song remains the same in 2008, and I look forward to sharing my adventures with you as they happen.

So, in today's post, here's Part 1 - my year in pictures - basically the first half of 2007. It will give you a flavor of the events I participated in and the places I was lucky enough to travel to. I could tell you a lot more and show you a lot more pictures about any of these, but not here. By all means, feel free to search my blog for the original posts these came from for more. Otherwise, maybe there's a book in this somewhere.....

Aloha! Can't think of a better way to start 2007 being based in the Great White North, eh - the Pacific Telecom Council conference in Hawaii. And, yes, I got an authentic Hawaiian shirt there that I hope will come in handy one of these days...

The ICF panel at PTC. This is the Intelligent Communities Forum, where they were announcing the finalists for their annual awards. As it turns out, Waterloo, Ontario came out the winner, chosen as the #1 intelligent community in the world. Go Canada.........

TMC's ITExpo, Fort Lauderdale. I chose this photo of colleague Moshe Maeir (with Rich in the background)since he was nice enough to post it on his year-end review - thanks Moshe!

Deloitte's 2007 Predictions event, Toronto. Group shot of their team, including keynoter Guy Kawasaki. He's quite the hockey junkie - and he's from Hawaii - who knew?- so they gave him an customized Leafs jersey as a nice thank-you. I'm starting to see a Canada-Hawaii theme happening here - strange....

Launch event for BlogTV.ca, Toronto. This sure was fun, and Canada was the first market Israel-based BlogTV expanded to. Unfortunately, the project was canned in the fall - easy come, easy go. BlogTV is going strong in the U.S., but it came later. I guess we were the guinea pig, but didn't quite get it right - gee, where have we heard that before here in Canada?

Microsoft Canada's launch event for adCenter, Toronto. Don't mean to nitpick, but if this is for Canada, shouldn't they spell it "adCentre"? I'm told life is in the details.....

Cisco's Channel Partner Summit, Las Vegas. From what I've seen, nobody stages a big event like Cisco.

MetaSwitch Forum, Orlando, with Martin Taylor. If you're into Harleys, you should check out my post about this event - really...

IT360 Conference, Toronto. Don Tapscott talking about Wikinomics and his vision for our Web 2.0 world.

ANPI AGM, San Diego, with CEO Dave Lewis.

Canadian New Media Awards, Toronto, with Adam Froman, CEO of Delvinia

Microsoft Surface, Toronto. We were lucky enough to get a private, 1 on 1 demo of this very cool look at what being connected will really mean, and what the coffee table of the future is going to look like. Max got to have the fun, while I took the photos.

Aftermath of a heavy summer storm, Toronto. Taking a drive about our neighborhood following a very intense storm, I came across some of the damage and for 5 minutes, felt like a roving TV reporter. Here's one shot of a mature tree being fully uprooted and crashing on top of van in someone's driveway. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but as you can see, it also took down all the Hydro wires, and went a long way to explaining why our phone lines went dead - but of course, my VoIP lines were working fine...