Today is my first day as a full-time freelancer, doing Web analysis and writing. It's also my birthday, so double reason to celebrate :-) 

I finished up at my day job yesterday, so as of today I'm working 100% virtually - with people and companies from Silicon Valley, Britain, perhaps even Australia. I do have a little bit of work here in New Zealand and in time I hope to put my Web 2.0 knowledge to good use in my own country. But for now, I'm using the Web to do my business. Skype, Gmail and now it seems Google Talk. These will be my communications nexus.

So what am I up to? Here are some of the things I'll be doing over the next few months:

- Traveling to San Francisco for the first two weeks of October, for the Web 2.0 Conference and to meet with people and potential employers.

- Writing a book. I wonder if you can guess what the topic is? ;-) The publishing contract is all but signed, so I'll give you more details soon.

- Freelance analysis and writing work. Here are just some of the projects I've already done:

- Spec Writing for Broadband Mechanics
- A research assignment on RSS/Search/Aggregation in the media space
- A competitive analysis and product comparison / benchmarking for a magazine website
- Analysis of 'The Long Tail'
- Report on defining the RSS vendor landscape (nb: I will be publishing the data for this soon, here on R/WW)

So if you have any work along those lines, please let me know :-)

I have other irons in the fire, which will be brought to light in due course. Plus I intend to re-design Read/Write Web, as it's due for the next phase of its life too!

For now, I'm going to relax and enjoy my new freedom and my birthday with my family. After that I need to sort out the admin parts of self-employment (home office set-up, taxes and so forth), catch up with blogosphere news, and go to work!