In any case, it seemed only right to take a look back at how that first year has gone. I made some yearnotes at the end of 2010, which looked back on a tough time mainly from a personal perspective, but perhaps it’s worth thinking about things from a work point of view.

So what did the last year do? First, it taught me a lot about being independent. For a start, you’re not really independent at all: you’re merely dependent on many more people, each in different ways.

Second, it taught me that most of the hard work of freelancing is pitching. Editors can be fickle, fragile prey, who are hard to tempt with your ideas and even more difficult to keep satisfied once you’ve got them to take your bait. I think I’m a fairly adequate writer (sometimes even reaching the heights of “not bad”) but I think I’m still just a mediocre pitch artist.

And third, I realised that even in a sphere where you’re writing about innovation and ideas, there’s a lot of conservatism in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Ideas that I thought were amazingly exciting, gripping and challenging have struggled to make the grade. When you’re a specialist, even a specialist who spent most of their career at such a well-known, broad church as the Guardian, mainstream publications are tough to crack: you’re too far down a nerdhole for them to believe you can write ordinary stories — and yet even when they do want your inside knowledge, they fear that you’re unable to communicate with ordinary people. It’s hard getting people to understand what you are is not what you were.

Still, though, that’s not to say that it’s been all struggle and no success. On the contrary: I’ve produced major features for Technology Review, Wired UK and the Sunday Telegraph. I’ve written a variety of things in between for other people, most notably the BBC, and a couple of unpublished stories for various folk. For the last three months I’ve been a regular contributor to GigaOM. I put a failed bid in to the Knight News Challenge, have got moving on a couple of other sekrit projects. I’ve done a lot of pitching.

Looking back on it, the first year was pretty good. The next one, though, will be significantly better.

Onward, comrades.