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Waking Up To Realizations

I just woke up and realized what I need to do. In a sense, a plan of action that relates to my online endeavors in sharing my ideas with others.

In making this realization, I’ve decided to close my Changing Culture journal and moved the contents of it back into my Personal Journal. I just don’t want to fragment my content right now. Instead I’ve got something better planned down the road.

As for when this idea will begin to appear out of the ground, I’m not really sure. I have a funny feeling it is going to be on a separate site but I’ll have to wait and see how things grow. Till then, postings will probably be very infrequent.

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Hoarding Knowledge

Steve Rubel in his post Edelman Acquires Valley Tech PR Giant A&R Partners indicated the following.

I am really looking forward to meeting the A&R team and their clients. Many of these companies are already blogging so I will be really interested to hear about their experiences and what we can learn from them. Welcome A&R!

I’m confused by this statement on two accounts. First it sounds like since they’ve “assimilated” these people, they are no longer their enemy but their friends now. The question I’m wondering here is why is knowledge sharing only occurring when someone is bought out or acquired? I mean why couldn’t they share knowledge even as competitors? Wouldn’t it make the entire PR industry all the better if they did? Secondly, if these guys have blogs wouldn’t he already be hearing about their experiences, as wouldn’t they be talking about them on their blog? Or do they avoid sharing the new things they’ve learnt from blogging?

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SEO Realities

Anthony has an excellent post on his site that sheds some interesting and humorous light on the wacky world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The proof is in the pudding!  🙂

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Bartering Only Goes So Far

Imagine a small farming community living within a commons alongside a river. Money doesn’t exist in this community. Each person farms, hunts, raises cattle, bakes bread or does whatever to survive. They survive because whatever they make, they barter for other goods or services that they need.

I see the Web today as part of this vision in that each of us is providing something that benefits others. The only problem is that bartering for goods or services just doesn’t cut it in the real world today because while it is possible to barter online to a degree today, you can only go so far. At some point if you want your online work and creativity to sustain you, you need money coming from somewhere to help pay for your offline expenses (i.e. rent, food, clothing, etc). Here’s a quick example of what I mean.

YouTube is an extremely popular service. When using it, you are bartering with YouTube. You are providing interesting content on it in exchange for pretty much unlimited bandwidth and storage (i.e. hosting multiple movies). If you had to pay a hosting provider for this storage and bandwidth, you’d be spending a substantial amount of money to do this, especially if your content was extremely popular and accessed by millions. Therefore by utilizing YouTube, you are trading your interesting content in exchange for their storage and bandwidth.

YouTube isn’t the only one doing this though of course. There are lots of other services who’ve done it in the past. Back when I used to play id’s Quake a long time ago, PlanetQuake followed this same principle. They’d give you free storage and bandwidth, as long as you create a site within their network that provided interesting content. Google’s rumoured vision of the future, with unlimited bandwidth and storage to everyone, follows this same idea as well. Yet again, one critical piece of this vision is missing. While it shows that money isn’t needed to create and host content in the the online world, money is still definitely needed in our offline world (i.e. again to pay for food, clothing, shelter, etc).

Right now, I only see two ways to achieve this sustainability without ads. One approach is similar to Chris Locke’s Gonzo Marketing, where you get a patron (not a sponsor) to help fund your endeavors. The other approach is opening a tipping jar, similar to Andrew Sullivan’s tip jar, with the idea that instead of being forced to pay for something that you may not be fully aware of it’s content, it is instead hoped that you will reward the person instead by giving them a small amount of funds for their great content that you’ve already seen and recognized as such. Both approaches maintain the important ideals of the Web with regards to having open and accessible content that is available to read by anyone.

It is an interesting approach to things, giving freely as a reward instead of being forced to pay for this online content. Yet I don’t think people are ready to accept such a radical paradigm shift. Mainly because we are so ingrained in our ways. To stop that big massive wheel of payments and instead turn it back on itself and change it to giving as a reward is still too radical a step for people to take right now. People are just used to not paying for something unless they absolutely have to do so.

It is kind of sad though. I mean imagine if you took $20/month (the price of two or three magazines) and decided to give it to those people online that you truly appreciated and valued their content. I wonder what would happen if a large enough percentage of people started doing this (i.e. achieving a tipping point)? Would anything change? And more importantly would people be able to support themselves? Of course for this reward model to work, the money has to keep flowing. So if one popular site received lots of funds in reward for their great content, they in turn would have to give to those other sites in reward for their help in recommending and drive traffic to them. If anyone breaks the flow though (i.e. hordes their funds and stops giving) then it would break the flow.

Thus as noted earlier, the only way for this to be realized would be if a substantial number of people did it (i.e. achieved a tipping point). Again, I just don’t think people’s mindset are ready for this kind of reward / giving approach yet.

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Weaving The World

Imagine the entire world as one enormous tapestry in the process of being woven. Each of us is a piece of complex fabric that fits into this tapestry. Along our edges are loose threads that help us to weave ourselves with others around us.

The problem in weaving this tapestry is that these loose threads along our edges are different for each one of us. We therefore need to find others around us with similar threads that we can weave ourselves with so as to be able to fit into this grand tapestry.

Therefore, while the richness of this tapestry is achieved by the diversity of these threads within each of us, the patterns within this tapestry can only be achieved if we find commonalities between one another and thus weave our similar loose threads together with one another. If we don’t then we’re only a pile of fabric patches that while beautiful on their own, still can’t create something truly wonderful unless we can weave ourselves together.

Now the question is, what loose threads have you seen in those around you that are similar to your own? And an even greater question is what are you doing to try to help weave those loose threads together to actually create something wonderful?

I think one last thing to note is that these woven threads aren’t permanent. They require constant rethreading and attention to maintain the strength of the weave between us, otherwise they just unravel and become loose threads again.

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New Design for Squarespace

Whoa! Anthony pulled out all the stops and whipped up an awesome new design for Squarespace. Check it out!

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Google Trends

Everyone’s been hyping Google Trends lately, so I’d thought I’d take a peek at it. Really didn’t find anything that terribly interesting until I started filtering and focusing on things. Check out a couple of examples below. If I discover more, I’ll add them later.

  • Darfur vs Iran: Seems like more people in the United States over the last month are become more aware of and interested in Darfur than Iran. Nice to see people taking more interest in today’s reality versus tomorrow’s possibilities.
     
  • Al Gore & Global Warming: Is Al Gore helping to bring more awareness to global warming in the United States? Kind of looks like that. In the latter part of 2005 and the beginning of 2006, it looks like each peak of interest in him has also brought a dramatic rise of interest in global warming.
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Reinventing Your Online Home

Yesterday while walking around outside, I was glancing at some beautiful homes in the area and I was struck by the fact that homes are an accumulation of small pieces combined together to form something wonderful. And even more so, what goes in those homes follows this same principle. We usually fill our homes with things that we’ve collected over the years that define who we are and what’s meaningful in our lives.

Now this morning while playing with our spastic cat Sam (who wakes us in the early hours of the morn because he wants to play), I remembered a book on our living room bookshelf that touched upon this subject of what you put into your home and how best to design its placement. The book is entitled Meditations on Design, Reinventing Your Home with Style and Simplicity, by John Wheatman and when I flipped through the first few pages of the book, I realized what had pulled me back to it when I reread the following.

If you point to a picture in a magazine and say, “I want this for my home,” you have skipped over the most important phase of the design process. You must go beyond how your room looks and begin to analyze who you are and how you use that room. Only when you’ve figured out how to be comfortable doing the things you do in that space can you move on to the question of how it should look.

So why bring up something like this about home design? Because I think everything is interconnected. Design is design. It has basic fundamental elements to it, that with each day, I’m realizing are integrated into so many things around us (i.e. permaculture is all about design). Therefore when I read the above, it mirrored many of the thoughts and struggles I’ve been having with designing the structure of my own site. What hit home for me was the emphasis on “how you use that room”. I’m struggling to take that emphasis and apply it to my own site by trying to focus more on how I want my site to function than how I want it to look. It’s the old saying of “form follows function”.

A paragraph or two later, the book also describes the following.

Similarly I have often encountered the notion that interior design consists of essentially casting out what you have and buying everything new. In fact, some of my most satisfying projects have not involved the purchase of any additional furnishings. I always begin by editing what is already in place. I help people discard the items that don’t work and organize the ones that remain so everything comes together and makes sense — functionally, visually, and financially. Sometimes that’s all that’s necessary.

Again this really hit home for me because I believe the same thing about blogs. I have this very strong feeling that we don’t really need any new fancy Web 2.0 applications to making blogging better. We just need a better design, placement, and structure of our “existing” content to make it more accessible and usable to us. I mean right now, when you write something, it’s pretty much off your radar in a week or two unless it’s getting a lot of attention and you revisit it frequently. That’s because your content is displayed in a chronological order. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I just think that we need other better designed views to help evolve blogging to something more than a steady stream of words.

Giving a quick example of what I mean, visualize two bookshelves in front of you. The left bookshelf is organized chronologically with your oldest books at the bottom and your newest books at the top. What do you see? Probably a bookshelf with a jumble of books on it. Now visualize the right bookshelf in which you’ve organized your books in a variety of different ways. You may have your favorite books on one shelf that is in easy reach because you use them quite frequently. On other shelves, books are not only grouped by category but they may be sorted in height, largest to smallest. Even then, the few books of that particular category that are you favorite, you may want to lay on their side so that they stand out and are emphasized compared to the others on that shelf.

Now finally ask yourself which bookshelf would you want in your home? I’d take the right one any day. Not only is it more visually appealing to the eye but it makes it much easier to access the books you need. In addition, it also highlights the books that are the most meaningful to you to others that visit your home. This is exactly the thing I’m striving for in designing my site through the proper placement and structuring of my content. Again how best to do this on a website though is the thing that I’m struggling and experimenting with as well.

Finally in closing, I think this last quote from the opening chapter of the book exemplifies my desire for designing a site that is flexible above all else, so that it can easily change as I change. As is known, what we may be today, may not be what we are tomorrow.

Finally, people often come to me with the expectation that we will “do” their homes together and then the job will be “done”. But who you are and what you want to say about yourself is continually changing. How you live and what you can afford also changes over time: You start a family, or your children grow up and leave to live on their own; you take up a new hobby or develop a new collecting interest. A good home changes and evolves with you — a good home is never done.

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Recruiting The Right Culture

Seth Godin has some interesting things to say in his Electronic Recruiting Exchange interview, particularly with regards to how our changing culture is changing how businesses advertise to recruit new people.

Employee satisfaction is entirely related to the respect and autonomy employees are given. Over and over again, it has been found that you cannot buy employee happiness, but you can earn it by treating people with respect and giving employees the autonomy to make decisions. And so, when you apply both of those factors — the first being that small companies act like people, and the second that people who work in companies where they get respect and autonomy are happy — we have a challenge for big companies.