What to do - Buy now or wait???


click to read conversation

Sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up in the activity of turning a profit.

Take some time to reflect on the true meaning of being helpful.

Thanks go out to Brian Gardner for giving me permission to share this with you.

I’ve been writing a fair number of posts about social media. I never expected to come up with a new way to use it.
Now, I’m not saying I created this concept. In fact, what I’m about to describe happens all day, every day on social media sites.

I Wrote Something!

I use Twitter. At least once per minute, someone will send a message like this:

Just updated my blog: 5 Reasons to (not) Drink Coffee, http://snipr.com/5k4xb*

If I want to follow along with that blog, I have several options:

• Add it to bloglines.com
• Stumble it
• Add it to Feedly via Firefox
• Bookmark it in Firefox
• Tag it with my PhraseExpress *cool autotext keyword

While any of these will link the blog to my thought space, they are not really effective at pushing future posts onto my radar scope.

The Bookshelf or the Coffee Table?

When I consider the large number of blogs that I have found interesting, I realize that they fall into two categories: authority and personality.

Blogs with personality are saved using the same bookmarking schemes that I use for authority blogs.

The problem is that authority blogs are more like reference books. I’ll keep them on a bookshelf until needed.

Personality blogs are like my favorite magazines. I want to keep these on my coffee table, within easy reach from my comfy sofa.

This Blogger is Cool!

I’m going to start following bloggers on Twitter. Whether you are an authority or a personality, I’ll be more likely to read your post for the simple reason that I’m on Twitter far more than I’m on Feedly or Bloglines.

If I don’t follow you yet, Six Degrees of Separation, Cosmic Karma or Google will probably connect us, somehow. That’s how I found @UMLGuy, who inspired my post, Racing Around the Office.

I’m not advocating that bloggers start tweeting about every single post. I think that just seeing your regular tweets will be enough to prompt a visit now and then. After all, magazines don’t need to put their entire table of contents on the cover!

Coffee Table Rules

Although reference books can languish, forgotten, on bookshelves, old, tired magazines get tossed out.

Here’s where Twitter beats the pants off of feed readers like Bloglines and Feedly. I don’t have to literally sweep a ton of unread posts into the “Mark All Read” trashcan. Nor do I have to cancel any subscriptions. I simply ignore the tweets!

Browsing the Magazine Rack

I’m continually looking for fresh stuff. While checking the games and entertainment directory on JustTweetIt.com, I discovered Never Unplaying, a blog written by @tailsmarik.

I also check out some of the @ links, whether I see them on Twitter or on blogs.

Becoming a Discriminating Reader

Twitter is what it is and, sometimes, there are just too many tweets flying by. Third-party tools like TweetDeck and Twhirl are indispensable for managing my Twitter experience. In particular, TweetDeck allows me to group my followers, while Twhirl gives me a great pop-up notification of tweets. I’ll probably switch to TweetDeck, because of this:

Good looking out, @iaindodsworth!

Blow Ins that You’ll Read

I love serendipity! I just came up with this today, so I wanted to see if one prolific writer, Jessica Hagy was on Twitter. Her blog does have a Twitter link; she is @jessicahagy.

Here’s what makes her cool: her blog is printed on index cards.

The serendipitous part involves one of her tweets:

So, Jessica, if I’m not too late, here is my idea.

Check Out This Magazine!

Follow me.

The free version is more than enough for 99% of us.

I spent a few minutes searching Google for a software program that would allow me to save text snippets as soon as I read them.
Portions of email, web pages, PDF files and any other interesting document should be highlighted, copied to the clipboard and pasted into a central database. Finally, retrieval has to be drop-dead simple, otherwise, I’ll get lost in a maze of arbitrary tags and meaningless labels.

After looking at the results, it dawned on me that I already have such a program. It’s called PhraseExpress. It is a text macro utility which organizes frequently used phrases into a single database. This text can be retrieved later and pasted into another Windows application.

One of the ways to retrieve text is by using a keyword, which PhraseExpress refers to as Autotext. For example, when I type reg and press the Enter key, PhraseExpress replaces it with

Regards,

Mitchell Allen

Normally, I want a unique keyword for each phrase. However, if I assign the same keyword to different phrases, PhraseExpress will display a description of each phrase and ask me to choose one! This has the effect of providing me with drop-dead simple retrieval.
I decided to use the keyword *cool for all of my interesting text snippets.

Saving text is a 4-step process:

1. Highlight the interesting text
2. Press the hotkey combination (Ctrl + Alt + C) to create a new phrase
3. Type an arbitrary but hopefully meaningful description
4. Type the keyword *cool in the Autotext field

Retrieving the text is even easier, assuming I can type the keyword somewhere:

1. Type the keyword *cool
2. Select one of the phrases
3. Press the Tab key to paste it into my current document

If I’m not using a text editor, I can right-click the PhraseExpress tray icon and view the snippet with the program.

Now, when I don’t have time to visit an interesting web link, I’ll save it for later, without worrying about trying to locate the document containing the link. I like to save interesting blog comments and, with PhraseExpress, I no longer have to store them in Microsoft ® Word.

Between PhraseExpress and Jing for grabbing screen shots, I can capture everything on my screen but the dust.

I found a fantastic example of this whole-brain thinking on HubPages.com. While updating one my hubs, I noticed that I had a new fan.

more »
HubPages

solarshingles is an Internet Marketer, so his left-brain activity shapes the hubs for maximum effectiveness. His Solar Power Shingles -Tiles hub clearly shows that he provides valuable content, understands SEO, writes in a clear style suitable for hubs and makes use of nearly every tool provided by HubPages page builder.

What fascinates me the most is that his fan base has grown to over 800 in only seven months. It seems that one of his strengths is engaging his readers and commenters. That is the social aspect, which his right-brain handles admirably.
His self-deprecating profile puts a human feeling to go along with his pleasant photo.

This stuff is really starting to click …

Really Thinking About Poverty

There are thousands of resources dedicated to the age-old problem of poverty. The causes, symptoms and proposed solutions are well documented:

There is no single cause of poverty. Poverty is too complex an issue to be the result of just one problem. There are, however, many interrelated factors that contribute to poverty in developing nations. ^[1]

My goal for Blog Action Day is to awaken my self-awareness of the issues and factors concerning poverty. In so doing, I can move from Inaction to Action, contribute to the efforts to fight poverty and gain more respect for the challenges that face us all.

There is much to learn. What are the relationships between unalienable rights, the social contract, ethical economics, economic democracy, the limitations of the Gini coefficient and the relevance of microeconomics in the context of a macroeconomic challenge?

Should we begin to question long-held beliefs about property rights? How does the Libertarian view of the land and labor contrast with capitalistic excess? Should we continue to honor gold and silver? Is monetary exchange an invisible barrier that exacerbates the denial of the natural right to free movement?

As I usually do, I draw analogies between complex systems and simplified examples in order to clarify my thinking.

Weed Control Provides a Clue

“Solving” world hunger by only increasing food production and not addressing root causes of hunger (i.e. poverty), would not alleviate the conditions that create poverty in the first place. If the poorer nations aren’t given the sufficient means to produce their own food, if they are not allowed to produce and create industry for themselves, then poverty and dependency will continue. ^[2]

• Hacking the Crown (mowing, using a weed whacker)
• Pulling (may fail to reach taproot)
• Changing the Cultural Landscape ^[3]
  • Prevent the problem (preemergence herbicides affect germinating seeds)
  • Treat the problem (postemergence herbicides kill growing weeds)
  • Maintain dense and vigorously growing turf cover
  • Adjust behavior (frequency of mowing, irrigation and/or fertilizing)

Beyond the Root

Three days of study hardly qualify me to suggest that we need to reconsider what works and what doesn’t. The questions I posed above are part of a mental swirl of conflicting theories, textbook definitions and nascent opinions. Once I sort them out, I will be just a bit more informed than I am today. No one blog post can wrap itself around a global problem. But one thing is certain: with all of us talking about it today and inspiring action tomorrow, the outlook is bright for the eradication of poverty.

There was a fair amount of prep work involved. Take a look:

Racing Around The Office With The Uml Guy

View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: strip comic)

Download your free game today! Office Race.

My buddy, Nukemdomis, sent me a YouTube video via Stumbleupon.

(Sadly, his StumbleUpon profile is off-limits to most of us.)

@slideshare “tweeted” a link to a presentation.

Enjoy!

I Will

embrace the ideas of social media experiments;

participate fully in the discussion surrounding these ideas;

support my family, friends and fellow networkers.

I Won’t

rush to join the latest network without just cause;

revive abandoned network affiliations;

support a network that uses meaningless, ego-centric metrics to coerce participation.

Plurk penalizes, CoComment confounds, Qassia kills.

Karma coercion, confusing setups and poor support litter the Social Media landscape, and I will gingerly step over these time bombs.

Bah!

Twitter titillates, StumbleUpon surprises and Ryze rocks.

Front Porch Folks looks promising, and reTaggr signatures look cool!

Relevancy, simplicity and fun highlight the allure of Social Media networking and I will continue to actively tweet, stumble and post as much as possible.

“Why do people wish to go back in time to ‘fix’ their mistakes, when they can go forward and pretend it never happened?”

- Aaron Clanky, Inventor of the Shaken Gent Whip*

Time Waits For No Man, Woman or Child

Dishwater-gray, moth-eaten fabric must be between my ears. I am increasingly unable to recall technical information. Perhaps there are erudite psychological explanations or simple physiological reasons but, here’s my take:

We fail to attach technical memories as well as we do personal memories due to the absence of emotional glue.

They’re called dry facts for a reason!

Anyway, I’ve been working on a new WordPress blog and the first few posts have no images. I finally added a post with images and needed to change the way the uploader stores them. The default is to use date and year subfolders. The trouble began when I stared blankly at the WordPress dashboard, willing my noggin to regurgitate the sequence of navigational clicks.

Time passed. I had no idea. I tried Google. I couldn’t even frame the question properly! I went to bed.

Saturday. Freshly charged neurons. With Pop-tart ® and coffee at hand, I set out to Google this - in reverse:

use month and year to separate uploads in WordPress

Bingo! I randomly picked WordPressGarage.com after noticing a promising phrase.

It turns out that the solution was given in a comment by Ryan Hellyer, which I am going to quote here, so I can create some emotional glue:

(1) Go to your admin panel

(2) Choose “Options” in the main menu

(3) Choose “Miscellaneous” in the sub menu

(4) Enter your upload folder in “Store uploads in this folder:”

(5) Un-tick the “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders” box

Time Sink

It turns out that on my new blog, I don’t even have access to the Miscellaneous sub-menu.

I can’t use FTP, either. I guess I’m stuck with month and year folders.

So , the big question is, did I waste time? Not really. I discovered a neat technical blog, I did find the answer to my WordPress question and I gained something to write about.

Time is a Temple, Temple is a University

I subscribe to an email group hosted by a cool guy named Bill Cheswick. He started a thread to share his time travel story.

Peter Radatti, a member of the group, replied with an interesting theory, relative to time:

“ [I] do not believe that time is a vector but omnidirectional. The past changes all the time, we just don’t know it because the changes become part of our perception of the past. I also do not believe that time is consistent. How could we know … if we use time to measure time?”

The two of them have inspired a bit of creative silliness:

A History of Brief Time

“The ideas of time travel are so quaint. Look at this one! They’ve concocted some sort of transport that is powered with constituent 94.”

“Yes, son, but it was just a motion picture and the creators were not really scientists.”

“But why did they work so hard to be true-to-life in so many of their other motion pictures?”

“Because they had first-hand knowledge of those experiences, or they knew where to learn about it.”

“Wait a minute, Pop! How could the film producers possibly have known about the giant lizards and the global super chill?”

“Often, they made lucky guesses that turned out to be correct. Sometimes, one of us would go back and tell them.”

“Ooh … not good.”

“Mmm.”

“Did you ever want to go back?”

“I do go back. Often.”

“WHAT?”

Photo by juria yoshikawa

“The ideas of time travel are so quaint. Look at this one! They’ve concocted some sort of transport that is powered with constituent 94.”

“Yes, son, but it was just a motion picture and the creators were not really scientists.”

Image by www.customroadsign.com Make your own custom road sign!

I used to rank number one on Google for this keyword phrase - I wonder why!
On my first blog, I kept a links post titled The Ambient Orb Blog Index.
It had a list of all my posts, color-coded and listed chronologically.

Thanks to a plugin written by Guilherme Zühlke O’Connor, my current blog has a nifty Table of Contents.

Gui, as he is affectionately known, also wrote a comprehensive tutorial!

Just for fun, I decided to list a dozen of my favorite posts, in the style of the original Ambient Orb Blog Index.

Legend

• Blue: Personal
• Red: Creative Writing, Challenges, Games, Silliness
• Green: News, Blogging, Technical, Indexes
• Gold: The “Zoo”
• Black: Networking
• Gray: Super Networks

• Empire of the Niche (read)
• The Closet (read)
• Hot Buttered Blogs (read)
• Adwords Poetry (read)
• The Rainmakers (read)
• What Color is Your Network (read)
• Father’s Day Introspective (read)
• Marxist Internet Propaganda (read)
• Stirring the Stockpot and Digesting Gore (read)
• The Continuum of Mutability (read)
• Twitter - Thesauritically Acclaimed (read)
• Stretching Social Media (read)

In a moment of sheer, unadulterated self-indulgence, I recreated the original Ambient Orb Blog Index.

Who knows, maybe someone from the good ol’ days will do a nostalgic Google search.

I’ve certainly stuffed the keyword ambient orb blog index often enough into the post.