Why I FAILED

Rebellion Against the Right Things

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” - Thomas Jefferson

I hope that I’m wrong, but my thought upon reading this quote today is that we live in a world that no longer believes this. A world running wild with ideas of political correctness, tolerance and fear. But not, as you might assume, fear of repercussions against taking a stand.

But fear that we aren’t capable of making a difference. So. We don’t. And tragically, we hide our shame by rebelling against those that do.

Which leads me to another quote I read today thanks to a co-worker named Justin. This one is from Randy Read:

“Too many attempt to live cautiously in the safety of established patterns. They do not feel fulfilled; they have found a formula not of success, but of simply avoiding failure.

This is the living death - when security becomes the overwhelming consideration.”

There are tyrants in this world and there always will be. I hope there are always courageous men and women to fight them.

We all have our personal tyrants too.
Be of good courage.

An Easter Offering From Chris Tomlin

I woke this morning with a desire to post on this Easter Sunday. Then my church Worship and Arts Ministry offered this song from Chris Tomlin.

“From the highest of heights to the depths of the sea
Creation’s revealing Your majesty
From the colors of fall to the fragrance of spring
Every creature unique in the song that it sings
All exclaiming

Incomparable, unchangeable
You see the depths of my heart and You love me the same
You are amazing God
You are amazing God”

Happy Easter

Digsby Launches

Lifehacker has announced the launch of Digsby which appears to be a step closer to my dream of an online hub. I haven’t downloaded it yet, but I will soon.

It could be cool…

Kevin Kelly and 1,000 True Fans

Kevin Kelly summarizes what I and a number of people have been trying to say for a long time. I could grab highlights from it and elaborate, but it’s as near to perfection as it can be.

Read it and get your 1,000 True Fans.

Organizing Me Online, Part II

In part one of this post, I discussed a desired future state where all my (your) contacts, thoughts, messages and posts would reside within a hub. A hub that would greatly simplify the creating and sending of content as well as the intake.

Next I’ll tackle the revenue options for such a technology/business model as well as what I’m going to do until those models come to fruition.

Why Revenue?

The revenue question is a biggie in my future vision because of the revenue models of today. Namely: eyeballs. The advertisers that support MySpace, Facebook, and all the rest, are paying for access to the users of those sites. If those users stop visiting, there won’t be any reason to advertise on the sites.

In my vision, I will no longer visit MySpace and Facebook on a day-to-day basis., Once I have my profile set-up, I wouldn’t need to visit those places unless I want too. These simply become nodes in a vast network that serves as a path - both into and out of - my hub.

On the surface, this is not a good thing for MySpace and Facebook. But there are three alternatives: fees, paid advertising and web services.

Three Solutions

1. I would gladly pay a fee to have such a hub. I’d pay $10 to $12 per year, or even per month for something this useful. In this model, the “Hub provider” would share some of their revenue with the sites I trafficked. In fact, it may end up that all of them charge small access fees in addition to advertising (there will be some eyeballs).

2. The second idea is paid advertising, but not in the same sense as today. What if advertisers supported my hub activity to get to my network? In this model, I would select advertisers that I believe in and their ads would be embedded in my output. No matter if it’s an e-mail to one person or a blog post to the entire network, the advertising message would go to them all. This would be very attractive to advertisers because it would be targeted and permission based. The people in my hub would expect ads and would be inclined to read them because I chose them. The key isn’t me – I’m nothing special – the key is people’s interest in what their friends and associates are into. One last note on this: I would like this much more than the “targeted” ads triggered from key words on a web page. Just ‘cause I write about men doesn’t mean I’m talking about Viagra. Get my point?

3. In a terrific post entitled, The Future is Web Services, Not Websites, Steve Rubel suggests the third way a hub could work. Mash his idea and mine together and you get a hub that’s built from a collection of web services and widgets from MySpace and Facebook. The core functionality would be separate from those sites, but they would provide the interactivity gateways in a branded and advertising supported way.

Which is somewhat related to what I’m going to do today.

While I’m Waiting

As I mentioned here, I’m working to simplify my online life. This means reducing the complexity of juggling multiple sites as well as web page design. Multiple site juggling speaks for itself and my web page design complexity is because of my inability to build a web site that fully communicates all that I am. I have great ideas, but since I’m not a coder and barely proficient at HTML, I don’t have TIME to make them happen (I don’t have the skill either…).

So my solution is to tackle both at once by relying more on “off the shelf” solutions for my online life. And though this may actually increase the number of sites I interact with, in the end, I’ll get what I want much quicker.

For instance, I’m in the process of building out a new Netvibes site using their new Ginger platform. Ginger has a robust set of widgets that allow you to build a multi-layered site with tabs, feeds, pages and written content. Rather than have my “About” content on page two of this site, I’ll send people there. You can watch it come together here.

Another example is Squidoo. I already have a few pages that contain resources for Why I Failed.com. I’ll probably build more, link to them from here, but also include them in my Netvibes home. I’m also open to other easy page building sites like Google just released.
The only danger I see is visitor fatigue because of the multiple formats for presenting my content. I’m hoping people will adjust, see it as an experiment and go with the flow.

None of this solves my biggest issue about efficiently creating and sending content, but I’ll have to wait for that.

Let me know your thoughts.

The True Seven Wonders

A group of students were asked to list what they thought were the present “Seven Wonders of the World.” Though there were some disagreements, the following received the most votes:

1. Egypt’s Great Pyramids

2. Taj Mahal

3. Grand Canyon

4. Panama Canal

5. Empire State Building

6. St. Peter’s

7. China’s Great Wall

While gathering the votes, the teacher noted that one student had not finished her paper yet. So she asked the girl if she was having trouble with her list.

The girl replied, “Yes, a little. I couldn’t quite make up my mind because there were so many.”

The teacher said, “Well, tell us what you have, and maybe we can help.”

The girl hesitated, then read, “I think the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ are:

1. to see

2. to hear

3. to touch

4. to taste

5. to feel

6. to laugh

7. and to love.”

How true

Three Thoughts on Music

Nico Ramon at Not Evil Music has some wisdom about Using exclusivity to market your music.

Seth Godin offers a perspective on Bruce Springsteen from his friend Randy about the fact that: “At some point in the last 35 years, Bruce won over each one of those
fans - one at a time - and began a relationship. One he respects
highly. And every so often he throws a party and we’re all invited to
come over for a few drinks to celebrate that relationship - and for
that, we’ll gladly chip in about 2 or 3 hundred to help cover the cost.”

Lastly, Seth has also provided a transcript of a recent speech.

Check ‘em out.
 

Organizing Me Online, Part I

I’ve made one step forward, but I have so far to go.

Earlier this week I made the decision to use this blog for more than just music. I feel freer and more light hearted since the decision - exactly as I hoped to be. However, I still have so far to go towards my ultimate vision partly because of time and partly because of the current state of tech and business.

Time:

People don’t live lives the way our computers think we do. There’s a vast difference between the papers and pens on my desk and the start/programs/office/word/my_life on my desktop. Online isn’t much better and socially it’s even worse.

Social life in the real world - networking - is a friend/acquaintance/stranger network that revolves around me (or you). It does not revolve around a place. In other words, I don’t go to Chili’s to find my friends, I find my friends and we go to Chili’s. The context is me and them, not Chili’s. In fact, tomorrow, we’ll go to Arby’s.

But online, my life is segregated by place. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, blog(s), e-mail, etc. Though it’s true that several friends are present in all of those, many of them are only in a few. The tough part comes when I want to talk to a sub-group of friends about a topic - say, social networking.

On the off chance that all my “friends” are interested, I’m currently forced to communicate something 5, 6 or more times, in different formats and forms. Not only is this time consuming, I know the failure rate is high because of the fact that the recipients are bombarded by stuff in their networks all day long. How will they know to read my thoughts on a topic they’re interested in when my last five thoughts have been on unrelated topics?

Tech and Business:

Which brings me to tech and business. Technology is simply not where it needs to be yet and it’s because of business. MySpace wants me to live in their network (Chili’s). Why? Because their advertisers are counting my eyeballs and those of my friends. Same with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc… There’s nothing inherently wrong with this of course, I’m just wanting the next phase to happen now (can you say impatient?).

What I (we) need is interconnected hubs with ourselves at the center as opposed to websites (Chili’s).

Vision:

In an interconnected world, we will most likely be connected through tags, but in a different structure than today. We currently use tags to describe content. These tags categorize the content by subject, usually several at a time. For instance, the post will be tagged life, social networking, personal development, about me. This works great in a world organized by sites and blogs.

But what if tags were the paths that interconnected our personal hubs? What if each tag represented levels of connectivity between us? Think concentric circles around a hub.
Imagine this post tagged like this: [stevegrossman - thoughts - about me - life - personal development - social networking - stevegrossman]. Now imagine your RSS feed reader set to look for [stevegrossman - social networking - personal development]. You would automatically receive any thing coming down my path that ended with [personal development - social networking - stevegrossman]. Likewise, a person’s feed reader looking for [thoughts - about me - life - personal development - social networking - stevegrossman] AND [thoughts - about me - music - success - personal development - stevegrossman] would receive my posts on both those subjects.

On my side, I would manage my content and contacts by looking out from my hub - me. My contacts would be tagged too. A close friend would be tagged: [friend, their name, e-mail (or message), thoughts] and any e-mail groupings I need like “church”. An “acquaintance” would be [tagged, name, thoughts].

Any e-mails or thoughts would go to the first person. The second person would only receive my thoughts, not e-mails. If I tagged a post e-mail, church, it would go to the first person and anyone else in that grouping. Automatically. More specifically, when I wrote a note tagged with [friend, their name, e-mail] - it would only go to one person.

This may sound like a set-up nightmare, but not really. Most of us already do this in our heads, and we have to “tag” every thing we write and usually across multiple sites and technologies. First we have to consider who will be interested in our message or who we want to contact. Where they are online - e-mail or social site. Which of their multiple e-mails will work. Where most of the people are who we want to contact and what are their addresses (what’s the MySpace nickname for Cathy?). Add to that the fact that we’re only guessing as to who is really interested in what we have to say, and TODAY is the nightmare.

The hub based network I envision connects everyone exactly where each person wants to connect. Remember, I only described my address book and content tagging. On the recipient end, they would control the input with similar tags. They can chose to accept everything I send by configuring their feeds deep into my hub, or only receive certain topics near the edge of my hub.

Either way, I sit down at my computer and sign into “Steve’s Hub”. I write a post with tags and hit send.

Across town or across the world a person sits down at their computer and signs on to “Cathy’s Hub”. They see my post because they wanted too.

Who would pay and what I’m thinking about doing while waiting for “Steve’s Hub” will have to wait for Part II