A Meaningful Life

I had an experience today reading a post in Google Reader which when I later opened the post on the bloggers website I realised it simply wasn’t as clear and easy to read as it was in Google Reader. Google Reader had cleaned it up quite well.

So for bloggers out there it’s worth a quick check to compare your blog posts in a few different commonly used RSS readers versus your actual blog pages. It might just highlight some style shortcomings.

I’m no style guru, so let me know if the same applies to my blog!

If I was in Jack Dorsey and Biz Stones I would be monetising their Twitter asset fast, damn fast. Sell it, open it up, whatever it takes. I think they aren’t far away from being standardised out of their current business model unless they can quickly fix their scale problems.

Driven by reliability issues on the Twitter platform, a plethora of conversation emerged this week. Bloggers and tech commentators are turning their conversation to workarounds. It’s as though the conversations and connections in Twitter have become bigger than Twitter itself. The conversation is alive and it wants to fix itself.

One example is Techcrunch’s coverage by Chris Saad of Dataportability.org. His workaround is micro bloggers using tools that are certified as compliant with a microblogging standard (posts of 140 characters and no titles). Users install complaint software on their own servers like you would blog software. He expects this to emerge from the opensource arena.

Personally I disagree, Twitter is successful because it’s easy. Easy to get started, easy to play, easy to have fun. I don’t want to install an app on a server to use a Twitter like product. I love the SaaS Twitter engine and the ecosystem of desktop and websites that have evolved around it.

It’s much like blogging where it’s just a small hassle managing a blog on a server. However, it’s still a hassle. I’d rather someone take care of that for me. My attitude to Chris’s self hosted microblogging application is the same - you’re taking my time away!

Twitter is most at risk from 3rd party application builders who have built desktop apps for Twitter. They are well positioned to build into emerging microblogging engines and thus becoming the microblogging feed readers. In much the same way RSS Readers cover many blog platforms. To do this standards are needed.

So there’s three pieces to the microblogging picture:

1. Platform
2. Reader
3. Standard

I expect one ‘rough’ standard across many platforms the way RSS has evolved. After all who seriously owns a 140 character field limit? How can you protect that?

I have started writing for The Calm Space online magazine on the topic of sustainability. My first article is The Sus in Sustainable. I get asked to write for tech, saas blogs but time restricts me. The environment however is a topic which can’t wait as it will impact us all much sooner than we think. It can’t wait for ’some day’ in the future when I have more time. Article teaser -

Society holds much suspicion toward sustainability. In the back of many minds out there I’m fairly certain that life may not be quite as balanced with nature as we would all like it to be… goto The Sus in Sustainable article

Leah Maclean one off our Saasu customers also writes for this online magazine. She wrote a great article about how it’s not easy being green in technology.

I’m intrigued by the whole area of applying natural world systems to the business world. This area has fascinated me since I went on my first Nature excursion at nine years of age to the bushland at City Beach (Perth, Australia). We learnt about termite nest construction. Despite being young I understood that the ants were following a pattern or system to create this amazing structure.

Many years later I learn’t that the Ants have a genetic design using chemicals, scents and behaviour that is systematic.

Humans are a little different though. Burdened with self awareness we are given creative license to ignore genetic impulses and adopt all kinds of knowledge and ideas. Some for the better and some for the worse. One of these is the idea that we need to accumulate lots of knowledge. This Idea Virus or Meme has been a two edged sword for humankind for centuries. Would we have moved ahead a lot more if we applied more knowledge and hunted a little less for it? I often wonder.

So often we accumulate knowledge and it never enters a realm in which it is actioned. Systems can create this outcome for you. This isn’t any special insight I have. Most reading this know this too well but sometimes our blind-spots are right in front of us. Well I found one the other day.

When I get up in the morning I make myself a Coffee, grind the beans, etc. It’s a ritual. This gets my mind buzzing and by the time I’m on my way to work my mind is back racing with ideas and plans. Some come and go quicker than I can write them down or commit to memory. Anyway I had been losing count of the amount of times I would think, “Damn I gotta blog that.”

I had no system in place to deal with this and my blog was left underused more due to my vaporised ideas and busy day than lack of enthusiasm.

Anyway, I got a notebook and am jotting things down to remind me. Yes I know that is very X-gen, I should be more Y-gen but something about writing seems to commit better to my brain. I think its because you read it, do something physical and have thought about it. 3 checkins to my brain.

Well, with the system in place here’s the first blog post result.

I will officially be ceasing my personal blog in the theme of simplifying life. Don’t worry, if you like to regularly read the odd crazy rant go to my new writing venue at our Saasu Blog http://www.saasu.com/blog or via RSS Feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/saasu

10 seconds of your time to add the new feed will keep you connected.

Thanks for reading!

Seth Goddin’s Squidoo.com caught a little more than the eye’s of Google. Seth has an interesting firsthand Google experience posted on his blog. Seth’s Squidoo.com lets you create online content on a topic you have knowledge about that you would like to share online. Much like Wikipedia, but as the author you get rated by the browsing audience.

Google announced their alpha version called Knol via their blog last week. When I read about this I didn’t flinch because the news didn’t seem big. After all, Amazon invented customer reviews of authors content online years ago. Google is really just applying it to content instead of books, an inevitable outcome. This was my initial thought, and a shallow one. My second thought is that it is not the technology that’s interesting in this direction by Google.

There is a clear evidence now that Google does no believe that the search algorithm is a search God.

Has Google been fighting the trend set by Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati and others for the last couple of years in democratic search rankings?

This could mark a peak in search algorithms as a primary method for information gathering. It’s nearly a clear admission that humans are better than robots when it comes to scrutinising content. A spammer can’t trick a human, by default the coder and hardware combination need to be better than your brain. Humans can tell when someone is selling via content or creating it for selling reasons.

Interestingly Wikipedia.org is getting a lot of mention from the bloggers out there as a threatened species because of the Knol announcement. I think Wikipedia will live on and actually stands to win this battle if they play it smart.

Wikipedia has a huge content lead time and volume advantage. Market penetration counts. Wikipedia could easily introduce author tagging and scrutinising features like voting, tag counts and referral counts. Some small changes by Wikipedia could address this weak advantage Knol has. Interesting times ahead.

Google Reader tells me this morning that I can now share my RSS feed with friends. So the gap closes with Del.icio.us and other content bookmarking tool using humans rather robots to control what is deemed to be a good read.

In person peoples views are far more open and authentic, even more so than the openness of their blog entries. This is simply because the risks are lower. That’s all it is, the risks. The risks are:

• looking bad (dumb, stupid, ignorant etc)
• offending others (customers, minority groups etc)
• being logged on the electronic record for all history.

There’s probably a bigger list but this is enough for this post. So the driver of this self censorship is reputation risk at the surface of it. Deeper though, the driver is survival. Everything stems from survival. Surviving and being happy are foundations of human behaviour and action.

Society demands some censorship to prevent laws, morals and ethics being crushed by authenticity. The reality is everyone sensors themselves when they write. If you wrote everything that little voice in your head said you would be an extreme blogger, the basejumper of blogging. 1 in 1000 posts would kill you. You would be popular, unpopular and extremely interesting all at the same time. That sort of volatility would make you feel really alive, but it might just kill you as well.

That little voice in your head full of unprintable ideas, likes and dislikes is the volatile version of what ends up as sensibly censored blog posts and musings.

When the Net began to evolve it was interesting to see what unfolded first. Yep, you guessed it was the easy business models like lists, search, news and online versions of paper publishing.

When I decided to get into the Internet business I said to myself “everyone in this ASP (Application Service Provider) game is going to run off and do the easy ASP’s first”. So I decided to avoid the crowd, create my blue ocean and do the hard one everyone will leave to last.

Interestingly it’s been nearly eight years in this business and it’s only now we are seeing some new faces. I blogged about well being yesterday and mentioned that this market has upside. What business person in their right mind doesn’t think soul soothing has a market for many years to come.

I feel compelled to explain a little further. My hypothesis is that the number of high quality news websites divided by the number of news magazines is a very large ratio (I’m using the term websites to represent blogs and portals). It’s an anecdotal ratio as I don’t have time to do the math or research.

There must be millions of websites dedicated to news but only hundreds of magazines. My second guess is that the number of high quality Lifestyle Websites versus their paper magazine counterparts is much lower.

Anecdotal evidence you can collect online by doing a quick Del.icio.us check of bookmarks reveals that this might be true. There are only 45,000 bookmarks for “Lifestyle” but a massive 1,250,000 for “News”. Even adding in terms like “Health” and “Well being” to bump up the “Lifestyle” numbers still has you at well bellow 500,000 relative to “News” bookmarks (yes I know it’s bookmarks, but to me that represents a vote on a page that is content of type “x”. You can’t ignore it).

Google returns an even more interesting result. 1.4 Billion versus 100 Million. A very large difference. Do you think humans allocate their time at a 14:1 ratio of News:Lifestyle. I don’t think so! Accordingly I smell upside in the air.

So you’ll see more high quality sea change, zen generation and soul soothing content like The Calm Space as overstressed and overworked humans try and fix themselves.

Why the difference? News is easy as long as you don’t expect to be first with the story (expensive). Lifestyle is harder as it requires skill and knowledge to write successfully. It takes new ideas to add value to readers. It requires managing the crossover between spirit and body.

All these things would have hit people as tricky or difficult when considering starting a website. It was easier to build a website and scrape ideas from others and call it a news portal. Looking at readership online is going to be the winner long term. One day you’ll be subscribing to the paper version of the online publication, not the other way around.

Devices are what will change this and they are coming thick and fast to your morning coffee reading as Leah pointed out to me.

This is without a doubt one of the next big areas for business to consumer on the net. Wellbeing is a hot topic. Yes it always has been, however I think we’ve only seen the tip of the recreational iceberg.

Happiness is every humans number one driver. It’s the original driver that causes all other drivers and behaviours. Even survival is second to happiness. After all, you try and survive in order to maintain happiness.

Check out The Calm Space as an example of what will probably be a new breed of well being websites and blogs. There’s lots of education in this area. Yes education, we educate ourselves in just about everything except looking after ourselves and being good parents. I think that’s a bit weird really. Why do we operate that way?

I recently completed a Landmark Education course called Fitness, Vitality and Wellbeing that hits this spot superbly.

Who doesn’t relate to a quiet time having a coffee, tea or power juice while you read your favourite magazine, blog or book. It can only be good for you.