Cyber Social Cloud Computing

Occupy is Facebook training cultural terrorists?

2011-10-27T16:57:00.002+11:00

It wasn’t that long ago when ‘Wall St, ‘(I use the term loosely) was comfortable in the knowledge, that as long as Generations X, Y & Z kept going to work and were preoccupied within the virtual landscape of the internet they posed no threat to business as usual.
What Wall St and a whole bunch of others were unaware of was that within the cyber society, slowly and surely Web 2.0 and Social Media was recruiting and training terrorists! Yes Facebook, WikiLeaks and the social media phenomenon is turning average wage slave debtors into pro-active, aware, consumer vigilantes.
We learned to ‘Occupy’, from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube we have been trained now to sign up, arrive, scribe our names, our pictures our likes and dislikes and most importantly it has elicited and encouraged our comments and opinions into the Cyber Social Cloud. Social media has made it OK for anyone to have an opinion.
As the “Occupy” movement gathers momentum it manifests itself in different ways, where governments are corrupt they are being shattered, where greed is corrupting human life, it is being questioned, exposed and quashed. ‘Occupy’ manifests where it’s most needed by the 99%. Imperialistic corporate greed seems unstoppable. Question: What happens when an unstoppable force meet an immovable object? Answer: The unstoppable force stops and the immovable object moves. Let us be clear the 99% are that immovable object. If the 99% chose to cut off the blood flow to the corporate vampires, they would inevitably expire. Without the 99% paying their monthly, weekly, daily debt instalment there would be no Wall street, if mortgage holders across the world chose to default on their loans for once, twice or thrice times, the domino effect would bring the corporate dynasties and banks to their knees. If all 800 million Facebook users were asked to default on any home loan just once, Ouch! You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one.
“Occupy” is the morning sunlight , to the weary old corporate vampires.
Even though the code for ‘Occupy’ is
1) Keep it Smart
2) Keep it Non-Violent
3) Keep it Growing.
If violence erupts, it is due to the frustrations pitted against each other. On one side law enforcement beholding to political masters and they in turn to their corporate puppeteers. On the other side the 99% downtrodden, their lives, efforts and achievements absorbed by a corporate and insurance sponge, spreading much like the red weed in “War of the Worlds”
The 99% has nothing more to lose, everything has been stripped from them and now even their future has been pre-sold. Any conflict strategist can tell you, that a few desperate people fighting for their right to survive are far more powerful than any invading force, as the US learnt after being thrashed by Vietnam?
Western and developing nations feel that they were insulated from the events occurring across North Africa and the Middle East; ‘Occupy’ has made it clear that they are not. The reality is unless the current political puppets cut their corporate aprons strings and really change the financial rules and offer some equality and fairness to the 99%; their days are numbered too.
Occupy Wall St today and Re-Occupy your lives tomorrow.

Life, Technology and Art.

2011-10-04T10:04:00.002+11:00

I turn 51 today, I cast my mind back and look at the role technology has played in my own life. The first TV I remember watching was “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”, filmed on some tropical location. I was probably 5 or 6. My first instinct (I’ve been told) was to remove all my clothes and attempt to climb into the TV and onto that monochrome beach. So you could say I was sucked in from day 1. From that time on the TV and I had a special relationship.

My favourite Aunt gave me a plastic DIANA brand still camera (which was the Hong Kong rip off of the Kodak), film and processing was expensive so you took lots of care with every shot). I was hooked, I dreamt of having slide projectors,Hasselblad’s and exotic darkrooms.

Then sitting up late at night with my Dad watching the live APOLLO moon landings.Sci-Fi was everywhere and it inspired you to think in that way, “everything was possible” We were all Sci-Fi mad, Thunderbirds, Star Trek, Space 1999,Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and Kubrick. As a teenager I dreamt of devices and systems that were technologically impossible at the time. Trapped here in Australia, in what seemed to be a cultural wasteland, the TV brought news of so many advances in society, science and technology.

Three things of significance occurred in the seventies firstly STAR WARS arrived; secondly I acquired a super 8-movie camera. Even though DR WHO and the BBC had been doing it for years, STAR WARS reaffirmed on a mass scale that Sci-Fi could be grungy, rusty and eroded. I made movies, models, animation and special FX, which resulted in a number of minor explosions in my Dad’s garage. Finally I realised that to “make art” and “relieve suffering in others” were the only true and noble lifelong quests.

I knew I wanted to dream and be creative and through the lens of photography I was lured into and possessed by the world of Film and Cinema, actually I took a wrong turn in a college stairwell, on the way to sign up for the photography major and found myself talking to an animator, which changed everything and made me into one of those people who make the TV ads, cartoons and movies. Bolex, Apple,Intercine, Steenbeck, Arriflex, Kodak, Pentax, Sony just to name a few, these brands of technology have directed and contoured my life. One’s pursuit of money as a filmmaker was never for personal riches, it was so you could get your hands on, rent or buy, better and better technology, many times we would spend all the profits from a TVC on a new lens, light or computer.

In the early 90’s, I recall we had produced a 30 sec piece of animation on a computer, for a short film I was making called “The Other Room” it was a flying path through a virtual maze, It took us about 8 months to complete it, often we were waiting for bigger storage systems to become available, but the digital to video transfer time for the 30 second piece altered from 4 hours @ $240 per hour to real time @$240 per hour in that short period. That’s how fast thing were changing. Fortunately I was never absorbed by mundane technology like cars and domestic appliances, it was always the expensive exotic stuff I was after, Stedicam, Panavision and a like.

I have explored these technological realms; it has been interesting and good.

It has allowed me to make art both strange and nice, through advent of digital technology like the Internet, digital video, solar power, computers, photographic technology I realised many of my impossible teenage dreams, like exotic darkrooms, movies and buildings in the course of my life. Today social media is the new frontier, it allows us to collaborate and create content like never before. I look forward to the next 50 years knowing that my imagination is having a hard time keeping up with the current rate of technological progress.

How has technology affected your life?

City 2.0 and the Dawn of True Democracy?

2011-10-03T17:22:00.000+11:00

A city communicates with it’s inhabitants via signs and symbols simple explanatory signs like: Walk, Don’t Walk 60, 40, Roadwork, School zone etc. the only requirement is that you follow these instructions and the city will provide you with what you need.

Trying to effect change within the city has always been a long drawn out process usually quite frustrating (unless you know somebody), because our communications are generally one way, from the top down. This is all about to change; social media and Web 2.0 technology is going to change it.

Welcome to City 2.0. the cyber social environment. Imagine if your local council or municipality was a machine, a computer that listened to you.

About 25 years ago it was muted that international trade, international agreements etc. should all be handed over to the computers; they’d do a much better job than people with no racism, no patriotism and no preconceived judgements. Decisions made purely on a practical level, for example if computers were in charge of food production and distribution, famines would be minimised, machines could predict via all given data what is going to be needed and where then organise commodities to be sent to places facing a potential problem well in advance. Humans are always reacting after the fact, even though we are aware of pending problems and disasters we choose to make short sighted, decisions that essentially are political in nature. We tend to think in one lifetime chunks, rather than considering future generational needs.

In reality we don’t need councillors or petty politicians, this role can be taken up by automated social media systems, with the ability to gather information in real time, and thus effect policy on demand, effect changes to infrastructure through real time polling, there would be no vested interests except those of the machine, which is to serve the greater good. The building of roads, schools, the deployment of essential service all can be done automatically without human interference. The machine can judge, prioritise and issue directions to human contractors as to what needs to be done, where and when. Prioritise budgets so that things get done cost effectively as required.

The systems we need to do this are already here, for example if you play games like “CityVille” or “Social City” you build a city based upon what you want then at some point the game will inform you when your citizens are unhappy and what community building will solve the problem, it is no great task to shift these ideas into the real world. The hardest part in this shift is deleting the human politicians from the equation.

Social media gives people the ability to communicate directly with the system, ask, describe and offer up individual needs. The system in turn can take every single request into consideration, the machine can process massive amounts of data in real time, and in a sense it is the dawn of true democracy.

Get Listed Get Found

2011-09-28T08:33:00.001+10:00

Small Business Social Media September Workshops

2011-09-19T23:34:00.001+10:00

The Science of Social Timing

2011-09-18T07:41:00.001+10:00

My Twitter persona by visual.ly

2011-07-17T16:14:00.000+10:00

The NBN Show is coming to town!

2011-07-13T14:03:00.001+10:00

Social Media and The Independent Screen Producer

2011-02-17T15:29:00.000+11:00

How to Filter Your Personality through Social Media.

2011-01-05T22:32:00.000+11:00

Your social media profile is your cyber social face, it is in most cases the first port of call for connections, friends and followers to find out who you are what you do. However most of us play a number of different roles in our daily lives, and no one circumstance does justice to our whole personality, that’s why it’s hard to write a defining profile.

The big advertisers would like us to confine ourselves to one social media platform like Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube, “put everything in one basket”. Because it’s much easier to monitor your online behaviour from a single source.

When signing up to a network, you need to determine which aspects of your multi foliate personality should be expressed, what online information will best serve your needs. How do we do that?

We need to create multiple profiles out of single personality (except for the small percentage who really do have multiple personality disorder). You can filter your personality so that those various aspects are properly represented in the cyber social cloud.

Breaking Down your personality.

Step 1. Research,

Find out where your people are.

What networks are you attracted too?

What networks are your friends and colleagues using?

Step 2. Divide your life into 4 Parts

1. Work and Career - your business role/ services/ specialities

2. Personal and Relationships - home, children, special events

3. Community Contribution - Belief systems and causes.

4. Pleasure and Leisure - hobbies, sport, cultural interests

Step 3. Summarize

Write a sentence maybe two summarizing each part, try and be humorous. e.g. Personal and relationships, “Happily married, part time vegetarian with two teenage children and a second mortgage.” Keep them short, no one likes being confronted with tonnes of text.

Step 4 Connect the media

For each profile upload relevant media, photos, video, music, writing, etc.

Give people something to look at.

Social Media allows you to enhance your “good” qualities and talents while at the same time downplay or even omit your “not so good” qualities.

Using various social media networks simultaneously allows you to be as diverse as you really are, it allows you to make full use of Web 2.0, which will in turn offer you friends, followers and connections that are specific and in sync with all of you. How many social media networks are you signed up to?

4 Reasons why Traditional List Building is Dead.

2011-01-03T16:14:00.000+11:00

Marketers, whether online or off, will tell you that you that “the money is in the list”, and with out a doubt it’s true. Internet marketers have coveted and vigorously guarded the sanctum of your inbox, since the dawn of email. Why then are list building e-products dropping in value and potency each day? You can now find systems and products that were selling for hundreds of dollars only a year ago marked down to $19.97 or lower.

There are four main reasons for this;

1. E-mail is becoming passé. Most people are daunted by the prospect of opening their inbox, because of the avalanche of SPAM they know they are going to be confronted with. Increasingly we are creating email addresses, just so as to sign-up to a social media network, after which it’s hardly used again.

2. Privacy, there’s been a lot of talk about privacy, yet privacy concerns aren’t driving people away from social media, we are adapting to the new paradigm, we tends to use social media to talk about things that are not so private, things we don’t mind strangers knowing about. E-mail is being used for completely private conversations and the exchange of large chunks of data. For short interaction we are using social media.

3. The open source list. As soon as you become a friend of follower on a social media network you have access to their list of friends or followers. If you have a social media account, with more than fifty friends, followers or connections, you already have a list, a big list, indirectly you probably have access to over 10000 people. Free Web 2.0 tools give users the ability to create massive lists automatically, e.g Yahoo7 can now import your Facebook friend list straight into your contacts.

Marketers are being confronted with the spectre of having to introduce themselves and ask permission to send you something, build trust and maintain a personal relationship. They can’t set the auto-responders to spam the whole list, hoping that the scattergun effect will net a signup, conversion and sale. Chances are they will lose access to those people in a very short time, because there is failsafe. In the past to get off a list, first you had to locate an unsubscribe button, then go through a process to get off the list, and quite often it didn’t work.

4. The “unlike” button. Just as the social media networks have given users the ability to create and accept connections with just one click, by the same token, users have the ability to delete them just as easily.

DID YOU KNOW?

2011-01-02T21:20:00.000+11:00

20 Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Presence

2010-12-22T14:30:00.000+11:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

20 Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Presence

View more documents from Wax Custom Communications.

iClassroom

2010-12-03T06:01:00.001+11:00

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Collaborize. All opinions are 100% mine.

I've worked and taught Information Technology and Multimedia in remote Australian public schools for over a decade now. Over that time I've seen the dramatic changes that Internet technology has delivered to educators.

Children from Western NSW can go live with a scuba diver, underwater on the barrier reef and ask the diver questions about the things they see in the water around the diver. Some of these students have never seen the ocean. without a doubt Internet technology offers a richer, more meaningful educational experience for each student. The modern classroom allows teachers to accomplish more with less, with powerful online teaching tools. New amazing tools are being created constantly. Collaborize Classroom is a new online learning platform that brings the power of social media into the modern classroom, it allows students to engage in online discussions.

Collaborize Classroom is offered to teachers at no cost to increase student participation and encourage in-class discussions and engagement. All you need is a valid email address. Teachers can easily create online lesson plans, increase student participation and intelligently build a structured online community for your classroom. Using state of the art WEB 2.0 technology, teachers can simply create a site in a matter of minutes!

How far away is iClassroom? Will there be a picture of Steve Jobs on every iClassroom wall?

Digital-Screen-Forum.m4v

2010-10-25T17:05:00.000+11:00

Digital Screen Forum 2010

2010-10-20T13:05:00.003+11:00

Screenworks is shouting about the program and speakers for the digital event of the year in the Northern Rivers region. In partnership with Arts Northern Rivers, Screenworks is bringing an exciting list of speakers to Mullumbimby Civic Centre on Saturday 30th October to use their fantastic knowledge and experience to explore the digital markets, creative and development opportunities for the regions creators and producers of 3D animation, phone apps, games and web content. However it doesn't stop there, if you are creating TV or feature films, then these are the digital accessories that compliment and extend your project. More and more all big screen and small screen projects are extending the life and engagement with different age groups via phone apps, games and 3D animation and other web content.

Speakers include

Brett Feeney, Head of Production at Dr D Studios, Sydney. Brett worked with George Miller and Doug Mitchell to set up the 3D animation Dr D Studios in 2007. They are now in production on Happy Feet 2 and Fury Road.

John Passfield is co-owner and Creative Director of 3 Blokes Studios in Brisbane. He is a veteran of the computer games industry including games designer, lead programmer, director and scriptwriter on numerous award winning titles.

Shainiel Deo is the CEO of games developer Halfbrick Studios in Brisbane. Founded in 2001, Halfbrick has been on the forefront of handheld, casual and mobile games development for years, recently achieving worldwide success and recognition for iPhone games including Fruit Ninja and Monster Dash.

Tania Chambers, CEO of Screen NSW and Keynote speaker at the Digital Screen Forum has extensive experience within the Australian film, TV and digital industry, and in leadership roles at both organisation and Board level.

Justin Brow, 60Sox, MC extraordinaire, Justin was the MC for Screenworks 2008 New Media Conference and Incubator and we are so pleased to have him back for this event. Justin is a pioneer of Australia's digital media industries. He holds leading roles in several national programs assisting the commercialisation and international competitiveness of the Australian digital media industries.

Register Here

Why the majority of your posts are failing

2010-09-30T11:32:00.001+10:00

Mashable today published a post, of recent stats, which indicates that 71% of tweets get no reaction, that is to say little or no click thru or re-tweeting activity. View the Mashable post. Why is it so? Online marketers today have access to the most comprehensive metrics than ever before, the ability to segment a market down to gender, age, location, socioeconomic and educational background etc. Why then are the majority of marketing posts falling on deaf ears?

The first and most obvious reason for this lack of interest and engagement is that; the consumer today is better at ignoring ads than ever before, they have seen and been subjected to the cleverest hype that Madison Ave has to offer, they’ve seen and heard it all before and yet social media marketers think they can rehash old ideas and people are going to buy it. It’s obvious they are not. We have a plethora of start-up pseudo marketers, operating in the old paradigm of “frequency and saturation” gets results. The vast majority of social media marketers aren’t putting in the hard work and as a result they’re posting crap, BS, rehashed information and useless stupid drivel!

Secondly, the cyber-economy and the ability to impulsively buy anything your heart desires online 24/7, has brought with it a massive marketing dilemma, a dilemma that only Web 3.0 is going to solve, marketers need to know what people will want, before they want it, they must pre-empt the consumer in the business of consumption, as theWEB 3.0 database grows as Google andFacebook get better at knowing what you need before you need it, the task of delivering relevant copy that generates engagement will get easier. Until then marketers are caught in a “cyber limbo”.

Advertisers must develop ad copy that changes from user to user, depending on whose looking at the time, adapting vocabulary, cultural idioms and local time and place requirements. We can no longer write “one size fit’s all” ads, we have to write adaptive ads, you can’t use the same ad in the Bronx as you do on 5th Ave, they speak different languages, across one city, across one nation, across the globe.

My humble advice to online marketers today.

Carefully study and analyze the metrics. Write variations, using culturally specific language and deliver to a precise user groups. Be aware, and utilize every advancement in behavioural analytics. Sure it’s more time, sure its more effort, but remember this: We are now creating lifelong customers and not one off sales. Work out what one customer is worth for a lifetime of loyalty.

That’s my rave what’s yours? Leave a comment.

Revitalize your Web Presence

2010-09-04T12:09:00.001+10:00

The first thing you will like about the Webvitalize™ website, is the clear and clean layout, easy graphical navigation links and explanations of their various services and that’s before you get to the content. Which immediately gives any business owner or manager, interested in starting or improving their web site, a very precise indication of what Webvitalize™ can do for their business.

What Webvitalize™ has done; is adapt the successful techniques and innovative solutions they developed for their big business clients and created an evolved approach with a full suite of professional services, that include web design, custom web development and programming, content writing and creation, search engine optimization, PPC/SEM, social media marketing, mobile/email marketing, video/photo creation/editing and easy e-commerce, in fact an all in one package for small or medium business to establish and optimize their web presence. All this, at an affordable price and without have to resort to the use of cheap and outdated solutions, or go to the other extreme of establishing an entire IT department.

Finally there’s a company that offers a real solution for small and medium businesses to create a powerful and effective web presence and strategy. Webvitalize™ provides great solutions at realistic prices which will enable smaller business to compete on an even playing field with large and multinational companies.

Why is Social media so Powerful?

2010-09-03T17:44:00.001+10:00

Traditional product and service advertising in all its forms; classified, direct mail, email marketing, and general static (billboards, newspaper and magazines) or dynamic as on TV or cinema advertising, have all suffered from the same problem. The problem that Social Media is now addressing!

As an advertiser, your copy, your slogan, your offer is designed to generate, interest, desire and a question from your potential customer; the most common one being, “How will it make my life better”, in the not so distant past the consumers interest and desire has been left hanging. If you’ve been able to generate sufficient interest to make them “go to the store”, later, or “get on the phone”, later, or look up the details of your offer, later, then you might score a sale. There’s always been a gap of time between the initial advertising implant and the customer’s actions. To combat this, it’s been necessary for advertisers to go into overkill, with extreme copy and saturation to keep the customer sufficiently informed and interested until they can get to the sales point or interface. This gap of time is where 90% of advertisers have lost their potential customers.

Social media marketing or as Seth Goldin puts it. “permission marketing” addresses this ‘gap’ problem, in a very particular way. Social media adds the ability to engage the customer in real time, e.g. the commuter reads your ad on the subway, they can immediately get on their iPhone and ask you a specific question, you can answer them in real time, if your answers are compelling and exciting enough, chances are your going to have sale before that person gets off the train.

Not only that, but with the advances in drop shipping and delivery, what ever they bought from you may be waiting for them in the letterbox when they get home from work, their excitement can last the whole day. They will be discussing their purchase with work colleagues, chances are you will also get spill over just from the fact the purchase was informative and hassle free.

Through the use of social media, not only can the customer get 1^st hand information directly from you, they can also speak to their friends, about your product.

If someone likes your product or service they will tell or recommend it to 16 other people, however if they don’t like it they will tell up to 45, that was in the past, when word of mouth was restricted to face to face or telephone conversations, now with the advent of Facebook, Twitter and the plethora of other social media networks, one person can tell hundreds (immediately) how good or bad your product really is.

To illustrate the importance of the personal connection in business let me tell you a story. Many years ago I was making Television commercials for a living, being the producer and account executive entailed lots of meetings with the clients, to continually get a grasp on what they wanted to achieve from their ad and who they were trying to sell to etc.

What I found was that most of those meetings, generally started off with the latest details and updates on the ad and campaign, but after a short time, they’d start talking about other issues, like the latest gossip from within their particular industry or personal issues like their family, their health and so on. So from being an advertising consultant when I’d walk into their office, within minutes sometimes I would become a pseudo psychologist listening to their woes, and quite often offering some of my own home spun advice. In reality the issues we had to discuss with the client, could have been done on the phone or via fax, but it was the personal engagement that gave me the edge, over the larger depersonalised companies.

Once you know something about a persons personal life, you’ve become a friend of sorts, being there and listening instilled a kind of trust, they felt, (rightly or wrongly) I wasn’t just there for the money, I was a sympathetic ear, they could off load to. Listening is a pivotal sales skill. The basic rules of advertising still apply, but with the use of social media the advertiser can apply a human touch to the whole process, they don’t have to be on the “hard sell” all the time. Because as an advertiser your trying to create a lifelong customer, not a one off customer.

Secrets of Success in 8 Words and 3 Minutes

2010-08-30T08:38:00.000+10:00

Order the Coffee Now!

2010-08-29T06:28:00.000+10:00

One of the aspects that I really love about this era of cyber social cloud computing. Is how easy it is to create and distribute art.

and because the "Cyber Social Cloud" gives conceptual art a place of ironic permanence. Suppose your walking down a main street in your town. Suddenly you have an interesting and possibly lucrative cyber-economic thought. I know I have them, I assume you do too.

However, at that very moment, financially things are tight so you don't have startup cash in your pocket or in your bank account. in fact you have just enough money for a cup of coffee.

So you stroll into an internet café, find a comfortable spot to sit down. Log on and order a coffee and a glass of water. collect a number of paper napkins. Then dip your finger into the glass of water, and quickly draw some funny lines on the napkin, with just plain water, you could use coffee, NEXT with your cellphone, photograph the wet napkins, bluetooth the pictures to the workstation, and they become the graphic theme for your new blog. You can have a hosted blog up and running by the time they bring your coffee. (that's certainly true of some coffee establishments in the northern districts of Sydney)

NEXT You write your idea out, keyword research it, all the while your supping your first coffee. Your idea becomes new content in a matter of minutes, then, if armed with a strategy you can order another coffee and begin to publish, inform, monetize and direct thousands of users to that content, within a matter of hours.

It doesn't take long to make your original content a very valuable piece of cyberspace real estate, to all kinds of organizations who also wish to communicate or advertise with your readers. After 8 hours in the cafe you would transfer digital earnings into your online bank account and pay for your subsequent beverages and online session, also getting a cash out and go home. Consider the Internet portal as an ATM, accepting deposits, and dispensing cash, in your favour.

Everything has a story.

2010-08-26T21:11:00.000+10:00

Everything has a story. Well, everything will need a story if it is to exist, at all in Web 3.0.

Everything that comes into existence at any given moment in time has a beginning and thus a following story. Look around the room right now, take a random look at anything, and there is a story. As the Net moves towards a more sophisticated and more intuitive protocol, Web 3.0.

Web 2.0 is busily building the behavioural database assets that are essential building blocks for the design of Web 3.0.protocol.

Stories published to the Net database, creates “keyword relevant” and contextual sentences, text and pictographic sequences that are indicative of human behaviour and the subsequent documented activities that occur.

The recent emergence of apps like, Google’s QR coding and TOTem, or Sentiment sensing apps likeViralHeat and Facebook’s “Places”, these are all ways of collecting stories, adding context, geo location and motivation to each and every story. Google’s Gmail Un-send feature, Why?

Does un-send actually UN-send? As humans we would like it to mean, “take it back”, take back that moment when you felt and wrote those things. IS that emotive information deleted or only withdrawn from your visible status and data updates? Now I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’m a cybersocial pun dent, as plugged in as you, making lots of small stories. I’d say No way, the information gathered about what you “don’t want” to say, compared to what you “do” actually say, is invaluable in determining and predicting your future online behaviour patterns. All this is added to the Web 3.0 database, the intuitive web.

One of the charms of the Web 2.0 is that you’re not penalised for making stupid mistakes, it teaches you for free! A better way. Web 2.0 trains you with Youtube tutorial videos on how to best use it.Which maximizes your ability to create new content. That’s my story for now, have you got a cyber-social story? Please leave a comment.

5 Ways to manage your time and digital productivity

2010-08-23T10:30:00.004+10:00

Managing your productivity and time, especially if the focus of your work is online, is a constant dilemma, for writers, bloggers, graphic artists and alike. Our biggest enemy is distraction, within a couple of clicks you can end up on the other side of the planet, in someone else’s head, far far away from your starting point in a matter of minutes.

One can argue that because it’s all so interesting, because everything might be relevant, (in a Google sort of way) and really you don’t know until you read it and explore it, it’s important to follow those links, well yes that’s true. However, suddenly you realize that hours have been wasted and your no further down the original work path than when you started, you’ve generated no income and the only winner here is your ISP.

There are a number of ways of combating this problem. I will outline some of the methods I use

1. Staying offline as long as possible is one option, don’t set your internet browser to automatically open on login or startup, have your word processing app open first so that you are presented with a blank page, rather than the search bar.

2. Avoid checking your stats and email until you have created some content, even if it’s only a sentence .

3. Set a time limit for checking and responding to email (stick to the time limit, most of your mail has been patiently waiting overnight, besides most of them have been sent by auto-responders (who have no concept of time) so they can probably wait a bit longer.

4. Because your web browser is your frontline interface to the net, it’s important to configure and arrange your bookmarks and favourites, so as to generate a productive workflow,

a. Remove spurious junk from your bookmark menu, bury it deeper than two clicks away, which means you require an additional step to go there, this additional step, requires a conscious decision, it’s a bit like asking for additional confirmation before you delete, you move the action out of involuntary to the voluntary realm.

b. Your bookmark menu should reflect what your trying to achieve online, if your trying to create income, only have your real income streams there, it means when you click the link, you will must take action to work the site to your financial advantage, if you’re a creative, you want to use bookmarks that will inspire you to create, not sit and indulge.

c. Use Google alerts to stimulate your productivity, I find myself being transported to places I don’t need to be, that zap my time and energy, sifting through other peoples notions. Your alerts should contain nouns and verbs so that each alert is a call to action.

d. Choose a theme or trend for the day, (it doesn’t have to be within your niche) use that as a springboard for generating new and interesting content.

e. Instead of bookmarking copy useful info and data into documents you can access offline.

5. Reward yourself with a break of some sort or whatever beverage you might use, I give myself a coffee break reward when I hit 500 words, sometimes I can get mighty thirsty, during periods of writers block but I persist and wait until I have achieved my goal, nowadays I can almost smell the gentle aroma of Lavazza around the 420 word mark, in fact I can smell it now.

These are some of the techniques I use I hope they’re helpful, following these steps will help you be productive and more original with your concepts and output. If you’ve got any additional ideas please post a comment and let us all know, have a great day.

Game On

2010-08-21T11:24:00.002+10:00

Two things you'll notice about Seth Priebatsch: One, his infectious, get-you-out-of-your-chair enthusiasm. Two, the inventory of entrepreneurial feats he's managed to accumulate at a remarkably young age. The 21-year-old founded his first startup at age 12, and by age 18, he'd founded another -- PostcardTech, which makes interactive marketing tours for CD-ROM.

Now he's working on SCVNGR, "a massive experiment in building a mobile game together." Backed by Google Ventures, the SCVNGR platform lets organizations tap into the power of cell phones and smart mobile devices to offer customized adventures -- outside of the office, beyond the screen, in the real world.

Mena Trott Founder of Typepad talks @ TED about Blogging

2010-08-11T07:11:00.003+10:00

Semantic Enrichment of Social Media Resources for Adaptation

2010-08-06T13:23:00.000+10:00

The amount of dynamic content available on the web is rapidly growing. It becomes

more and more difficult for users to keep track of all relevant information -

in particular since it becomes more and more overwhelming to manually separate

relevant from irrelevant content. Even if a user has identified a variety of news

sites and blogs that often contain information she is interested in, those sites will

also contain lots of information the user is not interested in. Purely syntactic

filtering based, e.g., on keywords, as offered by today’s tools, offers only a partial

solution. What is really needed is semantic filtering, i.e., filtering based on some

“understanding” of the content. This will allow for higher precision, i.e., fewer

irrelevant articles displayed, and higher recall, i.e. less relevant articles deleted,

and will thus increase user confidence in using the tools.

extract from a paper by -Oliver Schimratzki, Fedor Bakalov, Adrian Knoth, and Birgitta K¨onig-Ries Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany

Read the whole paper here (Pdf)

Looking For the Sweet Spot Between LowThreshold Participation and Expressiveness in Social Media

2010-08-02T09:14:00.001+10:00

User participation is the essence of social media. But participation in itself is a malleable concept. On the Web, participation models include creating and posting to an online blog, commenting on articles, editing Wikipedia, tagging, giving a star rating and pushing a thumbs-up button.

Less users participate when the complexity of the required interaction increases. At the other side is what we call the expressiveness of a participation model. It describes how well users can communicate through a social medium, and how much information can be transmitted. -

extract from a paper by Bernhard Krupl - Vienna University of Technology, Austria

read the whole paper here (pdf)

Will Web 2.0 Social Media spell the end of Internet forums?

2010-07-31T15:52:00.004+10:00

The exponential growth of social media and the development of specialized lists within the social media networks will spell the end of Internet forums (as we have known them). In reality bulletin boards and the Internet forums were the precursors to the current blog and micro-blogging formats

Social networking across the Internet has been around for over 30 years in the form of Internet forums or bulletin boards. New users, who have recently joined and begun using social media like Facebook or Twitter, may have never participated in a traditional Internet forum.

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site. It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board. From a technological standpoint, forums or boards are web applications managing user-generated content. Does this sound familiar?

Forums have been traditionally an area where specialist information is explored, clarified, links posted and discussed. Users participating in an Internet forum may cultivate social bonds and interest groups for a thread or topic. Forums have also been an area where marketers have been able to ascertain, the amount of interest within a niche, all these aspects of information mining is being addressed more and more by the social media networks.

Broadly speaking social media now takes many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, micro blogging, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking.

Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme for different social media types in their Business Horizons article published in 2010. According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media:

1. 11. Collaborative projects.

2. 22. Blogs and micro blogs.

3. 33. Content communities.

4. 44, Social networking sites.

5. 55. Virtual game worlds.

6. 66. Virtual communities.

Technologies include: blogs, picture sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services are now being integrated via social network aggregation platforms. Like Facebook.

Over the past 5 years we have seen a steady decline in forum creation and use as Web 2.0 makes it easier to create a mini social network than to create and manage a forum.

There are four main advantages over traditional forums;

1. Speed, Social media networks offer an ongoing thread generally in real time. In the past as a forum user you would have to logout and log back in to refresh the forum to see if others had replied to the thread.

2. Specificity, Forum users who would have traditionally sought out a niche specific, up to date forum (if it existed), now the user can do a simple keyword search within their network and be able to isolate all other users discussing the topic.

3. Diversity, The wide variety of social media platforms, allows the user to express themselves in more than just text, which has certainly opened up opinion to wider group of users.

4. Moderation, There is no need for moderators as each user self moderates, using accept and like or hide and block buttons.

In a sense modern social media engagement can be seen as an evolution of the original bulletin boards and forums, many of the netiquettes are lifted from the original forum guides and rules that were developed over twenty years ago.

How long before social media absorbs and integrates all forms of online communication?

Cyber Social Consciousness

2010-07-29T13:31:00.005+10:00

You can spend a long time in the metropolitan and urban environment and never meet or acknowledge your neighbours. Cyber Social Cloud Computing is changing all that.

Cyber because it’s just 1’s and 0’s or more accurately, switches turning on and off, Social because the 1’s and 0’s emanate from real people, people with keyboards, or iPhones and Blackberries etc, and they are all conversing in a place called “The Cloud”. To understand “The Cloud”, think about all the things that you engage in via your computer or phone. How much of your activity actually exists on your hard drive and how much of it exists out in cyberspace? You use Facebook but it’s not on your computer it’s just an address in the cloud. Your bank is not on the computer it’s just an address in the cloud that you go to, and engage with.

Only a short time ago ideas travelled a physical journey to reach you, the newspaper, magazines, there has always been a distance involved and time, time for news to be created, to be written about and the time it took to get to you. We now live in a world of instant gratification, you can watch it live as it happens and if it takes too long to load your not interested, correct me if I’m wrong.

It was once that money was mostly cash it could be drawn from the bank put in your wallet or purse and then you could go out and buy stuff, pay bills, send it. Now the money is not physically real and it is real at the same time, we know there just numbers, we know these numbers are manipulated into being and these numbers manifest themselves at the ATM or the restaurant cash register. We accept that arbitrary credits and points will equate to real spending money it’s money because whoever is generating the numbers says it is, because they back up their numbers with their influence.

Physical activity doesn’t generate numbers but ideas do. Ideas become data. New data is very important, the Internet is full of information, most of it is self-replicating, that is to say, it’s not new, but when new data does appears, Google and the other search engine databases snap it up in a frenetic race for new content.

We want other people to see our data, we want people to hear our rave, what ever it might be, the internet doesn’t care if your rave is left or right, good or bad it’s just content, that adds to the ever expanding database. This Cyber Social Consciousness is unbiased its un relenting its ever-present, search for something today, if you search for the same thing tomorrow and there will be new data about it. The World Wide Web understands only one principle, growth. Google estimates the World Wide Web to be 15 million terabytes in size. There are thousands of obscure undefined servers, which are boxes of electronic equipment parked in various places around the world, that you engage with. The majority of your activity online only exists while your online, and nowhere else.

Generating money is no longer attributed to just work or physical labour, I move around in the world I walk around my house, that doesn’t generate numbers.

Sometimes the hardest physical labour you need to endure is typing on a keyboard; I type words I post them to the cloud, people read them they spend money to be online, they may choose to buy or use what I wrote about.

Language affords us the ability to express ourselves in a number of ways, yet there is a limit to this expression, because there is a finite number of letters and characters in any given language, there is a finite number to the way the languages can be arranged. You can only absorb as much as your vocabulary allows, before pushing the boundaries, until you have to reach for the dictionary. The internet is not as finite as the human brain, it’s bigger, it’s more diverse it will begin to fuse language, concept, expression, add to this equation the ability to connect with all the other vocabularies out there, add to this the ability to extract and participate from other people’s experience.

Now it’s get interesting, each experience being unique sometimes vastly sometimes minutely, yet each nuance, ads another layer to our perception of life on earth and in this universe. Where is it going? Will it ever stop? Yes it will, but it might be some time before you notice it. It may have stopped already but you wouldn’t know it, until you have been able to explore everyone else’s experience. We can double our experience and knowledge just by meeting another individual. Cyber Social Cloud Computing offers us the ability to meet and know more people in a single day than our ancestors could have met or known in an entire lifetime.

What does that do to our experience? It enriches life, make us more tolerant, your Facebook friends are living unique lives separate from you; they are experiencing it all differently, why is it so enthralling, so fascinating? Because we like to believe in secrets, we believe there are things that we do not know yet, but someone else does, we know that others are experiencing a different reality.

Cyber Social Cloud Computing lets us share and expand our experience, we don’t need to know others in an intimate way, because of we have common assumptions, we know they probably eat, they probably sleep, they love they dream just like us, so there are common truths, common realities. What does all this mean?

It means that the longer you wait to adopt, accept and engage in Cyber Social Cloud Computing the sooner you will be marginalised the faster you will become a solitary individual alone in the world and lost in the digital void. Social media is the gateway to the next stage of communicative evolution. It’s not a new marketing concept or fad, it’s very different, it is the beginning of Cyber Social Consciousness, join or be discarded. Be part of it or perish there are no other options.

RockYou Strikes Virtual Currency Deal With Facebook

2010-07-26T10:49:00.000+10:00

RockYou has entered into a five-year agreement to make Facebook Credits the exclusive payment option in its social games and applications on the social network. The deal, unveiled Thursday, is a boon for Facebook, as RockYou is one of the largest developers on the site, with about 34.6 million monthly active users and 2.7 million daily active users, according to Inside Network's AppData. read more by Mark Walsh,

Social Media and the new Marketing Paradigm.

2010-07-24T19:17:00.002+10:00

While most medium to big organisations are umming and aghing about their entry into social media and worried about R.O.I etc. A new breed of company, developer, strategist and entrepreneur are establishing themselves on the ground floor of this nue marketing paradigm. The current astronomical growth can’t be ignored, Facebook now has 500 million users, that’s nearly twice the population of the U.S.A! Twitter has the population of Brazil.

So why haven’t traditional advertising agencies, who saw all this coming over 3 years ago, leapt in and claimed the high ground in the social media stakes? Why? Because it’s just too hard, or should we say it’s not kindergarten anymore, we have arrived in college.

The problem traditional and long established companies and advertising agencies have, is that it’s certainly not as easy as broadcast TV or syndicated Radio, or the mass press and other forms of one way advertising. As an advertiser not only does the customer have to accept your initial relationship, but you have to keep that relationship healthy over time. You can’t just saturate, because once your off the “like” list it’s very difficult to get back on. You have to regain the trust of a very cynical public.

The tired old advertising agencies can’t use the same old gimmicks that they have been using for the last 30 years. Relabelling and reusing the same outdated psychological crap over and over again. They can no longer scam their corporate clients with fiddled figures, because most stats are now a matter of real time public record. You can’t hide in cyberspace, if your selling something you don’t want to any way.

It’s no longer a battle for the consumer dollar it’s a battle for consumer sentiment. That’s what social media rides on, sentiment and the public mood and it trends in real time. To deal with this nue paradigm, new innovative methods and new strategies, laterally created are required, and frankly the incumbent advertising agencies, haven’t got the “right stuff”.

It’s a whole new relationship, the buying public is no longer the blind donkey to be mass marketed to. They have suddenly become a whole bunch of different people with different likes and dislikes, opinions large and small, everybody influences everybody else. In the past the advertisers have had the ability to just throw oodles of money and saturate.

We’ll I predict that, in the social media landscape there will be an initial surge as the advertisers stumble their way into social media, but after a few mass deletions, and mass boycott, as the consumers find and exercise their power to hide and ignore anyone from there incoming stream. Others will tip toe their way in with a gently gently approach, maybe taking it a little more seriously, paying for research and not concerning themselves with R.O.I at this stage.

Expect to see the demise of some big names that have dominated advertising for a quarter of a century.

How Does Google Work?

2010-07-19T05:28:00.001+10:00

How to Do Effective Keyword Research

2010-07-18T02:24:00.000+10:00

How to Do Effective Keyword Research...

Whether you like it or not, the nitty gritty of it all, are the “keywords”, getting your labels to match with what the customer is writing and searching for.

Keyword research is the backbone of any internet business, people will use keywords to find you, they’ll use keywords to praise you and they’ll use keywords to blame you. If done right the first time your core keyword list will be a source of limitless ideas and inspiration. But getting that list in the first place takes a bit of effort.

Let’s make it interesting by putting yourself in the customer’s shoes for a while. Some of you may like to dress up, pretend your typical consumer (A) Sit down infront of the computer with a cup of instant coffee and start looking around on the internet for what you want. Transfer your keywords to an Excel spreadsheet, or a simple notepad or text edit file. After you’ve done this for a while, take off the wig, makeup and pantyhose and consider these questions:

NOTE: Each one of these questions could take up half a day of exploration if you let it, so set a specific timeframe to work through this list.

1. Is your customer really going to type your keyword in?

2. What other things will the customer write down in relation to keyword

3. What words or phrases would describe the other things?

4. What would someone type in to find your website?

5. What problems does your customer face?

6. What keywords are they typing in to find cures to those problems?

7. What is related to that problem that they are facing.?

8. What competitors are showing up right now for those keywords?

9. What are those competitors selling?

10. How can you be better than those competitors on the search results right now?

If you can initially and adequately address these issues, your going to have a very solid foundation, for your product, your advertising and plenty of good text for your social media exposure.

For more detailed information, here is an excellent article and associated definitions The Importance of Keyword Research from http://www.web1marketing.com

Free keyword research tools

Google AdWords keyword tool

Google traffic estimator

Social Media and ROI

2010-07-15T17:13:00.006+10:00

Lets talk about Social Media, Cyber-Economics and ROI (Return on Investment), the fact that this issue is at all topical and being discussed across the business community indicates that, corporations and companies are now fully committed to investing in large scale to social media marketing, because their thinking about the long haul. There thinking about when, not if, they’ll be getting their money back.

Firstly, if the organization that your working for, doesn’t have any dedicated staff to manage social media exposure, I suggest you get up right now walk into the CEO’s office and suggest you will set up the department, and it won’t cost them a cent more than they’re spending on you right now. If they don’t step out and create a consultancy that they can contact when their ready.

Social media networks are going to replace the old “convention” concept in a very short time, why do companies send management and staff to conventions, events, and lunches etc, to build real relationships. Nothing could ever replace face to face relationship building. Nothing until Social Media! For a social media to be even more productive and powerful than the bonds created in physically meeting it’s got to have an edge, that transcends the normal way we see the world. So what is the edge that social media has? What is making it so irresistible to consumers and advertisers a like? In one word, the Analytics.

Social media is reshaping and redefining the global cyber society into clearly labeled keyword groups and phrases, with the ability to target right down to hourly sentiment. Social media is showing us the real time mood of the population. You can gauge the public’s excitement about an idea, in real time. You can adjust campaigns, on the run. It’s a very flexible environment, with incredible statistical data. Which makes it quite scary to some, because it can’t be wholly quantified, but that’s OK we have to learn to manage it, not control it.

Social media relationships “aren’t determined by what you do or if your customers care or not. And they’re not about ROI. Sometimes in relationships, you get nothing back. Google built a relationship with us, (they listened to exactly what we wanted and gave it to us). We adopted it as the missing link, now we couldn’t live with out it and I don’t care what Microsoft thinks. But real relationships actually make a difference to ROI and customer care.

Even though R.O.I. is a term most closely associated with big companies and big corporations one of those terms that gets jargonized by the top end of town. However understanding and recognizing the need for R.O.I. has a vital part to play in the small business or for the lone entrepreneur. Your time is the most valuable thing you own, and the time you invest into growing your lists, your friends, followers and connections, is real money, real investment your putting into you business. So when it comes to social media investment, perhaps R.O.I should stand for something else, perhaps: “Return On Intention” would be a better way to look at it.

Over 50 Million Tweets Per Day

2010-07-13T11:45:00.000+10:00

New press release from downloadablewealth.com

2010-07-13T08:37:00.000+10:00

This movie represents a very realistic vision of the NEO cyber-economy of the very near future, where all water is protected by armed guards and drones, hackers are just blown up,(on live television) All menial work is farmed out via the net to cheap labour outsourcing in less fortunate countries.

It's depictions is a very real extrapolation of current trends. your account password is your DNA sequence. If your worried you should be, because it's this gritty not so pretty vision that we will embrace, not the clean new ethical cyber universe.

We should begin to prepare for this grim reality rather than wait for some shining future to suddenly appear. In other words, patent your DNA, secure your water supply, buy enough ammunition to fend off looters and hackers.

5 Blogging Business Models

2010-07-13T07:31:00.000+10:00

1. The Authority Blog
The first business model based on blogging is the notion of the ‘authority blog‘, this is achieved by becoming an expert in a particular field or niche and truly pumping out copious amounts of remarkable content consistently. The content you output must be useful (highly), it is often good practice to optimize it for social media, so use lists and make it easy for readers to scan.

The best idea for this type of blog is to ensure that content is easily accessible, so people do not have to pour through archives - they can simply click and go. By maximizing site usability and functionality, you will retain more returning visitors and achieve higher page-views which will in turn increase revenue, advertisements are usually limited in these types of blogs but they are found in high converting locations.

2. The Personal Blog
The second business model revolves around opening yourself up to the world and being very personable with your audience. It also involves heavy amounts of advertisements in less converting areas, hence the requirement for increased advertisements (so more revenue can be generated).This kind of blog will usually have a crowd that is very familiar with the author and has thus developed a close and solid relationship with them. This personable rapport makes readers more receptive to the authors recommendations because they are familiar with the person recommending the product and trust them more than average.

This type of business model requires the blogger to have a lifestyle which is more active than the Average Joe so that experiences can be shared with the readers, compounding the already existing relationship. The readership are more likely to complete tasks asked of them by the blogger, they also tend to visit the actual blog instead of reading the feed (largely due to the great on-blog atmosphere), so an integral part of succeeding in this type of blogging is to ensure that your blog can be interacted with in multiple ways.

3. The Paid Blogger
The third blogging based business model is that of the paid blogger. These types of blogs exhibit a sole purpose, to review products and services and be paid for it. The blogger may not make themselves known and it may seem quite ‘faceless’ at times, regardless of this, if the blog has a respectable Google PageRank, a working site design or theme and a solid writing style, they could end up earning thousands. A paid blogger may have ’some’ traffic and a few advertisements.

These kind of blogs are usually not interested in attaining huge amounts of traffic because their income is earned from reviewing products and services, not by having visitors click on ads, sign up to services or buy products. Being a paid blogger is highly rewarding, it is, however, very time consuming and requires you to sometimes review products you have not fully experienced or tested previously. Some people have earned well beyond $5,000 per month by being a paid blogger.

4. The Internet Marketer’s Blog
The fourth type of blog is that of an internet marketer. It is usually an ‘aside’ for most internet marketers, where they talk about their lives, upcoming product launches and recommend other Internet Marketers’ products. The readership is often very receptive because the internet marketer has pitched their own blog to their mailing list - thus attracting the most responsive subscribers (which means a higher chance of comments and interactivity on the blog).

To own this blog, you must first become a dedicated ‘internet marketer‘ and this often takes years to occur. So, the path to this is similar to authority blogging, but in this instance you must develop products and services (free or paid) which demonstrate your expertise in the niche or field of expertise.

5. The Affiliate Marketer’s Blog
Some people may refer to this type of blog as a spam blog because it is seen as a repository for mounds of reviews of affiliate products or services (often with lifetime residual income for the affiliate). Nonetheless, it can succeed if constructed correctly, the trick to succeeding with this is to make your blog look and feel like a real blog, including posts of real written content and links to a few pages of ‘recommended products and services’ which is where your cash will come from when people sign up to services or buy products.

The 3 LAWS of Cybereconomics

2010-07-05T01:12:00.000+10:00

The Three Laws of the Cyber-Economy

The Internet phenomena is profoundly puzzling to the traditional business world. As the network frenzy increases, and the so-called anarchic nature of this new meta-medium starts to influence our cultural, political and economic practices, many of the established business commentators keep wishing that it will all go away, and that the anomalous practices on the Internet, such practices of freely giving away information and software, are just a temporary phenomenon. These "anomalous" business practices are not transitory, but comprise the new way things are being done in the online world.

Law 1: The Price of Information Will Tend Towards Zero

Law 2: The Price of Communication Will Tend Towards Zero

Law 3: The Price of Transactions Will Tend Towards Zero

to read Michel Bauwens article in detail go to: The Three Laws of the Cyber-Economy

What we learn from this is that if your business or income stream are derived from the price of either information, communication and transactions, these streams will dwindle in time and disappear, that is to say individuals will and can, search for , free information, free communication systems and locate organisations that offer free transactions, they will in time abandon traditional business models.

Current internet marketers are feeding off the remains of old school business models, and are able to sell, free information, to those who can't mine data themselves.

Pythagoras talks about The Golden Tweet Ratio

2010-06-25T12:26:00.000+10:00

the Golden Tweet Ratio

2010-06-12T08:59:00.000+10:00

The Conversation Prism

2009-12-02T16:37:00.000+11:00

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

The Hallmark of Success is Originality.

2009-06-17T15:14:00.000+10:00

Creating a new idea is like finding a new beach, everyone who heres about the new beach knows that it will be covered with new wonderful shells because it’s a completely virgin beach. But after a while it gets harder and harder to find new shells and then it becomes time to find a new beach.

Originality comes from tapping into the creative process. The only bit of the creative process we actually know about is the moment of insight. At the moment of creative insight, boundaries dissolve between disciplines and we discover new modes of aesthetics.

Because creative thought just seems to “arrive” the credit has been laid at the feet of gods and spirits and more recently, the id or the subconscious mind.

The creative personality?

The creative personality tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. Creative people have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive.

Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion, Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.

Creative people also use the different rhythms of the day, the weekends and holidays to help shift focus and brain sate. They may spend two hours at their desk then go for a walk, because they know that pattern works for them, and they don’t feel guilty.

There is a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. The brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli (low latent inhibition) than less creative types. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness

To be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.

What we know about creativity.

Creativity is the ability to discover things that are in some sense there for anyone to find: things that the rest of humanity will appreciate because they are beautiful or because they are insightful or because they are truths about nature.

Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by a very different sate of mind. While people are dreaming up ideas the dominant brain activity is in alpha waves; a relaxed state, the conscious mind is quiet while the brain makes connections behind the scenes. But when it becomes time to work on those ideas, elaboration, the brain becomes busy. In fact the greater the difference between the sates the more interesting the ideas tend to be. Creativity is about mental flexibility. Not a two-step process, but a toggling between these states.

Creative Tips

Merge two previously separate concepts that are in conflict.

Know your stuff, creativity requires expertise, but don’t know it too well, overspecialisation puts blinders on.

Hold the intention or the question trust it and it will happen. Leave a space to daydream, relax and doze.

Creativity demands that you leave your comfort zone, that you continually challenge yourself and be prepared to confront conventional wisdom

Have reckless disregard as to what the experts think.

You need to spend a long time getting nowhere in the hope that at some later stage you’ll have what feels like a bright idea. Most of the time it’s very frustrating, you try lots of things that don’t work 90 to 95 percent of the creative process of trying things and discovering that they don’t work.

Tap into a Money Maker by Selling to Online Business Owners

2009-05-12T07:51:00.000+10:00

Are you just starting out in the world of cyber-business?

If you've just opened your doors, you may not be getting

the sales volume you want.

Perhaps it's only a sale here and another there - not quite

what you had in mind when you ... By Melissa Ingold.

SEO terminology Explained

2009-05-11T09:44:00.000+10:00

A great resource page by Suite101.com

The Race to Develop Cyber Weapons.

2009-04-29T17:52:00.000+10:00

US sets the pace in race for cyber weapons! See this disturbing post from David Sanger in New York

Preemptive Karma: Evolution, cyber economics and political karma

2009-04-11T20:26:00.000+10:00

By kevin@preemptivekarma.com (Kevin)

Evolution, cyber economics and political karma ... otherwise known as Thursday's linkage fest.
Modern life's pressures may be hastening human evolution. Very interesting piece.

Online ads: nuisance or necessity?

2009-04-02T21:30:00.000+11:00

- From ABC News Australia

Global action needed to prevent economic catastrophe: World Bank

2009-03-09T19:05:00.000+11:00

2009-03-05T16:27:00.000+11:00

Art & Internet

2009-02-26T09:50:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I visited Tim Aickin, he's an Australian landscape photographer friend, the purpose of my visit was to discuss ways he could increase targeted traffic to his photography website. However as soon as I arrived at his office, a wild electrical storm began, so we had to unplug modems and computer equipment, sit have a beer and talk, while we watched the lightening and rain tumble down all around us.

What we ended up talking about the most, was the effect that the internet and social media was having on the modern visual artist, how the artist can utilize and leverage this emerging technology to distribute their art to an ever expanding audience, without compromising their integrity and thier aesthetic vision.

In the current high tech environment, an artist can create and maintain a virtual identity on a global level, by using web marketing techniques, (many of them free) they can get their art seen by more people than ever before, and open up new ways their art can be redistributed and used by many levels of business and society.

In fact an original artist is in an envious position, because they are continually creating new content, in a content hungry environment. The internet is crying out for diversity, without it, it will become just a dull self replicating environment.
So it is continually looking for new text, new images, new opinions, new anything!

The holy grail for any artist is that their work becomes "iconic" after a time. That is to say thier work comes to represent something of meaning or value in a given culture. That it becomes instantly recognizable to the mass.

By using keyword domination, clever labeling, tags and self promotion an obscure artist in any country, can position themselves and their work on the front page of the search engines.

Whether it's the artists intention to sell more work or just to be seen and be acknowledged makes no difference. The tools and opportunities are there.

The internet takes the distribution of art out of the hands of the bourgeoisie art dealers, it allows for free opinion and free criticism, it allows the artist to deliver to all, not just to those who can afford it.

Ways to promote your site with a bit of money.

2009-02-22T14:36:00.000+11:00

1. AdWords: Google make billions of dollars every year from the AdWords-AdSense combo. Why is that? Because they work. Adwords is probably the most efficient method to generated raw traffic for your website. In order to get started you should create an account, add lots (by lots I mean hundreds if not thousands) of keywords that are related your site and set the maximum Pay-per-Click rate at $0.01. After that raise the rate by $0.01 every week or so until you start getting the desired amount of daily clicks. Notice that at lower bids the keywords will be reported as “Inactive for Search”. Do not worry, it just means that your ads will not appear on the search network (Google’s search results), but they will appear on the content network (websites of people that use AdSense).

2. Site-Specific AdWords: if you pay attention to the AdSense units you will see that most of them have a link titled “Advertise on this site”. This feature enables AdWords advertisers to create customized ads that will be displayed only on specific websites. Those ads work on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) rather than a CPC (cost per click) basis, but they can generate a good amount of very targeted traffic since you will be in control of where the ad will be displayed and of the message. You can get even better results if you use some creativity when designing the ads, click here for some examples.

3. StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a very innovative social bookmarking site that allows users to discover great websites by using a browser toolbar. When the user clicks on “Stumble” he will be delivered a website that people with similar interested rated positively. The user is also able to give positive and negative ratings to any website that he visits on the Internet. StumbleUpon also offers advertising campaigns, calledStumbleUpon Ads, where you can deliver your website directly to those “Stumblers”. It costs $0.05 per page delivered, but since the websites that appear on StumbleUpon usually have a high quality it is very likely that part of that paid traffic will convert into regular readers.

4. Text Link Ads: if you are trying to increase your search engine rankings to leverage organic traffic you should consider buying some text link ads. While those text links can also generate direct traffic the biggest benefit you will have is an improvement on your search rankings, specially if the links are placed on authoritative and relevant websites. There are several places to buy text links, including specialized companies like Text-Link-Ads and Text Link Brokers or online forums like Digital Point’s market place.

5. Direct Banner Sales: most established websites sell banner ads or sponsorship plans directly. Those advertising deals usually are structured with weekly or monthly fees, regardless of the number of impressions or clicks that you will get. Despite this characteristic a banner placement can represent good value for money because apart from the direct traffic you will also create visibility and brand awareness. Readers of the website where you will display your banner will associate the message on the banner with your site or blog. Should they come across that banner or message two or three times it is very likely that they will get curious and decide to check what the buzz is all about. Another advantage of banner placements is the fact that people will unconsciously think that the author of the website endorses your content or product.

6. Sponsored Reviews: buying some sponsored reviews is a good way to kick-start a website. They will bring backlinks, traffic and RSS subscribers. There are many market studies confirming that “word of mouth” is the most efficient way to capture people’s attention, and that is just what you get with sponsored reviews. You can either pay a low price (sometimes as low as $5 per review) to get a large number of reviews from small sites or you can focus on large players (which can charge several hundreds of dollars for a single review) that are authorities on your niche. The best way to purchase sponsored reviews is through sites like SponsoredReviews.com, ReviewMe orPayPerPost.com.

7. Blog Networks: there are several blog networks founded around a traffic exchange principle. Basically you create an account for you blog and you earn credits by surfing other members’ blogs. Afterwards you can use those credits to make people visit your blog or to display your banners around the network. The interesting part is that most of those blog networks allow users to purchase credits with money, and the price is really convenient. You should be able receive hundreds of visitors or to get thousands of banner impressions for less than 10 dollars. Some blog networks that sell credits includeBlog Explosion, Blog Soldiers and Blog Advance.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

2009-02-20T09:18:00.000+11:00

You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are some steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com) http://www.my.yahoo.com

2. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

3. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

4. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com

5. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

6. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

7. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

8. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

9. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

10. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

11. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

12. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

13. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

14. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box.

15. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

Cybereconomic Stimulus.

2009-02-13T15:27:00.000+11:00

There's a lot of talk about “economic stimulus”, what does that mean exactly? Well.. governments the world over are inventing money they don’t have to give to corporations, companies, community groups and even individuals. So as they have enough confidence to go out and spend it, thus funneling money back into a decrepit and ailing economic system.

All this stimulus is going to have only a short term band aid effect, a bit like an adrenalin rush, which will fade and leave everyone lower than before, its going to make the corporate numbers for 2009 look better than they otherwise would. The Trillions, billions and millions being squandered to prop up a system that is obviously in decline, that obviously can’t sustain itself, because its been riding on the back of a resource driven economy.

Now there are no new resources left, it can’t go on in the same way. The recent global economic forum in Davos ended up being a blame fest, with no solutions, no innovations and no new ideas except those put forward by Al Gore. Those with access to the bailout millions are going to pocket it and run.

To survive economically, if your company got a bailout, its time to bailout yourself!. Investors should immediately start pulling there money out of resource driven conglomerates and putting it into infotech, green, recycled and sustainable startup companies, these are the only ones that will survive and prosper over the coming years.

The first thing that goes is Research and Development. If you’ve got investments in companies look carefully at their proposed R&D budgets if they are reducing R&D get out, get out now!

Existing pre and post cyber companies are going to spend the bailout monies buying up the competition, cutting services, staff (who will be asked to mulit task and be more productive, so as to maintain a greedy profit margin thus reducing economic diversity and when the shit hits the fan again, as it will by the middle of 2010, the big will be bigger and the falls will be greater no amount of bailout is going to save them. (there will be no more pretend money left for another bailout anyway

The future of economic survival lies in micro transactions, information products, it lies in individual peoples ability to create real value and services out of their own experience and knowledge. Shifting your income base to a number a small streams, sustainable from cottage size organizations is the key to survival in the neo cyber economy. Soon there will be a new phrase “Post Bailout”

In summary, go small, go wide, so when the great fall comes your not dependent on one income stream.

2009-02-08T07:43:00.000+11:00

The New Digital Order

From a Raw power to the establishment of a Res Publica

Under the combined pressures of technical devices and social trends of a new nature, industrial structures are being caught up in the folds of an unparalleled cultural economy: production, communication, preservation, consumption, the exchange of images, sounds, texts; in other words, all forms of intellectual or sentient matter that take the form of homogeneous data that can be automatically managed through the use of their digital identity

Important cultural effects can be expected from this general logico-technical recycling process, which, in a singie movement via the polymorphic economy of the digit, will affect the practice of rationality (knowledge organization) or material processes (the production, preservation, exchange or consumption of tangible entities) as well as - and this is the most important innovation -the very condition under which one deals with symbols (the production, preservation, exchange and consumption of signs as well as meaning) and one's sense of esthetics (the production, preservation, exchange and consumption of sensory stimuli). Thus the digital order appears to be first and foremost a body which must urgently be raised to the status of a Res Publica.

The Digital Order and Its Categories

The increased penetration of Automated Information - calculated and calculating - throughout all sectors of society (industry, communications, science, education, etc.) must certainly be of interest to anthropologists and philosophers, for whom the new order presents stimulating concepts (virtuality, multimedia, interactivity, etc.) as surprising cultural adventures. The 0/1 dyad is at the origin of this new order; "Unlike the atom," remarks one of the champions of this new culture, "the bit has no color, shape, or weight and can travel at the speed of light" (N.Negroponte "Digital Man", Robert Lafont, Paris, 1995) Because of this quantitatively disqualifyng aspect, the new informational order tends to create a certain type of space4ime and a new, emergent form. Neo-industrial groups must henceforth operate within the framework of this new notion, restructuring the logic and the characteristic qualities of previous notions of space-time:

- Fluidity. On a practical level, the numeric system attempts to organize the recycling of elements, experiments or signs in a flow of homogeneous data, traveling at the speed of light in a rhizomatic field. Solids lose all authority in this context and are henceforth subordinated to liquids or even gases. Cultural notions thus take on a dominantly meteorological identity affected by a fundamental instability.

- Openness and multiplicity. Social organisms are henceforth confronted with an informational space that is constantly expanding and in which each element, each region, takes its meaning and functionality from the relations that tie it to other regions (interconnections). Although it may provoke predictable reactions of cultural identification, this space nonetheless marks the definite end of stable, separate territorial authority (in the order of things as well as the order of words and knowledge).

- Polymorphism and metamorphosis. Here the process overrides the state of things, the passage outweighs the territory and the potentiality of becoming a sign becomes more important than a sign itself. The notion of multimedia, a pure product of the digital economy, brings into being the notion of thought in all directions, the polymorphic essence of the object of thought. On this basis the choice of a particular form (visual, audio, conceptual) will no longer be based on the origin but rather on the interfaces used for conversion. The choice of a specific channel, medium or language will enable the digit to exist in the long run as an image, sound or text, for a specific use.

- Ubiquity. The chronological authority of time (differed time) will give way to real time; in other words, an immediacy will be established, in which the particular here and now of an object will be taken over by the infinite multiplication of its representations (the data). Although they will not disappear, the topographic adjustment of places and original cultural identities (ties to land, geographic sites, to history or an author) will henceforth be "covered" by a layer of signs that are no longer the passive representation of things, but are designed to facilitate their manipulation through the use of their very "pretenses".

- Virtuality. Power overrides the present; the present henceforth includes another dimension - call it quasi-presence (visual, audio, sensorial) - that. is affected by the interactive~ simulating power of the digits and the model.

Excerpts from an essay: "The New Digital Order by Alain Renaud (go here for full text)

Can You Maintain Your Massive List?

2009-01-28T07:03:00.000+11:00

Internet marketers have flocked, like molluscs to a rock. to the Virtual Social Media networks, because it’s been seen as an easy place to “build a list” and send out mass communications, to a group of people all seemingly interested in the same thing, with an aim to sell their product or service. Why easy? Because people are desperate to connect with other people, "in a safe way" Facebookers, MySpacers, Twitterers all get into a frenzy of building up the numbers of friends and followers, just to get the numbers, because “more is better” which just a status thing, but suddenly, because of the nature of social media, all those people the marketer connects with have something to say too, they’re no longer just one way consumers, they have a life as well. There experience as humans is unique.

This puts the online marketer in an awkward position, they must maintain an ongoing conversation with them or they’ll be dropped or blocked. People want to know that their messages are being heard, people want to be relevant! Suddenly the marketers “list” is live, it wriggles and makes noises it even asks annoying questions, that the marketer must answer personally. Blanket phrases and rehashed truisms don’t cut it anymore.

List maintenance has become a time consuming activity, it takes a lot more effort to maintain a social media list than an email or auto-responder list. This is where the test is.

As an online marketer can you maintain your massive list?

Is what you’ve got to say interesting enough to keep your list live?

Can you keep track of everybody’s interests?

To improve your overall productivity and connectivity, with your social media network switch off the net each day for a few hours. Prepare content offline, because in this way you are leveraging your imagination and your personal experience, rather than reacting, responding or duplicating someone else’s

Content is primarily sourced from the reinterpretation of real world experiences, even though other users are unable to have the exact same real world experience as you, they are having a human experience but in a different location, so the reinterpretation of your experience gives them something to relate to and feel with. Maintain an emotional connection and you can maintain and grow your list.

What the FUck is Web 2.0?

2009-01-22T01:16:00.000+11:00

We have come to expect that a digital term followed by a consecutive number will imply that the digital asset has been altered or/and improved in some way. (Except when it comes to Microsoft products, a new number there usually means “keep away” until they get the bugs out three more upgrades down the track), But in most cases V,2.0,3.1,4.2,5.7 etc infers that some improvement has been made.

The interplay between the Blogosphere, the traditional WWW and the emerging social media, has been termed Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is an upgrade vastly different to the ones we have been used to, because Web 2.0 has included the "wet-ware" as a major component of the overall infrastructure. Wet-ware otherwise known as the human user, for Web 2.0 to work it requires people using and building credibility and trust within expanding networks, The personal relationship has gone viral. In Web 2.0 we will see the re-emergence of the spokesperson as a force in the business world. In Web 1.0 we went through a phase where organizations, transferred or tried to transfer each and every product or service across to a static website. But what happens is that most pre and post cyber business models can’t keep up with the changing pace and demands, their websites seemingly remain static. Well that’s really fatal because when a business becomes static it loses money and eventually loses the game.

In 2009 information needs to be changed constantly, it needs to be ever so slightly different each time the user reencounters the information source, news sites are a perfect example, when I go to my favourite news site, I want it to offer me new info each time, I feel ripped off if it hasn’t changed since I laste looked, because I know that the world has changed, in the last hour, so much must have happened since I last looked why isn’t it reflected by my news site, I conclude that they’re slack, the news 5 minutes old is no longer news its history. I look for a different source. It seems to be the same phenomenon as channel surfing was on Free to Air TV.

The other most important aspect of Web 2.0 is it’s interactivity, (the wet-ware thing again) the fact that I can leave an opinion or comment, no matter how mundane or stupid it might be, and my opinion becomes part of the whole network of information in this way I feel connected. I feel important, significant in some way, especially when others respond to my opinion or comments. My input, no matter how minor ads value to the existing information, I watch the development of a business, via email, via comments on their Blog, I take note of how many followers or subscribers they have, I compare their performance against the response others have to the same thing.

We can conclude that the static business model has little value now, in 2009 I want to know what my friends on Facebook, My Space and Twitter think about it, what’s the “Tag cloud” looking like? I want to know if my suspicions and interpretations are the same as other real people.

In fact my relationship to most large organizations is generally via an Auto-responder. So I know that I haven’t been heard, my opinion really doesn’t count. Consumers/Users don’t want to be statistics any more. They want to be relevant. Within Web 2.0 you can be relevant.

Should MLM be Banned from Facebook and Twitter?

2009-01-17T09:37:00.000+11:00

MLM or Massive List Marauding is like drift net fishing.

The concept is pathetically simple. Set a big enough, wide enough net and your bound to catch something, in fact your bound to ensnare everything that’s going past, there’s absolutely no skill in it. Its just another expression of the bigger is better American mantra. Targeted marketing like Ad words, is more like line fishing, everybody gets a choice to take the bait or not, it takes skill to lure the customer, it takes patience, it takes originality.

Why is MLM fucked? Well not everybody wants to join MLM, not everyone wants to be assaulted daily with pathetic sales clichés and the misuse of profound and beautiful sayings twisted and distorted to encompass the pursuit of personal profit. There’s nothing wrong with the pursuit of personal profit, but it raises an ethical issue.

There are people out there interested in creating a legitimate online income, using their wits and skills to attract other like minded individuals.

MLM takes the lowest common denominator, “make money” that’s it just "make money" which actually isn’t a thing in itself, making money is a result of offering a product, value or service to others. MLM is not a product or a service or even interesting. Its just large scale drift net fishing, the result of which is a large proportion of potential customers caught in it are quickly fleeced, discarded and are so disillusioned they become completely suspicious of every other legitimate program or product that is on offer on the net.

MLM destroys the trust and respect that potential customers might have had in other products. Making it even harder for other marketers to convince people of real legitimacy. The question remains should MLM be banned from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter?

Trends

2009-01-12T06:29:00.000+11:00

What’s a trend? A fad or temporary fashion, a popular or convenient notion, a easy way to determine what you are going to do next.

Create trends don’t follow them, to this there are three simple rules to keep in mind.

1. Don’t let trends govern you or your decisions.

2. Be free to counter trends.

3. Compare your own thinking with the trends.

Think outside the box. There will always be another way to solve or overcome any problem or obstacle through creative thinking. It may take a little more effort to do this but you can make yourself stand out from the crowd by following these simple rules.

95% of emails and advertising that I see coming from internet marketers are the same, 95% of internet marketers fail to succeed, 95% of internet marketers just copy paste and send rather than observe, analyse and create.

Where Do I Start?

2009-01-09T06:42:00.000+11:00

If you’ve been on the net, even for a short while, if you’ve been signing up to all the latest and greatest programs and following each and every self proclaimed Net marketing Guru. Each day your inbox is filling with, let me say crap. You spend those first enthusiastic hours of the day reading and it all sounds great, but it’s not getting you anywhere apart from distracting you from your original objective, and your probably still not making any money either. What do you do to turn your fortunes around?

Decide and Focus my friends, Decide and Focus.

To DECIDE you must know some simple yet profound truth’s about yourself. These are not things that you have been told to be true, but they are things you know, in your heart to be true, things that, in the course of your existence you have discovered to be true. Don’t make decisions based upon second hand perceptions of yourself these are always going to fall short. Only you know you and no-one else, knows what things excite you, only you know what things drive your passions, however mundane they may seem they are your personal truth. If you search the global Blogosphere and look at the top 50 Blogs on the planet, you’ll find that they consist of very mundane topics, yet hundreds of thousands of users flock to these blogs each day to know what is going on in someone else’s head, to discover what other people are thinking and feeling about the everyday, why? Because the majority of the users on the net are devoid of originality, devoid of personal thoughts they need constant guidance. The majority of people fear making a concrete decision, that’s why the western world is the home of the wage slave.

To FOCUS, you must apply a sort of tunnel vision to your directions and actions. All those other things will still be there tomorrow or the next day, begging for your attention. Focus requires an ability to close out, for a time, all other distractions. Most people fear that if they focus on one thing they will miss out in some way. This is a myth by focusing you will gain the satisfaction of completion, rather than living in the nether world of half finished projects. Focus makes you a magnifying glass people will always stare more carefully through a magnifying lens in the hope that they will see, that which was hidden from their naked eye.

Zero Cost Transactions

2009-01-07T20:03:00.000+11:00

The Internet creates an environment in which both the market and transactions can happen seamlessly and at near-zero cost, as it allows the elimination of all human intervention in the transactional shopping and commerce practices. Micro-payment technology, enabled by digital cash systems, have created new sectors of the economy in which knowledge workers are able to directly sell their wares to the consumers. Also, this has generated Internet re-engineered businesses who have substantially eliminated physical intermediaries, and allowed them to operate at seriously reduced costs. In turn, the physical intermediaries have been replaced by Internet market-makers who create a context for supply and demand to meet and transact, directing our scare attention in the sea of offerings.

What does the Internet God look like?

2008-12-29T20:53:00.000+11:00

Why is there so much information on the Internet?

2008-12-29T08:28:00.000+11:00

Besides the argued academic tradition that birthed the Internet and the still prevailing consumer-to-consumer exchange and self-help ethos, there are compelling reasons that force corporations and organizations to give away information.

The Web is an invitational medium where the scarce attention and limited time-bandwidth of the user has to be earned by compelling and useful content or services. Without a distinctive practice of what could be called the Principle of Intellectual Philanthropy, there can be no successful marketing. Hence companies are forced to use information as teasers. Also, in order to compete, companies are forced to enrich their products with networked-based features, usually information-rich features which enhance to value of the products they are selling.

Because of the Internet and the Web, it becomes cheaper to produce and distribute information. The Net combines the force of the need to give away content in order to attract attention in the first place; and the fact that it has become relatively cheap to produce information.

This means that it will from now on be extremely difficult to charge for basic information. For every company trying to sell information, there will be a competitor giving it away for free!

There are solutions for the information industry, based on advertising-based revenue strategies, based on moving up to information food chain (from databases to decision-bases), based on phased approaches combining free access with value-added services.

What does Cyberspace Look Like?

2008-12-27T16:15:00.000+11:00

Cyber Quotes

2008-12-26T21:49:00.000+11:00

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation: - William Gibson

The Internet is a global communications medium. Decentralized, flexible, and anti-monopolistic, it is particularly suitable to the promotion of pluralism, freedom of expression and access to public information.- Center for Democratic Technology

There is no escape from the transformations brought on by “the Internet”. Only the beginnings have been witnessed of the euphoria and the anxiety, of the gains and losses incurred by this shift to a truly planetary economy.- Michel Bauwens

Anybody can be the Top Player in the Game

2008-12-24T12:44:00.000+11:00

In the Neo-cyber environment, My Space, You-Tube, Twitter, FaceBook etc, we know that every individual with a registered name, every birth certificate can claim the virtual territory of their own name and every variation thereof in a.com. That is to say that anybody can get a domain name and hosting as easily as any large company or corporation.

The neo-cyber business person, has cut their teeth in the online real time games like Rune-scape, War-craft and alike. Where they had to fight for survival and deal in millions of game dollars from the age of seven. We’re they learn that anybody could win and be the top player, they had to learn and become adept @ planning and strategy. make deals, allies and relationships, buy and sell property. They have also learned to kill from time to time to get what they want. The world of real online business, real money is just another extension of the game.

The thing to remember is; that the WWW is an unstoppable and uncontrollable force, a global communications medium. Decentralized, flexible, and anti-monopolistic, it is particularly suitable to the promotion of pluralism, freedom of expression and access to public information.

However if groups of people gather in cyberspace, they can command a presence, they can dominate. As each group grows in size, it social or political power grows as well. Journalist’s will now quite often refer to, or quote a census or statistic derived from You Tube or My Space.

Social networking and acquiring online assets is a way of life to the gamers. How long will it be before the wealthiest people in the world are16-18 cyber teen geeks?

Frankly, Pre and Post cyber business hasn’t got a chance of survival. With proper SEO a 15 year old can get as much business traffic to their profile page than IBM can.

Anybody Can Make Money Online Guaranteed!

2008-12-23T10:07:00.000+11:00

Anybody with ten 10 bucks, half a brain and one working index finger can make money online. There are enough "no-brainers" "turn-key" out there to make every single piece of squeeze page rhetoric to ring true. However only 15% of internet business owners can make a reasonable living. and about 5% are going to get rich. You might say! thats appalling! It's all a huge scam!

No more than anything else in the business world is, in reality, like most industry groups in the Western Industrialized World. The average, success rate of new business ventures is only 10-12% . Only 1 in ten, go on to succeed, make money and turn a profit, in the physical or real world.

For example in Hollywood (its even worse in Australia), film businesses everybody knows that only one in 10 movies a producer makes will actually make money, and turn a profit for the investors. But you've got to do the work and make the other nine movies anyway, cause that big one is going to cover the costs of all the other losses combined and make it all worthwhile.

The reason why the SucceSS phenomenon is so, let me say, over stated, on the Internet, is that cyberspace is a place where sometimes lone individuals can succeed and achieve, what in the past was only achievable by a large, expensive to run, organization, carrying high overheads which meant that a company would generally need to turn over millions each year to stay in the race.

The internet riches, holy grail is always just around the corner. So you invest, you learn, you experiment, you spend lots of money, etc. Because when you do strike the lucky 7even, you do stand to make a lot of money and as an individual and it all goes into your pocket. What's the trick?

Well your chances of finding it, are as as good as mine or anybody else with half a brain and a working index finger. So that makes us aware of the score! Then how do traditional businesses do it? If the odds of success are as good as they get. It comes down to plain hard work, which on the internet means hours and hours of methodical, systematic and calculated work.

But because of the very, viral nature of the WWW, news of success spreads just like a plague, and at each node of interpretation, every portal and every screen the story is heard a little differently, the "bug" hits people in a myriad of languages, spreading across the globe like a pressure wave of excitement.

Then you calm down and settle back down into the plain old hard work again, your tickled enough to keep going.

Finding what you want on the internet.

2008-12-22T08:50:00.000+11:00

In the internet business game,We can seek to determine what people are wanting by what is being searched for on a daily basis however because of the very nature of the internet and it textural structure users are always going to be limited by their grasp of their language. The culture you grew up in, the schooling you did or didn’t do, the books you read, it’s all going to have a significant bearing on your ability to find what you want.

Expand your ability to find by expanding your vocabulary.

Yes you may want and desire many things but if you don’t know what to call them, if you don’t know what they are labeled as then your limited in a very big way in finding what you want. To combat this problem of general ignorance in the mass, search engines like Google can predict bad spelling, they can predict and offer alternatives to the words you use and they can point you in the direction of what others with similar interests in keywords are also looking for and discovering.

The Factory default society

Browser manufacturers like Microsoft and Mozilla assume that people are on the whole, nice, (we all know that hidden behind every Christian is a serial killer), but they don’t want to encourage anyone or be seen to be encouraging aberrant behaviour. So most people, (unknowingly) live in a world of “moderate” or "safe" search or the factory default search, to avoid being shocked or disturbed to some degree by what’s really out there.

Moderate or safe search is much the same as TV censorship, it lulls people into a false sense of security so they can be funnelled into the average, Why? Well, it’s about predicting consumption, if you can manipulate the average then you can target advertising and marketing much more effectively.

To get a better idea of what the world is really like, switch safe search off, see what happens, just because you come across offensive or disturbing material doesn’t mean you have to visit that site or view or read the contents. Besides all the really heavy stuff you have to pay to see anyway. Remember you can just turn the channel or switch off the TV if you don’t like what you see, if you can’t work that out then you deserve what you get!

the Cyber Transaction Process

2008-12-18T19:34:00.000+11:00

getting a cyber edge on the competition

2008-12-17T07:02:00.000+11:00

Make real money selling virtual objects

2008-12-16T06:33:00.000+11:00

1. Virtual objects aren’t really objects - they’re services

Virtual objects aren’t really objects for example, a virtual flower service has 3 components, firstly there’s the object itself represented by a flower icon, then there’s the animation of someone sending the flower and finally, there’s the payoff of everyone being able to see that you got a flower. The payoff is the service people are willing to pay up to $10 for.

As the barriers between peoples’ online and offline selves continue to erode, this market for virtual goods is going to explode. People are going to continue to seek out ways to show real emotional engagement online. Virtual gifts are a particularly compelling way to package your attention.

2. Virtual objects create real value for people

Each day, thousands of transactions take place via markets such as eBay for virtual swords, currency, or clothing across a multitude of virtual world environments. For people who purchase virtual items such as swords or armor, buying these items increases the overall satisfaction they receive from spending time in this virtual world / online community / online game. For example, struggling along as a level 20 character might give 20 units of personal satisfaction per hour, whereas progressing as a level 20 character with a very powerful sword could confer 50 units per hour. In this case, the user would be willing to pay the equivalent of whatever amount generates an incremental 30 units of personal satisfaction for the sword.

Probably the most powerful way that virtual objects create real value is through self expression. "RockYou" is now serving 150 million+ widgets a day - widgets that people put on their Facebook profiles to differentiate themselves - much as they do in the real world with accessories and bling.

Cybercash V1.0

2008-12-13T13:54:00.000+11:00

Proposed new US $100 Bill to be printed in 2012

commemorating release of Cybernoid V 1.0 - "Ranken"

Neo-Cyber

2008-12-13T08:35:00.000+11:00

The emergence of CyberEconomics has created three global business models.

1. Pre-Cyber

The “dot com” era was the “Pre-Cyber” business world trying to own the new, trying to buy up everything, absorb it into their infrastructure a desperate attempt to catch up, to claim the new cyber territory. But who actually made the most money? Virtual entrepreneurs, who, invented words, dot com names, created out of nothing. These virtual properties which were eagerly bought up by the archaic business models of the past. Then it peaked, the old pre-cyber businesses thought they had claimed all the territory. Then came the Forums, the Blogs, etc that was the dawn of Post-cyber business, still attached to some other entity to generate income and profit.

2. Post-Cyber

The Post cyber business operates on the principle of offering itself freely becoming an vital part of everyday life, then after a time, requesting dependent users to support its continued existence by donating in multiple micro transactions e.g Netscape, Google, Wikipedia,

We have the emergence a new business model.”

3. Neo-Cyber”.

In the Neo-cyber world, My Space YouTube, FaceBook etc we know that every individual with a registered name, ie a birth certificate can claim and profit the virtual territory of their own name and every variation thereof. The Neo-Cyber business person has cut their teeth in the online real time games, Runescape, War craft and alike, where they had to fight for survival from the age of five. It is all an extension of the game.

NoT an Ounce Of OriginalitY!

2008-12-09T09:09:00.000+11:00

Make Money Online

Aren’t you just SiCK & TiRed of that phrase?

There’s one major thing missing from the entire internet marketing industry, “creativity”, its dominated by what seems to be disassociated CPA’s, who couldn’t cut in the real world and are searching to scam a quick buck out of each and every user in cyberspace, rehashing 1960’s and 70's advertising slogans and concepts, offering no new ideas, no innovation, not an once of creative thinking. All trapped in an archaic pre cyber mindset that is modelled off outdated and abused systems, programs etc.

Born in the square, destined to live always within it and never to see beyond it, some people don’t even realise there are sides to it. Is this you? It is not in the systems vested interest for you to escape. Duplication, that’s what the guru’s advocate, copy and multiply. spread like a plague. Why because its real real easy, it certainly easier than coming up with one new idea.

Users, who are at first idealistic and optimistic about the cyber economy are crushed under the weight of internal corruption and conservative thinking. It is so boring that it turns enthusiastic, motivated people off in a matter of months. Is that you?

In desperation they turn to dodgy health products and relabelled re-branded crap! Lets face it no matter what colour you paint it is still crap on the inside!

Many guru’s believe originality arises from sending us stories about their boring and disaffected lives, or stories of the same random individuals that happened across riches. (perhaps 10 years ago). Hell we don't even know if Jason Cardomine is still alive! That’s what most gurus are selling and what most users have to wade through, a pile of spam pretending to be ham! looking for a trace of originality in their inbox.

We have the spin doctors, the profit coaches, the gurus of money making science there all out there trying to get a piece of you and your wallet. Sucking up the fruits of your labour and turning it into a thick homogeneous grey coloured jelly, how much of your email is regurgitated?

What’s the first thing your asked to do when signing up to a new program “please add me to your address book”, why because the filters will see their mail as just the same old SPAM and chuck it, I say trust the filters before you trust the words of the online money guru’s!

Humans have faced each challenge that nature presented us with innovative solutions. The greatest ideas have come from left field, and as we know traditional capitalism is scared of the term “left”

My suggestion: Don’t adjust your email SPAM filters, let them be original and try and get through! What will get through is something new, don't hold your breathe though!

Cyber-economics is commerce born and breed in cyberspace it quite often bears no relationship to the real tangible world, so it shouldn't be treated in the same way.

Cyber Musing # 3

2008-12-08T10:29:00.000+11:00

Naïve pre cyber business believe that Cybereconomics is just about effecient electronic transactions over the internet. Well it's not! my prediction is most of currently existing pre-cyber businesses will collapse and dissappear within 10 years.

Cybereconomics is about the generation of complete virtual properties and products, straight from the mind of a human, translated cybernetic

ally via text or image then transposed, marketed and distributed via the internet delivered, all financial transaction done almost automatically in an binary format.

With the end user/customer deciding when and if "it" should physically manifest, albeit printed or manufactured to specifications somewhere then shipped somewhere else. Just Look at Cafe Press

As the interest in surgically placed cybernetic implants grows the PC interface ie the mouse and keyboard will vanish, Voice recognition software, motion sensory arrays and optical recognition. Are metamorphosising the whole world of human creativity.

In the the future:

‘Think it” and it will be manifest.

“Speak it” and it will be written.

“See it” and the world will be able to watch it too.

But thats in the not too distant future. Right now though, the cyber-economy can exist in a the palm of your hand and not in any particular location. Its players are a new generation of mobile remote business entrepreneurs who have grown up "in the Game" they met their friends "in the Game" they now know how to enter and win the "Game" always on vacation yet always in the office 24/7. With an array of cybernetic employees that work for nothing, and can create and distribute information around the globe in milliseconds.

No Free Rides

2008-12-05T06:37:00.001+11:00

Something the physicist and metaphysicists knew well before the advent of the internet, was:

There are no free rides in the universe!

Everything that happened, is happening and will ever happen, costs something! It costs energy, be it vast and cosmic or subatomic in its proportion, there is and always will be a price to pay.

Lets bring it down to earth then......

So when we filter down through the atmosphere on planet earth park ourselves at some address be it physical or virtual it all still costs something usually money

When your looking at a web-page, its not free. Chances are that you or somebody else has paid money to see it.

You pay to have access to the internet at home, be it hundreds of dollars a month or $2.00 at the local internet cafe, besides the coffee usually costs more than internet access. And if its seems free then the cost has been hidden somewhere in the overall transaction.

Remember there are no free rides!

And if my memory serves me correctly that money is being paid to someone else and I could stand corrected here, but I'll take the risk

A lot of money ends up in only a few peoples hands.

There is some stupid list somewhere which shows how 100% of world wealth is concentrated in about 5% of the population.

CyberEconomics is about addressing this issue, redistribution of the binary econmy amongst all users big or small.

We need it Now!

2008-11-27T10:49:00.000+11:00

The Neo-Cyber business world is being continually frustrated and deliberately thwarted by the established pre and post cyber businesses systems ability to deliver real time transactions, real time profits, real time decisions.

Why because the rate of change is too fast for the old business world they cant keep up. Their systems can’t adapt and change as rapidly as the cybereconomy does. The delays and time lags are merely veiled attempts to hold back the potential growth of the neo Cyber economy.

Remember information 5 minutes old is considered ancient history and not worth paying for!

Neo-Cyber businesses need their profits now!

Not in two days or a week, or dividends paid at the end of the financial year. The neo-cyber economy wants and needs to turn over, reinvest and spend their profits now, this instant!

New business ideas spring up hourly sometimes every few minutes. The savvy neo cyber business person is being alerted, notified and pinged constantly and they require the ability to divert money into these new ventures.

Does TV owns your brain?

2008-11-01T19:45:00.000+11:00

Do you have a identity of your own?

How long have you been watching TV?

How many years would it be?

How many commercials have been infused into your mind?

It shaped U into the person, that you are now.

If you don't know who you are,

well you weren't watching were you!

Lets get Wet!

2008-11-01T10:40:00.000+11:00

Professor Robert Schenk used the term "CyberEconomics" in his interactive paper, An Analysis of Unintended Consequences in his interpretation CyberEconomics is a vast interactive meshing together of monetary history, practice and theory.

I like to interpret CyberEconomics as the vast virtual ocean of money. where, those with cyber skills and know how, can either take modest sips, drink with gusto or dive in and swim.

The myriad of ways we can "get wet" in this Ocean, are perhaps the greatest Unintended Consequences of the meshing together of the internet and global economic trends.