tech ronin

Career Freedom

I found a neat lady - Wharton MBA, UC Berkeley PhD. in Marketing, ex-Professor, career coach, writer - whose got a ton of free stuff about mid-life transitions and career freedom on her website. She has a free ezine, a free ecourse and lots of free articles. She probably sells stuff too but I'm starting with free right now. Her name is Cathy Goodwin. She's moved a lot ( a very ronin kind of thing to do), her domain name is movinglady.com! I love it. I am already signed up for the ezine and ecourse based on what I've seen on her site. And, I lied. She found me on Ryze! I love being found by cool people. That's what visibility and self-disclosure is all about.

Easing into an Ezine?

Yeah, I'm thinking about starting an ezine. Now that I've proven to myself that I can write pretty regularly and that I'm a decent writer, the thought that blogging is just a proving ground for more serious undertakings such as an ezine has insinuated itself into my consciousness. I am quite pleased with blogging and I don't want to switch or, heaven forbid, add writing an ezine to my bulging schedule.

Blogging feels like self-expression and contribution without expectations. I can write what I want. I provide value and all that, but it's low key. I can meander and switch topics. I have lots of latitude, or at least, I've granted myself that permission. Ezines seem more like work, more practical and businesslike.

Since fun is the operative word in my intellectual life, I am taking my own sweet time researching ezines and their value as a marketing tool. I've been arguing here about the importance of personal branding, saying that you can build your personal brand and your reputation (that's the old-fashioned term) and get slightly famous by writing a weblog. And that doing so will not only be cool and fun but will help your bottomline.

But it seems that most of the internet marketing books I read these days recommend and many websites I visit have e-newsletters (ezines). The volume of marketing messages and spam being what it is, the argument goes, if you want to market to someone, you need their permission (Permission Marketing - Seth Godin) and you need to earn that permission by offering real value. So you offer value in your ezine and put your marketing in there along with your valuable non-marketing content. Then you build your mailing list by offering people the chance to subscribe everywhere you can.

Besides websites and weblogs, ezines are delivering an incredible amount of valuable (and not so valuable) information - for free. In this economy, free works. The only price of admission is your email address and first name. I don't know the numbers. I know weblogs are rising dramatically and I think ezines are rising but not sure whether blogs are replacing ezines or not. Blogs are completely free, you don't have to give out your email address and you don't have to receive a piece of email on a regular basis. Instead you can read a blog when you want.

I voluntarily and enthusiastically receive four free ezines right now: Robert Middleton's More Clients, Wizard of Ads Monday Morning Memo, Adam Engst's Tidbits and I just started Martin Avis's Kickstart Daily.

There's a difference between an ezine and a blog. The ezine is potentially more focused and polished. It's delivered less frequently - typically weekly - and thus more time is available for editing and researching. All things being equal, the signal to noise ratio of the article is higher just because more thought goes in and more extraneous junk is edited out. I'm afraid, though, that the authors often go too far and throw out some good personal, authentic voice, context stuff with the bath water in their efforts to be concise and professional.

Typically, even if you get higher value content, you *pay* by submitting your email address and *pay* by tolerating more marketing content coming along for the ride (not that you have to read it). A recommended ratio I heard was 75% value-content and 25% marketing-content. And there's always that chance that the email address you've supplied, no matter the wonderful privacy assurances, will slip out into wider distribution. I trust people, but accidents happen. Of course, I've slathered my email address all over my websites and public forums so am really not risking much to give it out one more time.

Mr. Kickstart Daily, Martin Avis, suggests that if you want to start your *own* ezine you should start reading ezines, pick the 10 you like best and then emulate the essence that makes them your favorites. He also suggests, you write a few ezine articles before you start to make sure you can do it. This sounds like good advice.

There seems to be a progression out there that goes blog, ezine, free articles on other ezines and websites with attribution, paid articles on ezines, paid articles in print, chapter of a book, book. I think you can skip steps and have a multi-pronged approach. But, yes, I buy it and I've always said I wanted to write a book some day... And I do. But, then, as I was saying, I'm taking my time.

I already have a 2700-person mailing list from my software demo downloads, but that's a very specific audience to serve. Writing a good monthly ezine would probably be an excellent marketing tool and might even squeeze into my schedule. So, I think I've answered my own question, a monthly ezine for creative services professionals would be good. I'll put that on my to do list.

One last thing, though. Should there ever be a Tech Ronin ezine? And would it add to my readership, brand and credibility? Can it be done and be just as fun and personal? Would it be redundant? Some people might prefer getting the cream or the edited version of my blog minus some of the roughage. Stay tuned while I explore the ezine world and report in from the field from time to time.

One more important difference to consider. Weblogs have comments. Ezines don't. With an ezine, the writer gets a lot of email in response to the ezine, so gets feedback. But, what's lost with an ezine is the public conversation via comments. Readers get to interact not only with the author but with each other. They also get published and get visibility. This last point might keep me strictly in the blogging column when it comes to Tech Ronin.

Listamatic

I am enamored of web standards, stylesheets and minimalism, so have been wanting to know how to make tabs on my webpages without having to use graphics. Listamatic to the rescue! It shows all sorts of tab and list options including the HTML and stylesheet entries you'll need to implement them. For the web DIY crowd who want to be hip, slick and cool. Now if I could only figure out how to integrate tabs into my design... [via Dan Gillmore]

Cool Flash Blog

Thanks to Abe at Abstract Dynamics, I came across this interactive blog: PolarFront. It's definitely a work in progress, but cool already and something to fiddle with to starting thinking outside the box about blogs. The blog content is good, so I'll give you a tip - click on the teeny-tiny type and it expands to readable size while the type on the previously expanded post shrinks! Right now, you can't tell who the author is. You can't quite figure out what will happen when you click and only the posts are there. No archives, no comments, no calendar. But, hey, it's a prototype or experiment! As Abe says, "stuff like this will bring us to the future someday".

Blogging as Social Networking

I'm finding myself lured away from spending as much time as I might on Ryze Business Networking for two reasons: (1) I'm spending a lot of time blogging and (2) I'm using my networking time surfing blogs, bookmarking the good ones, blogrolling the really good ones and occasionally commenting on them. The blogosphere is getting a little warmer to me these days. Not yet as warm as Ryze, but getting there. I think it's partly the phenomenon of TypePad which is smaller and has an extra hint of community to it. I was hoping for more of that and it's here.

I recently decided to add a whole bunch more links to my blog in the way of a generic blogroll plus other lists of blogs and sometimes website links. Part of the plan is that it gives me a nice place to surf from and hopefully turns you guys on to good blogs but the subtext, secret reason (oops! not secret anymore) is that I'm hoping some of the admired bloggers I link to will come over and check out my page. And, at least on a small scale, there's a detectable uptick in my blog traffic and a couple of these people have linked to my page! Whoopee!

As a relative newbie to blogging (started end of April), I'm easily excited by this. In all seriousness, though, this tit for tat behavior is tangible, real live social networking. Coming over to investigate my blog is a welcome contribution of attention. Linking to my blog is much more. The linker is affiliating him- or herself with me. Affiliation sounds a lot like networking to me. For that matter, linking sounds a lot like networking.

It's an interesting difference from my experience on Ryze. There, you write nice little notes in each other's guestbooks. You send private messages. You *talk* to each other via guestbooks - often publicly - as step one. Later on you declare someone to be a *friend* which is a link on your page - it's just that it doesn't mean the same as a link on my blog. But it certainly does declare an affiliation.

What's cool about blogging is that you've got a meatier medium of exchange. It feels a little like Ryze is on the end of the scale of "all talk and no action" and blogging is much more about action. I thought of the networking and reputation management and testimonials that occur at the ultimate trading site - eBay. It's not just talking about networking, it's real. It counts.

I still like Ryze though. It has been my best source of blog readers. It's OK on Ryze to just strike up a conversation with a stranger without really commenting or offering an opinion. You can just say "hi, you look like a kindred spirit." Blog comments sometimes are like that, but the norm is to discuss the blog entry. It's not as straight on with the person, it's about the content.

I'm circling over insight here without quite landing on the runway. I would love to hear comments from other bloggers who can relate - and anyone else on the planet as well! ;-)

Fame vs. Fortune

Whoa! The genie is out of the bottle. This weblog thing is transforming publishing or as Clay Shirky says, "the shift in publishing power is epochal and accelerating". Now that average Janes and Joes can self-publish practically for free, they are flooding the market with free content because they aren't publishers who need to make a profit and recoup their content, printing and distribution costs, they're "artists with printing presses".

Clay Shirky published Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content on Sept 5 in his Networks, Economics, and Culture mailing list. He explains why the cheapness of micropayments isn't going to lure websurfers into paying for content.

His first reason is that surfers experience what Nick Szabo describes as mental transaction costs:

The function of prices, from the point of view of a shopper, is to let the shopper map his personal resources (budget) to his personal values (unique and not directly observable). This mental process requires comparison of the purchase price of a good to its personal value. This entails a significant mental cost, which sets the most basic lower bounds on transaction costs. [The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments, 1996]

The second reason is the one that really fires me up, creative people want to express themselves and be heard! Here's some good stuff from Clay's article:

The fact that digital content can be distributed for no additional cost does not explain the huge number of creative people who make their work available for free. After all, they are still investing their time without being paid back. Why?

The answer is simple: creators are not publishers, and putting the power to publish directly into their hands does not make them publishers. It makes them artists with printing presses. This matters because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do not. Prior to the internet, this didn't make much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities -- even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.

This disrupts the old equation of "fame and fortune." For an author to be famous, many people had to have read, and therefore paid for, his or her books. Fortune was a side-effect of attaining fame. Now, with the power to publish directly in their hands, many creative people face a dilemma they've never had before: fame vs fortune...

For a creator more interested in attention than income, free makes sense. In a regime where most of the participants are charging, freeing your content gives you a competitive advantage. And, as the drunks say, you can't fall off the floor. Anyone offering content free gains an advantage that can't be beaten...

Getting slightly famous is the new game in town and it fits neatly into the security-gap created by the death of the good job.

Treo 600 beats P800

My favorite tech toy reviewer, Walt Mossberg, has been carrying this Palm-based cell phone around for a couple weeks now and he says in this week's Wall Street Journal Personal Technology column that it's the best out there. He says it beats all the PC SmartPhones and the rest of the lot. Good solid review.

Wish I hadn't bought this darned Sony-Ericsson P800. I didn't realize when I bought it how much I had counted on the Palm platform that I knew well and for which there's tons of software. Palm-compatibility is a huge difference between these two devices. Major point. I rejected the Treo 600 because I would have to wait 3-4 months and because it has a crumby little 160x160 screen vs. the 208x480 screen of the P800. That's the only way I can feel OK about this whole thing. I keep hoping that there will be a silver lining and more good apps for the P800 - and how about a keyboard? But have gotten pretty resigned that this tool will never reach its potential. I'll wait out my 1 year contract and then all bets are off!

Women Bloggers on the Radio

Pixeldiva had an interesting 8-minute conversation on blogging with technologist and blogger, Louise Ferguson, this week on BBC Radio's Woman's Hour.

Of course, pixeldiva blogged about it after and so did Louise. The blogs were more interesting in some ways, but it is fun to hear the two live. Take a listen.

Free Coloring Tools

Pixel Diva has the scoop on coloring tools. I love to play with color, so I'm putting these links here for safe-keeping:

• Color Match. Nice simple tool that suggests a 6-color scheme for your blog when you slide a slider. Has the hex numbers too.
  
• Color Toy. Another simple fun tool with a random button that I couldn't stop pushing.
• Color Scheme. You have to see this to believe it. You choose different color scheme methods: monochromatic, base + complement, split-compements, etc. Has extra settings to let you see what your colors look like with various kinds of color blindness. Great tool to learn about color and pick colors!
  

Spin the TypePads

I've found a fun new little game. I signed myself up on the TypePad webring and have a button that lets you click the question mark and get a random TypePad page. This button push is a push for adventure, discovery and community. I am looking for good people, good blogs. I want to find the good ones on TypePad - a community in the making perhaps. Pushing the button is like pulling the handle on a slot machine. Sometimes you get lucky.

Today I found Lisa Firke and her Hit Those Keys Prototype Worklog. On it, I found an awesome quote from Oscar Wilde summing up his work day: "In the morning I put a comma in and in the afternoon I took it out." I can't say I'm like that - I don't think I could be that parsimonious if I tried. But there's a certain spare beauty implied there...

I told myself I would just spin the blog once. But I enjoyed it so much that I did it again and found Lisa. I wonder what the next spin will bring...