tech ronin

Cool New Book: The Renaissance Soul

If you've ever thought of yourself as a Renaissance person or just someone with a lot of passionate interests, check out this new book. Margaret Lobenstine is a passionate advocate and wise advisor for the Renaissance Souls among us. I'm definitely on the list and it's interesting and uplifting to see Ms. Lobenstine explain why Renaissance Souls are often better off following their multifarious instincts than choosing one area of interest and sticking to it.

The people who are most secure are not those who pick one career and stick with it. They are the people who follow their passion–or passions.

It's much more interesting than that, though. Lobenstine analyzes the vast changes that have been occurring in corporate hiring and organization and makes a good case for why the wise jack-of-all-trades may do better than those with a more single-minded bent. All those extra experiences, contacts, skills and knowledge bits can come in handy when tables turn in these uncertain times.

When they found themselves unexpectedly cast out by economic forces, they were unable to compete for scarce jobs with those whose enthusiasm led to glow-in-the-dark recommendations.

Lobenstine is a Renaissance soul herself and she's done very well. If you have worried that your lack of single-minded focus has or may be a career liability, you can load up here on a boatload of stories of how current and historical figures and Lobenstine's clients have done very well for themselves.

ECONOMIC ADVANTAGES TO BEING A RENAISSANCE SOUL

1. Passion makes your performance sparkle, giving you an edge over "lifers."
2. An ability to embrace change is valued within today's corporate world and the new "free agent nation."
3. You're more likely to be a successful entrepreneur when you thrive on wearing many hats.
4. Love of variety makes you a great project manager and troubleshooter.
5. People who enjoy learning new languages and exploring many cultures are highly valued in the global economy.

Consumers are Rising Up Out of their Barcaloungers, Part 1

As you may have forgotten due to a large outpouring of blogging about personal technology lately, my blog is called Tech Ronin. And it's not meant to be just about gadgets. Gadgets and personal technology including computers and software are the tools of modern times that make it possible for individuals to create their own careers and successful businesses.

The other half of the equation in Tech Ronin is the individual -- knowledge-, tool- and network-enhanced. Modern times have largely taken away the security, predictability and practically guaranteed comfortable lifestyles many of our parents and grandparents *enjoyed* in the 20th century. The corporate job. The staying with a single employer like Ma Bell, PG&E or the government through to retirement.

My own father worked for the federal highway department as a bridge engineer through to retirement and got a very nice pension. And he's retired. What a concept! To be sure, there's still the government with some jobs there and big companies that seem likely to be around a long time but there's also a lot more turbulence and uncertainty about that longevity. Add in 9/11 and Katrina lately and things seem pretty darned unpredictable.

As I've mentioned before (such as Social Networking Made Easy, Part 4, 5, 6, 7, Jobless Recovery), our whole idea of the phrase good job has slipped out of our grasp. Good jobs used to seem like they had a fairly long duration. Tom Peters, corporate guru par excellence, strongly suggests that you regard yourself as *Me, Inc.*. This is a strong hint from someone who knows. Inside or outside the corporate walls, this strategy applies.

But, let's say, like me, you are outside the corporate walls (or would like to be if you could make it work). Let's say you have a company of one or more that's providing probably professional services of some sort. That's a lot like being a *gun for hire*. Might look like subcontracting. It's not a real business like where you mortgage your house to start creating widgets you hope will sell. You can start your business with a credit card (or modest savings if you are one of the seemingly rare Americans who has some savings).

It starts simply by going out and getting or creating your own business cards and putting up your first website, which I highly recommend be a blog with some flexibility to put up auxiliary *static* pages for background information. I think TypePad is quite useable for this at this point albeit with nowhere near enough documentation (hint, hint).

The world that we knew with workers and employers seems to be breaking down fast in the face of modern technology. It's crumbling into a finer granularity -- individuals. First we got our own computers. Wow! Now we have a global Web full of web sites and services, eBay (global marketplace), Craigslist (Net-enhanced local marketplaces), TypePad (your own printing press), Skype for free or near-free long distance calling. And those are just a few bigger names you already know.

I just got my latest issue of Trendwatching.com's newsletter this morning (it's an ezine but newsletters nowadays are almost always ezines aren't they?). It's called Minipreneurs:

a vast army of consumers turning entrepreneurs; including small and micro businesses, freelancers, side-businesses, weekend entrepreneurs, web-driven entrepreneurs, part-timers, free agents, cottage businesses, seniorpreneurs, co-creators, mompreneurs, pro-ams, solopreneurs, eBay traders, advertising-sponsored bloggers and so on.

I love it. Looks like there's a much bigger wave of self-employment and entrepreneurism in the works. Instead of being fired or quitting your job, you dabble in some way in the global market for goods and services (not the stock market). It might be by having a blog (Typepad helps you put text ads into your blog now to make a little extra money). But it could be trading a couple things on eBay. Just sticking your toe in. A way to make a few extra bucks on the side maybe. An offshoot of your hobby that someone is willing to pay for. These mini extensions into the world of commerce are accessible to everyone! Not only professionals, whatever they are.

Trendwatching.com talks mostly about consumer trends, but luckily they don't think of consumers as just consumers anymore. They are very much watching and analyzing from the point of view that the days of the passive consumer are over. So-called consumers are rising up out of their barcaloungers and creating -- and selling what they create or just selling stuff they already have or know. Cool stuff. Read it. More on this.

Technorati Tags: careers, meinc, minipreneurs, personalbranding, quittingyourjob, ronin, selfemployed, solopreneurs, yourownbusiness

When Being a Mac-User Becomes a Career Asset

If you are a creative person and are forward-leaning - liking to work for companies that are flexible, innovative and even leading-edge, you might find that those types of companies will begin to make positive associations when they find out you are a Mac user - expecially if you are a knowledgeable one.

Here's why. From the beginning, Mac has been associated with the creative industries. The 1984 ad was a huge brand/lifestyle statement. The Think Different campaign associated Mac with the offbeat, maveric, innovator and genius.

We are now entering a time where innovation, disruptive technologies, thinking outside the box and creativity are actually valued as opposed to just getting paid lip service. You don't have to be a Mac user to have a rep for being visionary, creative or innovative. But, being a Mac user will be one more piece of evidence that you are on that side of the fence. Willing to use the software you think is best and break out of the norm.

Of course, I am horribly biased. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Blogs vs. eZines

OK. It's past bedtime so I'm going to make this brief. I just recently subscribed to Tom Peter's blog - his RSS feed. I got off on his 18th post in a series called 100 Ways to Succeed. This one was called Lunch Management. It's good, read it. But that's not my point.

I've been trying to convince my favorite marketing guru, Robert Middleton, to start blogging. He's had a runaway success with his excellent free eZine, More Clients, which has a subscriber base of something like 30,000. So far, I haven't had much luck in convincing Robert, but it just struck me what he's missing by not blogging.

There's something about blogging - could it be Google-juice that is missing from eZines? They are private. Yes, they can be passed on from friend to friend but they generally aren't posted.

When you blog, you are discoverable. Now, perhaps Robert has good Google-juice. He says that he picked out certain keywords and he's achieved a high google-rating with those words.

And Robert has a Forum that's apparently really good - I haven't checked it out but I'm sure it is. So he has a way to get feedback from his subscribers. I'm sure he gets great feedback and ideas from it.

But, I say that a blog could raise Robert's stature in the world. I was thinking - what if Tom Peters linked to his blog - if he had a blog? What would that do?

Blogging makes you accessible. People can subscribe (unless you set up walls around your blog). People can read you when they feel like it - now and then or regularly. They can comment (if you let them). Tom has his comments turned on.

Perhaps there's some thinking to do to figure out where do eZines fit and where does a blog fit. Do you need to choose between the two? I hope not.

Blogging: Improving the Quality of your Hits

Have you ever looked over the stats for your blog to see what people are reading? I have, and it's not pretty. Let me show you a random bit of stats for this blog compliments of Typepad:

These are almost all coming from Google and they are almost all about the latest *hot* gadgets. A more impressive term is personal technology, but still. I have to say that these *searchers* have good taste. Only the best for my google-based readers.

The truth is that I always have my ear to the ground for the best personal technology. It's really just me being curious and trying to get what I want. But, because of that, I track about 40 different sources with some regularity and hit places like Gizmodo, Engadget, The Gadgeteer, PDA 24/7, Russell Beattie, et. al. almost daily with my trusty newsreader NetNewsWire. I find stuff that's hot. And when I know it's new, hot and cool, I often write about it with my particular slant.

My blog name is Tech Ronin, after all. Tech is a major feature, whether it is gadgets or software or the impact or opportunities of technology. Anyway, the confession is that I do these little personal technology articles partly because I know they are going to get a lot of hits.

But what I really want is a following. And not just because I find cool technology. I really want the following to be about my authentic voice, my ideas, my writing. Stuff that's much more subtle than things you can find by putting a word or two into Google.

I guess you could say that my personal technology stuff is partly my loss leader. I'm really up to bait and switch. Maybe some folks who find me on Google will decide to subscribe. I want subscribers because that starts to feel like friends, associates, partners, community. It would be cool to gain financially, but that's way down the list.

OK, I think I promised to tell you how to improve the quality of your hits. Here's how. Don't sell out and narrow-focus your blog to the point that you forget that it's the added value, the personal touch, the writing, the connection and accessibility that will get you fans.

Blogs Beat Websites Hands Down

As you probably know, I just created a second blog called FileMaker Fever and about two days later upgraded from the Plus to Pro level of Typepad. Upgrading, by the way, was a bit of a shock, but that's another story. Starting a new blog, I'm faced with how to get the word out and build a readership for it. I've already got a bunch of content and links there, but I'm linking almost 100% to plain old websites, not blogs.

What a difference a blog makes! In the blogging world, if I link to someone's blog, they'll find out about it in a hurry probably with technorati and come over to my blog and probably link back to me. With non-blog links, I have to write to people and tell them I'm linking them etc. It's just not as slick.

FileMaker consultants seem to all be back in the era of websites and haven't progressed over to weblogs. The reason I know this is that I used Technorati's search feature to look for "FileMaker 7" and my new blog was listed as the first 3 links out of a total of 8 links for the last week. FileMaker consultants and developers aren't blogging - yet.

At first, I thought, oh great, I won't have any competition! I'll become *the* source for current news about FileMaker 7. But then I realized a very cool thing. I want FileMaker consultants and developers to blog too. Then we can link each other, have some great conversations either in comments or by trackbacks and raise all of our profiles on the web. I'm hoping that my colleagues will see what I'm doing on FileMaker Fever and try it.

I guess I'm leaving out the biggest advantage of blogs over websites, the ease with which you can do chronological entries which make it much easier for your readers to see what's new on your site. Now that I've upgraded to the Pro level and can do whatever I want with my Typepad blogs, I'll be exploring how to make my blog more like a website (they have a couple advantages too, see my earlier post Weblogs vs. Websites).

Weblogs vs. Websites

Weblogs as online journals, are already just fine. TypePad is easy enough and quite full-featured and Blogger is ultra easy if not so full-featured. If all you want to do is blog, you are set. But, I'm self-employed. I work for a living - for myself. I need to have a web presence that does what websites do and the weblog is just part of what I need to do.

Now that I've been blogging for several months and reading lots of weblogs, I'm beginning to take for granted that I can cite a particular *chunk of information* specifically rather than an entire web *page*. I have two websites: tokerud.com and studio-manager.com plus one active weblog - this one. When I want to cite something on my web pages, I can only easily point to the page, not the exact *spot* on the page where the information I'm talking about is located. That doesn't work for me - anymore.

I want my websites to be organized by chunks and pieces just like my weblog is. In fact, I want more than what my weblog does. Because, on my website, I put mini-articles and little chunks of information in all three columns - not just the center column. How do I reference those? I know there are such things as anchors, but I don't think they work well in multi-columnar situations.

I'm a database developer, so I'm especially interested in information design. I want all those *chunks* of information to be cataloged and stored somewhere for easy access. I don't want my web pages to be *dumb* sheets of text. They could just as well be made of paper for as smart as they are right now. OK, they do have links on them and that warrants some acknowledgement. But, now that I've been using a weblog where each post is stored in a database and has its own URL and can be categorized and archived and displayed on a calendar, I expect more.

Websites need to be more like weblogs, but, weblogs need to be more like websites too. Websites are good for static content such as author profiles, archives of all your articles or newsletters. Pages devoted to any particular topic where a journal-dated format isn't appropriate.

Typepad is working great for me, but I would like a way to add an extra page and have templates of several possible formats for those pages. The first format should be for single articles that have appeared elsewhere. I can work around the problem by *posting* the article in my blog and then it will in effect have its own page. Maybe I don't want to do that. Can I create the same effect without having to post it first? Where do I put my list of all the songs I've bought on iTunes or all my CDs in my entire collection? It's too long to fit on a TypeList. Then what?

I want to drive my websites with TypePad or Movable Type so I get all the content-management benefits I get from a weblog. But I don't want to lose any of the flexibility I have with a website. That's where I'm going. I'm looking for easy ways to do this. If I bang my head up against the wall long enough and pore over my many tech books and experiment and tinker, I'll figure it out. OR, maybe someone can point me towards some answers that must be somewhere either in someone's head or already written up and perhaps even published somewhere.

Big honking web-making software packages like DreamWeaver need to help you build blogs into your websites. Or someone could create a little blog-helper program that works with these code monsters (I was going to say dinosaurs - oops!). Or maybe this blend of weblog and websites is only available to the hacker and the professionals who will do anything if you pay them enough. I'm also hoping that TypePad will keep giving us more capability and that Movable Type Pro will come out one of these days (the press release dated in February said it would be out in the Summer) with features that help us get to the holy grail between weblogs and websites.

Vicarious Writing - NaNoWriMo

Richard MacManus, author of one of my current favorite weblogs, Read/Write Web, has me hooked. He decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month and attempt to write his first novel in 30 days. To finish successfully, you *just* need to have written a 50,000+ word *novel* in the month of November. You win if you do that - quality aside. Here's an informative interview with Chris Baty, the guy behind NaNoWriMo.

Richard is targeting 2,000 words a day and has hit that the first 4 days of November. Today, he has posted the draft of his novel online. It's a gas following his heroic effort, checking his blog every day and, now, reading what he's writing as he goes along. I'm into chapter two and really enjoying it. If you haven't checked Richard's blog and you are the least bit of a closet novelist, check it out!

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.

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.