Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

Vibrant and alive and full of purpose

I have spent the last few weeks locked into a battle between me and some troublesome code. I am getting the online directory up online for the revamped Livingnow.com.au website, and it has been giving me a few issues. But through perseverance I can see the light at the end of the development tunnel, and can now start to focus on getting some new interesting projects on the go, including a new social bookmarking site, and another cracking idea for a new form of social network which is in collaboration with the excellent Seamus Ennis.

I have also been thinking over the past week (through a code induced haze) that this site is going to be a central asset to the success of these and other projects, as I want to use it as a central hub to introduce people that I meet on my real life and digital travels to all of my projects. The development of a personal brand is one of the most important things that we as blog reading, digital literate people can do.

If you are in anyway half serious about getting your work out there or if (more importantly I think) that you have new and original ideas then get yourself a personal blog. Make it the focus point of all of your online efforts, a hub where people can find out about you and your work. Put it all up there, your social media profiles, your writing, links to your work, links to things you are selling. Give people handles that they can grab onto you and connect with you.

On Rebel Zen, Seamus and I  are always talking about letting your “real self” shine through, and that is where you should be headed with your macro and micro blogging efforts. Show us more of the real you, and you will make your online efforts vibrant and alive and full of purpose.

Chasing the Thread of Thought

The internet is one of the most brilliant things that ever to emerge in the history of reality. Sure, that is a pretty sweeping statement, but when you really sit down and have a look at what the internet REALLY is, it is absolutely mind-blowing.

It is a way to collect the combined intelligence of billions of the most complex things EVER developed in the Universe (as far as we can presently see) and allow each of them to communicate this intelligence to each other in ways never before seen. It is the over mind, a way of joining all individual minds together, here in the physical world.

But it does more than just connect minds, it also connects IDEAS.
By amassing so much data together in such a close proximity, we can see connections, similarities and patterns in the way the real world that have never been seen before. All over the planet, at this very moment there are people making scientific, philosophical, spiritual and unclassifiable discoveries that are absolutely amazing.

You don’t hear about them a lot in the mainstream news, or even on other blogs and alternative media on the net. But they are out there. Small rays of hope and inspiration, insights and theories that shake your conception of reality to pieces.

It is my hope for this blog that I can highlight some of these ideas, and my own to a wider audience. To chase some of these threads of thought back to their very beginnings, and unravel them into coherent concepts and stories.

One such thread that I have currently been following is that of physicist and theorist Nassim Haramien theresonanceproject.org, who has some very interesting theories concerning energy, other dimensions and the interconnectedness of consciousness.
It really does amaze everyday how mundane reality looks to the average western world citizen, but how incredibly complex, and exciting it really is.
Just to illustrate that point, here is one youtube video that you should watch.

Don’t worry if the physics goes over your head, if this has captured your interest go to YouTube and hunt down the rest of the videos. They are well worth a look.

I can see a time in the near future where a grand unified theory of physics gets mixed with our present knowledge of consciousness, and also with theories about what exactly Information is.
In fact, I think a lot of what has been termed spirituality, and controlled and interpreted by religions over the past 6000 years may soon be seen to have some foundations in scientific fact.

The world of present cutting edge scientific theory looks nothing like worldview presented to us by the media, government and scientific education of all but the highest level. String theory, Brane theory, advances in information science and quantum theory. The present state of these leave the idea that we are living in a solid, material,  3 dimensions of space and one dimension of time universe on very shaky foundations.
This is not science fiction; this is not wishy dreamy new age platitudes. This is fact.

The Vital Spark For Your Online Projects

There are no shortage of programs, courses and books out there showing you how to make your business work online. You will read one and it will tell you to go through steps A…Z and at the end you should be making X amount of dollars per month.

It looks simple, and if you followed their step by step approach you too should see similar results (if they are being truthful, please do a bit of checking out any incredible or unbelievable “too good to be true” statements at least a little bit sceptically before jumping in headlong).

For most internet marketers, blog owners and other online business people the road to profits starts to look a bit harder as soon as the information has been digested. Because now, when it becomes time to put the theory in to action you hit the first road bump. You need a market to apply this fantastic information to, and idea to base the system on, a topic to write your fantastic new ebook about.

There is plenty of information out there about using Google tools to find a niche, and this is a very good method of finding what people are searching for, and what they are finding as a result of those searches. If you can offer something that is significantly better then what is currently being offered in that niche (or can market / convert the traffic better) then give it a go.

Also, be creative around your research into niches. As the online marketplace has matured, new niches (ones that are profitable) have become as rare as hens teeth. But they are still out there, and new ones are created every day. Just keep your eyes and ears open, look at innovative ways of using the technology. For instance there are a few books starting to appear about using twitter as a marketing tool. Keep your finger on the pulse, be an early adopter of the next big web thing and then inform all of those that jump on the bandwagon later on.

The idea around your internet business and the niche that you target with your material is one of the fundamental keystones to your online efforts. If it is a good niche it could be plugged into any model. Ebook sales, membership site, adsense, affiliate sales.

Wikis, Knols and Hyperintelligence

The announcement of Google Knols a few months ago has got everyone talking about Google trying to take over from Wikipedia as the de facto “go to” place for facts online.

It was easy to find information on the web before wikipedia, It’s just that the information that you found was often in specialist jargon, or badly written, or just plain wrong. Also when you searched for a term, say “calculus” for instance, there was a number of pages that you had to wade through before you found one that fitted your level of understanding, and you really had no idea if the information that you were reading was from a credible source.

Although wikipedia still has minor problems in these areas, it’s peer reviewed operation allows for the correction of errors by others users. The information known about Knols shows that google is trying to fix some of the problems with wikipedia. It is easy for an error or complete fabrication to slip in to an article and remain detected until someone with more knowledge about the subject happens to read it, and then be bothered enough about the mistruth to change the article themselves. This could take an hour for a widely read important article, or it could never happen if it was a fringe topic of limited popularity. Knols, because they have authorship attributed to a subject expert, will supposedly be a more authoritive version of the facts. This isn’t really new thinking, About.com had topic editors years ago, and squidoo.com lenses allow people to create topics and declare themselves experts on things. I’m not sure that this loss of anonymity of authorship and editorship is going to be a good or a bad thing at this point, but it will soon become clear as Knols have their inevitable gain in popularity.

The good thing about the many authored, anonymous nature of wikipedia is that even if the information provided is not the 100% truth, it is a representation of the consensus reality around the subject, and therefore allows you to converse with other about it, apply the subject to other areas and use the knowledge provided as a tool. It provides enough facts, figures, equations, links to experts, software or other resources to give you the head start, and compress anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 weeks of web surfing about a topic down to the time it takes to read the wikipedia entry. More »

5 ways to beat Habit Creep

Hi all, I am busy getting ready to go on holiday for a week and a half down at the beach with my family, so posting may be less frequent for the next 10 days or so as I get a bit of much needed R&R.

I have been thinking over the last few days how easy it is to fall back into bad habits after you make a change, even if it is a change that you really want to make. For instance, at the start of last year I made the commitment to myself to check email only once per day, in order to limit lost time from constantly checking the inbox, and the distraction of answering mail that really, when you think about it could have waited until the evening.

Email, while a fantastic tool, is a real flow killer. What I mean by that is the constant interruptions, the sense of “this is urgent, I must answer now” that most messages have breaks your attention away from the things that you really should be getting done. I used to find myself checking it perhaps 10 times a day, which is not as bad as some people that I know, but when I look at how I want to be living my life, feeling like “I have to check email” is one of the things that I don’t want to have constantly buzzing in the back of my head.

So the year started of well, I would check my email at 9am, and then just leave it for the rest of the day. I am not going to lie to you, at the start it was a painful experience. I thought I was missing out, I thought that life was going to pass me by. The big surprise is that it didn’t. The worlds turned without me pushing send receive every 10 minutes, and I found that I had at least an hour of productive time more during the day. The one thing that I did learn is that even if you make a minor discretion, it’s not worth throwing in the whole process and going back to your old ways.

Habit Creep, where the old habit slowly starts to worm its way back into your life is always going to happen. It can happen easily. First it’s a check in the morning, then one at lunch, and one at night. And that’s fine. But then its also one at morning tea, then at 11am and so on, until before you know you are back hitting send receiver like a rabid monkey. The important thing is that when you become conscious that you have fallen back into an old pattern to not mentally punish yourself or give up. Just start again and continue.

So If I beat the email demon you ask, then why has this been on you mind for the last few days?

Glad you asked, this has been on my mind because I have become aware of a new, more insidious terror that has crept into suck time from my day. The name of this demon is RSS.
I have got into the habit of checking and rechecking RSS feeds, even when I know that they probably haven’t been updated, even when it is distracting me from more important tasks. It has been my mission over the past few weeks to work on some simple tools to beat “Habit Creep”; the following is what has worked for me.

Top 5 ways to beat “Habit Creep”

1. Write down the permanent changes that you want to make and look at the list once per week. I know that this may sound really pedantic or a bit too much trouble for some, but it really does work. An ingrained habit is your automatic response to a situation, and it will take a lot of work to change it.

2. Only make a change if it is reasonable and increases productivity, not to make a point. If checking email 10 times a day is a real necessity then continue on. Only make a change if it will make a real improvement.

3. Cold Turkey doesn’t work for everyone. A conscious decision to slow down or reduce the amount of a habit can work, if you give yourself a daily reminder. Any change is a step in the right direction, and the only person that you need to prove anything to is yourself.

4. Don’t overly chastise yourself for indiscretion. As I said above, you haven’t failed if you make a slip up and go back to old ways. Just take it as a learning experience on the path to the lifestyle that you want and continue from where you left off.

5. Remind yourself of the positives, not the negatives. On your list of permanent changes, write next to each one what the benefit is. The benefit of not continually checking RSS would be at least an hour of extra time a day, time that could be used to get more done, or to knock off from work early and spend time doing what you love