Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

The effect of being too busy to blog

Hi All,

This site has gone into stall mode over the past few weeks as I have been developing a new look for it, and the rest of my life and business world has taken over a bit. I have a lot of new and exciting business developments that have come up over the last month, and it has been crunch time over this period, securing new contracts for the new year and finishing off old ones.

But every cloud does have a silver lining, I have learned some amazing techniques that can be applied to both online and off line business from real experts, people who have been in the entrepreneur game for 20, 30 and 40 years and made a real living pursuing things that they love. Over this time I also learned that the quickest way to lose traffic on your blog is to leave it in development limbo and not post… the old stats look a bit sad compared to a few months ago. But I do know how to turn that around and generate traffic and buzz once more.
Hope everyone has a great easter with friends and family, doesn’t eat too much chocolate and is ready to share in some fantastic information over the next few months.
Thanks,
Steve Mills

Hello from Development Land

Hi All,

The new site build is coming along well, akthough it still looks a bit rough around the edges my overall vision is starting to take shape. Thanks to all who have stopped by and seen my CSS manglings and div tag catastrophies over the past week. I promise you that it will look better very soon.

I have a lot of exciting projects on the boil at the moment, which has given me plenty of material to blog about once I get back into the writing and posting groove again.

Steve

Site Redesign Phase

Sorry for the slow posting, the site is going through a radical redesign at the moment….

I will be back at full posting strength early next week.

I am sure that you will all like the new look and direction of the site coming up.

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 »

Quick Update From Holidays

Hi All,

Thanks heaps to all of the recent commenters, I really enjoy the thoughtful additions that you have all made to the discussions here.

I am currently enjoying some  R&R, but will be back with my usual frequent posting schedule in a week or so. Please subscribe if you are interested in what I have talked about over the last few weeks, there will be  plenty more articles and discussion like that comming up.

Now you have to excuse me, its time to go for a surf, then spend the afternoon lazing in my hammock.

Steve