I recently started freelancing fulltime, and as a newcomer, self-promotion is crucial. This is why I started blogging once again. This is nothing new for me, starting it, but what’s new is that this time I have a focus. This is not to be considered a new blog, but rather a fresh start to the one that has been on a hiatus for some time. A fresh start with a lesson learned and a new meaning and focus.

Why blog?

As I said, self-promotion is crucial. Being completely honest, the main purpose of this blog is to show my expertise and draw people on my site by creating relevant content. I have a good reason to publish a link to my domain on Twitter or Facebook whenever I publish a new post and I will be more easily found in Google, not forgetting the fact that if someone finds that what I write makes sense, they might consider me a credible and useful professional.

Many businesses want a blog. “We want a blog”, they say. I build them one and teach them how to publish with it. Then they publish a post titled “Stepping into the new media” or something similar. Then nothing. Sure, I smile on my way to the bank, but the client didn’t get any value out of it. They lacked a reason. It may be that their competitor had one too or they heard that social media is the future. That’s not enough, because unfortunately there hasn’t been anything new and cool about blogging for 10 years, and just having a blog is as good as nothing.

When deciding whether to blog, consider these questions:

• What do I really need?
• Can I get it through a blog, or are there better means?

Examples of a reason might be “creating publicity for iTech product launches” or “making people trust our Instacrap microwave food”.

Keep the focus!

This surely is not the first time I make a fresh start with blogging. Indeed, I have had different kinds of blogs earlier, but they all found themselves forgotten after some time. Why? I lacked focus. I never asked myself, “Why do I write about this?” Sure, the previous one – of which I included posts to act as the basis for this fresh start – was mainly for self-promotion too, but I didn’t really have the answer for the question “self-promotion for whom and how?” So, I had the need, but I didn’t have the focus.

Focus is something concrete: “telling about the current state of future iTech products” or “giving recipes and tips using Instacrap products in different ways”. Without a focus, your blog is a series of writings and you yourself run out of motivation and ideas soon.

Do it for the readers – on every post

Every single post should be helpful in some way. For this post, the real purpose is about telling to possible clients that “look, I not only know technically how to do it, but I also understand something about the meaning of having a blog”. But at the same time I’m giving tips, being helpful. People who read this don’t really care about my expertise. They are looking for something for themselves. So, even if the blog is made for self-promotion, you shouldn’t concentrate on that in the content. Nobody is interested in how good I am. Instead, they are looking for information. Give it and then shut up. Or at least be very, very funny, if that’s your purpose.

For each post, think about these

• if it’s not your mom reading, would the reader be interested in the topic?
• does the post give any relevant and new information that is useful for the reader
• does the title correspond to the content

I have to admit that for me, especially the last one is a difficult one and in my past, I have often ignored that. I love to be witty, but as far as I’m not a famous and interesting individual per se, I have to trust on my title to draw the attention and give the reason for the reader to click through and read the whole post. If you’re not someone I know, you’re not reading this because you want to know what I am writing about, so apparently the title raised enough interest on the content itself.

Topics for our example blogs could be “Making cars navigate themselves” or “Classic cheesecake in 5 minutes”. Then in the content, it would me mentioned that iTech is designing a GPS-based system for driverless cars or that the quick cheesecake happens to be made using Instacrap cheese soup.

Believe in it!

You might not see much result the minute you post “Hello world!”, but don’t lose your faith. It is an investment, not an instant win.

I don’t expect anyone to call me tomorrow, telling “Hi! I saw your latest blog post and I really liked it, could you make me a website!” But I’m sure that after time the blog affects the value of my site and gives me credibility as a professional and brings traffic. It also becomes a good information bank that I can refer to when a client asks a difficult question, such as “what do you mean what’s the purpose of my blog? I just need one!” Then, I could just give him a link to this post and he understands, without me needing to explain it over and over again. I just need to keep updating.

I may not be in any position to give business advice for you, Mr. Murdoch, but since you started pushing forward your idea to start charging for online news content, I couldn’t help saying to myself: “You just don’t get it, do you, Ru?” Since I know you’re reading this, let me share you some widely agreed thoughts about how things work nowadays. May this blog post be called “Internet economy for dummies: Love is no more the only thing money can’t buy”. This should be obvious information for the younger generation, but you’re not one of them.

To simplify to extreme: in the “old economy”, whenever we create something, resources are used, and because resources are scarce, this “something” has a cost. This cost then affects the monetary value of this “something”. For example when we make a newspaper, the approximate monetary value of the newspaper can be counted by adding the costs of paper, ink, labor, copying, distribution etc, and then dividing the number with the amount of copies. To make a newspaper you need money, and that keeps the poor idealist hippies at bay.

But what if paper, ink, copying and distribution had no cost and the amount of copies is unlimited? Then the same calculation brings the monetary value of the newspaper to approximately zero. Add the fact that everyone has an unlimited amount of paper and ink, distribution would be instant world wide and everyone can make a newspaper for free. Now, how much can you charge for it, when idealist hippies are writing the same stuff for free and have the same audience?

Unfortunately for you, Mr. Murdoch, the Internet was invented and we moved to another era. Publishing transformed from scarcity to abundance and this means the economical models are different. It’s not simply about money anymore: we have new currencies, such as reputation. The USD on your bank account has been rivaled not by EUR, but by WLR (Wikilandia Reputation), a currency of reputation, good will and ego boasting. Open source is a serious competitor to your model: Most of the world’s servers are running Linux, the biggest rival of Internet Explorer is Firefox and Wikipedia is our most important single source of information. All three are ridden by non-profit foundations rather than money. They have value that money can’t buy, and *boom*. Money has lost some of its power.

I can just imagine how much you would be willing to pay for Wikipedia but – I hear your curse – owning Wikipedia is impossible. It works outside your world, in a different dimension where money can’t buy content.

Then what is valuable, you might ask? At least money is not valuable anymore. YouTube is still making losses every day, but still its value is counted in billions. You probably would have stayed away from that kind of business, but Google seems rather happy to own this little peace of money-eater it bought couple of years back. Maybe Google thinks more about the value than the money. For Google, which is a 100% Internet company, money is a mere number, credits instead of bills and coins. It’s not the main focus, the primary objective on their radar. Google understands that money has the tendency to find its way to where people are. In the internet, you can be big without being rich!

But don’t worry! Even though you’re better in the USD-based economy than WLR-based one, you have a chance: Just that you can’t really sell air doesn’t mean you couldn’t make USD out of it: You can sell compressors, air fresheners, ventilators or scuba diving equipment. You have to make it special. Nobody buys air just to get the oxygen required, but to add value to their lives by specialized air products. Just like nobody pays for the news anymore, but are prepared to pay for specialized highly valued content or better consuming experience that is not available for free.

(Of course, if you happen to be a cigar-smoking representative of music of film industry, you can always push out legislation that turns online content usage and effective independent publishing into criminal activity. This still seems to be too easy.)

For further reading, I suggest the following:
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

Let’s imagine the same situation in the year 2050. An old man has just lost his wife and wants to go through her archives. He opens her laptop and luckily guesses the password correctly. He knows she has kept her private diary and documents online, behind a secure password. The man tries to get through but can’t guess the password this time. Disappointed, he closes the laptop and turns to a pile of old CDs and DVDs from 50 years back. He becomes desperate: CD and DVD drives are a memory from the past, and the few ones that still are left, are held in museums, obviously not working anymore. Now all he has is a pile of plastic, holding his precious memories, and no way to access it.

As archeologists find hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt or pieces of clay in ancient Sumeria, they have their tactics in learning to understand the language they are written in. Thinking about the archeologists 3000 years forward, what do they learn from us, finding pieces of silicon in ruins of ancient San Francisco? What kind of ancient civilization will we be? The Digital Dark Age. It’s just a pile of silicon. No writing, no stories, no documents.

It’s not only a problem of the archeologists of the future. If I would be run over by a bus today, all my email, online accounts and many files would be inaccessible for eternity. Then I heard about Legacy Locker and signed up. The service promises to hold my online assets and pass them to my family (or whoever I choose) when I pass out. This really is an answer to our needs. What worries me is that since the Internet is in constant change of ever-growing speed, I doubt this service even exists anymore when it is needed in my case. I don’t have my old emails from 3 years back anymore, so let’s say I live for more 50 years, what will my family get? Passwords to services that haven’t been existing for generations? Not to say that probably the whole service will be long forgotten.

I am a huge fan of Long Now Foundation, an organization that aims to promote long-term thinking in this world where 10 years is enough to call something “ancient”. 15 years ago, I first connected myself to the Internet and already this very technology has changed our society in a radical way, with more changes to come. The same time passed between years 1034 and 1049 AD, one tenth of the time that passed between 2300 BC and 2150 BC. Still, we don’t feel there is any difference between these numbers. Even 4000 years is a very short time in Earth history: The sun is approximately of the same age even after 3 million years, but for us, 100 years is enough to make us dizzy. Year 2109 feels like being far in the future! We are the Homo Erectus of technology, and we need to understand that.

Long Now Foundation has many projects helping their cause, some more concrete and some based more on educating people. Along them, is Long Server and its Format Exchange project. In the project, the foundation is building a format library to prevent old file formats to be completely readable after they become obsolete. I really hope this foundation grabs the attention and critical mass it needs to survive the inevitable end of its core people’s limited life spans. I recommend checking also other projects of theirs, like Long Bets.

Oh, and don’t forget to leave something behind you! Luckily, I lived my childhood in the analogue age, so my first grade school material is still available, whenever I want to feel nostalgic. And when I ever will have children, I can imagine their faces when they see how backwards the life was in the early 90’s: paper and pens! Or maybe the archeologist of the year 5000 thinks we’re the backward ones, for not leaving a trace of our civilization?

Since all readers are either spam bots (I love them, sending me comments and couraging me to continue when nobody else cares about this stuff) or my friends, I probably don’t need to say that I live in Brazil right now, learning about my life and doing an internship as a web developer, which is professionally more like being on a gap year than something that I would get retired from. As I was the reknown Facebook addict in “my circle” back in Finland, here my life is less on the web. These might be some of the many reasons:

1. Facebook is blocked on my workplace, where I spend almost 3 hours more each day than I used to in Finland, where on the other hand, usage of Facebook was more or less couraged by the working environment.
2. working from home is not supported and simply not possible for me
3. most of my friends in Europe are sleeping when I get home and online. Here people don’t use Facebook and Orkut is too myspace for my liking
4. using mobile phones is freaking expensive, so I’m not interested connecting via the beloved GPRS (and for sure I can’t afford 3G)
5. Carrying a laptop on the streets is not adviced, and wlan/wifi hotspots are not that popular and common
6. Internet just doesn’t seem all that important

What most surprises me noticing, is of coursenumber 6. Since most small businesses don’t have a website, or if they do, it is coded by the boss’s nephew and then left outdated, I don’t know what the local lunch place has on its menu today (although I know it’s rice and beans). Nor do I know what are the prices or opening times in the other one – the existence of which I happened to learn by walking past, and not by Googling. I don’t know which bus to take to go from A to B, and sometimes my credit card is not accepted when trying to buy something online. I can’t get an appointment to the doctor by a handy online form and in order to make a bank transfer, I need to go to the bank. I can’t order a taxi with an SMS and sometimes I even have to explain where I am, because of the lack of GPS.

SMS is not quite popular, since it is not very reliable, to be honest, and the usual way to get information here is calling on the phone. Calling is not exactly difficult, so of course there’s no problem. I mean, if you feel comfortable making phone calls… Probably one reason why I love the internet so much is that I hate talking on the phone. For example, I don’t keep enough contact with my family for the mere reason that the only way to do it is via telephone, and it makes me feel like a bad person. I am of the type who has to write down a script about things I’m going to say and then take a deep breath and prepare myself mentally to press the numbers and the green button. The fact, that here I have to do that usually with a language I only started practicing a half a year ago, is not making it any more comfortable.

My time here in the tropic might me teaching me more than I ever thought it would. It is teaching me what I need to learn, and what the technology really means to me. It means “relief”. It means independence. It means no extra heartbeats and misunderstandings because of bad line. It means… comfortably controlled social deprivation.

As much as I really want to see the universe from a different angle, I’m afraid it changes only the lifes of a minority. It’s a good and a big idea, but maybe the fact that the introduction video has the length of a Hollywood movie, is a sign? Maybe it’s just a bit too big, don’t you think? I want to have all my friends in waves and not just the nerds, so please, don’t scare them.

As much as I would like MSN to be history, I can’t see the world really changing until these means of communication are used by at least 50% of the humanity… And I really don’t see people who already have a difficult time writing e-mails and SMSs taking part in my waves, as handy and cool as they might be. The reason? They feel overwhelmed… Some dude called Mitchell Kapor once said that “Getting information from the Internet is like drinking from a fire hydrant!” When it comes to Google Wave, it looks like a waterfall, so I don’t see many people taking a sip. Knowing people, most of us are too lazy or have a real job…

Google should rethink their elevator pitch. That is when your idea is so clear that you can explain it during an elevator ride. Usually that’s like 30 seconds, not 80 minutes! I feel pity for those people who are stuck in an elevator for the entire lenght of that brief introduction. Hope they have spare oxygen…

With Google Wave, I see the internet-aware people excited and getting the kicks out of it, while the not-that-much-aware people are left cold, so the gap between the “estates of the cyber realm” will most likely grow even further. I would prefer doing something to get those old-fashioned offline people with us to this new dimension, instead of just scaring them away with even more powerful fire hydrants. And all those people who use Internet Explorer (sorry for the accurate generalization) don’t even want to understand, but rather do something more important. Internet should not be scary and overwhelming, but rather the welcoming and natural continuation for the physical world that it is. That’s when the world really changes.

Let’s hope it’s a step that needs to be taken, and ten years from now, also the IE people are catching up to where the nerds are now. I mean, more than ten years ago, most people considered e-mail to be nerdy. Now even my neighbour’s dog has one, and there’s nothing special about it. Maybe Google thinks that they really don’t need to push the IE people to the new, but they will get it eventually anyway. I would still prefer Google helping them with the start.

Yes, you’re correct. I never watched the presentation. Instead, I did my job and visited the library. And now it’s Friday night so don’t expect me to watch that now!

So, everybody (except for roughly 99.99% of earth population) has heard about Twitter going for the television business. Even though this was later commented by Twitter to be bullshit, I went forward with my wild fantasies and pictured the future in my mind. Then I recorded my thoughts and uploaded them into YouTube. Here it is:

Some Finnish senior citizens (maybe others too – I’m not that much aware of what are they showing in the TV networks around the world) may notice that it has a resemblance to a certain tv format that was rather popular a couple of years back. It consists of hopelessly lonely or drunken (preferably both) people sending expensive SMSs to the TV, suggesting the c-list celebrity guest to show her boobs. If this is where Twitter will lead us, then hooray for the brave new world!

I’m bored of balancing between my different social bullshit networks: Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, different blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, Couchsurfing, forums, Jaiku (oh, that’s gone now… thanks, Google!)… I would love to go for the new, but how the hell I’m supposed to keep up with the new bullshit services when I already have too many accounts in the old ones, and still only those 24 hours a day? So now there are the social dashboards! Something that should save me from this overwhelming amount of bullshit. Praise the lord for TweetDeck, Seesmic, FriendFeed, Ping.fm and the like!

But no… Now the problem with FriendFeed is that my friends should also sign in, although they already have an account in Facebook, Orkut, Flickr, Twittr, LolFag, MySpace, AdultFriendFindr, OmgLolr, iOneMore and WhatEvr.com. And after signing in to FriendFeed, I have to upload a foto and write my description… C’mon! I’ve done it already in all of those services, why don’t you just go and look up there? Then it shows that I currently have three friends in FriendFeed, with none of them being really a close friends of mine. But I have hundreds of friends in all of these different services! Again: How the hell I’m supposed to keep up with the dashboard service when I’m already busy keeping up with all the bullshit social networks I’m in! I’d love to just have a simple iGoogle app (yes, at least I’m stuck with only one iGoogle, even though I also have Netvibes), that would gather all recent events in all my networks, tell me what each one of my friends ate for breakfast in one simple feed, and an option to post a twit and update my Facebook status and Orkut-whatever, the same text in each of them. Or upload a video in YouTube and at the same time post it in all of the other services (if I wish, of course).

Then it comes to Ping.fm. I still don’t know what my friends ate for breakfast. It’s a one-way dashboard, which helps me post the same “today I ate spam, sausage, bacon and spam” to more than one place (and, interestingly enough, to FriendFeed), but in order to see my friends’ responses, I have to login to each site… That’s nice, isn’t it! And this is not all: I can only post a “status update” or “microblog” or etc. So I can’t update both my Twitter and Facebook through this? So still, I only have to do unified Twitter/Facebook status updates the “old-fashioned” way. I mean, everything I want is a good, simple and robust interface that sends info to all these sites up and down.

Oh, sure, there is Seesmic and TweetDeck… More names, more names… If it wasn’t enough already, at least now I’m getting all mixed up. And then… They are standalone desktop applications? Hey, isn’t that a bit 90’s! Give me an online service for that or at least a Firefox plugin to do the trick! I don’t always use the same computer, you know…

I want to have the same friends in all of these different services. I’m following only like 3 people in Twitter for the mere reason that I already have most of my friends in Facebook telling me what they ate for breakfast, so I don’t have the motivation to waste time searching for their Twitter accounts. And I haven’t added any new people in my LinkedIn for ages… I’m quite a social person and get friends easily, so whenever I find new friends, I need to add them as my friends in 10 different services? God help me…

I would love somebody to tell us that “this is the one service everybody should use”. I just love how wild and open the Internet is, but to be honest, sometimes I want that Kim Il-Sung to be there, pulling the brake and guide us. Or at least some kind of online crisis to kill 90% of the less popular bullshit.

If I were the president…

• Everybody would have only one account
• Everybody would have only one set of friends
• I wouldn’t need to think

I hate thinking. Why don’t you just make Internet proprietary and tell me what my friends ate for breakfast? Right now, I signed up for FriendFeed with high hopes, but ended up tweaking my profile and thinking that I should have more than these three friends. Sounds like just another Facebook to me. Tell me I got it wrong and it really saves my day!

Whatever… The worst part is that many of my friends have a real life so they don’t show up actively in any of those services. This means, I still have to meet people face-to-face and drink beer, or make phonecalls to know what they ate for breakfast – just because they are not in GoogleTalk, Facebook chat, MSN or Skype… Sigh. And with all this mess and the million options, I don’t see those people turning their social life online. It’s already way too messy and time-consuming for the ones “in it”. Mostly, people look for the simplest option, so give them that and stop the buzzword bullshit!