Dealing with those tasks, yes those tasks
When you look at your ‘to do’ list and you see those tasks; the ones that have been there for what seems like ages. They’ve been there so long you wonder how you’re going to raise the motivation and generate enough momentum to complete them. It’s at times like this you’re looking for the same level of motivation and momentum you have for those enjoyable tasks; the ones you really enjoy doing. http://www.diary4life.com/?p=212
Haves and have nots
The millionaires of our society sit in the comfort of their secure homes, behind their latest ’state of the art’ security systems, while the poor and poverty stricken residents of our deprived sprawling estates and tower blocks look down on the vandalised property, abandoned cars and badly maintained public buildings. http://www.diary4life.com/?p=189
Twitter as a learning aid - learning beyond university to informal learning
Twitter as a learning aid - learning beyond university to informal learning
Learning beyond university to informal learning using micro-blogging
Twitter can be used as a great aid to learning, but is it a replacement for traditional learning strategies?
Following the publication of a recent post Why Twitter is good for learning we have received a significant amount of supportive feedback. However some academic based sites have criticised the piece without understanding some of the fundamentals of learning and what Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms are capable of offering. Certainly learning appears to be stuck in the confines of “formal learning”, apparently missing the 80% of real learning that most of us do on a day to day basis.
It is interesting, as I sit and write this I am thinking about getting ready to attend the IITT annual training conference, one of only two “formal learning” interventions I will have undertaken for several months. But is this the only learning I do? .. no. I learn far more in an informal way from reading blogs , twitter and networking with like (and unlike) people.
This short piece has been written to provide some clarity on the application of the first article.
Firstly let me clarify my thoughts:
I am not advocating that Twitter can replace e-learning, classrooms or books, nor indeed any formal learning tool or strategy, however I am advocating use of twitter as an adjunct to learning strategies as a blended approach to re-enforce learning and key messages. We know that the most effective learning needs to be ‘just in time’, in a styles (learning or communication) that suits the learner, and that repetition helps.
Having read comments on other sites about this piece it is interesting that some people equate learning to be education, and only effective from university or books. Learning to me is very different from education and knowledge. Indeed our own model:
Knowledge >>> Understanding >>> Action = Learning
shows this – where education often only provides the knowledge.
Our work over the past 10 years with many owner-managers and entrepreneurs (many educated at some of the worlds leading MBA courses, UK, US & EU) clearly demonstrate that people gain knowledge on such courses, however real Understanding comes from making real world mistakes after putting it into action. Not from comprehension at an academic level. Many exiting from MBAs and other such programmes believe they have understanding – however as is often shown using the model – the four steps to learning we don't know what we don't know (unconscious competence), is often the mental state we are in after completing such a course. This is not to say that these programmes are not of value, they are – but not in the way many expect.
Not all learning occurs within the confines of a university or other establishment
Twitter is a tool which appears to have been adopted more by those in the age group 30-45 and little in the group 18-25. This says a lot about the platform and its relevance. Twitter as a learning tool is by its nature adhoc, sporadic, informal and most of all unstructured. Exactly the way we learn when we are not on a fixed programme of study. It is very much about learning what you need to learn at a given point in time.
So twitter and other micro-blogging tools:
- great to create a spark – a desire to learn
- great to find current thinking – and to start the journey of learning in a given area
- excellent for adhoc information and knowledge acquisition
- excellent as a refresher to existing learning
- excellent for learning from peers and their experiences
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© RapidBI 2009 Mike Morrison Our Blog Mike Morrison
My Shared Items / Sat, 26 Sep 2009 08:55:00 GMT
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How is life as a Hoarder?
When you hear somebody say I’m a hoarder. Do you asked them “What does that mean exactly?” Well, I hoard things . . . collect things . . . save things . . . store things . . . never throw things out . . . however you want to put it, I DO it. http://www.diary4life.com/?p=183#more-183
Learning to Forgive
How easy is it to forgive somebody who has upset you, offended you or even broken your trust? Do you find it difficult to forgive and forget? If so, why is it so difficult? On the other hand if you find it fairly easy to forgive another person why is it you find it within you to be able to forgive no matter what? http://www.diary4life.com/?p=174
Wants and Needs
The distinction between needs and wants is something to raise a interesting discussion in many social circles. http://www.diary4life.com/?p=171
Free Speech in Online Communities: The Delusion of Entitlement
Back in 2004 and 2005 when people asked me what I did for a living, I’d tell them I was a blogger. I got a lot of blank stares and invariably had to explain what a blog was. After that, people would lower their eyes, figuring that I was obviously on some ridiculous dead-end path with my “online diary.”
In January 2006 I gave a 90-minute Power Point presentation to explain blogging to a group of about 60 speakers in Las Vegas. By that time I was earning a decent sustainable living from blogging (a few thousand dollars a month). I predicted that blogs would be everywhere within a few years. That wasn’t a difficult prediction to make since Technorati was reporting such phenomenal growth month after month with no end in sight. You didn’t have to be particularly prescient to see that blogging and other social media had bright futures. But I doubt many people in the room believed me.
They believe me now.
Fast forward a few years, and social media has exploded. Now I can scarcely find people who haven’t at least heard of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Unfortunately there’s a downside to such a rapid technological and social change. Part of that downside is that people approach social media with some misguided expectations that aren’t based in reality. In this article I’d like to offer some suggestions and analogies to help steer people away from such erroneous thinking.
The major mistake people make is that they assume they’re entitled to free speech when it comes to participating in online communities such as blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.
Entitlement
In the USA and many other countries, free speech is a protected right. Well, that’s certainly debatable these days, but let’s be idealists for the moment.
There are some legal limitations on free speech (criminal behavior, slander/libel, copyright laws, Patriot Act, etc). Some countries, such as China, restrict free speech more than others. I live in the USA, and we Americans are accustomed to a wide latitude when it comes to free speech.
It isn’t surprising that this sense of entitlement to free speech should be carried onto the Internet. In general I’m all for that. I’ve especially enjoyed having the opportunity to interact with people around the world.
Free Speech and Contract Law
Free speech protection, however, does not extend to private homes or businesses. You may have the right to say what you like in a public forum, but you don’t have the right to enter a private home or business and do that. In such situations your right to free speech is subject to the discretion of the owner of that private forum.
Contract law may apply in many cases as well. With some limitations it’s perfectly legal for a contract to limit the right of free speech. This is because you have the ability to enter into a contract that restricts your right to free speech.
I’ve signed many business deals over the years that restrict my free speech rights. Many business contracts include a non-disclosure clause, whereby I agree that I won’t disclose certain financial or other protected info that another business shares with me. This is very common in business.
It’s likely you’ve entered into many contracts over the years that restrict your right to free speech. For example, if you ever sign up for an online service and agreed to their Terms of Service, they usually define pretty clearly what restrictions you’re agreeing to.
Free Speech Online
For many of the online sites where you may think free speech is protected, you’re required to contractually agree to limit your free speech rights. You actually don’t have the same right to free speech that you would in a truly public forum.
This is true of Facebook, Twitter, and pretty much all the major social media sites I’m aware of. Review their Terms of Service and see for yourself.
In most cases the restrictions are reasonable and maybe even necessary for maintaining a quality service. It depends on who’s running the service.
While it may seem that you’re entitled to free speech just the same as you would in a public forum, in actuality you waived that right when you joined the service. That was a condition of your registration.
Some online services are quite liberal when it comes to restricting your free speech rights, while others are more restrictive.
The Catch-All Clause
Many online services also include some kind of catch-all clause which basically gives them the right to censor you however they see fit.
For example, Twitter’s Terms of Service includes the following sentence: “We reserve the right at all times (but will not have an obligation) to remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services and to terminate users or reclaim usernames.” So according to those terms, they can nuke your account and content whenever they want.
Since I’m a Twitter user myself, Twitter could disable my account and delete all my Tweets on a whim. They have the right to do that because I agreed to their Terms of Service. Now if they actually went around doing this sort of thing, it would likely generate some bad PR for them, but because I agreed to their ToS, I don’t see that I’d have a strong legal case if I tried to fight them on it. The legal reality is probably more complicated than what I’m expressing here, but as far as I can tell, I do have a valid contract with Twitter where I willfully agreed to restrict my free speech rights when it comes to using their service.
Consequently, I know that when I post updates to my Twitter account, I have no entitlement to free speech. I’ve signed away that right in exchange for the privilege of using their service. And yes, it is a privilege. Tweeting is not a guaranteed right under the law.
I include a catch-all clause for the discussion forums on my website as well. It says, “The owners of Personal Development for Smart People Forums reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any thread for any reason.” In addition to that, you also have to agree to follow our forum etiquette rules. You can’t post messages in our forums unless you agree to our Terms of Service.
So in order to post your own messages on my website, you must also waive your right to free speech. If you think you can post whatever you’d like with impunity, you’re sorely mistaken.
This certainly isn’t unique to my website — not by a long shot. The phrasing I use came standard with the forum software I installed. A simple Google search can verify that thousands of other forums use similar phrasing.
The Reality of Private Forums
Why do so many online communities restrict free speech? Isn’t the expansion of free speech the whole point?
This isn’t some draconian conspiracy. It’s largely a matter of business realities. Creating and managing a highly social website isn’t free. If someone is going to go to the trouble to host and maintain such a community, especially one that may become very popular, they want to make sure they have enough control over the management of the site to fulfill their reasons for building the community in the first place. Unbridled free speech can easily degrade the quality of a community and run afoul of the site owner’s agenda.
If they were legally prevented from restricting free speech, fewer people and businesses would host such online communities. I for one would not host an online community under those conditions.
While it’s nice that government played a major role in funding the underlying Internet infrastructure that makes online communities possible, they don’t directly subsidize online communities like mine. I have to pay my site’s expenses. This includes my $350 monthly web hosting fee.
Computing power costs money. Bandwidth costs money. Site management, including installing security updates and performing basic maintenance activities, takes time. The forum software I use costs money; I pay an annual license fee to use it. Maintaining an online community certainly isn’t free on my end. Even if I use free software and find free hosting, I still have to invest my time. And someone else would still be paying for it somewhere down the line.
Allowing unbridled free speech on my website would be a very bad idea. It’s easy enough to predict what would happen because I know what our moderators deal with on a daily basis, and I’ve seen what happens to other forums that have done that. Within a few months, the site would be overrun by spammers and marketers looking to promote their wares. Flame wars would flare up on a daily basis, and threads beyond a certain length would be quickly derailed by juvenile comments and trolling by drama addicts. The quality of discussions would go down the drain, especially when it came to sensitive personal topics. I’d take one look at the mess and quickly pull the plug. Our forums would not be able to fulfill their purpose under such conditions, which is for conscious growth-oriented people to come together to help each other solve problems and improve their lives.
Although our community has more than 25,000 registered members and more than 407,000 messages posted, the core community of regular daily visitors is actually much smaller. Our top contributor has more than 10,785 posts herself (2.6% of the total). On any given day, the number of registered members who visit the site is around 400 people total. So the core community isn’t nearly as big as the casual visitors. This is pretty common when it comes to online forums and social media sites in general. The hardcore users make up only a small percentage of the total community.
Managing our community requires a staff of volunteer moderators. These moderators aren’t paid for their work. The forums don’t generate enough income to justify it, especially since I removed all the Adsense ads last year. If the quality of the community was too low, we’d have a really hard time recruiting decent moderators, which would lead to a downward spiral. So if we slacked off a little, the community could quickly go from bad to worse as our moderators concluded, “This just ain’t worth my time.” By maintaining high community standards, our moderators can see that their efforts help keep the community as a whole running smoothly, and that intrinsic reward is very important to maintaining community integrity as a whole.
Many of the most active members of our online community have been with us for years. I’ve met many of them in person, including several of our volunteer moderators. Consequently, our community doesn’t much resemble an open public forum. I’d say it’s closer to a really large family reunion with lots of drop-by visitors.
The Site Owner’s Agenda
Amazon wants to sell products. They allow you to post product reviews because someone at Amazon decided that allowing lots of people to do this would increase their sales. Do you honestly think they’d let any of us post reviews if it hurt their sales or cut into their market share to do so? They have some free speech restrictions to prevent people from doing too much damage to their sales, like posting non-Amazon links in reviews. It’s their site, so they make the rules about what you can and can’t post in a review.
The owners of Facebook have an agenda too. Investors have poured a lot of money into the site, so I’m sure they want to see it turn a profit. Consequently, you’ll see ads on your Facebook pages. Facebook makes money from those ads.
And as for Twitter… well, I don’t think Twitter’s owners have even figured what Twitter’s agenda is yet.
Some people seem to think that my primary motivation for starting and maintaining an online community was financial, as if being an entrepreneur means that all of one’s actions are driven by a profit motive. Now that’s a laugh and a half. If I really cared that much about money, I’d never have launched our forums in the first place, and even if I did, I’d have quickly realized my mistake and would have dropped them within a few months. Our forums aren’t profitable. They hog a lot of computing resources, requiring me to pay for a much faster server than I’d need for my blog alone. The forums usually cost more to run than they generate in revenue. On top of that, I’m not counting the value of the time Erin and I invest in administration. If we had to pay someone else to handle the admin, we’d lose more money on it, even if we could hire someone for less than minimum wage.
This isn’t the first time I’ve hosted an online community, so this didn’t surprise me. I used to host a popular forum for game developers, and I’ve been active in online communities since the early 90s. My game developer forum wasn’t profitable either, but I kept it going for a while because I enjoyed the communal interaction. So I knew full well when I started my personal development forums that they weren’t likely to be very profitable. Fortunately my blog generates more than enough revenue to subsidize the forums. But if I ever sold the site to someone who sought to maximize revenue from it, they would most definitely either ax the forums, flood them with third-party ads, or make some other changes to financially justify the community’s existence.
The main reason I maintain a discussion forum is that I like having like-minded people over to hang out. Just as I frequently invite people to my home, I also invite people to my online home to hang out together and talk about life. As I see it, paying for the upkeep of the forums is similar to providing snacks for my house guests.
If you have issues with the site owner’s agenda, don’t pay a visit to their virtual home. And don’t make the naive mistake of assuming their agenda is to help you assert your right to free speech.
Common Courtesy
When people approach online communities with the erroneous belief that they’re entitled to unbridled free speech, this misjudgment often leads to inappropriate behavior.
For example, sometimes people will register for my forums and try to trash talk me.
I don’t mind a bit of friendly ribbing now and then, and I’m all for intelligent debate, but if people come to my website and try to treat me, my wife, my friends, my business associates, or other members of my community with disrespect, they get banned very quickly.
Try going around to various privately owned forums and trash talk the site owner and his/her family. See how long it takes before your account is nuked. Sure, some people will allow you to do that. Some people don’t care. Some don’t pay attention. Some will get into it with you because they like the drama. But quite often you’ll end up having your account disabled. Ostensibly it’s for violating their Terms of Service. But in reality, you got banned for behaving like a jerk in someone else’s home. And when you find yourself bounced to the curb, see how much anyone cares to hear your protests that you were simply exercising your right to free speech. I’m sure the crickets will enjoy listening to your well-formed arguments.
You Are an Invited Guest
Here’s an attitude I suggest you adopt when it comes to participating in online communities. When you visit someone else’s online community, you’re a guest in the owner’s online home. Behave accordingly. Your participation there is a privilege subject to their owner’s discretion.
For example, StevePavlina.com is my own private website. In case that wasn’t obvious, take note of the URL. Notice that the URL is NOT personal-development-free-for-all-subsidized-by-steve-pavlina-who-will-bend-over-and-take-it-up-the-ass-from-anyone.com.
For some reason, certain people seem to confuse those two URLs quite often.
Technically Pavlina LLC owns StevePavlina.com, and technically an LLC is a separate legal entity from a person. Lawyers, accountants, and IRS agents get off on that sort of thing. But based on the company name you can probably guess who owns 100% of Pavlina LLC… and you’d be right.
Some people seem to have a really hard time with the whole notion of privately owned online communities. The idea that they don’t have the right to free speech everywhere online really messes with their heads. They visit their favorite online communities expecting that they’re entitled to rant and rave about anything they wish, even after they just legally agreed that everything they post is subject to the site owner’s discretion.
From time to time, visitors come to our forums and post something disrespectful toward me, Erin, our friends, or our community members. Naturally they get banned rather quickly.
Some visitors act really immature and annoy our members. Banned. Some visitors try to use our forums to promote the latest pyramid scheme. Banned. Some people think it’s fun to derail other people’s threads. Banned. And some people try to participate without ever having seen The Princess Bride. Banned and sent to Count Rugen for rehabilitation.
Most of the time, I’m not the one doing the banning. We have a team of more than a dozen moderators who do a great job of enforcing the community rules. But if I happen to be the first to notice a problem, I’m happy to take care of it myself. It’s my home, so I’m ultimately responsible when problems arise.
Sometimes people who’ve been banned will go to another online community such as someone else’s blog or another online forum and rant about what happened. “I can’t believe it. All I did was go to Steve Pavlina’s website and insinuate that he was a loser for being into self-help, and he banned me. What a jerk!”
Sometimes someone else who had a similar experience will chime in and commiserate. “Yeah, he banned me too. And all I did was call him a Satan spawn for being married to a psychic medium. Can you believe that? He’s censoring people!”
No, actually I banned you for being a moron. Well, it might not have been me personally, but I’ll gladly take credit for it. And if I was the one who handled it, most likely I did it without guilt or remorse. As everyone knows, the Dread Pirate Roberts never takes prisoners.
Do I censor people? Technically yes. But I don’t like the word censorship in this case — not because it’s too strong but because it’s too mild. I’m not just censoring people. I’m kicking them out of my home and telling them not to come back. I’m not saying, “I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m going to cut you off.” I’m actually saying, “GET THE HELL OUT, BITCH! AND TAKE YOUR NASTY CHEESE PUFFS WITH YOU!”
Is that clear enough?
So my critics in this area are a bit off base, not because they’ve accused me of something I didn’t do but because they didn’t accuse me of enough.
If you’re going to come into my private online home and behave like a jerk in my presence, I will show you the door every time. And after you’re gone, I’ll return to my other guests and refill the snack bowls.
Who Makes The Rules?
Ostensibly when someone is banned from an online community, it’s because they violated the Terms of Service and/or community rules. But the deeper and more accurate reason is that the site owner has ultimately decided they don’t want you there.
After all, who wrote the rules in the first place? Quite often the site owner did. At the very least they approved someone else’s boilerplate text. Where did those rules come from? They came from the owner’s sense of what behaviors they’re willing to accept in their online community.
Who wrote the formal rules for my online community? I did. I solicited a lot of input from others, but the final decisions were mine to make. Where did those rules come from? They’re based on what sorts of behavior I’m willing to accept from people in my online home. If I’m not willing to tolerate certain behavior in my online home, and if I can articulate it reasonably well, I add it to our community rules, and it becomes part of our Terms of Service. But the unwritten rule is that every member who participates in this community does so at my personal discretion, especially given the catch-all in the ToS. Most people seem to have no problem with this, especially those that have had a lot of experience participating in other online communities.
Now generally speaking, if you want to build a cool community, it’s wise to be fair and reasonable. If you behave abusively toward your own community, you’ll have bigger problems to deal with. I happen to think our current community rules are quite fair and reasonable given the nature of the subjects we discuss. Again, it’s like having people over at your house. If you host a good party, people will enjoy hanging out there, and everyone is happy. If you’re an ogre, you’ll scare everyone away, and your parties will suck. The point of throwing the party is to bring people together to socialize. Maintaining a good social atmosphere requires maintaining a careful balance between freedom and good manners.
How would you react if you were hosting a party at your home for your friends, family, and community members, and someone waltzes in and starts treating your guests rudely or otherwise behaving like an obnoxious buffoon? Would you continue to welcome this person into your home, or would you show them the door right quick?
In general, this is the unspoken truth about how online communities are managed. The idea that you have free speech is a delusion. Your participation is subject to the site owner’s consent. Even if the community has written rules and does its best to uphold them fairly, who makes the rules? In most cases the site owner makes the rules.
Online Abuse
If people want to rant and rave about me in their own homes or on other websites I don’t own, more power to them. I really don’t mind that. Some bloggers commit libel by posting ridiculously false info, and sometimes we end up with a version of the telephone game where information loses accuracy as it spreads around. But as I see it, such things are a natural consequence of my chosen lifestyle. This can get a bit weird sometimes, but after 5 years of blogging, I’m used to it. It’s easy enough for me to tune out someone who rants about me somewhere else. No one is forcing me to go look at it. Whether I choose to read stuff like that or not depends on how masochistic I’m feeling.
That said, I have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to being abused in my own home, whether online or offline. I’m simply unwilling to enter into an abusive relationship with anyone. If I catch you peeing in my yard, I will hose you.
When someone posts trash talk on my own website, it’s like they rang my doorbell and left a pile of crap on my doormat. It smells bad, and it’s a waste of my time to deal with it.
Do you have to become my close personal friend or agree with everything I say to participate in my website’s online community? Heck no, I’m not that strict. But if you pay me a visit online or offline, I do require that you treat me, my wife, and our other guests with basic courtesy, politeness, and respect. Treat me online as you would if you were a guest in my home. Just as I open my website to others, I often open my home to a variety of guests as well. I love hanging out with many different kinds of people, as long as they behave with a modicum of human decency.
Now if at some point you think that I’m behaving oddly or that my manners are a bit lacking, you’re always free to leave. No one is forcing you to sit there and listen to me. It’s my home after all, and if you’re going to hang around in my living room 24/7, you’re bound to catch me at my worst at some point, so try not to be too shocked when that happens. But rest assured that when I visit your home, I’m going to be respectful of your space.
Am I trying to build a cult of supporters? No, I’m actually stricter than a cultist would be. I’ve turned away people who might have had the potential to become good and loyal cult members, but I just didn’t want them in my home because they acted too stalker-like. I want to hang out with interesting people who enjoy intelligent discussion, and I want to maintain a persistent place where people like that can come together. I have no interest in surrounding myself with mindless minions.
Misunderstandings arise when people make erroneous assumptions about how online communities really work and why people run them. This really isn’t rocket science. Can you grasp the analogy of virtual communities being equivalent to someone’s online home, regardless of how big they appear to be? Does this make sense to you? Does this help shed light on some of the problems you may have encountered in the past?
Quality Criticism
Isn’t it a community owner’s obligation to be receptive to criticism?
I’d say that’s entirely up to the owner.
I do think it’s reasonable to be open to critical feedback. A bit of constructive criticism now and then is good for growth. It keeps people honest and grounded.
If I’m going to listen to criticism, however, I want it to be of high quality. I don’t want to waste my time listening to drivel. In my case the best quality criticism almost always comes from people who know me pretty well. They’ve met me in person. They’ve met Erin. They know me on a personal level beyond my public persona as a blogger.
I’m not nearly as receptive to criticism from people who wander in off the street (virtual or otherwise) and who’ve never had so much as a single one-on-one conversation with me. Such criticism is almost always of such low quality as to be useless. Too often such people base their criticisms on one or more inaccurate assumptions and build a house of cards on top of it. It’s totally inactionable; they might as well be talking about someone else. In this area I think Erin has it worse than I do. She gets some pretty wacky criticism from people who begin with, “Erin, since you’ve obviously sold your soul to the devil, you may not be receptive to what I have to say, but please hear me out anyway…”
There’s a difference between offering genuinely helpful constructive feedback to someone you know, coming from a place of respect and wanting to be helpful, vs. cluelessly ranting because you want to vent or you like drama. I do my best to listen to respectful, actionable criticism because it’s in my own best interest and the interest of my community to do so. But it isn’t a good use of my time to wade through unreasonable criticism, and I don’t welcome unreasonable critics into my home to hang out with me either.
Communities within Communities
On some sites we see communities within communities. For example, I have a Facebook page which is maxed out on friends. The friend limit is 5,000. Someone else owns and manages the monstrous beast that is Facebook, and all members, including me, are subject to their Terms of Service.
Beyond that, anyone of the 5,000 Facebook members who want to post messages on my Facebook page are subject to my unwritten Terms of Service.
Imagine that the larger community is an apartment complex, subject to the terms of whoever owns that complex. All residents and guests of residents must follow that owner’s rules. But within that complex, each unit is additionally subject to the individual resident’s terms.
I regard my Facebook page as my online apartment. It’s another fun place to hang out online. If people visit my apartment and try to trash the place, I kick them out and unfriend them. It goes without saying that if you go to a friend’s apartment and behave like a jerk, they won’t be your friend for long.
When I visit a friend’s Facebook page, I consider myself a guest in their online apartment. We all live in the same complex, and it’s fun to pop over to other people’s units and see what they’re up to. But I know that if I go to my friends’ apartments and graffiti up the place while they’re gone, I’m going to lose those friends rather quickly.
I suggest you adopt a similar mindset when interacting in online sub-communities. It will save you a lot of grief.
I think if you have your own Facebook page or something similar, especially if you have a lot of active friends, you’ll have a reasonably good idea of what it’s like to manage a larger online community. How would you react if people came to your community and started posting trash talk about you? How would you feel if they started disrespecting your friends right in front of you? I imagine you’d send such people packing right quick. And I seriously doubt you’d be swayed by their protests of free speech entitlement.
So just to be abundantly clear, in most cases you are not entitled to unbridled free speech when you participate in online communities. You are a guest of the site owner — and possibly of the virtual renter as well. Behave as you would if you were a guest in someone else’s home, and you’re likely to be welcomed as a friend. Give the site owner a reason to dislike you, and you’re likely to be booted to the curb.
Online Fairness
Is this whole situation unfair? Maybe it is unfair.
I think the concept of fairness stems from a misguided sense of entitlement. You may be entitled to the right of fair treatment under the law (but realistically you can’t even count on that anywhere on earth that I know of), but you certainly aren’t entitled to fair treatment in someone’s private home, whether online or offline. When you enter a private residence or online community, you’re subject to the rules of the Lord or Lady of the place. Whatever level of fairness you may experience is at their discretion. Fairness is a privilege that humans may choose to bestow upon each other, not a right that you’re automatically entitled to.
I imagine that most homeowners like to consider themselves fair people, but their implementation of fairness is a very personal decision. You have no special entitlement to be treated fairly by others. Some laws may apply under certain situations, but generally speaking, whoever owns the house makes the rules.
If you go through life thinking you’re entitled to fair treatment by people who barely know you, well, let’s just say that you’re in for a rude awakening. The real world doesn’t work that way. Give it another decade or two, and reality will hopefully straighten out your belief system.
I’m not saying you have to like this situation, but I’d encourage you to accept it for what it is. If you have a hard time accepting it, you may have picked the wrong planet on which to incarnate.
You may now commence with the Steve-bashing… as long as you do it off-site and don’t tell me about it.
Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, October 2-4, 2009.
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© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.
Keeping on top of your clutter
Enjoyment and achieving success are two things we aspire to each day. For some, these two criteria are achieved without too much trouble, however for others it becomes a daily ordeal, a nightmare.
So why are some people successful whilst others ‘fail’ miserably. If these people were to scrutinise their lifestyle, become more self aware and undertake an honest appraisal of their everyday activities they would realise they had far too much clutter in their life. They have so much ‘going on’ in their life they are suffering from continuing spiral of failure compounded an inability to make an honest decision. An honest decision to do the important and urgent jobs on their ‘to do’ list rather than hide them away while they do the enjoyable and ‘buzz’ giving tasks.
How often do you find yourself falling into this situation, knowing full well you have tasks to do that require your immediate attention. All to often important and urgent tasks are overlooked in favour of the less important and urgent tasks. A more ‘trendy’ or popular phrase for this is procrastination. The procrastinators of the world seem very skilled at compiling ‘to do’ lists and identifying the things that need doing; the problem begins with deciding which tasks ought to be completed first.
Next time you find yourself in this position try analysing each task in turn and score them in terms of their importance and urgency. The following explanations may help with your assessment of their importance and urgency.
Urgent
Urgent tasks are deadline based. Usually the deadline is control by others and you have no control over it. The more urgent tasks require completing first. Urgency and importance are not related.
Important
The time you want to spend on a job is a measure of the importance you place on it. Importance is not related to urgency. The importance is a factor of the time you want to spend on the task not the time you actually spend on it. Quality and time are related for important tasks.
When you have honestly assessed your tasks allocate them into important or not important and urgent or not urgent. A useful matrix for you use can be viewed by clicking the link below. Feel free to download and apply this matrix to the time management of your daily schedules.
Beware that some of your task will move from a low ranking to a higher ranking over time. Have fun improving your time management and achieving more free time in your diary.
Thank you for reading, let me know how you go on and share your experiences.
Share and Enjoy:
Don’t Be a Greedy Blogger
This is another guest post from Robby G at Shite I Like.com where he gives expert dating advice for both men and women, amongst other advice.
I’ve only recently realized the benefits of good Karma. Greed and blogging doesn’t go well together at all. Right off the bat I wanted to say that if you’re thinking of starting a blog strictly for money and your heart isn’t in the blog topic, you will not only fail but you will lose all that time you’ll spend creating the blog and writing content that will be extremely difficult to produce just because it’s not something you believe in but just something you think has a high monetary rate of return. There are two ways to looking at blogging: 1. Every other blogger is your competition, or 2. Every other blog out there is an opportunity.
Though other blogs, particularly that write about a topic similar to yours, are your competition, they are also your ticket to success. Now allow me to explain.
Opportunity in the Blogosphere
Think about this, if you were the only person on earth with a blog and no one would have caught on to this wonderful innovation then your blog would quickly die because there wouldn’t be enough demand for blogs, blogging, or bloggers. Since there is a blogosphere and people are enjoying each others’ blogs, that means that there is room for you to grow and create a leading blog in your niche. But what if there are already tens or hundreds of blogs writing about the same topic as you are? Well, use that in your advantage. I’ve noticed over the years that mostbloggers are quite good people (nevertheless I have run into one or two a**holes) and they don’t mind to share their knowledge, their friendship, and most importantly their love for blogging. There is opportunity in your competition because if you are a good-hearted individual and aren’t greedy about attracting all the traffic to yourself, there is room for you to grow. Now what are the ways to attract Brownie Points with Karma? There is a list of ways that you may think do not help your blog, but in fact they eventually attract much more people to come to your blog overtime than you would have if you did not take part in them. Here’s the list:
- Provide useful comments on other blogs: By doing this I did not only get lots of traffic from people clicking on my link, but I also received emails from the authors of the posts asking me if I could broaden my comment into a full post and submit it to them as a guest article. This doesn’t happen for every comment, but there’s that chance people will really want you to share your knowledge as a guest post without you even asking for it.
- Link to other blogs in your posts:Linking to other blogs may seem like a sure way to lose readers because they will simply jump ship and start reading your competitor’s posts. But that’s a mistake many bloggers have in mind. By providing readers with relevant links, they see that you know what you’re talking about and you want to help your readers with the most informative links.
- Blogroll: I personally do not have a blogroll on my blog, but what I do have is a post with my favourite blogs that I follow daily. Since only recently I have been getting out there and making lots of friends in the blogging community, I have decided to create a full-blown blogroll linking to the blogs of my friends, which is in the works. I do not ask anything in return from the blogs I link to, because I leave it all to Karma, and more often than not the people I link to end up linking back to me.
- Attract guest posts: Guest posting attracts you links and new traffic, but when you allow other bloggers to guest post, you attract bloggers, sometimes a link from their blog, and again a wave of good Karma. When someone guest posts on your blog they right away feel a certain companionship with you and that can last for a very long time. From simply allowing and attracting guest posts, you open yourself to an opportunity of new friends and new openings for yourself to maybe one day create a certain campaign with that friend that will attract a much wider audience than your current one. If you think you have ideas for a guest post relevant to my blog topic, feel free to contact me.
- Get expert opinions: If you’re not too sure about something, go ahead and ask an expert. People love to be praised and a great way to do that is to ask an expert what they would do in a certain situation. For example, my blog is based on giving dating advice, so if I was to be stumped on a reader’s dating question, I would ask a fellow expert on their opinion and I would throw in some of my ideas to complete the most perfect advice I could possibly provide for my reader. This way I am showing my reader that I care about their issue and want to provide them with the most help I can, and it also allows me to get in touch with interesting people who may eventually want to conduct some sort of business later on, seeing that I cared enough to reach out to them for their expert advice.
- Interview and help promote others:Interviewing others gives your readers fresh new content. It also gives the person being interviewed exposure of their product or website. And what about you, the blogger? Well, it gives you the opportunity to grow. After interviewing an expert in my field, I did not only get to give my readers new content, but I also received an advertising offer from the person. It builds your credentials, authority, and broadens your circle of friends.
- Fill your ad-space. Once in a while when you don’t have advertisers waiting to fill up the empty space-ad you have on your blog, contact someone that may be interested and give it out for free for a month or so. This is an act of goodness, plus it gives more exposure to your advertising services, and maybe some day that person you gave away an ad-space for free to will help you out some way or even pay for some ad-space in the future.
These are just some of the ways you can use to help other bloggers and get good Karma. It all usually comes back to help you out somehow or someway. As long as you find ways to share the love and don’t feel the need to be greedy, good things will always come your way.
Do you have any ideas for ways to share the love and still reap the benefits? Leave your thoughts in the comment section. Cheers!
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Create Reader Profiles/Personas to Inspire and Inform Your Blogging
One of the techniques that I’ve employed in my blogging over the last 6 months behind the scenes is to create Reader Profiles (or Personas).
The technique is simply - open up a word document and begin to describe a type of reader that you’re either attempting to write for or who is already reading your blog. I’ll show you some examples of reader profiles that I have created below - but in short the task is to describe who they are, what their interests are, why they might be reading your blog and what their needs are.
The idea is that you end up with a picture of who you’re writing for that you can then use to inspire and inform you in your blogging.
Before I talk about the benefits of doing this and give a few thoughts on how to do one for your own blog - let me show you one that I created a while back for my photography site (click to enlarge).
The profile above describes one of the types of readers that we have on DPS - people who largely use their cameras to photograph their kids.
The profile describes why she reads DPS, some of her dreams, the type of photography she’s into, how else she uses the web, a little about her demographics, the level she’s at etc.
Here’s another one from a different type of reader at DPS:
Again - I’ve described another type of reader in a similar way to the first.
In each of these cases the reader profile is based upon a reader group already within the community - however this same exercise could be done with potential readers - or the type of person you want to read your blog if you’re just starting up a blog and don’t yet have readers.
Why Do I Create Reader Profiles?
Hopefully you can already see some of the benefits of these kinds of reader profiles - but let me list a few of the things I’ve enjoyed about having done this exercise:
- It Personalises the blogging experience - I find that having a person (real or pretend) in mind as I write reminds me that there are real people on the other end of my posts. There are people with faces, names and needs - I find it inspiring to visualise them as they read what I’m writing - it also helps me to write in a more personal tone.
- It informs my writing - having these kinds of personas before me and in mind as I write reminds me of some of the needs, problems and questions that readers might have. As a result I tend to write more practical posts that are written with real reader needs in mind. Often as I write I visualise the questions and reactions that these different readers might have to my posts and then try to build answers into what I’m writing based upon these questions and reactions.
- It identifies opportunities - I remember writing the first profile above (Grace) and having the realisation that quite a few of my readers have mentioned that they have dreams of one day making some money from their photography. This triggered me to start a section in our forum on making money with photography which has been really popular.
- It can be helpful for recruiting advertisers - often when talking with potential advertisers the question you’re asked is ‘what type of reader do you have’. Having these pre prepared personas can be really useful in answering that question. It also shows that you’ve thought about your readers and run a professional site.
- It identifies ways to connect with your readership - you’ll notice I’ve included details in the profiles on how the reader uses the web. It’s really useful to know what other sites your reader uses and what places of presence that they have as this can identify opportunities to identify places where people like the readers you already have (or those that you want) hang out.
How to Create a Reader Profile?
There are no real rules - you can see I’ve developed a certain style in my personas above. I added a picture to each of the type of person in the profile to further personalise it. I also tried to include information on these kinds of areas:
- Demographics
- Financial Situation
- Needs/Challenges
- How they use the Web
- Motivations for Reading DPS
- Experience with the topic - Level
- Dreams
I’m sure that others would include other types of information - if you’ve done this type of thing before please feel free to share your suggestions and tips in comments below.
Let me finish this post off with one last persona - again for DPS.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Create Reader Profiles/Personas to Inspire and Inform Your Blogging


