Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library gave an entertaining entrepreneurship peptalk at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, on how to build personal branding using the internet : Position yourself to succeed. If you do something, you hate, stop.
At a very young age, Gary took over the family business, a liquor store in New Jersey. Over a period of 6 years Gary and his father Sasha rebranded the business as Wine Library and transformed it from a local store doing roughly $4 million in sales annually to a $50 million national industry leader. The development of the Wine Library juggernaut reached its zenith on August 25, 2006 when Gary was featured with a caricature in the top left corner of the Wall Street Journal, a lifelong goal of Gary’s that he achieved before the age of 30!
Now enjoy his talk :
To sum up Gary’s points :
1. Quit doing stuff you hate. You want to position yourself for great things, and they won’t happen as long as you’re stuck in a daytime job you hate.
2. Stop excusing yourself and think you can’t “monetize”. You can. Even if you collect smurfs, someone will buy into that - smurf it up!
3. Quit watching LOST and you’ll find the afterhours to work for what you want. You won’t get money to do what you want. You work to get it. Find time. Earn a little on the way.
Found this courtesy of Raymond at dltq.org. Thanks for the tip!
Preparing a battle plan for integrating Wordpress µ (or MU) with our network of sites. I will commence the execution of this plan at a non-disclosed time sometime in the near future. The Kaplak Blog and Kaplak Wiki will remain online but the site in our root will be completely removed and therefore unreachable. This in effect terminates the old Kaplak site in favour of a complete Wordpress µ install. We will work from there to rebuild the root site with new texts and the subsite network reachable from subdomains to kaplak.com, which will be known as the Kaplak Stream.
I’ve never done an install of WP µ before. I’ve performed lots of installs of web software before, but I have no prior experience with µ. Installing web packages I’ve usually taken the backups I felt were necessry but otherwise simply plunged ahead and learnt from my mistakes. I’ve always learned to prepare mentally for a one way process of steep learning dotted with the occasional tumble, which makes me spend days beforehand searching for other users’ experiences. A little planning and knowing the road ahead doesn’t hurt. So I’ve spent a lot of time these past days reading up on other people’s experiences and problems, to get an idea about what to expect. Unfortunately, what we’re doing with µ doesn’t seem to be the usual thing - so we will no doubt learn things the hard way, either way.
Here’s what the general plan looks like right now :
1. Install WP µ package in our root
2. Create the pages we need to make the root site functionable
3. Create the initial round of subsites we need for archival purposes. Every external service we use will be set up to feed a site of it’s own. I.e. all of our bookmarks will be archived from delicious, all our tweets will be archived from Twitter, and so on.
4. Install and make sure WP-o-matic (or another appropriate automatic RSS feeder) is acting up to speed. WP-o-matic should be fully compatible with WP µ.
5. Feed our archived streams back into one major subsite channel, which will be the Kaplak Stream, as well as to other subsites to which they are of interest.
This completes our first setup and the site is functional. It only starts getting interesting, though. Next, we generate any subsite we wish at a particular time by feeding it the appropriate RSS lumps of interest. For this work we will use Google Reader to begin with, with it’s built-in tagging option, which makes it easy to generate new feeds from existing RSS feeds. Each subsite aims to sell preferably one product only, or a very limited range of products. To begin with, these will be products made available via affiliate programs such as (but not limited to) Amazon Associates, eJunkie and RedAntenna, depending on the product. These sites need not be popular, nor updated or visited frequently, but will seek to stay highly focused on their subject of interest, in order to offer as rich a context as possible when they are visited, commented upon or linked to. This makes it easy and valuable for related sites and communities to tap into these streams, as they build up lasting value.
Video featuring an interview with Clay Shirky with some memorable quotes, found courtesy of Jake Mckee.
One of Shirky’s great points is, that in order to coordinate group efforts on a large scale, one needs to fail informatively, i.e. deliver the metadata to enable the user to identify which projects and tasks are worth pursuing and which are not. Answering a question by Chris Heuer on “how to connect the dots” i.e. groups working independently of each other but often on similar projects : (my emphasis)
The two modes of management we have are the micro manager [and the] grand strategic visionary. Neither of these really work with community. You need something in the middle, which is a kind of facilitation skill. Noone to guide the community, noone to let them go. And it is really, for the individual projects, that’s what you need.
For the, you know, web scale how-do-we-connect-the-dots, the only answer I’ve seen, that really works at large scale, is to work informatively, and to fail informatively.
So if you go on to Sourceforge, which is the biggest collection of open source projects in existance, three quarters of those projects are completely inert, 1 developer, no downloads ever, it’s just nothing ever happened. But on Sourceforge you can always tell what’s working and what’s not, every day. So it doesn’t matter that you’re letting people try things all over, because they can discover each other and move off “this project isn’t working but that one is”. And so you gotta give people the kind of metadata it takes to say : “This is what my organization does, what’s your organization doing, I can find it on Google, I can pull it out of an RSS feed, I can work with it”. If you give people that kind of information, then they’ll find their way to each other, and you don’t have to do anything top-down, you don’t have to do anything to restrict the grand experimentation. But you also don’t end up with lots of little pockets. The open source movement, as so often, they do that better than anyone else, but I think the rest of the world is catching up.
Shirky also had an opportunity to expand on the previously prophesized “50 years of chaos” and what happens with the introduction into society of technologies such as the printing press and the internet :
The biggest surprise and the biggest pleasure researching the book was actually the early history of the printing press. Because it became clear, reading the various accounts of what happened between 1450 and 1650, that we didn’t move from situation A to situation B. We used to have this pre-literate world, where scribes were copying bibles by hand. All of a sudden we had science and this enormous up-welling of all kinds of publications and the catholic church was undone as a pan-European force. We didn’t go from A to B. We went from A to a long period of chaos. And only out of that chaos did B arrive. And that’s my thesis for what we’re seing now with the internet. We’re not seing an orderly transition to a new kind of society. We’re actually seeing all kinds of experiments, short term and long term. We can’t tell which ones are gonna last and which ones are gonna be blips. And in the meantime, a lot of stuff in contemporay society is just going to break. And so, things are going to get weirder, before they get saner, I think is the conclusion.
Time to write a new “real” blogpost again. I’ve got more than 50 drafts for posts in our blog WordPress backend, but it’s time to write a completely new post from scratch, one of those which sets itself apart from the rest.
This has to do with two things.
First, I read Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody this month. It’s a marvellous book, and one that should shake the foundations and organizational ideas of every organization, including companies and startups. It’s certainly a disturbing read, especially if you are busy building or defending an organization built on traditional principles such as hierarchy or filtering-before-publishing. More on this in a minute.
Second, I’ve been playing around with RSS feeds, in particular stuff such as the amazingly powerful and promising WP-o-matic plugin for WordPress. In short, what WP-o-matic (and similar plugins such as FeedWordPress) does is feed a WordPress install with posts from chosen RSS feeds. Feeds can be grouped in campaigns and customized with HTML and additional text - and if not now, the potential is there for feeds to be automatically or semi-automatically filtered too, for particular keywords or particular categories. It depends on what’s in the received RSS feeds.
There are technical quirks. Most of these plugins I believe are still in their infancy. But the effects of what this entails, are revolutionary, as far as the web is concerned, and perhaps beyond the web.
Shirky’s thesis in short, is that the way low-cost technologies accessible via the internet facilitates group coordination, makes possible new types of groups, which can very effectively organize collective action. Groups may be thick in substance, with few very connected people, or they can be large, more loosely connected groups. What matters is, that the cost of organizing whatever action the group undertakes, has dropped to be the equivalent of the accumulative spare time of the group’s participants. Wikipedia is an obvious examples of this, effectively organizing the production of a large scale effort by utilizing this ressource only. But there are countless other examples. In effect, ‘every URL is a latent community’, as it is quoted somewhere in the book. People otherwise disconnected by geography and the difficulty of knowing who’s out there and where they are, suddenly find themselves capable of creating groups which were not possible before the internet. Because there were previously no ways of undertaking the costs which this would entail. See the below video for a taste of what all this means :
Shirky’s book is uplifting in so many ways, because it shows (among many other things) how difficult these new capabilities make life for people in power everywhere, and especially those in power of dictatorships and any regime, which seeks to limit access to information and limit the organizational capabilities of groups and group action. And we’re only getting started. People everywhere in the world are discovering new things, learning and experimenting with the new opportunities. It’s happening with a speed and scope which takes away your breath. And this is f**king great.
Now, what RSS does is provide a simple way to get information from one platform into another. Typically used to feed a lot of information into a particular piece of software, a RSS Reader, such as Google’s online platform for doing so, Google Reader. It means news and stories can reach greater audiences, because everywhere everyone can direct attention towards what’s interesting in their field of interest. Feeds can also be shared, and in effect re-published, just as easily as they can be read. In Google Reader this happens simply by selecting a story one likes, and choosing “share”. The story is then re-published to a webpage of it’s own, with it’s own corresponding feed, which can then be shared with friends and others one wants to read the shared items. Not just news stories and blogposts can be shared like this - but videos, bookmarks, tweets, torrents, podcasts, etc. Everything which can be systematically presented in a simple RSS format.
There’s a lot of grey zone activity in this field of course, since re-publishing something from a feed may violate IP rights of authors, when republished to the web, for instance. Website owners who indiscriminately create traffic to their sites from other bloggers’ RSS feeds and generate income from advertising without adding any material of their own, run the risk of being called “scrapers” and generate general bad feeling from original authors.
What’s happening now is that tools such as WP-o-matic makes it beyond easy to set up a blog to automatically or semi-automatically fetch feeds, which means that the “automatic” website is moving into a domain traditionally dominated by “rich content” bloggers writing their own articles. Writing a blog or maintaining a website, for instance, is of course, a lot of hard work. If one can import information to build a rich website in minutes, or support one’s own stuff with valuable information in a very short time, it makes it a lot cheaper and easier to do this. WP-o-matic and other such plugins in other words makes it very very easy for web publishers to earn a dime on even the slightest of niche subjects.
Why is this important? Because, it gives the power back to everyone to aggregate the web’s information easily and conveniently, a power otherwise vested in the large search engine companies. I’ve previously discussed the merits of tools such as Lijit and Google Custom Search. Automated RSS posting is even more promising, as it can support almost any segment of interest. Even the slightest interest in a subject may spawn a rich site, which may draw in other interested readers, which in turn strengthens the effects Shirky is on about. A URL with an interested group of readers, large or small, is all that it takes to create a group. All that is needed to change this group from a latent group to an active one capable of coordinating the group’s actions, is communication tools such as blog comments, email, twittering or other widely accessible tools we have available. We only need the connecting points. Everyone is or has the opportunity to be an aggregator, an expert access point to connecting people, selling stuff or organizing groups for larger scale efforts.
