Articles

By Stefan Sojka

In the age of ideas, creativity might be a little overrated.

I’ve been suffering a bit of performance anxiety lately, when it comes to creativity.  It seems everywhere I look I am being told to unleash my creativity, ‘Think Different’, stand out in a crowd and think outside the square.  It’s like I am not a complete person unless I can revolutionise an entire industry, transform society or claim responsibility for one of those emails with all the Photoshopped animals morphing into vegetables.

What makes it worse is that I am bombarded daily with thousands of examples of other people doing just that; effortlessly manifesting their creative genius and splashing it all over my screen.  My own inadequacies are being hammered home with every news story about the latest viral sensation, dot-com billionaire and amazingly simple but absolutely brilliant business ideas I wish I had thought of.  Then comes the slick new gadget advert, telling me that it has unlimited potential in my hands, if only I will buy it and swipe my fingers all over it.

If I zoom in, however, I find a slightly different story.  Sure, there seems to be an explosion of creativity on the planet, but it is being done by millions of different people – each individual only coming up with a tiny sliver of inventiveness, if not simply recreating what already was and giving it a slight twist.

Most apparently brilliant ideas are just rehashed and adapted versions of what already was.  Before FaceBook, there was MySpace and before Twitter, there was SMS.  People were uploading videos of themselves doing all kinds of things, way before YouTube came along.  Look at all the latest design trends in the so-called ‘creative industries’.  The same design themes and styles are popping up everywhere.  Musically, there hasn’t been a song like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in the charts for over 30 years... despite the ridiculously powerful creative tools everyone has had at their disposal recently.

Perhaps that old adage about 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration is true.  Thinking outside the square is not something to be done that frequently.  In fact the more time I’ve spent in creative La-La Land, the less actual work I got done and the harder life became.  I have to fight that urge (and all those marketing messages) to be more creative than everyone else in the entire world and focus on getting stuff done.  Who knows, that might just leave me relaxed and comfortable enough, one magical moonlit evening, to allow that 1% spark to kick in.

Small business, particularly online business, depends so much on mundane activities to prosper; technical implementation, keyword analysis and optimisation, mailing list management, spreadsheets, link building, regular maintenance and updating, proof reading, file management, administration and processing…. you couldn’t be any more ‘inside the square’ by renaming 100 photos from DSC0003456.jpg to keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.jpg, but that’s what has to be done.

As I surrender to this mechanical reality of my day-to-day life, I am actually enjoying the process of building the systems, habits and infrastructures I neglected when I believed being creative was the only way to go.  Now I am not only freer to be more creative in my down time, but I am much more prepared to do something with my ideas when I get them.

I can also do what all the other ‘creatives’ have been doing for centuries; borrowing and adapting from those around them who continue to be seduced by the enticing and rather unproductive realm that exists outside my humble – but very effective – little square.

By Stefan Sojka

It takes a lot of hard work to make everything look so easy.

I had a potential client call recently, excited about a new e-commerce Website they wanted to launch.  The domain name sounded great and they had plans to go viral and generate big sales.

In one short phone call, they described their idea.  They had clearly been thinking about this for a long time.  I filled an A4 page with notes, as they proceeded to describe their vision; a totally customised, world-class, elegant, classy, beautiful, powerful, enterprise-level entity with enough bells and whistles to form an orchestra.

It was our first phone call, so I asked: “Have you prepared a brief?”  The answer?  “No.”  “Do you have a budget?”  “Uh… no… as small as possible, please, because I am just getting started…”

There is nothing wrong with starting off small and dreaming big – most successful businesses do – but it suddenly dawned on me that I was the first person to ever put pen to paper on this project.  It was a big idea without an ounce of actual work put into it.  These plans were hatched during a few months of daydreaming and Web surfing, dictated over the phone to me, who was now expected to make all those daydreams come true.  Easier said than done.

If you want to start any business, you usually put a lot of planning into it – why would an online business be any different?  In fact, a Web-based business often requires more planning and preparation than most ‘real world’ businesses.  This is due to the additional layers of complexity, combined with the inherent risks and costs of getting things wrong.  There are awesome e-commerce packages available and countless other great resources.  There’s a rapidly maturing industry of Web professionals too, but time is money.  The more time you can put in yourself, the better.

It is understandable, I guess.  Websites that generate millions (if not billions) of dollars all look so elegant and simple.  Everything has been carefully engineered (after 1,000 iterations) to look fresh, clean and effortless.  Add to that the use of the word “free” and “easy” in just about every online advert and one would be forgiven for getting the impression that Web enterprises were a piece of cake.  Getting ‘something’ online might be easy, but getting exactly what you want could involve a few hard yards.

Everything you want to happen on your Website needs to be told to happen that way …in code.  It is often just as hard making a site elegant and clean, as it is to make it look messy and clunky.  When you bring e-commerce into it, things can get complicated.  You are engineering an experience that ends in people handing over their credit card details.  It’s like running a shop with no shopkeeper – it has to be pretty special to get someone to willingly open up their wallet and serve themselves.

Even static Websites can take a lot of work to get right.  One site we recently launched took 7 people 266 hours.  Fortunately, the site owner put in a huge chunk of that time, saving money and delivering a far better end result.

So, if you have a great idea for an online business, write it down, make a plan, do your research, set aside as much time and money as you possibly can, define everything in intimate detail – then seek out professional help to make it happen.  That way you’ll both be on the same page and have a far greater chance of making your dream come alive.

By Stefan Sojka

Look closely… attention deficit creates disorder.

How strange our brains are.  Organic supercomputers, with 80+ billion neurons and as many as 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, capable of rendering total immersive live 3D video and surround sound, controlling an entire eco-system of organs without us hardly noticing and practicing such diverse skills as architecture, astrophysics and lead guitar – yet we always forget the milk!

It seems our meat-based computer operates rather differently than our silicone-based cousins.  They can recall everything perfectly (if you tell them to) yet find it a lot harder to be nuanced and subtle, poetic or virtuosic.  Everything our mind does seems approximate and even vague, depending on our focus and requires a lot of repetition to forge the desired neural pathways.  There’s the old musicians’ joke; what’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?  You only have to punch the information into the drum machine once.

So what happens when silicone and meat supercomputers meet?  The brain realizes the immense power of the chip and begins pounding instructions and content in until the cows come home (on well-worn neural pathway-like cow-tracks).  Highly focused people – lawyers, marketers, programmers – have filled our digital world with unfathomable amounts of information that they expect us to read and understand, while we seem much happier giggling at cute kittens or piglets wearing gumboots.

We now have a bit of a problem.  I believe we are all beginning to suffer from attention deficit disorder.  With a supply of information so vast that we can never hope to absorb a fraction of what we would like to, we have all become habitual skimmers, scanners and non-readers.  When was the last time you actually read and understood the terms and conditions before ticking the box saying that you had?  How often do you triple-check your important emails before sending them off?  How many days did you spend analyzing every phone plan on offer, before confidently choosing the right one?  What about software licence agreements?  Insurance policies?  “What, no flood cover!!??”

Closer to home, what about your Website?  Did you write and review every single word, or just leave it up to your Web Designer?  Whose business is it?  If you can’t take the time to write and review it all, why would anyone else bother?  What about the “thank you” page when someone registers?  What does that say?  It is a perfect opportunity to do a bit of PR and build relationships.  Ditto any confirmation emails and even invoices.  Which is best, a dull “Message submission received” or “Thank you for registering with our new service, we look forward to getting to know you…”?

We need to accept that it is becoming increasingly difficult for all of us to keep up.  Our minds work best when they concentrate, so we have to take the time to do just that.  One less YouTube video, one more re-read.  My business partner, thank heavens, is one of those people who naturally double-checks everything, while I admit I am more the ‘creative’ type who tends to skim, because I am always thinking of the next big idea, but I am learning.  Skimming is asking for trouble.  Missing important details, making costly mistakes and missing great opportunities, creating embarrassing misunderstandings and often making more work for myself than I thought I was saving by rushing.  A short cut is often a long cut.

It’s time to recognize the inherent limitations and great power of our biological computer.  Take time, concentrate and get the important stuff right.  It makes very good business sense.

By Stefan Sojka

The worst experiences can often deliver the best lessons.

Anyone who has been in business for more than a few nanoseconds has likely encountered at least one difficult customer.  Something about certain people and money trips a short circuit in their brain, where logic, decency and empathy get replaced with desperation, anger and a sense of entitlement to the right to be not very nice.  We’ve all seen it – maybe we’ve been it, on occasions.  The customer is always right, right?

In most cases, that maxim works well as a guide to good customer service, but what about those nasty characters, who make it their business to become your business’ worst nightmare?

One reason why large companies pay lawyers small fortunes to write reams of disclaimers is that they are inoculating themselves from bad customers.  Small businesses are not so lucky.  We often risk people walking right through our front doors and creating havoc.

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I set out in small business was to presume that everyone had the same ethics and values as I do.  Of course they are all open, honest, fair, easy-going and like to resolve any misunderstandings amicably.  Yeah, right!

Every small business owner has a story.  I’ve had my fair share.  Clients who refused to pay, just because they didn’t feel like it.  Clients who blamed me because they hired the wrong person to head up their project, then sat back gleefully and watched it implode just so they could unleash their anger at me, the same way they do with all their suppliers.  Then there are those who invest their entire existence into something so that the tiniest issue becomes an utter tragedy, leading to midnight phone calls to sort it out after they’ve polished off two bottles of red.

I can laugh about it now, but these customers took their toll.  I have associates who have faced far worse; threats of violence, screaming, humiliation and huge financial losses, even bankruptcy from unpaid accounts.  Bad customers might be 1 in 100, but that one can ruin everything – at best they can sure suck the fun out of what should be a passionate and joyful pastime, operating a small business.  My worst clients have taught me two things:

There is no obligation to serve every customer who comes along

“We reserve the right to refuse service” is a powerful statement.  Taking on the wrong customer is simply not worth it.  Even though a budding small business might feel a necessity to take on everything that comes along, the opportunity cost of picking up the wrong client is too high.  Trust me, there are plenty of awesome customers out there.

Recognize the early warning signs.

With hindsight, I should have listened to the alarm bells.  At the first meeting, they told me about a terrible experience they had with a previous supplier (was it the supplier’s fault?).  They wanted me to help them take the world by storm, but they didn’t have any money right now.  There was just something about their demeanor that I knew was dodgy, but I didn’t listen to my instincts, or my wife, when she said, “I don’t like them.  They’re trouble.  Don’t do it”.

I would have preferred to have never had any bad clients, but they sure cured me of my innocence and taught me that I deserve better.  Life is too short.  I want to spend it taking care of all my cool clients who share my values and want a fun, exciting and rewarding ride. Don’t you?

By Stefan Sojka

Don’t throw the real baby out with the virtual bathwater.

There is something about online business that tends to set us up for a huge amount of misaligned expectations.  With everything just one click away, the hidden complexities of Web functionality lead people to believe that it all happens auto-magically.  Some coder just copy-pasted in a few lines of recycled PHP and ‘whammo!’…instant global success story!  I have had people seriously enquire about replicating eBay and/or FaceBook for $5K and honestly believing that should do the trick.

It’s kind of understandable.  Most of the hard work is hidden in scripts and files and thanks to the limitless talent of a planet full of awesome GUI designers, everything looks so slick, clean and simple.  The Internet is the most complex entity in the known Universe, yet its astounding success is due to its belying simplicity.   If it didn’t look and feel easy to use, it would still to this day remain the bastion of computer scientists, hackers and brainiacs.

As a business owner, I still need to contend with the complexities.  If my business model is almost exclusively an online model, such as selling downloadable software, I am going to need a team of coders on hand to manage the high level of sophistication involved; security, functionality, payment, membership management.  Imagine; a Website as deceptively lightweight as Twitter requires 140 employees to keep it running – at a loss!

The big growth area now seems to be hybrid businesses, with one foot in the online space and one foot in the real world.  Think of pizza delivery.  You need a complex online system to manage and process customer orders and an efficient off-line operation to get the pizza to my door within 30 minutes.  Similarly, sites like Groupon rely enormously on the online component delivering deals and getting online exposure to billions of users, but without the real-world participating businesses delivering on those great offers, Groupon’s image could turn sour real fast.

Then there are your businesses that most of us are engaged in, that operate primarily in reality but use the Web to promote products/services and attract new business.  Even the simplest of “brochure-ware” sites need to be created to a high standard to reflect the quality of the business and to have some basic technical expertise applied, even if it is just for contact forms, updating content and measuring the site’s performance.

There is no avoiding the fact that I have to get the technical stuff right.  But what will really make or break the operation is everything else.  If I expect that the code will magically solve all my business problems and make me an overnight squillionaire, it will be at my peril.  Technology alone will not cut it.  Why does software keep on getting upgraded?  Because it will never be perfect.  It’s what we do with it and how we integrate it into our business that counts.

Here’s what I focus on; customer service, communication, quality control, administration systems and processes, accounts, building relationships with valued associates, ensuring (not assuming) that I am on the same page as my customers, diarizing everything, keeping time-sheets, keeping my desk tidy, my files organized, and my inbox manageable.  You know, all the stuff that prevents my life and business from descending into a chaotic nightmare and will only get worse the more things grow.

Every business now must have a layer of technology surrounding it and you have to get the right solutions and systems in place.  But as technology pervades our lives and the lives of our competitors, it’s the fundamentals of off-line business practice that will determine our ultimate success.

By Stefan Sojka

The growing global movement to redistribute and reorganize resources presents unlimited untapped entrepreneurial opportunity.

I was defragging my hard drive the other day and it got me thinking – as one does, sitting there staring at a little colour-coded progress bar for three hours – perhaps it’s time to defrag our civilization. If my hard drive runs faster and more efficiently when all its files are organized into nice neat contiguous sectors and clusters, surely there is a big opportunity for improving off-line efficiency if we apply the same process.

Defragging is going on all around us already, of course; airline ticketing systems, car-pooling, off-peak hot water, express checkout lanes… but we are surrounded by so much complexity and so much inefficiency, that the opportunities are endless.  It’s only a matter of identifying them, then working out clever solutions.

Many of our off-line systems have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years, including the economy, transportation, communication and our public institutions, often with outmoded rules that have, like the inefficient way data is written onto hard drives, forced us poor humans that are lumbered with them, to endure a mountain of inconvenience and waste.  Within all that inconvenience, some people make out like bandits (think of currency traders, recruitment companies or 1,000 other types of agency), but if we want long-term sustainability, we must look for ways to profit from making things better, not capitalizing on keeping them the same.

Rachael Botsman and Roo Rogers’ eye-opening book “What’s Mine is Yours – The Rise of Collaborative Consumption” documents an online movement of peer-to-peer sharing and reallocating, and identifies the new drivers and motivations that make phenomena like www.airbnb.com and www.zopa.com take off.  The Web not only facilitates better resource and service allocation, but it has built-in personal reward incentives for participants in the form of social interaction, validation and relationship building.

Here are a few of my pet defragging projects I would love to see get up and running:  House-swapping so everyone lives within walking distance of wherever they commute to every morning.  A register for all your unused musical instruments/tools/books/stuff, so needy local kids can drop in and borrow them.  Something (anything!!) that will permanently eliminate the need for filling out forms.  A map/database of unused backyards that can be made available for suburban farming.  A site for locally-based freelance experts who are happy to come to my place and show me how to use all my gadgets and software properly.  Any niche or industry-specific version of existing Websites and businesses, where unused resources and people-power are made available to others.

If only this column was a two-pager, I would keep going!

Everywhere I turn and look, there are systems, processes and things being mismanaged, underutilized or overburdened.  So, put your thinking caps on, register a domain name and start offering your brilliant solution.  No one ever went broke identifying a need and fulfilling it perfectly.  Build in the social media marketing component, so everyone tells everyone else about your idea and you have yourself a start-up!

Before you begin, spend some time checking out what others are doing in this area, try a few sites out that swap things, introduce opportunities, facilitate microloans, sharing, group investing and matchmaking and you’ll find a defragging movement so diverse it almost needs defragging itself!

We might be a fair way off the Utopian vision of Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project – www.thevenusproject.com – where all resource use is optimised by computers, and humans spend all day marveling at how clever we all are, but it’s nice to think we are at least heading in the right direction.  If you look closely, you’ll see the path along the way is paved with fragments of gold.

By Stefan Sojka

The recent 15th birthday celebration of eBay has got me all misty-eyed as I ponder my own 15-year on-line odyssey, the next 15 years and how to reconcile Internet time with the growing awareness of the inevitable limitation of my own human lifespan. 

How old were you when eBay started?  I was in my early 30s.  1995 was the year I first went on-line.  I had a few Internet friends who were in their early 20s who thought I was the ‘old guy’.  Now they are mid 30s, heading on that slippery slope to the big five-0.  Scary, huh?  15 more years and I’ll be a pensioner!  I have nephews who are finishing high school this year, who were just out of nappies when Craigslist, MSN, Yahoo and Match.com were being born.

15 years in human terms is pretty significant; a full demographic shift, a career or two and long enough for your hair to turn grey or disappear.  Yet light from our sun has only traveled as far as the closest 50 star systems in that time – out of a total of 100–400 billion in the Milky Way alone.  15 years is at once an entire generation and the blink of an eye.  Long enough for Google to go from an idea for a PhD project to arguably one of the most influential organisations on the planet, with 22,000 staff and astronomical cash-flow.  Short enough for me to still have to-do lists from 1995 with things still not ticked off!

For a quick flashback to 1995, try this video:  http://waxy.blip.tv/file/752713/

‘Internet Power!’  There were 35–40 million people on-line in ’95 – there are now almost 2 billion.  Average PC RAM storage has increased a thousand-fold.  Interestingly, even though so much seems to have changed, that old video shows that the essential elements of today’s Web were all there back in 1995.  It was slow and clunky, but you could watch video, download music, images, chat, email, upload and download.  Most of the groundwork had been done.  It just took 15 more years of coding and cabling to bring it all to life.

If we take the long view, 15 more years might go just as quickly as the last for you and me, yet the next Google might still be someone’s PhD project.  Yours, perhaps?

While it seems all the great Internet ideas might have already been done, consider Chat Roulette, FourSquare, local start-up, Envato, or the many other start-ups featured in this very publication, who are expanding exponentially with no sign of slowing down.  In fact the more I think about it, and how frustrating many aspects of my on-line life still are these days, the more massive opportunities seem to remain untapped or not even dreamed of.  The next 15 years could make the last 15 look like the dark ages.

To those born in 1995, the Internet-enabled world is the only world they know.  While we email and Google-search for Web pages, they are hard-wired to 3D surround-sound gaming environments already and will no doubt prefer to do business that way, once their parents stop feeding them.

Will we pay bills by stabbing them to death?  Invoice clients by lobbing a hand-grenade at them?  Purchase products by shooting them?  Hire new staff by challenging them to a Kung Fu fight?  It could get very weird...  Or it could go in a completely new direction and catch us all by surprise the way it has done consistently for the last 15 years.

Whatever happens, I want in.  I’ve got at least 15 good years left in me.  Come on kids, 2025 is just around the corner – let’s get busy!

By Stefan Sojka

It’s easy to believe that the Web has transformed over the last few years into a high tech Grand Slam, where the only contenders are the mega-corporations with Internet superstars providing the pre-match entertainment.  There’s still plenty of action away from centre court.

I was a huge Deep Purple fan when I was about 14.  Please keep in mind hip-hop, electronica, R & B or grindcore had hardly been invented.  Three choices:  Rock, Pop or Country & Western.  Besides that, I was trying to learn guitar and Smoke on the Water enabled me to instantly play a hit song with no lessons …or practice!

In those days, Rock superstars were about as inaccessible as today’s celebrities, not because they had a wall of agents and publicists protecting them, but simply because there were no means of communication.  If you didn’t find them in the local phone book, they were out of reach.  You could join the fan club, but that meant becoming the pen friend of the band’s single most obsessed and deranged follower and still never meeting the band.

This could become a column about how to follow your favourite artists online, but I only have one page, so I’ll get back to my point:  I recently contacted the bass player and keyboard player from Deep Purple and they both emailed me back personally.  This got me thinking…

According to www.internetworldstats.com, there are almost 2 billion people using the Internet.  If you can imagine applying any ‘bell curve’, or ‘long tail’ graph to this population, you will find a massive swell around the YouTubes, Mashables and Lolcats, with thronging hordes milling around Internet superstars like Ashton Kutcher, Justin Beiber and Community Channel.  These destinations are largely one-way streets, more like mass media.  Huge audiences eliminate your opportunities to interact personally with the object of attraction.  It’s out in the ‘burbs where the real action is.

Every has-been, wanna-be, could-be, also-ran, did-run-once-or-twice and going-to-do-it-again is out there – you and me included.  We don’t get a million hits a day to our blogs and videos, but maybe 10s or 100s, even 1000s.  We get a couple of emails a day/week from people who stumbled across us while Googling something else.  Think about it – everyone is out there!  And the ones who aren’t being bombarded with attention are more than likely quite happy to get some.

Scientists, musicians, sportspeople, business owners, charity workers, teachers, inventors, builders…. need I continue?  Whatever you want in life from the Internet is available and it is extremely likely that it is not happening in a high-traffic supersite.  Network science dictates that, like the deeply profound and effective work our subconscious does all night (and all day, for that matter), the less clicked regions of the Web are where we are going to find the answers, make friends, collaborate, instigate and activate.

Think of exactly what you would like to know, do and become in your best-lived life and I bet you will find the people to help you if you start looking and asking.  For me, it begins with old rockers like Deep Purple’s band mates and probably ends with me inviting a whole bunch of them to guest-feature on my concept album by simply emailing me their contributions to my tracks as MP3s.  For you, it might be a super-talented 3D artist who can render your invention so you can win your pitch to those venture capitalists to get it made.  Or perhaps a massive niche market in a non-English-speaking country accessed via a local bi-lingual micro-blogger.

Your ultimate personalised network is out there.  Get off the beaten track and start clicking.

By Stefan Sojka

As technology intertwines itself into my existence, information moves at the speed of light and everyone is either offering or expecting instant solutions, I realise the necessity of taking the long view; the download of a lifetime.

It’s not often a movie title makes its way into common use to describe a phenomenon, the way “Groundhog Day” has.  I can’t imagine anyone is going to feel very “Twilight” or “Avatar” and it’s been a while since I had my last “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” moment.

Danny Rubin’s idea of an endlessly repeating day has landed him a gig teaching screen writing at Harvard.  Such a clever and powerful concept and so well executed, wrapped as it was inside a romantic comedy.  For the sake of this column, I hope you have seen the movie.  You’ve had 17 years to get around to it; don’t tell me you’ve been stuck in your own Groundhog Day that long!

Ever since I bought a ticket on the digital media express, time seems to have hit the fast forward button.  I simply can’t get everything done in one day that I want to.  Every gadget has a 200-page instruction manual, each software program needs a 12-month college course, while my music and book collections remain un-listened to and unread.  I haven’t caught up with friends and family for years.  It’s hard enough keeping the email inbox from overflowing.  No wonder it feels like Groundhog Day!

Even though the movie’s title entered the vernacular to describe the hellish vortex Bill Murray’s character found himself in, the true message of the film is that he got out.  It took him many years, but he did it – and it all started with a decision to live life right.  It has even become a self-help book – “The Magic of Groundhog Day” by Paul Hannam.  The key to getting out is the decision to make every moment count and realise that small daily steps lead to big life transformations.

I have decided to turn that corner and start getting it right.  From here, now that I'm seeing everything in bite-sized chunks, everything looks so much more palatable and easy to swallow.  I can gradually chew my way out of the abyss.

I'm unsubscribing from any newsletters that are not in line with my plans and subscribing to more that are.  I'm using good old-fashioned RSS feeds to send me relevant news and insights.  I'm subscribing to on-line video tutoring sites to learn how to use all my software.  I'm using as many of Google’s tools as I can (Insights, Alerts, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Picasa, etc.), to help me get things done, filter information and manage my life.  I'm bookmarking the best blogs that seek out and compile everything I am interested in, so I don’t have to.  I'm spending a few minutes each day updating my Website, writing a little blog post, following up a few leads and researching powerful new productivity tools.  Above all, I am eliminating all those on-line activities that, let’s face it, are doing nothing more than locking me into an eternal cycle of underachievement.

With an optimised, focused online regime, my perfect day is within reach.  Maybe soon I will have more time to relax, exercise and nurture relationships.  I'll throw in a bit of piano practice and before too long I’ll be rockin’ the house, just like in the movie.  Tomorrow I might even wake up to a brand new day.  Until then… it’s happy Groundhog Day.

By Stefan Sojka

Ever since I was conceived I have been producing data.  My mother’s doctor began by taking notes when she saw him about her morning sickness.  Even before that I was generating information that back in the 60s nobody was tracking; new genetic code strings, physical trajectories, chemical changes I was inducing in my mother, measurable rates of cell division, numbers, mathematical patterns, nutrient levels…

Upon my delivery, hospital records were created and the government collected a bunch of details for my registration of birth.  From that day forth, everywhere I went I produced and deposited data – data that directly influenced businesses, governments and me.

Every cent I have ever spent generated bookkeeping records and sales figures. My school reports informed education departments and helped them modify curriculums. My census and tax returns impacted (albeit infinitesimally) policy decisions of governments from John Gorton onward. I have filled out surveys, been ticketed, counted, measured, rated, scored, ranked and photographed – and that was all before the advent of the digital age!

Now, it is getting ridiculous. Every mouse click is generating log files on my ISP and the stats package of the website I am visiting. Driving my car feeds countless cameras, sensors and toll-paying accounting systems. Shopping with an EFTOPS card provides the supermarket with a rich profile of my diet and lifestyle. With time stamping of every record these days, the whole concept of an alibi is as relevant these days as typewriter ribbon, inkwells and anvils. My data trail is stalking me.

This information is and always has been valuable. Not just to those who have been happily and freely collecting it for their own use or misuse (half the time without my consent or knowledge), but to me, for self-management, self-development and self-control. There is a growing mobilization of citizens who are waking up to this. Information is power, as they say, so the best place to start getting empowered is with the information I create.

www.quantifiedself.com is a community of users and toolmakers, who see the value in self-tracking, from health benefits, to better life-decisions, to sheer fascination and fun. www.personalinformatics.org is a wellspring of tools designed to harness human-generated data. Programs like www.patientslikeme.com are achieving phenomenal results by crowd-collating medical information to discover optimal treatments for a wide range of conditions that no clinical trial could have possibly figured out.

Here’s a tip; there are going to be huge opportunities for businesses who can offer services to help people manage all this newly collected personal information; aggregating, packaging, on-selling, interpreting, analyzing and providing tools to help us change our own numbers for health, wealth and happiness. It’s already happening, so strap on your data collection devices, put on your thinking cap and find new ways to share, manage and feed back this infinite data set of our lives back to us.

New paradigms will arise, questioning such things as how to control copyright of the data we produce, how to collect royalties from those who are already using our data for their own benefit and what risk we face, producing information that somebody doesn’t like, or would like to use against us. All of this screams opportunity to me; opportunity to learn, grow, evolve and self-actuate in a way that was unthinkable all those years ago. It’s data mining time!