Articles

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 over 3 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

It’s time to add Writer/Producer/Director/Actor to the résumé.

I got my first answering machine somewhere back in the late 80s.  I’ll never forget the horror of hearing my own voice on that micro-cassette tape.  I re-recorded that message at least 50 times before I was happy.  It was the first step on a long and slippery slope into business-oriented media production.

Before the answering machine, the only people who spoke into microphones were Shakespearean actors.  There was no purpose, nor facility for the average person to lay down their voice, let alone film themselves.  Humans had only barely gotten used to using phones – and not very well at that.  Without the feedback loop of listening to ourselves speak, or seeing ourselves on video, we were oblivious to how ordinary we all looked and sounded.

Fast forward a few decades and media production tools are everywhere.  By the age of three, most kids have been filmed more than any actor from the golden years of Hollywood, photographed more than Marilyn Monroe and laid down at least a few dozen answering machine messages and karaoke tracks.  Everyone is now expected to be a multi-media artist.  Every computer (every phone, just about) is a recording studio, movie production house and photo lab.

So why don’t more businesses use audio and video to communicate?  Why is it so easy to film baby’s first steps, but a guided tour of your offices with a few valuable insights into the services you provide hasn’t been made yet?

We might have the recording tools, but what about the lighting, audio engineering, script-writing, voice-over style, storyboard, green screen and a dozen other elements of good production that don’t come packaged with every laptop sold?   Making quality media is not that easy and putting in a great performance does not come naturally to most people born before the video age.

The only way to overcome your fear is to just have a go.  Write a script, rehearse it, film it, watch it back, cringe with utter embarrassment, then do it all again, slightly better each time, until you begin to like what you see.  Experiment with lighting and sound, posture and pace.  Before too long, you will learn how to look and sound great.

Without fail, anyone who actually perseveres will transform into a more appealing media-friendly version of themselves.  With a little experimentation on the technical side of things, using reasonable quality gear and the awesome editing software that is available these days, you can cut a perfectly respectable piece of promo in no time.

If it all gets too hard, get some training; voice, TV presenting, script writing and video editing.  No one really has a good excuse anymore for not picking up all the skills necessary to become a savvy and sophisticated spokesmodel for their own business.

We all know how effective great multimedia is – we consume it every day by the Gigabyte.  I know if I am researching a product or service, I will devour whatever media I can find.  Your customers are doing exactly the same thing.  You really would do well to get your personalized message in front of them.  If you have a particular expertise or specialist knowledge, the world is hanging out to hear about it.

Every businessperson is now a media performer and producer.  You just need to decide, right now, that you are going to be a really good one.  Lights… camera… mouse… action!

By Stefan Sojka

With the phenomenal successes of FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, etc., it's easy to ignore failure as one of the critical factors in their journey and the journey of their also-ran counterparts.

Oh, for a time machine!  I would travel back to 1995 and register facebook.com, twitter.com, youtube.com, myspace.com and a hundred other domain names – I'd be a trillionaire!  Reminds me of a friend of mine who was offered a few acres of beachfront property in Byron Bay back in the 70s for $8,000 – who would have known, eh?

One of the most fascinating universal ironies is how utterly unpredictable the future seems to be, yet as soon as the future glides on through the present and cements itself into the past, hindsight turns all those uncertainties into the bleeding obvious and convinces us that we could have predicted it all, if only we'd kicked ourselves.

It doesn't help when everyone who achieves astronomical success goes around telling us in their smarmy autobiographies that it all turned out just as they expected, thanks to their brilliant talent and superhuman level of dedication and determination.  What we forget is that all the losers would say exactly the same thing, if things had turned out differently for them.

I recently interviewed Aussie Internet entrepreneur, Collis Ta'eed, who commandeers the burgeoning Envato network.  It was refreshing to hear his answer to "if you could do it all again, what would you do differently", and he replied "I would make all the same mistakes".  He sees his failures as the most important factors in his success.

Success, I think, is actually quite unpredictable.  Sure, you can control many factors; you can work hard, make smart choices and respond well to hiccoughs, but there is always the element of chance that the losers will always blame and the winners will pretend was part of their plan.

I guess the first rule is to just keep going, regardless, ready for the next stroke of luck to land in my lap.  Through all my failures and hard-knock schooling, I'll be all the more prepared this time.

Life is like a game of Tetris (sorry Mr Gump).  The possibilities come cascading towards us as we madly try to exert whatever limited control we have on the outcome.  We miss a few, but somehow we are given more opportunity to connect another line and catch up.  The more mistakes we make, the better we get at the game.  By game over, we've left a trail of success and failure, achievement and regret, in, let's face it, fairly equal measure.

While Facebook and Twitter ride the crest of a massive wave, their reign is never assured and there are tens of thousands of start-ups like yours and mine, thrashing out our intentions every day, stumbling, falling, dusting ourselves off and getting back out there.  We've probably all got 100 domain names registered and our eye on some land half-way across the Nullabor that will one day be the main street of a megacity.  We're failing every day – and creeping ever closer to our destiny.

The first thing to do with any one of those 100 domain names is to just start.  As James Cameron said "failure is always an option, but fear is not."

By Stefan Sojka

The Web is increasingly my go-to place for everything; advice, support, intel and inspiration.  Is my traditional bull-dust detector up for the task of discerning what’s good for me?

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times (I can feel a novel coming on... dammit, I’ve only got 500 words!)  The world seems to be plunging ever deeper into chaos and crisis at precisely the same time as mind-boggling scientific breakthroughs are occurring.  Financial, social and economic disasters abound, while the Internet explodes with individuals and orgs purporting to have all the answers.

Pre-Web, there weren’t many people to turn to in times of need.  My solicitor?  Priest?  MP?  GP?  Bank manager?  Now every ‘consultant’, ‘expert’ and ‘coach’ is Twittering and blogging their personal contribution to solving my problems and creating my (their) Utopian future.

The problem Web-based advice and information is that there are a few additional dimensions that affect both the advice itself, the delivery of it and my perception of its usefulness.

Like, do I not trust someone just because they haven’t got time to update their Website regularly?  Or, if some ‘guru’ or other is highly active online and seems to have a lot of followers, sponsors and links all over the place, does that make what they have to say any more credible?  Does my style-over-substance sensibility dismiss an expert’s proposition out-of-hand because his/her site looks like crap?  Do I not even bother to read it, because it has no fancy graphics, bullet points and roll-over effects?

I need to keep a few extra wits about me, now that new media carries the message.  The simple task of discerning anything of value in amongst the sheer volume of information is a daunting one.  Judgment criteria go way beyond the content:

How did I find it in the first place?  A lot of sites get traffic thanks to nothing more than their search engine friendliness.  Google, Bing and Co. are working ever harder to bring you quality results, but they are a long way off passing too many value judgments and opinions on the links they deliver.

Is the self-appointed ‘opinion leader’ a sycophant who is just very good at recruiting followers through powers of persuasion, rather than the substance of their message?  It’s amazing what a blogger can cook up with a teaspoon of fawning and a few cups of self-aggrandisement.

Are they literate?  Even in today’s wrld of txting & ROFLMAOing, I maintain that someone with a reasonable command of the Queen’s English probably has most of their other faculties intact as well.

Is the thinking part of a groundswell?  Ideas whose times have come tend to pop up independently in multiple locations.  The best way forward is most likely going to be through ideas that many people are now beginning to expound, rather than one nutter banging on with his/her manifesto.  Does anyone agree with me here?  Oh the irony!  This is your NETT nutter, signing off for another month...

By Stefan Sojka

As my life becomes increasingly interwoven in a tangled web of networks, gaining a perspective of how I fit in has become my life’s mission.

Network science is very new.  Sure networks have been around forever, but no one really stopped to think about just how complicated and powerful network behaviour is, until the mid 90s when the Internet kind of shoved it in our faces.  Albert-László Barabási’s book ‘Linked – How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science and everyday life’ is an easily digestible summary of the Princeton Press scientific publication he co-wrote, “The Structure and Dynamics of Networks”.

The mathematics is staggering, describing how the simplest of connections and interactions can evolve structures and behaviours as phenomenal as our very own selves.  Individuals within a network need only perform the simplest of tasks to make this happen.  This is how civilizations, viral outbreaks and multinational corporations come to be.  Networks cause FaceBook, Beached Az, spam, Google, blogging and crowd-sourcing.

The more I think about it, the more embedded I seem to be.  So, it’s time to use these networks to my advantage.  The best thing I can do inside a network is to be active.  The simple tasks of emailing, clicking, posting, rating, linking and uploading are my means to participate.  My networks co-exist on- and off-line.  So here’s how it works and can work for you, if:

I join my local Rotary Club, a member invites me to join my local Chamber of Commerce, the local council holds a “Home-based Business Week” workshop and emails the Chamber asking if anyone would like to present.  I put my hand up.  At the talk, someone from NSW DSRD (Now Industry & Investment NSW) is there and invites me to speak at another event.  Someone at that event from the Department of Innovation invites me to a Hong Kong Trade and Development Council event in Sydney.  HKTDC asks if I would like to attend a trade show in Hong Kong, sponsored by AusTrade.  Much net­working ensued there.

Two months later.  I get a call from the Sydney Morning Herald asking me about my experience.  I get a decent sized article in the SMH business section.  Someone from Crikey.com.au calls me to ask how I do my PR and how I managed to get publicity in the SMH.  I tell them “it just happened because I work my network”.  They are intrigued and are interviewing me for an article about PR.  I will post that interview on my Website, along with all the other news stories about this chain of events.  I start popping up in Google for all kinds of searches because of all these activities.

I am now writing about all of this in this column, which I landed as a result of meeting the editor on a chat channel in 1995.  This column will become another news story on my Website.  Someone will read it and contact me about something.

And on it goes.  Such is the science, and behaviour of networks and what happens when I work them.

Perpetual promotion.  Try it for yourself.

By Stefan Sojka

I might be giving away my age here, but my very first record (that’s the 33 R.P.M., 12-inch, black vinyl kind, with a hole punched in the middle, then inserted into a plastic sheath and a printed cardboard sleeve, that you listen to by scraping a diamond across it) was Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s “Monster Mash” – a devilishly funny (to a 10-year-old) combination of old horror movie themes and 50s rock and roll.  It was my first encounter with a ‘mash’.

It seems we are predisposed to enjoying serendipitous contradiction – from the early baroque musical concepts of counterpoint and fugue to the hip-hop sampling of collections of sounds into new musical forms – our brains love to be stimulated by the unexpected, anachronistic, counter-intuitive, oxymoronic, incongruous outpourings of those among us who see the world differently.  It’s an analogy to life itself – take two sets of genetic code, twist them together in a unique new combination and out pops the next generation.  What is the act of procreation, if not the ultimate mash-up?

I’ve spent the past week giggling uncontrollably over www.stsanders.com catalogue of ‘shreds’, where the masher finds musicians who take themselves way too seriously and over-dubs horrendously bad playing that fits perfectly to the original clips.  If I type “mash-ups” into YouTube search, the next couple of decades could disappear before I get through the results.

The mash-up has grown up.  It is the future of human creative expression, but it is also – when applied to science, politics, medicine, or any other discipline – the future of everything.  Biologists are mashing with physicists, cosmologists with chemists.  The universe is our chemistry set and when we mix the right elements, things explode.

Perhaps the big bang was a result of some 9th dimensional mash-up artist collective combining a few random theories to ‘see what would happen’.  “Oops!  Oh look, a universe! …Damn, we can’t touch it now – let’s just watch what happens for the next 13.7 billion years...”

The more you think about it, the more mashed-up this world is.  Dog breeds, drive-throughs, Velcro, sporks, camera-phones, Hapkido, English… we are the result of a few millennia of mashes and it can’t stop now.  So, what can we do?  Like any good mash-up artist, we have to see everything as potential mash material.  Thai food in pocket bread.  Hotel rooms on trains.  Pool cleaners with marriage counseling qualifications.  Retirement village pre-school daycare facilities.  What can you think of?  Perhaps there is a brilliant business idea one mash away from you and one of your clients.

If your ambitions are more humble, how about organising a karaoke party for your friends where everyone has to sing different lyrics to the backing track?  If nothing else, you’ll have a few laughs.  In a world that seems to be taking itself a little too seriously, this could be the perfect remedy.

For a broad history and catalogue of mash-ups, try the ultimate knowledge mash, Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_ (video), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_ (music), en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_ (web_application_hybrid).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-disciplinary

By Stefan Sojka

It’s not as difficult as you might think to become an Internet superstar.  The Web is engineered precisely to facilitate such phenomena as FaceBook, YouTube and the ‘Evolution of Dance’ dude.  In this simple how-to guide, I’ll show you how it’s done.  The key is to be everywhere and do everything.  In a networked world, the one with the most nodes wins!

Remember Neo, in the Matrix?  Remember how he/you felt when he/you realised he/you were the one?  “That’s right”, grinned Morpheus.  This is your ‘I know Kung Fu’ moment.  You are the Internet, and the Internet is you.  Your DNA is the meme.  You’re unique, just like everybody else.

Have Geek Will Travel
You will need your own personal nerd.  The Web, for all its point-and-click convenience, is a ridiculously complex environment.  He/she will configure your server cloud, sync your mobile devices with your laptop and ensure your Websites are cross-browser compatible, fluid, elastic and WC3 compliant.

Arsenal
Rule-of-thumb:  If it was reviewed on Wired, TechCrunch or EnGadget, buy it.  Essentials include an HD video camera, podcasting microphone, iPhone, digital pen, electric car, pocket laser projector, Adobe Everything and a DJ console, so you can guest DJ at all your own launches and seminars.

Go Viral
The best way to permeate cyberspace is by infecting it.  I don’t care whether you wipe out on a skateboard or David Hassel-scoff a hamburger, what’s important is that the video is a calculated strategic element in your self-replicating pandemic.

Blog
Blog long.  Blog often.  With 112 million blogs, you do have to work hard.  Strategy is everything.  Post comments on the top 100 blogs with witty retorts and demoralising put-downs, always linking back to your own Blog.  Fear not, once the momentum of all your other activities kicks in, your archived ramblings will re-surface like the creature from the black lagoon.

Social Butterfly
Two mantras:  1. “Add Me” 2. “Thanks for the Add”.  Set targets – say 5,000 per day, per site.  Here is your starting point:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_net­working_websites.  Nurture every friendship, acknowledge everyone’s feelings and compliment their every photo upload.  This is your fan-base.  You are a one of their's.  It’s a 200-million-way street.  Drive it.

Authority
You are now an Internet marketing genius.  It’s time to share your knowledge.  www.squidoo.com makes it easy to build a soapbox and begin proselytising.  When you have posted enough material, go to www.lulu.com and self-publish your how-to book.

Life Stream
Upload your entire life to the Internet – and tag everything.  Quantity, not quality.  If you upload enough old photos, school reports, love letters and phone disconnection notices, you will come up on page one in Google for everything.

We live in a paradoxical universe.  Ubiquity is singularity.  If you are everywhere, you will be in one place – at the top!  ‘X’ marks the spot and you have the X-factor.  ‘Me, Star Wars Kid’, you ‘FailWhale’.  See you at the end – and on the cover – of 'Time'.

By Stefan Sojka

Isn’t it just like the Internet to spawn yet another trend without anyone ever expecting it?  Microblogging is suddenly exploding out of a few simple lines of code the way SMS sat dormant in our mobile phones until someone looking for the calculator accidentally pressed the wrong button and discovered it.  Microblogging is SMS 2.0.  Texting on steroids.  Musings gone global.

The current beacon of microblogging is Twitter www.twitter.com.  What started as a sideline dabble by San Francisco start-up ‘Obvious’, has grown so fast that its error message when overloaded – the ‘Fail Whale’ – www.failwhale.com – has become a cult hero.  Venture capitalists have been pouring tens of millions into Twitter, while the whale finds its fins and Obvious tries to work out the most obvious ways to convert ‘tweets’ into cash.

The simplicity and ubiquity of microblogging are its drawcards.  You sign up in minutes, start twittering in 140 characters or less, and you’re away.  Before too long you are recruiting a legion of followers, following legions more while the chit-chat starts to build to an almighty racket.  Now it’s being seen as the best way for breaking news to spread, churches to herd their flocks, corporations to leverage their demographics and friends to hook up.

Microblogging is at home on the desktop, laptop, hand-held and phone, which is what makes it so hot.  Trans-platform communications are barely viable yet:  text is king.  In Japan, where the whole population is glued to a tiny screen, Twitter is becoming a national sport.

A cursory glance at www.twitterholic.com will give you an idea of what is happening.  Follow a few links, and discover a community of hyper-connected trend-setters.

Meanwhile, spin-off sites, services and applications are blossoming – as are the Twitter wannabes and candobetters.  Twitterrific – www.iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific/ – and Twhirl – www.twhirl.org – enable easy reading and writing of your microblogs without visiting the site.  Summise, www.summize.com, a microblogging search tool, was recently bought by Twitter in an attempt to attach more value to their service.  www.snaptweet.com is a nifty tool to link your Flickr images to Twitter.

It’s so easy to imitate this stuff, code-wise, the clones are sprouting:  www.identi.ca, www.jaiku.com (snapped up by Google), www.dodgeball.com (snapped up by Google) and the quirky Plurk – www.plurk.com – no doubt soon to be snapped up by Google!  You might want to also check out www.pownce.com, www.tumblr.com and www.spoink.com.

Tweet this:  I can’t wait til they release more top level domains, so this parade of dumb Website names will finally end!

Twitter Glossary

You know you have a phenomenon on your hands when hundreds of words start getting invented.

TwitterBots:  Command-line instructions, issued via Twitter to perform all kinds of actions
Dweet:  A tweet sent while intoxicated
Fail Whale:  The loveable whale that appears when Twitter is overloaded
Fakers:  People who pretend to be celebrity Tweeters
Hashtags:  Using “#” to embed metadata into your posts
Twaggle:  A gaggle of Twitter followers
Tweet:  A blog posting to Twitter
Twitterrhea:  Sending way to many tweets
Twitticisms:  Witty tweets
Twoops:  An accidental private SMS sent to all your followers
Twebay:  To offer something for sale to your followers
Go to twitter.pbwiki.com for more…