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“Content, Marketing, Stuff”

February 12, 2012 Dude, Where’s My Muse?

I’ve heard many times that you should pursue your passion, and not worry about the money.  “It will come,” they say, “they” being people with vacation homes and retirement plans.

But many of us would love to pursue something that’s difficult to make money at, even for the best of us.  For me, it’s writing.  Over 90% of books published in a year don’t sell more than 1,000 copies, or so an agent cited at a recent Writer’s Digest conference.

It that’s not enough to make you hang up your keyboard, then you have the constant self-doubt and crushing criticisms.

And then there are days when you don’t even know what to write.

In her TED presentation, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, talked about the need to nurture creativity.  She spoke of her own pressure and the realization that it’s exceedingly likely that her greatest success is behind her.  “That’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9 o’clock in the morning.”

I know how she feels.  Except for the greatest success part.

Then she muses on a creative force being outside the self, that maybe we should go back in time to when they used to think it was due to external forces, like the muses or – like where the word comes from – genies.  Then, rather than put all this pressure on ourselves to produce, we could blame our genies for not doing their jobs.

True creativity, she says, doesn’t come from a person, it comes from the creative genius that that person is connected to. Just remember that great ideas always come when you’re not thinking. You need the silence to connect to your ‘creative genius’.

As I listened to her, I thought, yes, that’s it.  I’m not lacking lost, my genie is.  And, being Irish, I figure my genie is probably just drunk somewhere.  I just have to wait until he’s sober.  Then I’ll know what to write.

But she also says that our job is to do the job, the work.  Do your part, show up, make the effort – again and again, and sooner or later, the genius will come.  And perhaps, so will the money.

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February 6, 2012 Reporters Covering News Reported by Other People

While reading The New York Times article Blogging Site Tumblr Makes Itself the News, I thought, editorial is finally finding a place again.  For a couple of years, it looked like journalists were going the way of the paper publications they worked for.  Why pay professionals when you have people willing to write (using that word loosely) for free?

Huffington Post wasn’t the first or only, but they were certainly the most prominent to put “citizen journalism” on the map.  I guess “citizen” is nicer than “amateur.” But given the opportunity to build a personal brand, credibility, an audience, and links back to their own sites for SEO value, many citizens were wiling to contribute content for free.

Maybe that shift came first, or maybe it was the loss in ad revenue that drove the change; either way, I’ve watched round after round of editorial lay-offs and lamented the loss of quality in content.   Titillating headings and crappy copy flooded sites, and the job of sifting through it became, well, a job.  Literally.

With the continuous push of content (possibly doubling every 72 hours), someone needs to filter through it and find what’s worth reading.  Many publications have incorporated curated headlines and stories from other sites; and platforms like Facebook and WordPress – and now Tumblr – highlight interesting content from their communities.    And who’s bringing that crème of the content to the top?  The professional writers and editors.

And they’ll continue to do real reporting, as well – there will be fewer doing so, as the need to have so many people covering the same stories has greatly dissipated.  Instead of many resources dedicated to the same beats and stories, we’re spreading the coverage more broadly, looking to the thousands of “citizen” journalists as sources.  Even HuffPo hired professional journalists.

Some say the lack of focus is killing investigative journalism.  But I think where’s there quality, there’s always some way of –and someone – bringing it to the surface.

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January 30, 2012 Thanks, But No Thanks, Google

Normally, when I after I use Google+ or Gmail, I immediately log out, rather than have my friends see what I’m searching for.   Why?  Because it’s none of their business.

But last night I forgot to log out and did an image search for “cocktail.”  (Again, not anyone’s  business).  But what came up in the top half of my image results were photos taken at a friend’s cocktail reception.

It was a little creepy.

But the other problem was that that was not at all what I was searching for.  If I wanted something as specific as “cocktail reception,” I would have type that in.  But even stranger, the second half of the results were what I was looking for (and I found a great photo of a Negroni, thank you.)  But Google decided that what I really wanted to see were results connected to me socially.  And that was a huge fail.

If I wanted to see my friend’s photos, I would ask her where she posted them.  See, Google, when I use your service, it’s to find the most relevant answer to my question, not the most relevant within my social circle.

The one positive I see in these results is, well… I might finally have a reason to try Bing.

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