In a recent interview, Ameen Sayani - colossus of Indian radio - had this to say about singers :
"A good singer is like a river which has its origins in a faraway past. As it flows, it gathers treasures the shores offer, and also gives to the shores the treasures it has to offer."
In my opinion, it also sums up wonderfully what good planners (and good planning blogs) should be like.
[Original pic by SpringChick]
Have just cobbled together a customised Google search engine - MisEntropy Plannersphere Search Engine - that limits its results only to advertising planners' blogs. By searching within this strict confines, I am hoping it will save me - and any one else who wants to use it - valuable time otherwise spent weeding out unnecessary stuff.
I have taken the list of planners from the plannersphere wiki - if you are a planner with a blog that isn't listed among the targetted sites, do mail me and I shall add it. I would also love to hear any feedback on the customised search engine itself.
Here are all the entries for the 'blogging mistakes' blog project I took part in recently. Each one of them is drawn from the experience of a blogger and for that reason is instructive - and could very well save you some heartache of your own.
[This post is a part of a blog project compiling mistakes made by bloggers and what they did to overcome them.]
The worst blogging mistake I made was to start off many many more blogs than I could run - simply because I thought each blogging idea deserved it's own space and URL. In a short while I discovered that it takes quite a bit of time and energy to generate content and to get a steady stream of readers for each blog - and by spreading my limited resources across so many blogs I was not doing justice to any one of them.
But it took me some time, a great deal of perplexity and much heartache to challenge my assumption that each idea should have its own blog. I eventually realised that by combining the different ideas and content all under one umbrella blog (which then became my one personal multi-faceted blog) I could not only combine all my readers but also improve my Google Pagerank substantially.
And what's more, by strongly sub-branding each feature/series in my blog and labelling them distinctly I could actually sport these individual blogs-within-blog as separate blogs. At this moment I run three such blogs within my primary MisEntropy blog: ten things i didn't know until last week, the sentence and the aphorism factory. I am also experimenting with other ideas that can become long-running series.
I'll probably come up with a few more ideas for blog series' - but it will take some convincing to persuade me to blog them under a different blog/url.
One exception to this rule, of course, is if you are blogging to establish professional expertise - rather than running a personal blog - in which case, you're better off not mixing your professional blogging with your hobbies and other eclectic stuff.
But for me this blog is an extension of the person I am - and therefore it is natural for it to encompass everything I am interested in, no matter how disconnected those diverse things seem co-existing under one blogging roof.
Some time ago, I wrote a paper on the use of aphorisms as information carriers. The central argument of the paper was that aphorisms fare better as repositories of wisdom as compared to traditional information systems, particularly intranets.
A related project that has interested me since then, is collecting epigrammatic wisdom about blogging - a recent field of activity with a fair bit of widely known and shared information, very little of which is in aphoristic form.
The aphorisms that follow are meant to kickstart that process - with a little help from wise men through the generations. I would love to hear from all of you about which ones hit the mark, and which ones don't. And if you have aphoristic advice to bloggers, do pass it on and I'll be glad to add it to the body of aphoristic wisdom on blogging.
Aphorisms on blogging:
* Fortune favours the blogger.
* A wise blogger knows everything; a shrewd blogger knows everyone.
* The secret to a good blog is to have more beginnings than ends.
* Blogging is a device for combining solitude with good company.
* If you want to work on your blog, work on your life.
* No blogger is ever too small, no blog ever too big.
* A blogger cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
* No two persons ever read the same blog.
* Hyperlinks are wonderful things; they make what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
* Don't judge a man until you have followed his blog for two moons.
* Everything in the world exists in order to end up on a blog.
* A blog is a thread on which we string our experiences.
* A sufficiently advanced blog will be indistinguishable from the blogger.
Why do planners blog? Though this question keeps cropping up in various posts all over, this particular post at Diablogue made me sit up and really wonder.
Obviously, planners themselves have a lot to say as to why. As for me, when I am not a planner (and sometimes even when I am), I am an ardent devotee of evolution. Which usually leads me to ask questions in the passive form. What change is happening to planners when they blog? Does that confer a 'survival value' in any way?
The nature of the question also ensures that I look for broad patterns rather than individual exceptions. And some of the broadest commonalities and patterns we share are rooted in our biology. And possibly because of my viewpoint, the answers I found were steeped in bio-logic.
One final caveat before I begin. In my opinion, what I write here applies to all bloggers, not just planners. I have stuck to planners because my train of thought started with them, and I believe that planners are more keen on both the 'listening' as well as 'talking' aspects of blogging. Which, in my opinion, puts them at the vanguard of blogging.
Enhanced Cognitive Capacity
No, I'm not promising blogging will improve your IQ scores. At least not yet.
One common reason why planners blog is to take notes for self and others on interesting things they have noticed - a scrapbook of sorts. But blogs aren't the first invention to help us store information outside of our limited craniums. So why should they be any different?
I think the difference blogs bring is to the very process of storing and retrieving information. By incorporating reverse chronology, links, tagging and preserving the conversation around each entry (through comments and trackbacks), blogs mimic the very process of memory formation.
Every time you make an entry, it's almost as if you are deliberately firing a synapse. Revisits to the entry and the conversation extending from it fire the synapse again and again - strengthening it in the process. This external synapse is linked to and follows from the internal synapse - the very thought in one's mind - that created the entry.
I believe, over time, as the blog grows it becomes an extended (and integrated) part of our brains - almost like some kind of secondary memory. Of course, the access times for this 'secondary memory' vary wildly (from when we are online to when we are offline, due to bandwidth, etc.) but the accuracy, the vividness and the relative ease of 'recall' make up for it.
(Just in case you are wondering if anything outside of us can be a part of us, Richard Dawkins argues in 'The Extended Phenotype' that there's no reason why an organism should be given an arbitrary boundary of its physical form.)
Of course it follows that the longer (and more) one blogs, the larger this 'secondary memory' grows - and so does a blogger's cognitive capacity. (Theoritically there should be limits where the advantages of this increased secondary memory taper off.)
Biologically, there's an undeniable correlation between brain size and intelligence. This correlation is more precisely measured as brain-to-body mass ratio. And what blogging is doing is adding to our brain size without affecting our body mass - an evolutionary change that bodes very well if past records are anything to go by.
Of course, the results of this enhanced 'cognitive capacity' might not necessarily lead to increased IQ scores. I do think, however, that they will lead to increased storage and processing abilities.
Grow big and remain small
In evolutionary terms, growing big has it's advantages and disadvantages - one can capture prey quite easily but one also needs more food to maintain a bigger body. Staying small means less food needed but a relative difficulty in capturing it.
The spider had found an elegant solution to this conundrum. It stays small but builds a bigger low-cost 'body' - its web - to capture food. Being non-living, the web requires a fraction of the energy a bigger body mass would have needed.
What the spider's web is doing is increasing its 'contact patch' with the environment around it. I believe a similar mechanism is at work in a planner's blog.
A blog and its extended web of comments, trackbacks and links in combination with RSS readers and feeds, maximise a blogger's ability to continually capture the information he needs to feed his 'thought metabolism.'
In my belief, the better bloggers use their blogs as a cachment area for information from the outside world - as comments, links or as a continuation of conversation on other blogs. Which ensures that the energy needed to gather these 'inputs' is just a fraction of what it takes to do it the traditional way.
In fact, I think blogs are the 'long tail' of conversations (and probably even our senses) - carrying on forth both our 'speaking' and 'listening' to places and moments long after we have left the party.
The Dunbar Number and other dominoes
It follows that if our cognitive capacities and brain-body-mass ratio aren't as constant as we thought they were, indexes that depend on these constants will probably be evolving too.
The Dunbar number for eg. I am not quite sure it is a constant or that it is immune to the changes the web (and technology) is wreaking on us.
I have also left unexplored (for the moment) several other reasons why planners blog: the 'Sandbox Universe' where they can hone their thinking and presentation skills, the 'Mesh Memory' system that overlays our collective memories onto one interconnected network and the 'Free Lunch Cafe' where everyone gains by giving away things.
I will fire a synapse on this blog when I find answers to the questions I am seeking.
Came across this simple but lovely idea : one blogger's view of the month's top blog posts. And since imitation is the best form of flattery, am going to start putting up my own collection every month. Thanks, Jon.
A very happy birthday to Russell Davies whose blog celebrates its 3rd anniversary today. And as far as blogs (planning or otherwise) go, Russell has always been on the top of my RSS feeds list and recently when he took a 10-day break, I positively missed reading his eclectic and thought-provoking posts. This was my first experience of a 'missing the blog' feeling. I guess there will be many more of them to come.
In his anniversary post, Russell quotes from the statistics of how popular he is - but all of us already knew that. And not only that, as the comments at this post go - we've also long known he is an expert blogger.
But novice bloggers can take heart from what I unearthed recently (while trying to get around a temporary blogging ban here in India). An early attempt at a planner blog by the master himself - frozen for eternity in the sands of time (until Russell decides to dismantle it; I am hoping he doesn't.) And it demonstrates a piece of advice given to bloggers who are just starting out - keep blogging, that's the only way you'll get better at it.
Seth Godin worries here about what the inflation of content means for its creators - in a world where people are happy to let a shuffle algorithm decide what they are going to read/listen/experience next.
The only hope he holds out is that winning an attention-lottery - like being #1 on Digg for eg. - will earn subscriptions via RSS or email. Else we'll forever be condemned to the whims of the Big Shuffle.
I do share Seth's worries but I also am optimistic that things won't turn out as bad. Surely when man first practised agriculture and settled down in villages and cities, his first worry was the manifold increase in the number of people who he came in touch with. How would he remember all their names, how would he get to know all of them or worse still, how would he ensure all of them get to know him?
A particularly apt definition of friends I read somewhere was 'accidents of geography.' The anxiety of being amidst more people than there are fingers on one's hand has now passed to a comfort with not having to know all the people in the universe. And also a comfort in the natural shuffle mode with which one discovers, keeps and loses friends.
I am sure when our anxiety over the explosion of choice passes, we'll be able to define a geography (or a landscape) of this content. We'll understand that we can only maximise our chances of listening to the best music out there and reading the most interesting stuff. But we'll also know that we'll never get anywhere close to most of it. Just like I understand there are a million interesting people out there whom I'll never befriend.
And as creators of content, we can only be thankful that the Big Shuffle still offers all of us - without discrimination - a chance to be widely read or heard. And as recently as a few decades ago, even the slightest possibility of an ordinary person's word being widely heard would have been hailed as a giant step forward for mankind.
As an individual I do find the possibility of being left out by the Big Shuffle cruel. As a human being, I hail the opportunity it holds for anyone who's waiting to be heard.
Not a day passes by without us being reminded that new media - blogs, wikis, podcasting, etc. - have obliterated the information asymmetry that advertising and brands have traditionally exploited. We are told that the new blogosphere-enabled consumer is armed to the teeth with information and that in the new world, brands and its consumers are equal.
But every passing day, I am convinced of the opposite. It's true that the gap is decreasing dramatically. But the gap remains and probably will never be wiped out. I am even beginning to believe that the best brands not just exploit information asymmetries but actively create them.
Take this regular feature from the BBC Editors blog for example. It's a guide to pronounciation from the Pronounication Unit of BBC. It smartly exploits expertise that exists within the BBC to create a need in people that they didn't know existed.
Until yesterday I had no idea what the correct way to say Clydach (a Welsh town) was. And nor did I care. But by actively making me aware of my ignorance and then addressing that shortcoming, this wonderful regular feature has me hooked. No matter how far away I wander in my daily life, I return faithfully every day to this oasis like a wandering bedouin.
And isn't that what the best bloggers do? Actively create bubbles of information asymmetries - an expectation of finding out/ experiencing/ replenishing something in their readers - and then fulfil that promise. Just like the best brands.
So the next time you read reports of the death of information asymmetry, do remember they might just be greatly exaggerated.
"I am a creative planner/ brand and social media consultant based in Bangalore, India. This blog is a scribbling pad for my thots and ideas - on brands, social media and planning.
I am a winner of the WPP Atticus Award for my paper on the long tail of brand building. My whitepapers, articles and thot pieces on advertising, new media and the probable future are available here.
You can get in touch with me via Facebook or email. Thanks for dropping by." ~~ blaiq
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