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witcca · 4 years ago

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How ahead Up With a Profitable Invention

Determining an Issue

When you choose you are going to generate a great invention idea, you are planning an invention; this is different from having a revelation eventually. Well, if you have an interest in creating, after that you have pertained to the ideal location, right here is a post to obtain you started as well as generally direct you with the invention procedure. The initial step in coming up with a rewarding invention idea is recognizing a problem in culture. also check out https://www.techtimes.com/articles/249715/20200518/how-inventhelp-gets-new-inventors-onto-the-right-path.htm

Locating a Problem

You have to discover an issue. I assume most everybody recognizes what a problem is composed of, especially an issue when we are on the subject of developing. Up until now, you haven't discovered when you did this, however, going via day to day life as a human is your number one distributor for good issues.

When looking to identify an issue there is also one more source that is conveniently offered - people around you. Individuals situate troubles and also vocalize the requirement for the problem to be fixed, thus we have an invention idea or advance in innovation. Listen to the individuals around you, they will certainly tell you the troubles they have in their lives.

Individuals have trouble; they publish it on the net. There are thousands of blogs and online forums where people have leaped on the internet as well as published a problem they are having. If you begin to understand utilizing these three resources of information for recognizing issues, then you will quickly have as well lots of troubles to bear in mind.

Is the Issue Common?

Just so there is no confusion, you do want the issue you determine to be common. You don't wish to be the only person having that trouble, or else the invention idea you come up with to resolve that trouble will only work to you. There are several basic methods to decide whether trouble prevails:

Ask them if they have the same trouble. You do not have to tell them you are thinking concerning coming up with an invention idea to solve it, just ask, "Male, I dislike it when (empty) happens. This is a straightforward method to see if an issue is usually without informing people concerning your creating strategies.

If the problem is typical after that a thousand individuals have currently published concerning it on the internet. Look on Google, as well as see if the issue transforms out to be extremely popular.

Go to a location that consists of plenty of individuals whose attention you can obtain, such as school, as well as ask them to raise their hands if they have this trouble. This can be a little bit even more frightening to some people, and it will reveal you are up to something.

Do not take this action lightly; your problem needs to prevail. A lucrative invention idea has to interest plenty of individuals.

Has the Issue Currently Been Solved?

This is also an extremely important point to recognize. Solving an issue is mosting likely to do you no good if there is currently something that addresses it. So, you have to do a little research study to verify that your issue is free for you to fix. As you would possibly think, a terrific place to begin is the web. At this moment, you have possibly currently searched for your problem online, so hopefully, if it is noticeable that it has been addressed, then you would have already seen. I would do an extra detailed search to make sure you didn't miss out on anything the very first time.

Next off, it would be wise to do a patent search. You can do a patent search online at the USPTO's website or with a patent lawyer. I would certainly suggest just searching online as it will certainly be less expensive as well as much easier. Searching for a problem as opposed to an invention is rather challenging, so it may take a while. Likewise, you can try searching for an evident invention idea that puts on that trouble for much better outcomes.

Additionally, I find it assists a whole lot to ask about. Many times a person will state something like "I think I have heard about something that does that," or something along those lines. Do not forget the value of people.

Is Resolving the Problem Viable?

The ultimate question: is the trouble going to pay to solve? There is no definite answer to this question. There are numerous points to think about when you have made it to this question.

- Does it conserve individuals' cash? This is a large one. Individuals love products that can pay for themselves. We are additionally in the midst of an economic recession, so people are constantly trying to find means to save cash. If you are firing to conserve individuals' cash, there is one vital thing to consider; your invention needs to be cost-effective. People do not want to hear that your product will spend for itself in 5 years, they desire fast results.

- Does it conserve individuals' time? People want to get back to their free time, so conserving them time can be very attractive.

This is a really difficult point to consider because it is very opinionated; therefore, it requires you to make a judgment telephone call. Some people obtain comfort or entertainment from various things, so if you choose to take this course, you have to be sure your invention will use to lots of people.

This is one more large one and leads to very rewarding invention ideas. There is always going to be a great way to market an invention that conserves lives.

Several things impede people such as allergies, diseases, physical constraints, etc.

- Would people would certainly for this problem to issue solved? You have to kind of beginning to believe about exactly how a lot an invention to resolve this issue would cost as well as if that quantity of cash is worth resolving the issue. The worst point is to have a wonderful invention, but not be able to make cash due to a lack of research study at this action. Find out more advice https://midhudsonnews.com/2020/05/10/how-does-inventhelp-support-new-inventors/

Now you ought to have a positive problem to resolve; you are on your means to a profitable invention idea.

Research

At this point, you ought to have an issue that you are interested in resolving. Make certain you understand every solitary thing concerning your issue; review publications, read magazines, reviewed the web, as well as anything else that can inform you about your trouble. Doing research helps to completely submerge you in your invention; it creates you to believe regularly about your problem and also raises your urge to distinctly resolve it.

Discovering an Invention Idea

Use Problem Resolving

All troubles need problem-solving; nonetheless, some are simpler to solve than others. Some people are normally good at problem-solving as well as they can address issues with ease, yet many individuals have established methods to show individuals just how to solve problems.

- I simplify the problem. It is easy to look at the problem and obtain caught up in the complexity of resolving it, as well as this can inhibit you.

- Change the setting of your trouble. This might be tough to understand, so I will certainly give you an instance. Allow's claim your trouble is entering the shower and afterward understanding you neglected to obtain after that new hair shampoo container as well as currently you are all wet. Adjustment the setting from a shower to your cars and truck; keeping in mind to get a new pack of gum to place in your before you leave to go on a hot day. Doing this will certainly permit you to take a look at the trouble from multiple angles. Do not hesitate to do this many times for several various settings. Problem-solving is about resolving an issue by using logic and making use of techniques to enhance your reasoning. Logical issue fixing isn't the only way to go concerning addressing your issue; you need to also consider the abstract side of identifying ideas, which I will certainly chat about following.

Creativity

If creative imagination takes location when the brain perceives the information, and also the method the mind perceives information is based on experience after that creativity is limited by experience. That could have seemed like a stretch, however, believe regarding this. When you are a child your creativity is free-flowing and also untamable, yet when you get older as well as obtain experienced your imagination begins to diminish.

Just how does this put on invent?

Many of the wonderful inventions that end up turning over a huge revenue or changing the world outcome from an invention idea that is completely ridiculous to the average person. This means the key ingredients to an effective inventor are a loosened creative imagination and the capacity to creatively address the trouble. Well, I think if inventing could be composed in 12 actions to a perfect invention idea after that everybody would certainly be coming up with outstanding inventions.

How to break down the obstacles on imagination.

As I claimed above, the mind perceives details based upon previous experiences. It does this because it needs to conserve energy; therefore, the longer you live and also the even more experiences you encounter, the extra your mind will utilize the experience to preserve power. This conservation of power is the adversary when you are attempting to extend your ideas and be imaginative. Requiring your brain to count much less on experience is a very tough task or every person would be imaginative.

A great method to begin assuming differently is to do brand-new things - most likely to brand-new locations, take part in new things, and also fulfill brand-new individuals. Flooding the mind with all these brand-new points causes it to break down categories developed by the experience. To get rid of conventional thinking, you have to also identify that traditional thinking restrictions you and also there are different means to perceive points although you have seen it the same way for so long. Last, one of the most obvious means to attempt and break down common reasoning is by essentially taking a look at points differently. This seems easy as well as broad, but it can be difficult to achieve. An example of this would certainly be if you were a musician you can take images of your artwork, or possibly check out your art in a mirror. Raising your creativity is a hard task to accomplish, however when you do the outcomes can be very gratifying.

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Reviewing Your Invention Idea

If you are interested in producing earnings with your invention idea, then you aren't done. If you want to make cash, you are going to have to spend a significant quantity of cash to patent and possibly market your invention. There are three major methods to evaluate your invention.

Look at successful previous inventions and also look at unsuccessful ones. Research exactly how the economic situation was when the invention was released and also just how the economic situation contrasts with today's economic situation.

Talk to people about your idea as well as ask their take on it. Do not worry about them swiping your idea; the majority of people are way too careless to attempt that.

There are inventor organizations designed to aid out creators with ideas. To be truthful, I have never used them before, I have just check out about them on-line.

#What is InventHelp #Should I use InventHelp #InventHelp #help with inventions #Ideas #Patent #Inventors #Prototypes #Inventions #Technology #Innovation

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mobgaming957 · 4 years ago

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How much would it cost to build a gaming pc 2015

Tips For Starting A Gaming Blog

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goonlalagoon · 6 years ago

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The Great Haus Bake-Off || Check, Please!

I have no memory of what caused me to start writing this, but been re-reading some Check Please fic and finally got motivated to go back and finish it...

(also on Ao3 here)

No-one was quite certain, later, who started it.

It had been a post-practice brunch, they all agreed, sometime in that period when everyone on the Internet - or at least, about thirty percent of the parts of the Internet that Bitty frequented and re-tweeted things from - was obsessed with Great British Bake Off, and someone had eventually said “It’s baking, it isn’t like it’s exciting”, and it seemed like almost everyone in the room made a sound of thoughtless agreement.

Then came the terrible ‘clang’ of an oven door being closed.

Instantly, the room fell silent. The look Eric Bittle turned on them all would freeze enough water for an ice rink, and for a long moment everyone at the Haus kitchen table was both trying to remember whether they had said the terrible thing, and wondering with deep seated horror whether if no-one owned up Bitty would actually withhold all baked goods.

Chowder actually gulped when he began to smirk.

“Oh, really? Y’all better be ready to put your money where your mouths are.”

It’s really only supposed to be a small thing. Bitty plans to just get the boys to try and make something - maybe a pie, or maybe he’d give them something fancier, patisserie of some kind - which they would all inevitably fail at but would probably make fools of themselves in some deeply entertaining fashion while baking. But Lardo listens to him patter on about it for fifteen minutes, swallows her pie, and grins.

“Say, Bits? You reckon we could turn this into a Samwell Men’s Hockey publicity thing?”

They even manage to get a sort-of sponsorship out of it by dint of Lardo sidling up to the manager of the cute little store Bitty goes to for baking apparatus - he’ll compromise on many things for the sake of budgeting, but when he needs another pie dish or his scales go on the blink, Eric Bittle is not afraid to invest - and cheerfully explaining the entire story. The manager is delighted and insists on being a judge in exchange for giving them a deal on some of the key equipment, because Bitty loves his teammates to pieces but wouldn’t dream of letting them near his mama’s set of cake tins for love nor money.

When the delivery arrives he discovers that the manger has even managed to get them cake stands patterned with skating boots and little snowflakes.

One of Lardo’s arty friends agrees to film it in exchange for permission to submit it as part of his film and media portfolio, and Bitty indulges himself in a full rerun of every episode of Bake Off aired so far to gather ideas.

Lardo joins him for most of it, already planning the spiel she’s going to stick up on the SMH website to cover the event and organising a few people for taste testing (with a guarantee of a Bittle produced rendition of the days challenge in case all other offerings are truly inedible as they both half suspect they will be)

Meanwhile, the rest of the boys begin to panic. Baking is not a skill that was widely associated with the SMH Haus before the arrival of Bitty, and their main interaction with baked goods is still firmly on the consumer end of things.

Ransom is seen carrying a stack of cookbooks up to his chin across campus from the library, and spends his evenings memorising recipes with the fervour he usually saves for last minute test revision. No-one quite dares use the Haus kitchen to practice, because what if they damage Bitty’s baking stuff he will either cry or kill them or both, and take over miscellaneous dorm kitchens to try and memorise the basic sponge recipe. A bemused Farmer lets Chowder use her kitchen, and promptly tracks down Bitty to ask what on earth is going on, because “he accidentally used salt instead of sugar and I know for a fact he’s done that several times before, why is he trying to bake again now??”

(She joins in with the GBBO re-watch and makes some excellent suggestions for possible challenges.)

Shitty attempts to make macarons, because he suspects that Bitty is going to make them all suffer. He pokes his failed attempt and concludes that Bitty may be prepared to make them all suffer, but he also loves baking too much to inflict this level of horror on himself, surely?

He largely stops trying to prepare himself and instead starts waxing lyrical about baking in the context of gender roles, mostly the hypocrisy that being able to bake a cake is still considered an essential life skill for a girl, but no one has ever thought it unreasonable that he has never baked a cake before in his life, and winds up on Wikipedia at three fifteen A.M. having gone down a Google rabbit hole that has somehow led to him reading the page about the societal structure of meerkats.

In the end, Bitty decides on three challenges, as a nod to the format and a fun way to get some variety; cookie decoration (he’ll provide the prepped dough, bake ‘em once everyone’s used whatever cookie cutters they want, and then they do the decoration), mini-cake construction (everyone gets a batch of miniature sponges, their choice of how to glue the two layers together and add finishing touches), and one actual baking round - the showstopper pie.

Lardo makes a schedule, because the Haus kitchen won’t take all seven of the team who got themselves into this mess trying to work in it all at once, so that they rotate between stages and go in batches to Murder Shop ‘n Stop to buy their pie filling ingredients.

It’s a disaster, and Bitty watches the chaos unfold with entirely unconcealed glee, keeping up a cheerful voice over - and if his chirps happen to distract the boys and lead to much panicked responses and second guessing, well, that’ s just the nature of baking in a high-pressure environment, isn’t it?

The first round of judging involves a lot of guesswork. Admittedly, Chowder’s blue and white creations are a lot easier to figure out if you’ve seen the inside of the boy’s room and could reliably guess what he was going to attempt, so there are a lot of puzzled looks exchanged amongst the judges until someone makes the link with the Sharks hoodie he’s wearing.

It turns out that Dex can do a pretty neat galaxy icing pattern if he puts his mind to it, even if he got the consistency wrong; Bitty may actually have to try it himself, sometime.

(”Jack, did you…did you actually do maple leaf cut outs with a maple glaze? That’s…”

“Gotta stay on brand, eh? And I was told I wasn’t allowed to do plain circles and decorate them as hockey pucks.”

Most of the minature sponge cakes are gradually sliding more and more lopsided as the various attempts at butter-cream or other fillings prove unable to hold. Holster has somehow managed to cut his at almost a perfect diagonal instead of in half; Nursey simply gave up and presents his as an ‘open sandwich’ rather than trying to glue the layers back together.

(“Shits, what did you even put in the middle of - is this marmite? Did you - did you seriously - why?”

“Listen, love it or hate it, and I happen to love it. Sweet and savoury, a classic combination -”

“Marmite victoria sponge is not a classic combination, Shitty.”

“I was told to be creative, thank you very much, unlike those of us who went with jam and butter-cream.”

“I like jam and butter-cream. Anyway, I did use apple jam, that’s not typical. And I put maple syrup in the -”

“Bro, I am also from Canada, and even I will say that is incredibly Canadian of you.”)

Bitty almost weeps when he sees the final range of pies produced. He was braced for them to be terrible; he just wasn’t quite prepared enough. For a moment, he wonders if this whole stunt was really worth it.

Fillings are burnt while pastry is undercooked to the point of being raw - or the filling is horribly flavoured and the pastry overcooked until it’s about the consistency of wood chips.

Ransom has managed a surprisingly pretty lattice over three-quarters of his pie, but ran out of pastry for the last section. Chowder forgot to leave air-holes in the lid of his (and put salt instead of sugar in the filling).

Nursey isn’t sure what ingredient he forgot, but it was clearly one of the essential ones.

But there is one pie that actually looks…if not something that Bitty would have baked himself, at least something he wouldn’t be instantly offended to be connected to. The lid is a near perfect golden brown, with precisely spaced snips to let the steam waft gently out. The pastry is precisely crimped around the edge of the pie dish, with the excess trimmed away to leave a clean margin. The filling is sweet but not sickly.

The decorative pastry maple leaves add a certain artistry, the main judge declares with the pleased smile of someone who knows they were created with a cookie cutter bought from his own shop.

The video of Jack being presented with an ice-skate patterned cake tin and a matching apron as he’s declared the ‘Samwell Hockey Haus Bake-Off Champion gets re-tweeted by Bob Zimmerman within five minutes of being posted, to a flurry of Twitter activity.

Lardo and Bitty were definitely not expecting their slightly-spite-motivated publicity stunt to go quite this public.

(It was a really good pie, though.)

#Check! Please #OMGCP #omgcp fic #my writing #I...can't remember what sparked this idea but it's been sitting 3/4s finished in my drafts for ages #I actually cannot recall if Jack's love of maple syrup is canon or fanon at this point #or at least his insistance on using Proper Maple Syrup

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talesfromthefreezerinmymind · 5 years ago

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The Adventure of the Accidental Client

On this day in 1859 (May 22) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was born.

May is also Mental Health Awareness month.

What do these two things have in common? For me, quite a lot. I’ll start this story in early 2012.

At that time I was a freshman at Maryville College, in my second semester of majoring in graphic design. I was completely miserable.

Why was I miserable, exactly? Well…

I had no friends (turns out, I had never learned how to make them)

I doubted that graphic design was the career for me (Imposter Syndrome vibes)

I was homesick (even though I went home every single weekend)

I phoned my parents every night and told them about my day. During one such call, my dad told me about a show on Netflix that he’d started watching: Sherlock. It was made by some of the same people that made another favorite of ours, Doctor Who. I was intrigued, and had plenty of time on my hands, so I thought I’d give it a try.

If you know nothing of Sherlock Holmes (as I did when I first started watching the show), he’s a famous English detective residing in 221B Baker Street created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson solves mysteries in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But for Sherlock, the adventures are set in the modern day. Over the course of a week or so, I watched the whole first season. Normally I’m slow to warm up to things, but I was instantly hooked.

I kept watching the show. I read interviews with the cast and crew. I found a fan-run website with all sorts of lovely info. I discovered Tumblr and all the fandom madness that lives there. The second season had already premiered in the UK, and I dredged up info on it (and spoiled it for myself). I started reading the original novels and short stories that the show was based on. I read everything Sherlock Holmes in about 5 months. And then started reading it over again.

Sherlock had found me at just the right moment. I was unusually lonely. I was unusually bored. I saw myself in John Watson; a directionless man in need of a purpose. A deeply loyal man, without a friend to adhere to. I saw myself in Sherlock Holmes; a man whose mind is always running, who loves feeling clever and in control. A man for whom feeling like an outsider is normal, though not always welcome. In the words of John Watson, “I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers are irresistibility drained.” I was a lounger, an idler, and London had found me.

The Sherlock Holmes stories rekindled my love of reading, which had been dormant for a few years, and sparked a much more serious interest in writing. There was just something about how Doyle went from unknown medical man to literary giant that grabbed my attention. He started in one world and ended up in another. It got me thinking that perhaps though I began in graphic design, I could end up somewhere else: a published author myself. So I wrote more. And I read more. I changed my major in the Spring of 2013 to English with a concentration in Creative Writing (Oh, and I transferred to UT in the fall of 2012. I had to get away from Maryville. Fresh start. Sorta). In 2015, right after graduating UT, I joined an organization called the Society of Children's Books Writers and Illustrators. Long story short, in April 2016 I signed the contract for Roof Octopus, my first picture book.

Sadly, though, writing doesn’t pay much when you’re first starting out so I really did need a backup career for the moment. Fall 2015 I enrolled at Pellissippi State Community College (backtracking, I know, per the usual order of things) and began earning an associate’s in graphic design.

Though by this point I was far removed from my freshman year at Maryville, I still felt all the loneliness and failure that I had felt then (and I was still fanatical about Sherlock; third season came out in 2014). Honestly, I had been feeling watered-down versions of those emotions since my junior year of high school (that’s another story for another time). Plus, there was something else that I was carrying that was growing heavier over time: an addiction to daydreaming.

An addiction to daydreaming? Is that even possible? Well, it is possible. It even has a fancy name: Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder (MDD). It’s when a person’s habit of daydreaming is so obsessive that it interferes with everyday life. I would describe it like there’s a TV on in my head all day. It places my favorite shows, lots of reruns but new stuff, too. Your daydreams are like movies that you write and direct and star in and you can’t get enough. Part of the time they are white noise and I can ignore it. But more often than not, all I want to do is sit and watch. I have trouble focusing on what I’m reading or writing. I zone out super easily while listening to music or podcasts. I have trouble falling asleep for my mind not “turning off”. I zone out in class, at meetings, at church, and in groups of people when no one is talking directly to me. I daydream while driving and running and showering and cleaning and swimming and biking and just walking through my house. I’ve been struggling to focus while writing all this out; I’d rather daydream about writing this than actually do it. (Fun Fact: A big part of my daydreaming is I like to talk aloud while I’m doing it if I’m alone. On second thought, that’s probably more of an embarrassing fact than fun…)

People with MDD aren’t crazy; they don’t hear voices in their head or think people are around who really aren't there. They are fully aware that their daydream worlds aren’t real. But for some people MDD is so severe that they don’t leave their homes for days; they stay in and daydream their life away. Luckily, my MDD is not that severe. Often MDD is used as a coping mechanism. Even though I’ve never experience trauma like some people have, I still really crave an escape from life and all the emotions brought on by it.

I had never heard of Maladaptive Daydreaming Disorder until one day in the summer of 2016; I googled for ways to quit daydreaming and stuff about MDD was in the results. Up to this point I’d slowly been growing tired of my daydreaming. I’d always had an active imagination. Played pretend a lot as a kid, had imaginary friends. But in college it started to get out of hand. Particularly falling asleep was a struggle, or if I woke up super early, falling back asleep. It took me ages sometimes to write a paper or read through something. However, I had so much time on my hands that it didn’t really matter how much I procrastinated. (While at UT and Pellissippi, I still didn’t try to make friends.) I didn’t talk too much to anyone about how much I hated college. About how alone I was. I’m a Christian, but I didn’t pray about any of it. I didn’t talk about all the ways that I felt like a failure. I bottled it all up inside, because that’s what Sherlock did. Sherlock was a loner, who was never a failure. Emotions were for other people. He was too smart for them. Sherlock never seemed to let loneliness get to him, and I wasn’t going to let it either.

Anyway, the more I learned about MDD the more I was convinced that I had it. The most important thing that I learned about MDD was that people who struggled with it could get help. Therapy and medication (like antidepressants) had helped other people get control of their life once again. In the back of my mind, I began to wonder: I had been using MDD to help cope with life, but now did I need help coping with MDD? Nevertheless, true to my never-bare-my-soul nature, I shared these discoveries and questions with absolutely no one.

I kept on keeping on. Finished a year at Pellissippi (still worried about whether or not I could make it as a graphic designer). Signed that book contract. Stayed close (as close as you can be without spilling your guts) to my friends at home, who I usually had to make an effort to see (something I really missed from the good old days pre-college). Tried (and failed) not to freak out as some of those friends got married and/or moved off. Who needs friends anyway, right? They’ll just ditch you eventually; no one’s as loyal as John Watson. I daydreamed too much. I wrote and wrote. I worked at Cove Lake State Park in the summer. I started a second year at Pellissippi.

Then one night in December 2016, I stayed the night at my Nannie’s. After I went to bed, I, per usual, had a horrible time falling sleep. I laid awake for hours, but eventually drifted off.

The next day when I came home, my mom asked me if I had slept well.

That was all the provoking that I needed. I broke down and cried. I told her that I could hardly ever sleep because my mind would not turn off. My daydreaming had become too much. Once it had been my rescue, my escape from everyday life, but now I felt like I was going mad.

My parents talked it over together and decided that I should see someone professional. My mom made me an appointment at a counseling office. On December 20, 2016, I had my first meeting with my therapist.

It was rather surreal. In the first season of Sherlock, John sees a therapist because he’s trying to deal with returning home from war. In January 2017, just mere weeks after my first appointment, the fourth season of Sherlock aired. In in the first episode, Sherlock (spoiler) himself pays a visit to John’s therapist. Sherlock actually needs help and he’s actually asking for. And I had just done the same thing. Life is funny like that sometimes.

Over the last 3+ years my therapist has helped me understand a lot about myself. Anxiety has been present in my life for several years now. Talking to people I don’t know, and even people that I do know, often gives me some level of anxiety. I’m always worrying if I sound weird or dumb or boring. I never know what to talk about. Therapy has helped me build up my confidence so it’s much easier for me to talk to others now. Am I still an introvert? Oh, yes. Can I carry on a conversation with someone I just meet? Yeah. Do I always want to? No, not really. But I’m much more willing to try it now.

I’ve always hated change, good or bad. Watching friends grow up and reach life milestones (marriage, kids, dream job) all while I changed majors, changed jobs, and had little luck in the dating realm was (and still is) rough. Therapy has helped me be a little more okay with changes in my life. I’m not so scared of the future as I once was.

I prefer to keep to myself. I’m a perfectionist and a control freak. I hate asking for help. I always feel like an oddball, even among my close friends. I love feeling clever. I hate feeling like a failure. I hate change.

I am Sherlock Holmes.

Therapy keeps me in check. Keeps from going over the edge. Helps me understand myself, the world around me, and those in it. It helps me become a better version of myself.

Therapy is my John Watson.

I don’t know what would have happened to me had I not discovered Sherlock when I did. I do believe that God knows exactly what types of things would catch my attention (i.e. mysteries and best friend adventures) and perhaps that’s why and how things turned out the way they did. He is the Great Author, after all. I am thankful that He loved me even through the times that I was not a fan of myself, running and hiding from everyone, including Him.

I’ve told this story today because (1) I love telling stories. It’s why I write. It’s why I read. Heck, it’s why I’m addicted to daydreaming. Yep, I still daydream quite a lot, but I feel in control of it now. I’ve been taking an antidepressant for about two years now and that has helped with the daydreaming and my overall mood, too. I’ve also told this story today because (2) stories can save us. Sherlock Holmes saved me. I was a lounger, an idler, who wandered into 221B Baker Street in need of a mystery solved. What was happening to Lucy Branam? Can she be saved? Sherlock was just the detective for the job.

Happy 161st birthday, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Thank you for writing.

#sherlock #bbc sherlock #mental health #therapy #maladaptive daydreaming #mdd #anxienty

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xcenj · 5 years ago

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Critical Reflection

Throughout the last eight weeks, the Fashion Promotion Year 2 class have been given the opportunity to revamp PXL Agency. The class was divided into five groups: Branding, Research and Development, Website and PR, Editorial and Events. For this project, I was a part of the Website and PR Team. As a collective, we decided to divide our team into two separate groups; Website and Social Media, whilst as a whole agreeing on all final outcomes.

My role within Pixel Agency was to help create and design the new Pixel website as well as reach out to influential creative industry players and produce content/story ideas for Instagram. I put myself forward for the website sub-team, as I had never made a website before and was eager to further my knowledge and skill range. The beginning of the project was very daunting, as time was limited despite our huge responsibility. After listening to informative guest speakers week after week, I have learned that confidence and persistence are key in all creative professions. Unfortunately, I regret not taking the opportunity to ask guest speakers more questions and seek further insights. On the flip side, I’m really happy that this module allowed the whole class to work together, as I have made new bonds with class members I didn’t speak to before. Overall, this experience has taught me time management, networking, how to build a portfolio, teamwork skills, and consistency.

Eager and ready to learn I attended a private tutorial with Amy Bruce, in order to understand the basics of Squarespace. During Amy’s private tutorial, I had the pleasure of meeting Cyrus, the web designer for Pixel’s website last year and quickly exchanged contact information in case my team had questions about Squarespace along the way. Before we could start designing the website, I suggested to my team leader Karolina that a new Google Drive for PXL be created. In our drive, we had a clear folder for class members to upload their work. Despite having this folder we constantly had to nag the class to upload their work. As a group, we would use the work to create collages for our social media feed. I imputed to the process by drawing storyboards four at a time of what each page of the website should look like. In order to keep every aspect of the website on brand, a member from branding would oversee the drawing plans and adjust if need be. These drawings provided a clear structure and plan for the team to follow. As a group, we wanted everyone’s headshot to be uniform and continuous. To achieve this we successfully organised a time effective shoot, unfortunately some members of the class were unable to attend and didn’t feature on the website. This is a real shame as we all worked so hard. I took lead on the projects page by picking and uploading the strongest work generated by the whole class to show off Pixel at its best. With the help of others in my group, we were able to link the projects back to the individuals about us page. For part of my own page on PXL, I decided to turn my marketing reports into GIFs in order to show continuity within the design. As Pixel is a communications agency establishing connections between tastemakers, it was crucial for the PXL website to have a blog section. The blog section was available for all class members to feature. I wrote a blog post to inform creatives of the latest exhibitions around London with a brief description of what work and installations were featured.

Throughout the whole process, I am very impressed with how much our group conversated within our WhatsApp group chat. However, at times I felt as if our group had no clear structure. If I could change one thing about the whole process it would be the black background on the website. I was very vocal on the fact that the black background doesn’t bring out the best in everyone’s work and can be too dark, gloomy and contrasting. Another improvement would have been for our the social media sub-team to post more engaging stories with advice on how to better your CV and how to get an internship as we had all just come back from placement. As a group, we discussed taking inspiration from Instagram pages like ‘Find Your Intern’.

Leading up to the event, I noticed that the Social Media sub-team hadn’t invited many followers, influencers or industry moguls. During the week leading up to the event, I took it upon myself to send an invite to as many VIPs as possible. To try and attract the general public, I created a free open event post on Eventbrite for more traction. As a group, we could have improved our PR strategy and branched outside of just Instagram. I did suggest that we take advantage of Ravensbourne’s facility to use Fashion Monitor and email some press offices but received very low morale from my group that they wouldn’t come to our event. That being said some of the PXL invites I sent to Dazed via Instagram did receive positive feedback and a few RSVPs.

At the event, I wanted to be as hands-on as possible. During the first hour, I had learned that the flyers for the event hadn’t been delivered on time and weren’t going to arrive. However, I did not let the terrible news deflate my energy, I grabbed PXL stickers and headed to the streets to get the public through the doors. During my allocated leaflet time, I made my way to Shoreditch in attempts to draw in an artsy crowd, stopping everyone on my way. At the event, I met a lovely lady called Raquel Maillo who explained the importance of not giving up. I now feel better knowing that interning in several different places will eventually pay off. Nonetheless, I’m disappointed in myself as I should of networked with more industry figures.

At the start of this module, I began updating the aesthetics of my Curriculum Vitae and Cover Letter. Both are now sleek and modern, reflecting my style of design. As LinkedIn is such a vital tool to communicate with employers in regards to internships, it must be regularly updated (LinkedIn profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameo-johansson-706716151/). I constantly message people with job titles I would like to pursue to question what route they took to get where they are. Throughout this project, I have developed my online profile through the means of a visual blog. I use the blog as a sketchbook to post visuals that influence me. I have noticed an increase in my Tumblr followings and reposts, which inspires me to urge on. Offline I have made myself available to help out at industry events where possible, in particular a GQ styling masterclass workshop. After the masterclass, I networked with creatives such as Angelo Mitakos at London Fashion Week Men’s discussing the possible opportunities of interning. I would love to secure a placement over the summer with a company that will further push me out of my comfort zone.

I am still trying to discover my niche is in the fashion industry. As much as I loved learning how to create a website, I can happily say it’s not a career path I wish to further pursue. I believe that my personality and skill set would work better within a communication role for example Events or Editorial. Therefore if PXL was a real communications agency, I would be happy with a salary of 21k per year as an Events Co-ordinator.

Numerous triumphs left this experience: the Branding team executed a strong identity and dossier from the very beginning, the Research and Development team worked very hard to produce an informative on brand research pack all about Generation Z and X, the Website and PR team created a fabulous aesthetic website and Instagram, the Editorial team created unique campaign imagery for content and promotional banners and lastly the Events team pulled off a venue, a bar and two sponsors (MiiRO icecream and Press Juice London) Overall, I think the class has done a spectacular job, working to include everyone’s different aesthetic can be really challenging. However, in the end, we pulled off an amazing packed industry event with a website launch and clear synergy between all assets in the short space of time.

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suzanneshannon · 3 years ago

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Chapter 9: Community

In April of 2009, Yahoo! shut down GeoCities. Practically overnight, the once beloved service had its signup page replaced with a vague message announcing its closure.

We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.

Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.

In the coming months, the company would offer little more detail than that. Within a year, user homepages built with GeoCities would blink out of existence, one by one, until they were all gone.

Reactions to the news ranged from outrage to contemptful good riddance. In general, however, the web lamented about a great loss. Former GeoCities users recalled the sites that they built using the service, often hidden from public view, and often while they were very young.

For programmer and archivist Jason Scott, nostalgic remembrances did not go far enough. He had only recently created the Archive Team, a rogue group of Internet archivists willing to lend their compute cycles to the rescue of soon departed websites. The Archive Team monitors sites on the web marked for closure. If they find one, they run scripts on their computers to download as much of the site as they could before it disappears.

Scott did not think the question of whether or not GeoCities deserved to exist was relevant. “Please recall, if you will, that for hundreds of thousands of people, this was their first website,” he posted to his website not long after Yahoo!‘s announcement. “[Y]ou could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full color.” GeoCities wasn‘t simply a service. It wasn’t just some website. It was burst of creative energy that surged from the web.

In the weeks and months that followed, the Archive Team set to work downloading as many GeoCities sites as they could. They would end up with millions in their archive before Yahoo! pulled the plug.

Chris Wilson recalled the promise of an early web in a talk looking back on his storied career with Mosaic, then Internet Explorer, and later Google Chrome. The first web browser, developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, included the ability for users to create their own websites. As Wilson remembers it, that was the de-facto assumption about the web—that it would be a participatory medium.

“Everyone can be an author. Everyone would generate content,” Wilson said, “We had the idea that web server software should be free and everyone would run a server on their machine.” His work on Mosaic included features well ahead of their time, like built-in annotations so that users could collaborate and share thoughts on web documents together. They built server software in the hopes that groups of friends would cluster around common servers. By the time Netscape skyrocketed to popularity, however, all of those features had faded away.

GeoCities represented the last remaining bastion of this original promise of the web. Closing the service down, abruptly and without cause, was a betrayal of that promise. For some, it was the writing on the wall: the web of tomorrow was to look nothing like the web of yesterday.

In a story he recalls frequently, David Bohnett learned about the web on an airplane. Tens of thousands of feet up, untethered from any Internet network, he first saw mention of the web in a magazine. Soon thereafter, he fell in love.

Bohnett is a naturally empathetic individual. The long arc of his career so far has centered on bringing people together, both as a technologist and as a committed activist. As a graduate student, he worked as a counselor answering calls on a crisis hotline and became involved in the gay rights movement at his school. In more recent years, Bohnett has devoted his life to philanthropy.

Finding connection through compassion has been a driving force for Bohnett for a long time. At a young age, he recognized the potential of technology to help him reach others. “I was a ham radio operator in high school. It was exciting to collect postcards from people you talked to around the world,” he would later say in an interview. “[T]hat is a lot of what the Web is about.‘’

Some of the earliest websites brought together radical subcultures and common interests. People felt around in the dark of cyberspace until they found something they liked.

Riding a wave of riot grrrl ephemera in the early 1990’s, ChickClick was an early example. Featuring a mix of articles and message boards, women and young girls used ChickClick as a place to gather and swap stories from their own experience.

Much of the site centered on its strident creators, sisters Heather and Heidi Swanson. Though they each had their own areas of responsibility—Heidi provided the text and the editorial, Heather acted as the community liaison—both were integral parts of the community they created. ChickClick would not exist without the Swanson sisters. They anchored the site to their own personalities and let it expand through like-minded individuals.

Eventually, ChickClick grew into a network of linked sites, each focused on a narrower demographic; an interconnected universe of women on the web. The cost to expanding was virtually zero, just a few more bytes zipping around the Internet. ChickClick’s greatest innovation came when they offered their users their own homepages. Using a rudimentary website builder, visitors could create their own space on the web, for free and hosted by ChickClick. Readers were suddenly transformed into direct participants in the universe they had grown to love.

Bohnett would arrive at a similar idea not long after. After a brief detour running a more conventional web services agency called Beverley Hills Internet, Bohnett and his business partner John Rezner tried something new. In 1994, Bohnett sent around an email to some friends inviting them to create a free homepage (up to 15MB) on their experimental service. The project was called GeoCities.

What made GeoCities instantly iconic was that it reached for a familiar metaphor in its interface. When users created an account for the first time they had to pick an actual physical location on a virtual map—the digital “address” of their website. “This is the next wave of the net—not just information but habitation,” Bohnett would say in a press release announcing the project. Carving out a real space in cyberspace would become a trademark of the GeoCities experience. For many new users of the web, it made the confusing world of the web feel lived in and real.

The GeoCities map was broken up into a handful of neighborhoods users could join. Each neighborhood had a theme, though there wasn‘t much rhyme or reason to what they were called. Some were based on real world locations, like Beverley Hills for fashion aficionados or Broadway for theater nerds. Others simply played to a theme, like Area51 for the sci-fi crowd or Heartland for parents and families. Themes weren’t enforced, and most were later dropped in everything but name.

Credit: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age

Neighborhoods were limited to 10,000 people. When that number was reached, the neighborhood expanded into suburbs. Everywhere you went on GeoCities there was a tether to real, physical spaces.

Like any real-world community, no two neighborhoods were the same. And while some people weeded their digital gardens and tended to their homepages, others left their spaces abandoned and bare, gone almost as soon as they arrived. But a core group of people often gathered in their neighborhoods around common interests and established a set of ground rules.

Historian Ian Milligan has done extensive research on the mechanics and history of GeoCities. In his digital excavation, he discovered a rich network of GeoCities users who worked hard to keep their neighborhoods orderly and constructive. Some neighborhoods assigned users as community liaisons, something akin to a dorm room RA, or neighborhood watch. Neighbors were asked to (voluntarily) follow a set of rules. Select members acted as resources, reaching out to others to teach them how to build better homepages. “These methods, grounded in the rhetoric of both place and community,” Milligan argues, “helped make the web accessible to tens of millions of users.”

For a large majority of users, however, GeoCities was simply a place to experiment, not a formal community. GeoCities would eventually become one of the web’s most popular destinations. As more amateurs poured in, it would become known for a certain garish aesthetic, pixelated GIFs of construction workers, or bright text on bright backgrounds. People used their homepages to host their photo albums, or make celebrity fan sites, or to write about what they had for lunch. The content of GeoCities was as varied as the entirety of human experience. And it became the grounding for a lot of what came next.

“So was it community?” Black Planet founder Omar Wasow would later ask. “[I]t was community in the sense that it was user-generated content; it was self-expression.” Self-expression is a powerful ideal, and one that GeoCities proved can bring people together.

Many early communities, GeoCities in particular, offered a charming familiarity in real world connection. Other sites flipped the script entirely to create bizarre and imaginative worlds.

Neopets began as an experiment by students Donna Williams and Adam Powell in 1999. Its first version—a prototype that mixed Williams art and Powell’s tech—had many of the characteristics that would one day make it wildly popular. Users could collect and raise fictional virtual pets inside the fictional universe of Neopia. It operated like the popular handheld toy Tamagotchi, but multiplied and remixed for cyberspace.

Beyond a loose set of guidelines, there were no concrete objectives. No way to “win” the game. There were only the pets, and pet owners. Owners could create their own profiles, which let them display an ever expanding roster of new pets. Pulled from their imagination, Williams and Powell infused the site with their own personality. They created “unique characters,” as Williams later would describe it, “something fantasy-based that could live in this weird, wonderful world.”

As the site grew, the universe inside it did as well. Neopoints could be earned through online games, not as much a formal objective as much as in-world currency. They could be spent on accessories or trinkets to exhibit on profiles, or be traded in the Neopian stock market (a fully operational simulation of the real one), or used to buy pets at auction. The tens and thousands of users that soon flocked to the site created an entirely new world, mapped on top of of a digital one.

Like many community creators, Williams and Powell were fiercely protective of what they had built, and the people that used it. They worked hard to create an online environment that was safe and free from cheaters, scammers, and malevolent influence. Those who were found breaking the rules were kicked out. As a result, a younger audience, and one that was mostly young girls, were able to find their place inside of Neopia.

Neopians—as Neopets owners would often call themselves—rewarded the effort of Powell and Williams by enriching the world however they could. Together, and without any real plan, the users of Neopets crafted a vast community teeming with activity and with its own set of legal and normative standards. The trade market flourished. Users traded tips on customizing profiles, or worked together to find Easter eggs hidden throughout the site. One of the more dramatic examples of users taking ownership of the site was The Neopian Times, an entirely user-run in-universe newspaper documenting the fictional going-ons of Neopia. Its editorial has spanned decades, and continues to this day.

Though an outside observer might find the actions of Neopets frivolous, they were a serious endeavor undertaken by the site’s most devoted fans. It became a place for early web adventurers, mostly young girls and boys, to experience a version of the web that was fun, and predicated on an idea of user participation. Using a bit of code, Neopians could customize their profile to add graphics, colors, and personality to it. “Neopets made coding applicable and personal to people (like me),” said one former user, “who otherwise thought coding was a very impersonal activity.” Many Neopets coders went on to make that their careers.

Neopets was fun and interesting and limited only by the creativity of its users. It was what many imagined a version of the web would look like.

The site eventually languished under its own ambition. After it was purchased and run by Doug Dohring and later, Viacom, it set its sights on a multimedia franchise. “I never thought we could be bigger than Disney,” Dohring once said in a profile in Wired, revealing just how far that ambition went, “but if we could create something like Disney – that would be phenomenal.” As the site began to lean harder into somewhat deceptive advertising practices and emphasize expansion into different mediums (TV, games, etc.), Neopets began to overreach. Unable to keep pace with the rapid developments of the web, it has been sold to a number of different owners. The site is still intact, and thanks to its users, thriving to this day.

Candice Carpenter thought a village was a handy metaphor for an online community. Her business partner, and co-founder, Nancy Evans suggested adding an “i” to it, for interactive. Within a few years, iVillage would rise to the highest peak of Internet fortunes and hype. Carpenter would cultivate a reputation for being charismatic, fearless, and often divisive, a central figure in the pantheon of dot-com mythology. Her meteoric rise, however, began with a simple idea.

By the mid-90’s, community was a bundled, repeatable, commotized product (or to some, a “totally overused buzzword,” as Omar Wasow would later put it). Search portals like Yahoo! and Excite were popular, but their utility came from bouncing visitors off to other destinations. Online communities had a certain stickiness, as one one profile in The New Yorker put it, “the intangible quality that brings individuals to a Web site and holds them for long sessions.”

That unique quality attracted advertisers hoping to monetize the attention of a growing base of users. Waves of investment in community, whatever that meant at any given moment, followed. “The lesson was that users in an online community were perfectly capable of producing value all by themselves,” Internet historian Brian McCullough describes. The New Yorker piece framed it differently. “Audience was real estate, and whoever secured the most real estate first was bound to win.”

TheGlobe.com was set against the backdrop of this grand drama. Its rapid and spectacular rise to prominence and fall from grace is well documented. The site itself was a series of chat rooms organized by topic, created by recent Cornell alumni Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman. It offered a fresh take on standard chat rooms, enabling personalization and fun in-site tools.

Backed by the notoriously aggressive Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns, and run by green, youngish recent college grads, theGlobe rose to a heavily inflated valuation in full public view. “We launched nationwide—on cable channels, MTV, networks, the whole nine yards,” Paternot recalls in his book about his experience, “We were the first online community to do any type of advertising and fourth or the fifth site to launch a TV ad campaign.” Its collapse would be just as precipitous; and just as public. The site’s founders would be on the covers of magazines and the talk of late night television shows as examples of dot-com glut, with just a hint of schadenfreude.

So too does iVillage get tucked into the annals of dot-com history. The site‘s often controversial founders were frequent features in magazine profiles and television interviews. Carpenter attracted media attention as deftly as she maneuvered her business through rounds of investment and a colossally successful IPO. Its culture was well-known in the press for being chaotic, resulting in a high rate of turnover that saw the company go through five Chief Financial Officer’s in four years.

And yet this ignores the community that iVillage managed to build. It began as a collection of different sites, each with a mix of message boards and editorial content centered around a certain topic. The first, a community for parents known as Parent Soup which began at AOL, was their flagship property. Before long, it spanned across sixteen interconnected websites. “iVillage was built on a community model,” writer Claire Evans describes in her book Broad Band, “its marquee product was forums, where women shared everything from postpartum anxiety and breast cancer stories to advice for managing work stress and unruly teenage children.”

Candice Carpenter (left) and Nancy Evans (right). Image credit: The New Yorker

Carpenter had a bold and clear vision when she began, a product that had been brewing for years. After growing tired of the slow pace of growth in positions at American Express and QVC, Carpetner was given more free rein consulting for AOL. It was her first experience with an online world. There wasn‘t a lot that impressed her about AOL, but she liked the way people gathered together in groups. “Things about people‘s lives that were just vibrant,” she’d later remark in an interview, “that’s what I felt the Internet would be.”

Parent Soup began as a single channel on AOL, but it soon moved to the web along with similar sites for different topics and interests—careers, dating, health and more. What drew people to iVillage sites was their authenticity, their ability to center conversations around topics and bring together people that were passionate about spreading advice. The site was co-founded by Nancy Evans, who had years of experience as an editor in the media industry. Together, they resisted the urge to control every aspect of their community. “The emphasis is more on what visitors to the site can contribute on the particulars of parenthood, relationships and workplace issues,” one writer noted, “rather than on top-tier columnists spouting advice and other more traditional editorial offerings used by established media companies.”

There was, however, something that bound all of the site‘s together: a focus that made iVillage startlingly consistent and popular. Carpenter would later put it concisely: “the vision is to help women in their lives with the stuff big and small that they need to get through.” Even as the site expanded to millions of users, and positioned itself as a network specifically for women, and went through one of the largest IPO’s in the tech industry, that simple fact would remain true.

What’s forgotten in the history of dot-com community is the community. There were, of course, lavish stories of instant millionaires and unbounded ambition. But much of the content that was created was generated by people, people that found each other across vast distances among a shared understanding. The lasting connections that became possible through these communities would outlast the boom and bust cycle of Internet business. Sites like iVillage became benchmarks for later social experiments to aspire to.

In February of 2002, Edgar Enyedy an active contributor to a still new Spanish version of Wikipedia posted to the Wikipedia mailing list and to Wikipedia‘s founder, Jimmy Wales. “I’ve left the project,” he announced, “Good luck with your wikiPAIDia [sic].”

As Wikipedia grew in the years after it officially launched in 2001, it began to expand to other countries. As it did, each community took on its own tenor and tone, adapting the online encyclopedia to the needs of each locale. “The organisation of topics, for example,” Enyedy would later explain, “is not the same across languages, cultures and education systems. Historiography is also obviously not the same.”

Enyedy‘s abrupt exit from the project, and his callous message, was prompted by a post from Wikipedia’s first editor-in-chief Larry Sanger. Sanger had been instrumental in the creation of Wikipedia, but he had recently been asked to step back as a paid employee due to lack of funds. Sanger suggested that sometime in the near future, Wikpedia may turn to ads.

It was more wishful thinking than actual fact—Sanger hoped that ads may bring him his job back. But it was enough to spurn Enyedy into action. The Wikipedia Revolution, author Andrew Lih explains why. “Advertising is the third-rail topic in the community—touch it only if you’re not afraid to get a massive shock.”

By the end of the month, Enyedy had created an independent fork of the Spanish Wikipedia site, along with a list of demands for him to rejoin the project. The list included moving the site from .com to .org domain and moving servers to infrastructure owned by the community and, of course, a guarantee that ads would not be used. Most of these demands would eventually be met, though its hard to tell what influence Enyedy had.

The fork of Wikipedia was both a legally and ideologically acceptable project. Wikipedia’s content is licensed under the Creative Commons license; it is freely open and distributable. The code that runs it is open source. It was never a question of whether a fork of Wikipedia was possible. It was a question of why it felt necessary. And the answer speaks to the heart of the Wikipedia community.

Wikipedia did not begin with a community, but rather as something far more conventional. The first iteration was known as Nupedia, created by Jimmy Wales in early 2000. Wales imagined a traditional encyclopedia ported into the digital space. An encyclopedia that lived online, he reasoned, could be more adaptable than the multi-volume tomes found buried in library stacks or gathering dust on bookshelves.

Wales was joined by then graduate student Larry Sanger, and together they recruited a team of expert writers and editors to contribute to Nupedia. To guarantee that articles were accurate, they set up a meticulous set of guidelines for entries. Each article contributed to Nupedia went through rounds of feedback and was subject to strict editorial oversight. After a year of work, Nupedia had less than a dozen finished articles and Wales was ready to shut the project down.

However, he had recently been introduced to the concept of a wiki, a website that anybody can contribute to. As software goes, the wiki is not overly complex. Every page has a publicly accessible “Edit” button. Anyone can go in and make edits, and those edits are tracked and logged in real time.

In order to solicit feedback on Nupedia, Wales had set up a public mailing list anyone could join. In the year since it was created, around 2,000 people had signed up. In January of 2001, he sent a message to that mailing list with a link to a wiki.

His hope was that he could crowdsource early drafts of articles from his project’s fans. Instead, users contributed a thousand articles in the first month. Within six months, there were ten thousand. Wales renamed the project to Wikipedia, changed the license for the content so that it was freely distributable, and threw open the doors to anybody that wanted to contribute.

The rules and operations of Wikipedia can be difficult to define. It has evolved almost in spite of itself. Most articles begin with a single, random contribution and evolve from there. “Wikipedia continues to grow, and articles continue to improve,” media theorist Clary Shirky wrote of the site in his seminal work Here Comes Everybody, “the process is more like creating a coral reef, the sum of millions of individual actions, than creating a car. And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.”

From these seemingly random connections and contributions, a tight knit group of frequent editors and writers have formed at the center of Wikipedia. Programmer and famed hacktivist Aaron Swartz described how it all came together. “When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it,” described Swartz, adding, “as a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.” And these insiders, as Swartz referes to them them, created a community.

“One of the things I like to point out is that Wikipedia is a social innovation, not a technical innovation,” Wales once said. In the discussion pages of articles and across mailing lists and blogs, Wikipedians have found ways to collaborate and communicate. The work is distributed and uneven—a small community is responsible for a large number of edits and refinements to articles—but it is impressively collated. Using the ethos of open source as a guide, the Wikipedia community created a shared set of expectations and norms, using the largest repository of human knowledge in existence as their anchor.

Loosely formed and fractured into factions, the Wikipedia community nevertheless follows a set of principles that it has defined over time. Their conventions are defined and redefined on a regular basis, as the community at the core of Wikipedia grows. When it finds a violation of these principles—such as the suggestion that ads will be plastered on the article they helped they create—they sometimes react strongly.

Wikipedia learned from the fork of Spanish Wikipedia, and set up a continuous feedback loop that has allowed its community to remain at the center of making decisions. This was a primary focus of Katherine Maher, who became exectuvie director of Wikimedia, the company behind Wikipedia, in 2016, and then CEO three years later. Wikimedia’s involvement in the community, in Maher’s words, “allows us to be honest with ourselves, and honest with our users, and accountable to our users in the spirit of continuous improvement. And I think that that is a different sort of incentive structure that is much more freeing.”

The result is a hive mind sorting collective knowledge that thrives independently twenty years after it was created. Both Maher and Wales have referred to Wikipedia as a “part of the commons,” a piece of informational infrastructure as important as the cables that pipe bandwidth around the world, built through the work of community.

Fanfiction can be hard to define. It has been the seeds of subculture and an ideological outlet; the subject of intense academic and philosophical inquiry. Fanfiction has often been noted for its unity through anti-hegemony—it is by its very nature illegal or, at the very least, extralegal. As a practice, Professor Brownen Thomas has put it plainly: “Stories produced by fans based on plot lines and characters from either a single source text or else a ‘canon’ of works; these fan-created narratives often take the pre-existing storyworld in a new, sometimes bizarre, direction.” Fanfiction predates the Internet, but the web acted as its catalyst.

Message boards, or forums, began as a technological experiment on the web, a way of replicating the Usenet groups and bulletin boards of the pre-web Internet. Once the technology had matured, people began to use them to gather around common interests. These often began with a niche—fans of a TV show, or a unique hobby—and then used as the beginning point for much wider conversation. Through threaded discussions, forum-goers would discuss a whole range of things in, around, and outside of the message board theme. “If urban history can be applied to virtual space and the evolution of the Web,” one writer recalls, “the unruly and twisted message boards are Jane Jacobs. They were built for people, and without much regard to profit.”

Some stayed small (and some even remain so). Others grew. Fans of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer had used the official message board of the show for years. It famously took on a life of its own when the boards where shut down, and the users funded and maintained an identical version to keep the community alive. Sites like Newgrounds and DeviantART began as places to discuss games and art, respectively. Before long they were the launching pad for the careers of an entire generation of digital creators.

Fandom found something similar on the web. On message boards and on personal websites, writers swapped fanfiction stories, and readers flocked to boards to find them. They hid in plain sight, developing rules and conventions for how to share among one another without being noticed.

In the fall of 1998, developer Xing Li began posting to a number of Usenet fanfiction groups. In what would come to be known as his trademark sincerity, his message read: “I’m very happy to announce that www.fanfiction.net is now officially open!!!!!! And we have done it 3 weekss ahead of projected finish date. While everyone trick-or-treated we were hard at working debugging the site.”

Li wasn’t a fanfiction creator himself, but he thought he stumbled upon a formula for its success. What made Fanfiction.net unique was that its community tools—built-in tagging, easy subscriptions to stories, freeform message boards for discussions—was built with fandom in mind. As one writer would later describe this winning combination, “its secret to success is its limited moderation and fully-automated system, meaning posting is very quick and easy and can be done by anyone.”

Fanfiction creators found a home at Fanfiction.net, or FF.net as it was often shortened to. Throughout its early years, Li had a nerdy and steadfast devotion to the development of the site. He‘d post sometimes daily to an open changelog on the site, a mix of site-related updates and deeply personal anecdotes. “Full-text searching allows you to search for keywords/phrases within every fanfiction entry in our huge archive,” one update read. “I can‘t get the song out of my head and I need to find the song or I will go bonkers. Thanks a bunch. =)” read another (the song was The Cure‘s “Boys Don’t Cry”).

Li’s cult of personality and the unique position of the site made it immensely popular. For years, the fanfiction community had stuck to the shadows. FF.net gave them a home. Members took it upon themselves to create a welcoming environment, establishing norms and procedures for tagging and discoverability, as well as feedback for writers.

The result was a unique community on the web that attempted to lift one another up. “Sorry. It‘s just really gratifying to post your first fic and get three hits within about six seconds. It‘s pretty wild, I haven’t gotten one bad review on FF.N…” one fanfic writer posted in the site’s early days. “That makes me pretty darn happy :)”

The reader and writer relationship on FF.net was fluid. The stories generated by users acted as a reference for conversation among fellow writers and fanfiction readers. One idea often flows into the next, and it is only through sharing content that it takes on meaning. “Yes, they want recognition and adulation for their work, but there‘s also the very strong sense that they want to share, to be part of something bigger than themselves. There’s a simple, human urge to belong.”

As the dot-com era waned, community was repackaged and resold as the social web. The goals of early social communities were looser than the tight niches and imaginative worlds of early community sites. Most functioned to bring one’s real life into digital space. Classmates.com, launched in 1995, is one of the earliest examples of this type of site. Its founder, Randy Conrads, believed that the web was best suited for reconnecting people with their former schoolmates.

Not long after, AsianAve launched from the chaotic New York apartment where the site‘s six co-founders lived and worked. Though it had a specific demographic—Asian Americans—AsianAve was modeled after a few other early social web experiences, like SixDegrees. The goal was to simulate real life friend groups, and to make the web a fun place to hang out. “Most of Asian Avenue‘s content is produced by members themselves,” an early article in The New York Times describes. “[T]he site offers tool kits to create personal home pages, chat rooms and interactive soap operas.” Eventually, one of the site‘s founders, Benjamin Sun, began to explore how he could expand his idea beyond a single demographic. That’s when he met Omar Wasow.

Wasow was fascinated with technology from a young age. When he was a child, he fell in love first with early video games like Pong and Donkey Kong. By high school, he made the leap to programmer. “I begged my way out of wood shop into computer science class. And it really changed my life. I went to being somebody who consumed video games to creating video games.”

In 1993, Wasow founded New York Online, a Bulletin Board System that targeted a “broad social and ethnic ‘mix’,” instead of pulling from the same limited pool of upper-middle class tech nerds most networked projects focused on. To earn an actual living, Wasow developed websites for popular magazine brands like Vibe and Essence. It was through this work that he crossed paths with Benjamin Sun.

By the mid-1990‘s, Wasow had already gathered a loyal following and public profile, featured in magazines like Newsweek and Wired. Wasow’s reputation centered on his ability to build communities thoughtfully, to explore the social ramifications of his tech before and while he built it. When Sun approached him about expanding AsianAve to an African American audience, a site that would eventually be known as BlackPlanet, he applied the same thinking.

Wasow didn’t want to build a community from scratch. Any site that they built would need to be a continuation of the strong networks Black Americans had been building for decades. “A friend of mine once shared with me that you don’t build an online community; you join a community,” Wasow once put it, “BlackPlanet allowed us to become part of a network that already had centuries of black churches and colleges and barbecues. It meant that we, very organically, could build on this very powerful, existing set of relationships and networks and communities.”

BlackPlanet offered its users a number of ways to connect. A central profile—the same kind that MySpace and Facebook would later adopt—anchored a member’s digital presence. Chat rooms and message boards offered opportunities for friendly conversation or political discourse (or sometimes, fierce debate). News and email were built right into the app to make it a centralized place for living out your digital life.

By the mid-2000’s BlackPlanet was a sensation. It captured a large part of African Americans who were coming online for the first time. Barack Obama, still a Senator running for President, joined the site in 2007. Its growth exploded into the millions; it was a seminal experience for black youth in the United States.

After being featured on a segment on the The Oprah Winfrey Show, teaching Oprah how to use the Internet, Wasow‘s profile reached soaring heights. The New York Times dubbed him the “philosopher-prince of the digital age,” for his considered community building. “The best the Web has to offer is community-driven,” Wasow would later say. He never stopped building his community thoughtfully. and they in turn, became an integral part of the country’s culture.

Before long, a group of developers would look at BlackPlanet and wonder how to adapt it to a wider audience. The result were the web’s first true social networks.

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epackingvietnam · 4 years ago

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MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Ross Simmonds

Whether you recognize his iconic tweets or have read one of his content exposés on some of the world’s most powerful brands, Ross Simmonds has certainly made a name for himself in the content world. Through his experience working with clients both large and small, Ross has discovered the perfect recipe for developing and distributing content that will drive real results, and he’s ready to share it with our MozCon audience!

We're absolutely thrilled to welcome him back to the MozCon stage, and we connected with him ahead of the show to discuss how he broke into the industry, his content philosophy, and what he’s looking forward to at MozCon 2021.

Question: You’ve been covering content creation and content marketing for quite some time, so could you tell us a bit about how you got your start? How did you set yourself apart?

Ross: I got started in content marketing accidentally. It was a time when content marketing really wasn't a thing. I got started by creating content online about fantasy sports. My first blog was all about fantasy football. I would create content three times a week writing about which players I believed were going to perform the best, and people from all over the world started to read this content and connect with it while I was living in my parents' basement in the middle of Nova Scotia, Canada.

This is when the light bulbs went off that the internet is going to be big and that this whole idea of creating content online can give you the opportunity to reach millions of people.As I started to grow that fantasy football blog, the traffic went up while my marks went down and I had to shift that fantasy football blog into a marketing blog so I could satisfy my mum's taste of wanting to make sure that I did good in school. She told me to start writing about marketing and so I did.

RossSimmonds.com became my website where I created content for years, and that eventually started to get traction and engagement from people again, all over the world, and eventually I transitioned, again, that RossSimmonds.com business, which was just me as a freelancer, into Foundation Marketing, which is a content marketing agency that works with B2B brands across the globe on content strategy, content creation, and content distribution. I have consistently been putting out new content on a regular basis on my blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and etc., for many, many years and as such, people have started to take notice and have been able to see my way of thinking around content.

Question: This year you’re discussing a new way of looking at content — seeing it as a long-term investment rather than a one-off creation. Why do you think this mindset is difficult for today's marketers to develop, and what's the best thing they can do to change their perspective?

Ross: The #1 reason why content is often seen as a one-hit thing and a one-time thing is because we live in a time where instant gratification has never been more easily acquirable and offers a dopamine hit. As such, marketers love the idea of pressing publish on a piece of content and seeing tons of notifications that people are interacting with it, liking it, sharing it, etc., and that is a great feeling to have.

But it is very temporary and what I'm talking about when it comes to content as an investment is taking a more long-term view, and recognizing that the assets and content that you create today can actually serve you consistently for years, if not decades to come from now, if you're able to optimize, improve, re-share, republish, and create things that actually have a life cycle that goes beyond today.

Question: You frequently conduct case studies on businesses like Masterclass, Shopify, and Gong, who are implementing incredibly successful content marketing strategies. What do you think these businesses have in common that is driving their success? What advice would you give to other businesses looking to achieve similar success?

Ross: Across the board, all of these companies have an internal commitment to understanding the value of content and its role in creating a competitive advantage. A lot of organizations don't view content as a force that can offer a competitive advantage long-term, but that is exactly what it offers you. If you create content for a significant amount of time that content is now going to be published and available to the public for years to come, and that content — if it's ranking in Google for high value keywords — is able to generate value for your business.

Some landing pages that exist today that were published in 2007 are still generating hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month for some companies, and these businesses that view content as an investment and recognize the power, value, and scalability of content are the ones that win, because they recognize that it's a great way to differentiate, that it is a very scalable methodology for growth and driving traction and engagement, and that is what truly differentiates some of these best-in-class content brands versus everyone else in the industry.

Question: At Foundation, you work with the full range of clients from startups to large Fortune 500 companies. How does your approach to content marketing change based on company size?

Ross: We start by understanding the goals and objectives with every single client that we're looking to provide services for, and by understanding their individual goals, we're able to tailor our recommendations and the ways in which we work with them based on their goals and what they're looking to accomplish — but we don't stop there.

We also dive deep into understanding what their existing resources are, how big their team is, the way that they internally communicate, the ways in which they're resourced in terms of their team structure, etc., and we use all of that to make a decision around how we can better serve them to accomplish that overarching goal. We also recognize that every single company is different. They have different people, different goals, different resource constraints, and different levels of funding, some are private, some are public, and etc.

All of these things fit into the way in which we can serve our clients, and thus we navigate each instance differently and in a bespoke kind of nature where it's custom and tailored to them.

Question: The way that consumers digest content is changing rapidly day by day. In your opinion, what has been the most dramatic change in content marketing in the last five years? What do you think is going to be the most important area for content marketers to focus on in the next five years?

Ross: Five years ago, everyone was talking about how you need to create more content and publish more content because all the gurus were on stage screaming "Content is king".

You fast forward to now, and guess what? Everyone has listened to that mantra and that idea but content has become very common. There's content everywhere you look. Right now, as somebody reads the words that are written on this screen or is listening to an audio version of it, they are consuming content.

Content has become easy to create and content has become essentially the bar. You're supposed to create content. Now it's more difficult than ever to stand out amongst all the noise, all of the hundreds and thousands of blog posts being published every day, and the hundreds of thousands of influencers on LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., and because it is so difficult to stand out amongst them, I believe that in the next five years, the increasing emphasis on creativity and solid distribution will never be higher.

If you're in a boring industry, you still need to be creative and understand your audience's pain points and needs and give that to them in a form of content that they will want. That is consistent across the board, and I believe that there's going to be an increasing demand for creativity if you want your content to stand out in the months — if not years — to come.

Question: What’s your favorite piece of content that you’ve ever created? How can people give it a read?

Ross: A few months back, I wrote a piece called the The SEO Moat: Why SEO Can Be A Competitive Advantage, and it really speaks to the value that SEO brings to the market that often organizations are overlooking, even though it can truly play a massive role in helping an organization unlock millions of dollars in value for their organization.

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

Ross: I'm super excited to hear what Flavilla has to say this year. She always brings the heat and her perspective on the science of purchasing behavior is definitely going to be something I will be looking forward to hearing.

A big thank you to Ross for his time! To learn more about Ross’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

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bfxenon · 4 years ago

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MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Ross Simmonds

Question: You’ve been covering content creation and content marketing for quite some time, so could you tell us a bit about how you got your start? How did you set yourself apart?

Question: At Foundation, you work with the full range of clients from startups to large Fortune 500 companies. How does your approach to content marketing change based on company size?

All of these things fit into the way in which we can serve our clients, and thus we navigate each instance differently and in a bespoke kind of nature where it's custom and tailored to them.

Ross: Five years ago, everyone was talking about how you need to create more content and publish more content because all the gurus were on stage screaming "Content is king".

Question: What’s your favorite piece of content that you’ve ever created? How can people give it a read?

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

A big thank you to Ross for his time! To learn more about Ross’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

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nutrifami · 4 years ago

Text

MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Ross Simmonds

Question: You’ve been covering content creation and content marketing for quite some time, so could you tell us a bit about how you got your start? How did you set yourself apart?

Question: At Foundation, you work with the full range of clients from startups to large Fortune 500 companies. How does your approach to content marketing change based on company size?

All of these things fit into the way in which we can serve our clients, and thus we navigate each instance differently and in a bespoke kind of nature where it's custom and tailored to them.

Ross: Five years ago, everyone was talking about how you need to create more content and publish more content because all the gurus were on stage screaming "Content is king".

Question: What’s your favorite piece of content that you’ve ever created? How can people give it a read?

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

A big thank you to Ross for his time! To learn more about Ross’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

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xaydungtruonggia · 4 years ago

Text

MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Ross Simmonds

Question: You’ve been covering content creation and content marketing for quite some time, so could you tell us a bit about how you got your start? How did you set yourself apart?

Question: At Foundation, you work with the full range of clients from startups to large Fortune 500 companies. How does your approach to content marketing change based on company size?

All of these things fit into the way in which we can serve our clients, and thus we navigate each instance differently and in a bespoke kind of nature where it's custom and tailored to them.

Ross: Five years ago, everyone was talking about how you need to create more content and publish more content because all the gurus were on stage screaming "Content is king".

Question: What’s your favorite piece of content that you’ve ever created? How can people give it a read?

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

A big thank you to Ross for his time! To learn more about Ross’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

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ductrungnguyen87 · 4 years ago

Text

MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Ross Simmonds

Question: You’ve been covering content creation and content marketing for quite some time, so could you tell us a bit about how you got your start? How did you set yourself apart?

Question: At Foundation, you work with the full range of clients from startups to large Fortune 500 companies. How does your approach to content marketing change based on company size?

All of these things fit into the way in which we can serve our clients, and thus we navigate each instance differently and in a bespoke kind of nature where it's custom and tailored to them.

Ross: Five years ago, everyone was talking about how you need to create more content and publish more content because all the gurus were on stage screaming "Content is king".

Question: What’s your favorite piece of content that you’ve ever created? How can people give it a read?

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

A big thank you to Ross for his time! To learn more about Ross’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

0 notes

camerasieunhovn · 4 years ago

Text

MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Ross Simmonds

Question: You’ve been covering content creation and content marketing for quite some time, so could you tell us a bit about how you got your start? How did you set yourself apart?

Question: At Foundation, you work with the full range of clients from startups to large Fortune 500 companies. How does your approach to content marketing change based on company size?

All of these things fit into the way in which we can serve our clients, and thus we navigate each instance differently and in a bespoke kind of nature where it's custom and tailored to them.

Ross: Five years ago, everyone was talking about how you need to create more content and publish more content because all the gurus were on stage screaming "Content is king".

Question: What’s your favorite piece of content that you’ve ever created? How can people give it a read?

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

A big thank you to Ross for his time! To learn more about Ross’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

0 notes

gamebazu · 4 years ago

Text

MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Ross Simmonds

Question: You’ve been covering content creation and content marketing for quite some time, so could you tell us a bit about how you got your start? How did you set yourself apart?

Question: At Foundation, you work with the full range of clients from startups to large Fortune 500 companies. How does your approach to content marketing change based on company size?

All of these things fit into the way in which we can serve our clients, and thus we navigate each instance differently and in a bespoke kind of nature where it's custom and tailored to them.

Ross: Five years ago, everyone was talking about how you need to create more content and publish more content because all the gurus were on stage screaming "Content is king".

Question: What’s your favorite piece of content that you’ve ever created? How can people give it a read?

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

A big thank you to Ross for his time! To learn more about Ross’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

https://ift.tt/3bCn4AE

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kjt-lawyers · 4 years ago

Text

MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Ross Simmonds

Question: You’ve been covering content creation and content marketing for quite some time, so could you tell us a bit about how you got your start? How did you set yourself apart?

Question: At Foundation, you work with the full range of clients from startups to large Fortune 500 companies. How does your approach to content marketing change based on company size?

All of these things fit into the way in which we can serve our clients, and thus we navigate each instance differently and in a bespoke kind of nature where it's custom and tailored to them.

Ross: Five years ago, everyone was talking about how you need to create more content and publish more content because all the gurus were on stage screaming "Content is king".

Question: What’s your favorite piece of content that you’ve ever created? How can people give it a read?

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

A big thank you to Ross for his time! To learn more about Ross’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

0 notes