2009 March | The Innovationist

We are all spending our days working for someone, whether it be ourselves or someone else, or something. How do you know what you’re doing is worth your time and effort? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for several weeks, and I still haven’t figured it out, to be honest. I do have an idea of how we may be able to come up with an estimate, this requires honest introspection, no lying to yourself. Continue reading »

Another set of quotes to inspire and motivate myself and others from my Twitter stream. If you’d like these daily you can follow me on twitter @jimminy.

“A good laugh is good for both the mental and physical digestion.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

“The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity” ~ Tom Petters

“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” ~ Albert Einstien

“Whenever you have truth it must be given with love, or the message and the messenger will be rejected” ~ Mahatma Ghandi

“It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.” ~ Thoreau

“Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.” ~ Anonymous

“Work banishes those three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty.” ~ Voltaire

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” ~The Dalai Lama

“In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.” ~ Paul Harvey

“Personal participation is the universal principle of knowing.” ~ Michael Polanyi

“Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”~Scott Adams

“It’s so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite.” ~ Sam Levenson.

“No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.” ~Aesop

“You cannot do a kindness too soon because you never know how soon it will be too late.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.” ~ George Eliot

“It’s hard for many people to believe that there are extraordinary things inside themselves, as well as others, keep an open mind.” ~ Myself

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” ~ Bertrand Russell

“The only way that we can keep advancing is by not becoming complacent with what we have achieved and strive for more.” ~ Myself

“Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.” ~ Eric Hoffer

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” ~ Voltaire

“Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.” ~ Unknown

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk

“Prepare your mind to receive the best that life has to offer.” ~ Ernest Holmes

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” ~ Albert Einstein

“He who learns but does not think, is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” ~ Confucius

“The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.” ~ Walt Whitman

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” ~ Oscar Wilde

“Never talk defeat. Use words like hope, belief, faith, victory.” ~ Norman Vincent Peale

Do you follow many people or few? This is the most essential question and most disputed aspect of Twitter, although it is also a huge part of other networks as well. I’ve been thinking about it alot the past month and the answer is both depending on how you want to use the service. You can go small and extract alot of data and make deeper relationships or you can go big and funnel your relationships though they would be diluted.

Why go Small?

The main reason to go small is that you can stay heavily connected and have relevant data flowing constantly with out much noise in the stream. The system was originally designed for keeping track of friends so it makes sense to stay small. There are still problems with only following a few people and the main problem is based on the reciprocal friending that occurs on the service, if you are followed by someone they want you to follow them back. Having only a small group makes it hard to get a large set of advice and responses when you ask a question.

Why go Big?

The main reason to go big is to spur on the reciprocity that I mentioned above that allows you to poll your followers for answers. Also with the reciprocal reaction that gives you lots of followers it allows you to market yourself and your products to them. Another plus that comes with the mass friending is if your able to monitor and track the data that is coming through your stream you can pull out large amounts of focused data.

Now the downside of big is that you can’t build meaningful relationships easily with your friends based off of their tweets. You are opening the door to spammers by (auto-)following everyone back. It makes it harder to use apps because of to much data coming into the API for your user.

My Choice: Small

To me I’d rather have a large group of followers that I could ping off of but only be following a subset of them so that I can have a wealthy stream of information that’s relevant to me. To me I don’t want to have a lot of crap, I want to have valuable wealth inducing assets in my stream. It’s up to you whether you are marketing or there to extract information and build relationships to decide which path you want.

Note this is something that is equally applicable through the broad area of Social Media and it’s up to you. Twitter just takes this single aspect and inflames it in how their service is used making the way you use the service change based on the numbers. One site that has a similar set of changing data based on the numbers of friends & followers is Digg in that you have the ability to shout a story(currently being analysed for removal) to your friends to get dugg up.

So this is something that I was inspired to do by Erik Kastner over at his blog Meta|ateM. He did it last month and was fairly succesful and it also goes along with something that I have thought about and possible written about, providing people public knowledge of what your goals are so they can hold you accountable. So here is my list for March.

Get a working prototype of my Main project finished.

This might not get done but I’m really hoping that I can as I spent the past month working on the algorithm and design of the system. I think I can get the base down in 2 weeks but some of the higher functioning algorithms will take a bit longer but I have to build a working test body before I get to them.

15 posts

I know I was lacking last month, in fact this is the first post in over 2 weeks. I’ll be finishing a bunch of posts I’ve been working on and should be able to hit 15 fairly easily.

Find a new car

This is new as I just totalled my car an hour ago, at the time of writing. I was planning on looking more towards the end of the month but looks like that clock was stepped up a bit.

Build up my chipstack on Full-Tilt

Lately, I’ve been playing more often I haven’t reached a point where I’m able to sacrifice money from my daily life so I just play for fun and intellectual challenge. Right now, I’m at 3,000 and I want to reach 10,000 by the end of the month.

I’ll update you guys on how I did at the end of the month. Oh and for those of you that subscribe and visit the site I’m wondering if the new design is more pleasing to you?