Online Blogs
by amelia ~ November 21st, 2010. Filed under: Uncategorized.I was very inspired by a phrase I saw quoted on my favourite marketing blogger’s site. Its said “Usage is like oxygen for ideas.” Originally written in a post by Matt Mullenweg on his blog page called Matt, unlucky in Cards, in which he discusses how you can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to an idea until it has been released to the public. In his words, this means that every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. This quote was on Seth’s Blog, my favourite marketing blogger, and one of the most popular on the internet today. The quote tied in with his post about where ideas come from, which I think is something enormously interesting to read. I often think about it when I need to find creativity for something in my life – be it an essay, some other school work or something recreational. This is an excerpt from the post (the full version you can see on Seths’ Blog).
- Ideas don’t come from watching television
- Ideas sometimes come from listening to a lecture
- Ideas often come while reading a book
- Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them
- Ideas hate conference rooms, particularly conference rooms where there is a history of criticism, personal attacks or boredom
- Ideas occur when dissimilar universes collide
- Ideas often strive to meet expectations. If people expect them to appear, they do
- Ideas fear experts, but they adore beginner’s mind. A little awareness is a good thing
- Ideas come in spurts, until you get frightened. Willie Nelson wrote three of his biggest hits in one week
- Ideas come from trouble
- Ideas come from our ego, and they do their best when they’re generous and selfless
- Ideas come from nature
- Sometimes ideas come from fear (usually in movies) but often they come from confidence
- Useful ideas come from being awake, alert enough to actually notice
- Though sometimes ideas sneak in when we’re asleep and too numb to be afraid
- Ideas come out of the corner of the eye, or in the shower, when we’re not trying
- Mediocre ideas enjoy copying what happens to be working right this minute
- Bigger ideas leapfrog the mediocre ones
- Ideas don’t need a passport, and often cross borders (of all kinds) with impunity
- An idea must come from somewhere, because if it merely stays where it is and doesn’t join us here, it’s hidden. And hidden ideas don’t ship, have no influence, no intersection with the market. They die, alone.
I think the joys of social media are that communication channels are open to everyone these days, and that there is no excuse not to be vocal and active with your ideas with the greater online community. Social media removes the limitations that traditional, institutionalized media create, and so has a tendency to provoke change; whereas traditional media has a latent tendency toward the status quo. Now is a great time to be living and working because, as technology develops, so the limitations placed on society are becoming thinner and more whimsical. Now is when we truly are becoming capitalistic (in the good sense of the word) because now we can all specialize, promote ourselves without help of authority and have no one but ourselves to blame were our ideas to fade unnoticed into the abyss of cyber space. To end this post, I thought it was interesting to post a video by Common Craft (the Plain English video guys) on what social media actually is. I think everyone today has some idea of what social media is, but hearing a concise version of its scope helped me understand it’s influence better.
