Nice people thread part 3- Nice as pie

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

It's cut off from the real world, there are no jobs. I know somebody there that's going mental at the moment as they're unemployed there and really stuck. I think there are only 2 vacancies a week coming up in the whole town.

I'm looking for somewhere that's got: access potential to the sort of jobs I could do, access to good transport, access to shops that sell things that are everyday useful. I could find plenty of cheap boltholes, but they don't have work potential.

I'm really really confused now. I thought you work from home on your www stuff?

PasturesNew

GDB2222 wrote: »

I'm really really confused now. I thought you work from home on your www stuff?

I do. But I am moving - and my new location will need to have jobs potential.

Things change, the world changes daily. I can't assume the www will be there in its current form in 3-5 years, so I have to be mindful of keeping options open. Geography and access to services is very important for options.

I am looking for a long-term home, not a temporary hideaway.

If the www dies for me I need to plug the gap quickly with options.

tomterm8

dopester wrote: »

Something I read on the net and put in my Wisdom folder (on my pc) a while back.

A good salesperson always sells the benefit, not the function.

I'm not a salesperson, but I was always told to sell yourself not the product. If they like you, they will probably also like the product (particularly, if YOU like the product too).

vivatifosi

PasturesNew wrote: »

If the www dies for me I need to plug the gap quickly with options.

That's something I wouldn't mind your and tomterm's views on.

In info services world, there's a lot of talk about the lack of opportunity to monetise web 2.0 on a larger scale. Therefore what way can the web go next that still allows opportunities for entrepreneurs rather than those that don't have financial gain in mind?

PasturesNew

vivatifosi wrote: »

That's something I wouldn't mind your and tomterm's views on.

In info services world, there's a lot of talk about the lack of opportunity to monetise web 2.0 on a larger scale. Therefore what way can the web go next that still allows opportunities for entrepreneurs rather than those that don't have financial gain in mind?

Those who can monetise it will have a product, or a niche, or a following.

Proper entrepreneurs (not people who write irrelevant fluff) will survive, it'll just stop everybody and his dog putting up rubbish. People who put effort in will manage to make some money still.

But it's difficult for one small person to keep on top of all the changes/directions and implement them. The big boys have budgets.

So, I am not so daft that I think I am King of the Web and will make more and more money doing what I do, for the next 20 years

20 years ago people were still using manual typewriters, rich people had mobile phones in small suitcases and most people had never used a computer. I need to be doing whatever it is I do for 15-20 years for income/savings and "just in case".

tomterm8

vivatifosi wrote: »

That's something I wouldn't mind your and tomterm's views on.

Overwhelmingly, I think good content will triumph over bad content over time. By good content, I mean stuff that actually helps people. By bad content... I kind of mean a lot of what internet marketers produce.

If you can write stuff that helps people, you will make money.

It doesn't really matter whether you put this stuff on the internet, or write it in books, or write magazine articles.

There is always a market in gaming search engines... until they make computers more intelligent than a smart human, there will still be a market in gaming search engines.

But, if you game search engines, sooner or later they will work this out.

Then they will send your business to /dev/null (been there, done that, got the t-shirt).

I disagree with pastures new... I believe there will always be money in good content... there has been for a thousand years, and I think there always will be...

Crap content will make money in the short term, great content will make money forever.

Of course, I believe there is more money to be made in real, physical products... or service industries... most internet marketers have bought a job not a business. You need to be able to scale it up, and hire employees.

vivatifosi

Thanks tomterm and Pastures. Interesting points. I've worked with information for a long time. When I first started using info it was held in books, then on weird proprietary machines, then on CD Roms, now on online databases. The info has become more sophisticated as the new iterations have allowed it to be, but the good information sources are still for the most part the same ones.

I'd argue that the growth of the net has seen the democratisation of information, but as we've seen from certain users of this site, there are a lot of snake oil salespeople out there; only now they don't sell snake oil, they put their views on a podcast and broadcast it to their followers on YouTube, ie they have the following if not the (genuine) product/concept.

michaels

It's an interesting debate as I am finding google more and more useless as the top results for a search all seem to be different copies of the same marketing piece :mad:

(As an aside I am looking for some fair use software so I can play my nokia/ovi music on my mp3 player rather than just on the phone which doesn't have the battery life to be an mp3 player)

PasturesNew

michaels wrote: »

It's an interesting debate as I am finding google more and more useless as the top results for a search all seem to be different copies of the same marketing piece :mad:

(As an aside I am looking for some fair use software so I can play my nokia/ovi music on my mp3 player rather than just on the phone which doesn't have the battery life to be an mp3 player)

Your googling skills need improving

As for what you're trying to find/do WHOOSH ... I don't even know what those words mean really.

mostlycheerful

Possibly it’s winner takes all in the same way that the big supermarkets are now supplying more than 90% of food whereas just 20 years ago it was less than 50%.

Perhaps also similar to when America and Australia were first opened up and if you could hold off attacks from the relatively sparse and low technology indigenous people anyone could bowl in and steal their land and grab huge swathes of territory. Then once all the land has been marked out and fenced in newcomers and latecomers have to buy in and can’t just grab it free. And then in the desirable areas the price goes through the roof and can only be afforded by the rich elite. And even undesirable barren remote wastelands have a price tag on them that’s beyond the reach of many ordinary people.

So whereas currently individuals can gain a foothold in the net that probably won’t last forever and eventually there’ll be so much saturation of content that newcomers will be hardly able to get a look in. Early adopters can still get in now and if you can develop a sufficiently large catalogue of unique or rare material then you may last a bit longer than others. But sooner or later it’ll probably all be controlled by the top 1,000 companies and eventually possibly by just 100 or even only 10 companies, all of which will likely have overlapping deals and will merge with each other which then in effect means that there’ll be just one global universal library.

Convergence appears to be happening not only between machines but also between humans and machines and futurists currently estimate singularity as likely to be occurring some time in the next 20 to 100 years. At that point the whole of humanity and all the infrastructure and machines coalesce into one unified organism and so then there’s little or no personal individuality as everyone is subsumed in the greater whole.

There’s always been a gross excess of writers as compared with the number of publishers, distribution networks and shops available to sell books and now, with the advent of free print on demand services for all, the ratio is getting much worse. Whereas previously about 1% of writers could make a good living out of writing that figure is now going to 0.1% and then 0.001%. Yes, the upside is that you can publish your own book any time you want but the downside is that you’ve got an ever vanishingly smaller chance of selling any copies of it as every month that goes by you’re up against an ever increasing competition from a vast tidal wave of other writers’ material continuously being churned out everywhere.

As time goes by it becomes harder and harder to be original or innovative as everything conceivable has already been done, many times over. Imagination and creativity are finite. Song writers are already sometimes finding that their new songs are in fact unwitting pastiches of other people’s work. Even back in the 60s when Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday he was initially convinced that he must have heard it somewhere else previously as it sounded so familiar. Then George Harrison came unstuck with My Sweet Lord and unwittingly used Chiffons’ material which they then sued him about and won. So there are already examples of the difficulty of being original as there is already so much other stuff out there and this process plotted on a graph suggests that eventually at some point it’ll probably be virtually impossible for anyone to ever be original again. The pile of bricks in the Tate can’t really be done again, it’s already been done. Damien Hirst’s pickled sheep and shark can’t really be done again, he got there first with the idea so anyone else doing it and similar is just a copyist. And, really, in fact he was only pretty much copying medical samples in glass jars in the first place. A lot of supposedly original material is in fact derivative. Pretty much all creativity has influences and comes from somewhere previous and has a frame of reference.

According to some futurists’ projections advances in technology will, for instance, allow you to think a whole book to your printer in 10 minutes flat. But as it will be mostly derivative and only marginally different to many of the other 10 billion books that other people have thought in 10 minutes over the last few years there won’t really be much or any point to yours or need for it.

I was amazed to read on your site, Pastures, about the software that automatically rewrites your article into as many different versions as you want. Wow. Sooner or later content will probably be automatically generated by computers with little or no need for any original human input at all.

If you load up all of Shakespeare’s plays into the right program it’s already almost possible to generate ten whole new ones at the push of a button.

We’re now on the steep part of the exponential curve of development in which the pace of change accelerates and all things imagined come into reality.

Etc for a couple of books’ worth.

If you’re interested in reading some more about this, some interesting leading futurists that make good starting points to read are Ray Kurzweil who is more technology based and Aubrey de Grey who is principally interested in longevity and immortality.

So groovy gravy and blimey trousers. Woof woof.