All the best bloggers are world builders. So are science fiction/fantasy writers, politicians, entrepreneurs, architects religious leaders, non-profit organizers, teachers, and coaches.  Oh, and movie directors/producers, too (George Lucas and James Cameron didn’t just make movies – they made entire worlds.  Or even galaxies.)

What?  You say that all they do is move pixels, letters, numbers, and the occasional image?  How could bloggers possibly be world builders?

First of all, relax on one point: I’m not saying that bloggers are not planet builders.  I don’t know what your religious beliefs are (they are your business, after all) but I’m not implying that bloggers possess superhuman abilities to move and rearrange matter into organized clumps (although you could be forgiven for thinking that some of them might be under the delusion that they can do such things).

Worlds aren’t just planets.  Worlds, going back to etymology and history for just a moment, are not limited to being orbs in space that orbit stars.  World is a term that related to things like “turning chaos into order”.  World can also be a self-contained, unique reality that exists separate to the “real world”.

A world can be an ideal place, one that represents certain characteristics, beliefs, or ideas.

Blogs have themes, rules, topics of interest, visions, and calls to action.

Here are a few examples:

Chris Brogan: a world of human, café shaped businesses

Beth Kanter: world of compassion where non-profit organizations can use social media to be successful

Rob Diana: world for better coding, design, and techonology

Robert Scoble: world of cool and useful technology

Fred Wilson: world where more people are educated in business fundamentals

Seth Godin: world where more people realize what incredible opportunities are available to us all and what we lose when we squander them

Darren Rowse: a world where individuals can improve their lives by making money online using blogs and social media

Michael Martine: a world where businesses make better use of blogs and social media to be more successful

Steven Hodson: a world where companies and individuals stop making stupid mistakes with technology (see also Justin Kownacki)

Hugh MacLeod: a world where people get off their asses, follow their passions, and do great work

Mitch Joel: a world where companies grasp the fact that media is changing and baby, you’d better run smartly with it

Introvert Zone: a world where introverts can have self-respect and live happy, productive lives

Ian M Rountree: a world where you can do cool stuff, get better, and do even more while growing as an individual

Bill Wren: a world where people can find tools to become better writers

Steve Spalding: a world where you turn things inside out, split the atoms apart, and find the goodness that no one else has been smart enough to find yet

Louis Gray: a world where everyone gets to see and benefit from all of the good technology that’s out there, especially the great stuff that gets overlooked at times

Dave Winer: a world where technology is used intelligently as part of an overall democratic, fair society (see also: Doc Searls, David Weinberger)

Alexander Van Elsas: a world where free technology, the rights of the individual, and commerce can coexist

Jessica Doyle: a loving world full of wonderful art

Merlin Mann: a world where people have the tools to do their best work, and then they go do it

Gary Vanynerchuk: a world where people appreciate the complexity and range of great wines in the world

Brian Solis: a world where companies use social media, public relations and communications effectively and thoughtfully (see also Adam Singer)

Naomi Dunford: a world where individuals can start thriving small businesses instead of working for “the corporation” (see also: Jonathan Fields)

Valeria Maltoni: a world where everyone recognizes the power of honest and significant conversation

Kelly Diels: a world where we better understand the importance of sex, money and meaning and how together they intersect and shape our lives

Dan Schawbel: a world where people realize the power of their personal brand and how it precedes them at every step of the way

Have you visited any cool worlds lately?  Better still, have you made any?

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The gentleman in today’s installment of Thoughts From is one of the few social media folks that I’ve actually met in person.  However, the five minutes we spent chatting at a Third Tuesday meetup over two years ago had a big impact on my own blogging and social media presence.  Jason Falls is the founder and principal of Social Media Explorer, LLC and has been active at his Social Media Explorer blog for years.  Jason has a background in public relations and is a well known and respected voice in social media circles.  He’s a smart thinker who’s not afraid to zag when other people zig.  All in all, it’s a real pleasure to have Jason participate in this interview series.  Fill up your coffee cup and take a few minutes to check out this great interview post.

Why did you start Social Media Explorer?

SME launched in September of 2007 as I began working with clients full-time on social media projects. The blog became a business (my consultancy) on August 1, 2009.

Was there something in particular that you were trying to achieve with the blog and, if so, have you achieved it yet?

I wanted to build a level of thought leadership in public relations and social media. I knew I had ideas and insights about the social web that could help companies, but needed a platform to build that reputation nationally and internationally. I guess you can say I’ve accomplished that. Now that I feel comfortable in that skin, I now hope to use it to offer some responsible insight for everyone so marketing can happen without the industry being overrun with salesmen. Or something noble like that.

You’re an entrepreneur and have been for a number of months now. What’s the best part of being an entrepreneur so far?

I can say “no” now.

Flip side: what’s the worst part of being an entrepreneur so far?

Accounting. I hate math.

Are you having any challenges (or victories) in keeping business and personal separate? Or is it a big deal to you?

It’s actually easier now that I’m my own boss. In agency life, you’re at the mercy of your clients, then your new business efforts and you work 72 hours a day and deal with it. You can’t say “no” and you can’t stop. Family is almost expected to suffer for your career, which, frankly, is bullshit. Now, I’m home for dinner and to put my kids to bed with very few exceptions. And I only work on weekends after the rest of the family is asleep.

Do your children use the Internet yet or computers in general? To what extent?

My son turns five later this month. The extent of his Internet is PBSKids.org, which he plays on about an hour a month at most. That and watching silly animals on YouTube with me every now and then. But both of my children (I also have a soon-to-be 2-year-old daughter) have blogs where my wife posts pictures and little stories for the family. We’ll turn them over to them when they’re old enough.

Can you describe the psychology of an internet troll? I know you’ve had to deal with them before.

I think most trolls fall into one of two categories with one stark commonality. They’re either really, really ignorant and insulting people somehow compensates for this in their minds, or they are unusually intelligent but are intimidated socially and think standing out has to be a bravado thing rather than just being smart. Both are overcompensating for some self-loathing or dissatisfaction with their own life/standing/person. I feel sorry for them in a lot of ways.

And dealing with them, in my mind, is pretty simple. You either show some common decency and respect or we’ll all tune you out. That deprives them of their platform. They normally comply. If not, they run and pick on someone else, which gets rid of them anyway.

Is PR generally getting better at using social media? Are practitioners learning what’s right and what’s wrong yet?

Some are, some aren’t. I think it’s gotten better, but there’s still a lot of bad PR going on out there. Unfortunately, if you’re delivering the metrics your clients want, you have no reason to try and change. Bad PR isn’t going away.

Can you describe a situation when you really, really wanted to laugh out loud at something in a meeting but you managed to bite your tongue and keep a straight face?

No. I laugh out loud anyway. Major personality flaw. I was born without an edit button.

Pretend that the Internet is destroyed overnight. What do you do when you wake up the next morning?

Play with my kids. Read a book. Go to a baseball game. That’s a pretty nice day in my mind.

Any parting thoughts for our readers?

Just don’t do it down the middle. We call that a “butt cut” where I’m from.  (Heh.)

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• PR 2.0 – better tools do not make a smarter mammal
• Speedlinking – Jan 22 2010
• 10 Old School Blogging Tips To Know
• Captured Brainwaves – 30 September 2009
• Public relations and bloggers – more alike than unalike

Just for a change of pace, I want to turn the podium over to you (in the Comments section, of course).  What’s out there that YOU would recommend to the readers of Broadcasting Brain?

This isn’t about Foursquare (despite the photo included in this post) or #FollowFriday or anything like that.

I would really like to see you all recommend a good blog post, website, or other online content that you think would be valuable to all Brainiacs who read this blog.  Maybe it could be something light hearted.  Or, it could be something more substantial or meatier that we might want to read over the weekend.

Have at it, mighty ones!  Give us some good stuff to read, watch or listen to.  BIG HINT:  it can be something that you created.

EDIT: ok, I’ll kick things off with one recommendation: Blogging Fears and How to Overcome Them – Part 2 by Remarkablogger (Michael Martine).  For example, Michael makes a great point about the following:  things that we write about that might seem to be too obvious and simple to us might not be too simple or too obvious to our readers.  Check it out.

Image by y2bk

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Tweaks not changes
• 10 Old School Blogging Tips To Know
• A new blogging resource – The Blogging Lens
• Prediction: Twitter will die before Facebook does
• The role of the Twitter follower

It doesn’t always come easy.  Sometimes it comes very, very hard.

No, I’m not talking about a bowel movement, although you might be forgiven for thinking that.

It’s the writing.  The blogging.  The whole “coming up with new ideas” thing.  Getting words down in a sensible order that makes a point, informs, or entertains.

Frustration is the feeling of thwarted ambition.  Sometimes the thwarting is just a temporary derailment of will and purpose and, with time and effort, you can get back on track and steam toward your destination.  (Hurray for railroad metaphors!)

The really bad thing about frustration is that it accommodates distraction.  No, that’s too gentle of a word.  Frustration supercharges the tendency toward distraction. Unless we can build the self-discipline to push through the things that thwart our ambition, we can enter a vicious cycle where by the following occurs (in true BASIC style):

10  WHEN INSPIRED BEGIN WORKING

20 IF ENCOUNTER CREATIVE ROADBLOCK

30 IF FEEL FRUSTRATED, GOTO 40

33 IF FRUSTRATION <= DETERMINATION, GO TO 90

40 LOOK FOR DIVERSION TO REMOVE FEELINGS OF FRUSTRATION

50 WASTE TIME WITH DIVERSION

60 DISCOVER THAT TIME HAS PASSED

70 DISCOVER THAT NO WORK HAS BEEN DONE

80 GOTO 20

90 DO WORK

100 FEEL SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

110 END (SATISFIED, SOMEWHAT)

The key to avoiding frustration would seem to be avoiding distraction, as painful as it is.  But what if you are trapped in the loop?  What do you do to get out?

Over to you, dear Brainiacs.  What do you do to get out of a rut?

Image by DOH4

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Where the words come from
• Don’t try to engage my enthusiasm–I haven’t got one (Marvin the Paranoid Android)
• How to say the unsayable

Something different for a change of pace:  a video showing the evolution of the design of the Airbus A380-800 aircraft, all in drawings:

In a world of one draft blog posts, it’s quite intriguing to see something go through so many design changes.

According to Wikipedia.org, this airplane has 530 km (330 miles) of wiring in each aircraft.

Can you imagine how freaking complex and hard it is to make one of these airplanes?

Maybe we should all reflect on this the next time we’re struggling with a website or a blog post.

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As you can see in the picture to the left, Lt. Commander Data (in a scene from Star Trek:  First Contact) is loaded and ready for bear, as they say.  But just a few minutes earlier, he was almost ready to collapse into a puddle of trembling jelly, full of fear.  While talking with his captain, Data expressed his feelings of fear of impending battle with the Borg.  This feeling was a “gift” newly available to him from an emotion chip that he had recently found.

As we know, Data is an android, a machine full of information and devoid of emotion.  The chip changed that.  However, he also had to deal with negative, paralyzing feelings while the emotion chip was active.  So, naturally, when Data expressed his fear, Captain Picard very logically suggested that Data turn off the chip.  So he did and he calmed down.  In the next breath, Picard expressed his envy of Data in that moment, when the android could just turn off his emotions like you would turn off a lamp.

Haven’t we all felt that way at one time?

Emotional fuel (or fire)

Our emotions are powerful motivators.  Joy, love, anger, envy, and fear:  they make us want to do things.  Or keep us from doing things.

Unlike Data, we really can’t shut off our emotions.  We can train ourselves to ignore them, we can accept them, and we can use chemicals to temporarily deaden them, but they don’t go away.  Feelings don’t have on and off switches.

Fear is one of the strongest feelings, at least it is in my experience.  How many things have I kept myself from doing because of fear?  (Note:  I don’t claim that the fear stopped me; I let the fear stop me.)  Perhaps you’ve had the same experience?

No matter how you feel about privacy, there’s no doubt that having a social media presence using your real name is a test of fear and bravery.  After all, people can Google you and find out what you’re saying.  They can judge you, for good or evil.  You can be made fun of.  Hell, your boss might read your blog and decide that what you’re doing isn’t in her best interest, or that of your employer.  And so on.

Fear of exposure

I’ve done it both ways:  I’ve used aliases and I’ve used my own name.  Every now and then it’s very tempting to create a new identity so you can write and rant about your more extreme views without fear of reprisal.  The possibility of telling the unembellished truth is seductive and perversely empowering when you can do so without connecting the words back to your true identity.

To borrow one of the most famous analogies of our times, I consider that to be the Dark Side.  Power without responsibility, without remorse, without accountability – that is both the lure and the damnation of the anonymous blogger.  Better to keep your name and face in the light, to add power to your thoughts.

However, that doesn’t mean that you need to share everything.  Despite any trends in technology and society, we all have a right to some privacy.  We don’t need to continually bear our souls, we don’t need to expose all of the secrets.

Authenticity is worth pushing through the fear

But if you want to say something with power, it sure helps to have your real name and face behind it.  It may be scary and you may wish for your own emotion chip to deactivate your fear, but fear can be mastered and that energy can be used.   One of my favorite super-heroes is focused on willpower and mastery of fear.  It can be done and you can use your courage to do great things.

If you have something reasonable to say the world, please don’t be afraid to say it using your own real face and voice.  It could be the best thing that you ever do.

Data, Picard, Star Trek are all properties of Paramount.  Please don’t sue, guys.  Kthksbai.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Think again – a checklist for weighing the impulsive act
• Social media – moving beyond your weaknesses and limitations
• Social media – your will is your only limit
• When a river stops running
• Book Review – The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz

Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder and Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a company that “works with organizations around the world to help them do less Good Work and more Great Work.”  In addition to his Box of Crayons work, Michael blogs regularly and he has created an excellent series of podcast interviews with interesting and creative achievers called the Great Work Interview series (here is an example).  He has recently published Do More Great Work, a book to help people achieve their own great work.  We at Broadcasting Brain are great fans of Michael’s work, so it’s a pleasure to do a Thoughts From interview with him.

Let’s start with a two-part question about your own series of interviews. What prompted you to start a podcast series of interviews with people about their own great work? Second, how do you select the various individuals that you’ll be interviewing?
I’m not quite sure what prompted me to start this series. It’s been about two years now. I think it was simply because I was curious and wanted to chat to people. And I have a pretty simple criteria: I’m looking for people who make me think and/or make me laugh and that have something interesting to say. I’m also conscious that a number of these good people are also influencers within their worlds – and that’s an added bonus for me.

Does any interview material wind up on the “cutting room floor” i.e. are there any unused bits that don’t appear in the podcast?
Actually, no. In part that’s because I’m lazy and don’t want to spend a lot of time editing and polishing the interviews. In part it’s because I like the organic flow of the conversation. Probably equal parts of both…

Which fictional character would you most enjoy interviewing to ask them about their great work? Why?
Gosh – that’s hard to narrow down to one. It would most likely be a person from the world of literature, because I’ve got a BA and an M.Phil in literature. Maybe someone like Sherlock Holmes. Or David Malouf’s Ovid (from the book, An Imaginary Life.)

Which deceased individual would you most enjoy interviewing to ask them about their great work? Why?
Mmm… another tough question. Probably one of the big scientists like Marie Curie or Crick. I do admire their pursuit of the unknown – it requires both imagination and discipline, not to mention resilience.

What part of your work gives you the most joy? Why?
There’s not one single part. I really enjoy creating and shaping new material, love performing in front of a group, love seeing something finished like a short movie or a book appear. I heard the term ‘portfolio career’ a number of years ago, and really liked it – building up a ‘portfolio’ of different tasks that all fulfil you in different ways

What part of your work gives you the least joy? Why?
I’m much less excited about travel than I used to be, particularly crossing from Canada to the United States. It’s misery crossing the border.

What was the biggest surprise for you when you wrote your first book (i.e. something that you didn’t expect at all)?
In truth, the joy of holding something beautiful in my hands that I’d largely shaped. I wasn’t expecting to feel so happy about it all.

What simple tip would you recommend that could help anyone to do better work today?
Figure out what you want to say No to. Once you’re clear on that, the Yes’s – the really important Yes’s – will be more obvious.

Pretend the Internet is destroyed over night. What do you do when you wake up the next morning?
Go “woo hoo!” – no more email to check. Then, take a big big breath, and start re-imagining ways to reconnect with people.

Any final thoughts for our readers?
Time’s a ticking. I’ve figured out my “death date”: Sept 15 2043. When’s yours? And what do you want to do, who do you want to be between then and now?

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A couple of my posts are featured in the March 5, 2010 edition of the Just Write Blog Carnival at Incurable Disease of Writing:

• Thoughts from Seth Godin
• The struggles of writing and publishing using the Free Model

You should check out the other great posts at Just Write Blog Carnival: March 5, 2010 Edition.  There’s some interesting stuff there for fiction and non-fiction writers.

For more information about the Just Write Blog Carnival, click on this link.

For more information about the main Blog Carnival website, which is a way to get some links and traffic back to your posts, click on this link.

Have a great day!

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I’ve created a new resource for bloggers.  It’s pretty simple, but I hope it helps.

For several years I have literally kept three or four binders of printed copies of the blog posts that I have found to be helpful, useful, and inspiring to my work as a blogger and a writer.  I regularly refer back to them for ideas.  They are my most important resource.  I wanted easy Web access to them, though.

If these resources were valuable to me, they might be valuable to other people.

I thought about publishing a blog post on Broadcasting Brain with the links to this information.  That’s great as a one time project, but in order to have lasting value, this should be a dynamic resource that can be added to, changed, and reorganized as needed.   I decided to use Squidoo.  This allows me to create and maintain that list within a lens, which is a type of web page.  There are two main reasons why I choose Squidoo:

1. I’ve used the tool before and I’m comfortable with it.
2. Squidoo allows the lens creator to receive royalty payments based on traffic to the lens and activity on the page like ad clicks.    You can donate your royalties to a charity.  In my case, I like the idea of Room to Read – I think illiteracy is a horrible setback to anyone’s quality of life and this is a way to help more people learn how to read.  Disclosure:  I maintain a few lenses which make enough income to buy a bag of potato chips during a good month.

So, yes, it’s a Squidoo lens.  And… 100% of the royalties from this lens will go to Room to Read.  Why not do some good while providing information to bloggers?

Go check out The Blogging Lens.  I want it to be the best central resource out there with links to the best content about blogging.  And remember, you can help raise money for Room to Read by visiting and supporting The Blogging Lens.

If you have any links that you think should be added to The Blogging Lens, let me know and I’ll include the best, top notch content on the lens.  It should contain all of the good information about blogging that we all would want to refer to.

Thanks for your support!

The image in this post was created by John Cox & Allen Forkum. See the original: http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000478.html

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Thoughts from Seth Godin
• 10 Old School Blogging Tips To Know
• Things I’ve learned after two years of blogging
• Must we define blogs again?
• The best bloggers are world builders

Image by johndal

Thought wrestling (different from the action that you see above, yet oddly similar) is one of the skills that you can develop as a blogger.  Here are some thoughts on that.

Yesterday’s question was why do you blog if not for money?  More than a dozen readers responded with their reasons for blogging and there were a few common themes in the responses.  I want to focus on one of those themes today:   developing your thoughts via writing.

Here are some examples of what some of you wrote concerning creating and refining ideas (or wrestling them into shape):

Susan Murphy (Suzemuse)

I started blogging in 2006 because I was interested in improving my writing. I thought that putting my thoughts online would be a good way to do this…  I blog mostly because I love to write. I am the type of person that will wake up in the morning with an idea in my head, sit down at the computer and crank out 1000 barely-edited words in 20 minutes, and hit Publish before I have a chance to think about it too much…  Blogging helps me sort things out in my head.

Rob Diana (Regular Geek)

I started blogging as a way to get things off my chest and to get some thoughts on “paper”…  Another side of this is that I have found the blog being a way for me to explore ideas. I always thought I would give opinions on tech news, but that quickly gets boring. For example, when everyone was writing about the (Google Buzz) launch I waited until I had a good feel for what it was. I realized that it felt incomplete, like it was meant for something bigger. So, almost two weeks after the launch I finally wrote something that was not a review or comparison to Twitter and Friendfeed, but more of a “why did Google release this” and “where is Buzz really going”.

Rob Patrob (Robert Paterson’s Weblog):

I blog because I think best aloud. It is a way of working out ideas – like an artist’s sketch book.

Ian M Rountree

But part of why I blog is to leave a permanent record… having a record of how my thoughts progress from one month to the next really helps me make sure I’m going the direction I want to be going.

Bill Wren (he linked to one of his own posts and I’m posting an excerpt of that here):

A friend of mine asks, Why should I blog? For me the quick and easy answer is because I like it. More specifically, I like writing. And if I look at everything I’ve posted on this blog and my other blog (Piddleville) I realize that what I’m really doing is thinking out loud online. I tend to work out ideas on my blogs.

AnneMieke (Mindstructures)

But if you would ask why I love to (blog), then I could not answer that so easy. The closest I could say, is that it is a way to get my thoughts in some form that is understandable…  Going straight to words is not possible for me, so writing is not an option. But with blogging I can (easily) use graphics that I can adjust all the time to make myself clear.

Ilinap

Blogging is therapy, but a whole lot cheaper… Blogging forces me to dig deeper than I would otherwise let myself go. I come face to face with some buried emotions and experiences. I reflect on my own brand DNA, my shortcomings of motherhood, my worries, my celebrations, my fears. Some things I’ve seen crop up in my head are still too painful or controversial to manifest into words. But thanks to blogging, they’re there, off the so called back burner and poised for capture and introspection.

These comments suggest to me that people are getting value from describing things that matter to them.  The blog becomes a tool to develop ideas, to gather thoughts and force them into sentences and paragraphs of meaning.

One of my first posts of 2010 was a collaboration with a lot of smart people who were giving tips on how to do better work.  Seth Godin chimed in with the following tip:

#1 thing: start a blog and write every day.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that tip, but after reviewing it in light of the comments above, I think I have a better understand of what Seth was trying to communicate with his tip.  He was talking about developing ideas.

The practice of regular writing and sorting through the thousands of pieces of information that we process daily helps us to get better at analyzing and using information.  Putting structure around data and wrestling thoughts into order helps us to exercise our reasoning and creative thinking muscles.  This is a critical skill that anyone can use to do better work.  The other comments that I’ve quoted in this post also support this concept.

What do you think?  Is blogging really thought wrestling, the new king of mental sports?

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