After chatting on Skype with someone who has a brilliant idea for a product but not quite knowing how to take it to the next step I made a suggestion. Not with the idea itself because in reality it is actually a brilliant one but in the way of getting these ideas into the first solid step you can take. One that I know helps you clear up a lot of the issues you face when you have a great idea and want to bring it to reality. The idea is based on storyboarding and prototyping and is a method I got involved with when I was working on usability.

The problem is always at the beginning, what do you do to flesh out an idea and make it into something real. In the IT world you would be expected to create a detailed specification of what you want but often it isn’t people with that kind of experience that have the idea. So you need enough to be able to describe fully your idea to someone who can actually do the work, write the code, create the product and make it something you can sell.

Of course having an idea in your head is not enough. You need to at least know that it solves the problem that created it. You need to create your imaginary product in your mind and test it all out in real life. This is the most efficient place to make changes to it, anywhere later will cost you time and money. Now assuming you don’t have the capacity of a great inventor like Tesla then you need to make some notes and drawings. This is where the storyboarding comes in.

Now whatever you artistic skills are and thankfully it doesn’t matter when you do this you need to draw how the product will be used. You draw up each function it performs and put in just enough to spark the imagine of seeing it for real. Even if you have to draw a little stick-man operating or using the product it will help you see its use more clearly.

There may be a number of ways that the product is used so for each one you can think of draw little pictures of how it will look. When you go through a function or action with it you can use a comic book like style to show each of the steps. If you have many pictures of certain aspects of the product then you can reuse them as you think of how the product will be interacted with. All this helps your cognitive functions analyse and imagine all the pieces that are necessary for the product to work.

I know that film walkthroughs are done this way, at least showing the ingredients of each action as the idea is fleshed out. Of course it is so simple and quick to change, rearrange, throw out and add to the story line this way you can see the film being someone using your product.

The next thing is that once you have thrown every problem and possible function at your product on paper you will then want someone to prototype it. Well the sketches will help for this too. If you are able to it will give you plenty of information for writing a specification. At least it will give you enough to know what you are asking for should you go online to a freelancing auction or service provider. The one thing that will always save you time, money and communication problems is having as complete a specification as possible when approaching a service provider. You could possible even just use the sketches or storyboard as the means of describing what you want and have the service provider help you get round any technical issues.

Creating a storyboard will help you make your idea a reality by helping your imagination flow in creating it, forcing you to consider it fully for any issues it might have and ease the communication you need in telling someone else what you need to create the idea into a prototype.

I did find a number of sites that describe this method though any search for ‘storyboarding prototyping’ should bring up more than enough background info.
http://projects.staffs.ac.uk/suniwe/project/prototypeuserinterface.html
http://webzone.k3.mah.se/k3jolo/Sketching/sk31.htm
http://www.usabilitybok.org/methods/storyboard

Right now with a flurry of Google Plus invites going on – and off apparently, I see Google has temporarily shut them down – another channel is opened up for communication. I cannot help feeling now though that there are so many things going on, that in the moment of something happening, you will have loads of people taking photos, tweeting, updating their statuses, now I guess hanging out on Google Plus and nobody was actually there to experience the moment.

There is the temptation to become a sort of ‘mobile CCTV’ recording precious moments but losing the point of actually being there to enjoy the moment?

Be selfish – leave the recording to everyone else – Be There!!

I have gone back to basics here and just tried to record my thinking process with the idea of maximising on content and its production.

I am still trying to figure out the best way of maximising content. Maximising its production, usefulness, reuse and value. Now it looks like there is a lot out there in reusing content and I have seen plenty of articles and videos that go into this but only in a superficial way. I really want to get to the bottom of this question and apply it. I suppose it comes from many years of doing things the wrong way that make me really keen on tackling the issues, I have spent way to long on the creation of the content and often end up with many original ideas never being completed.

My goal for this project is to find a way of producing content quickly, easily and consistently even during those moments when I am researching a subject. The time I have spent on research as opposed to producing content is always haunting me. How do you create something even when you are learning but maintain usefulness?

Content Reuse thoughts

Thinking about reusing content I think of the original piece as a jumble of concepts that have been placed in a syntactical order. I can easily reorder and spin this content in different ways and still maintain the concepts written but it doesn’t necessarily add any quality or usefulness to the articles that have been output.

One primary idea I see in many blogs and I guess especially in the article marketing area is the use of templates. This enables structure to be created that can be reused to cover many ideas and these range from the most simple, introduction – detail – summary to a vast proliferation of templates. Though this sounds useful, in that it helps you rapidly create content that meets a word count very quickly the work needed on working on the templates has to be done up front. I suppose you could go round quickly and make a list of the most popular articles and attempt to create templates from them but the variations here will be quite vast. Many writers have different styles and ways of putting information over and although this might be useful in examining the styles that apparently work, it is nonetheless a major task.

I have seen many simple structures created by the rapid article manufacturers but they do seem to be a little simplistic and reading the end results I feel makes them boring. The positive side however is that structured articles, although less interesting, are easily read by a greater audience because of their simplicity.

This makes me wonder about the exact difference between rewriting and article and writing an article from scratch. What addition tasks are needed? Coming back to concepts, it is the information gained in the written article, the concepts it holds that  is simply spun in a different way, whereas research or writing a new article means the addition of new thought or data.

From a high level view this can be thought of having a database of facts driving a set number of relationships which are then presented, through style or template to a written piece of content.

The more I think about this the more I love the idea of having a database of facts that are spun through a set of template relationship ideas to present the information in a certain way. In a real basic way I am thinking of a simple example, like the weights of widgets in the database of facts having a relationship compared template that would come out with the text that the X widget is the heaviest of its kind, or widget Y is of average weight, or more informatively if used with thought out relationships , the weight of widget Z is a little heavy for widget usage. But now with this I am entering into automatically generated content.

In trying to look deeper into the structures that are used by many articles that I see on the web I am becoming more and more frustrated by how much superficial and unnecessary content actually gets produced in an article. Many times the sentence structures are way too complicated and do not communicate the idea being presented efficiently at all. Is this author style? Is it just conversational? Often I feel it is unnecessary weight. Though looking back over my own work I can see I fall victim to the very same problem. It seems we do this when we write naturally.

When I think about the process involved in writing I am reminded of the unstructured nature of thinking and the process of putting thoughts into sentences. It is like a form of ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ where one thought which has followed a number of others needs actually to be pinned in the right place. However, this isn’t how we write is it. We write in a serial fashion where one thought must follow another in a reasonably logical fashion. This isn’t how the mind works though. Well, this isn’t how my mind works anyway.

In the process of thinking through an idea  then we have this lovely unstructured form that takes place, where a suggestion gets fired off in one area of the topic and then a new suggestion in another, together with the unrelated jumble that make up the wallpaper of the mind – the stuff, the connections that get fired off all over the place driven by events of the day, subconscious thoughts, memories of events, music that doesn’t want to vacate the wallpaper and many other causes.

At this moment I am drawn to thinking about mindmaps and how useful they are in connecting these thoughts together in a beautifully constructed and sensible whole. However, again, although they may be closer to how the mind works they do have a major fault. They do assume that this structure is visible to you at the time of the thought occurring. How often have I been in a rush to put loads of ideas and concepts floating around in my mind into a mindmap and had to falter at the very step of where to put the thought. Quite often I do not know where exactly on the map I should place them, after all they didn’t arrive in my mind with an address. This process will often destroy the line of thought by making me stop and think of where I should exactly put them.

So how should this whole process occur? I feel that if I could answer this question adequately I can somehow resolve the issue of how to write ‘useful’ content as I am thinking it. The alternative is this … a long rambling of prose that somehow needs to get placed into a lovely structured mindmap with all the missing elements and connections worked out. As it is the result of this process here is probably unbearably impossible for anyone but myself to work through and even for me later it would be quite a chore. So I have in one instance used a way of creating content as I think about a subject, but in no way made it useful, readable or of use to anyone but myself…

Now I have become interested in alternatives to just writing and mindmaps. I am intrigued to see if anyone out there has come up with any useful alternatives.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/rico-clusters-an-alternative-to-mind-mapping.html

Well I find there is something called Rico clusters. At first glance it seems like an unstructured precursor to mindmapping that lets you free form ideas. Then when you are happy you have placed the words that have occurred to you go through a phase of removing the irrelevant and structuring them. I like Dustin Wax’s angle on this method and agree with some of the conclusions he has made. It seems this idea needs an app to drive it with drawing all the connections or just simply and being rather retro use pencil and paper to use it. I am uncomfortable with this as it adds a number of steps I would need to actually produce something. I will give it a go though…

I created one quickly and one fault with having a pencil and paper is space. You do not know how much space you should allocate to an idea when you first produce it and you may quickly run out of places to put things. Also relationships may start appearing that make you final drawing a spiders web of connections.

Thinking about it this is probably just a graphical extension of my ramblings here… just squeezed into a word.

I know Tony Buzan likes the word to appear in his mindmaps – don’t go placing sentences there. This apparently allows the map to be more conceptual allowing you to explore the relationships more. The Rico Cluster looks like it has the same premise. One which I still feel doesn’t work for me when I want to write a line of text to explain my thought and not leave it imprecise or organic as just a word. After all I know what I was thinking when I created it and may not wish to explore all of the relationships that might occur when looking at the connection of two words. Thoughts are not words, well not all of the time. We do not hold a precise vocabulary in the mind that can be translated directly into a word – there are so many concepts in there that are not represented in this way. Can we one day work on a more structured language that would suit us all – I know English is painful to both learn and use. Though in that pain comes beauty I know…

http://ideamappingsuccess.com/press.cfm

Idea mapping looks like a free form association exercise that looks like an organically styled mindmap. I was unsure of any benefit with this method at all other than having a colourful image that might be useful for remembering your map. Something I know which Tony Buzan already states as useful in his mindmaps, if you follow it closely enough. Maybe I missed the point there but I didn’t see anything new in this idea at all.

To be continued…

Of all the equations known to man I think Einstein’s equation of E equals m c squared to be one of the most famous. Now this article is nothing but an exercise in free writing and using the equation as a focus. I love the equation and what it means but I will not pretend to be a scientist or tell anyone that I see profound things within it, I am just using this as a simple exercise and seeing what comes up. Not having the ability to know whether the equation is in fact 100% true means only that I must accept it and think through what any of the implications are.

E equals m c squared

The energy that exists in a situation is exactly the same as the mass that exists multiplied by the square of the speed of light. Nice and simple, showing the relationship between mass and energy. It shows the enormous amounts of energy held within mass and that the two things are eternally connected.

But first some thoughts about equations…

An equation is a beautiful construct in the mind, showing an exact relationship of a concept with others. It is like a universe in itself. An equation tells you many things by showing what is absent within it. In this instance there are three concepts that are related and nothing else. Energy, or the concept of energy in this instance, is nothing but a relationship between mass and the speed of light in an interesting form. There are no other factors involved in this mini universe, nothing else matters. The colour or shape of the mass, the speed at which the mass is moving, accelerating or resting has nothing to do with it. Energy is purely mass times this strange square of light.

It is in an equation’s limits that you must hold the whole of a concept to bear. In this example, the equation is fundamental; it applies to absolutely everything that exists and nothing else. So no other information is of importance here, my typing of this article is displaying the use of this equation at work, because it exists everywhere at all times.

Looking at light, it is detailing a speed, not a velocity, a change in distance over time that is all. So the ideas of distance and time are involved in this relationship wrapped up totally, but in an interesting way. The square of the speed of light, not its cube or E equals m c. There is something fundamental about space that is wrapped up in here. Energy and mass seem wrapped up in the movement of something.

Isn’t it strange that the whole of the universe is wrapped up in dependence of change? A maximum change, a fundamentally constant change, the speed of light is constant and all mass and energy that ever existed is eternally related to it. Interesting also that for energy and mass to exist at all the speed of light is squared, that two dimensions of space and two of time. Not three dimensions, three that we are familiar with, or even one of time, which we are comfortable thinking about, but two dimensions of each.

E / m = c squared

E / m = distance squared / time squared

The equation at any point holds this relationship between mass and energy. If energy increases, mass decreases, and so on in a perfectly reciprocal way, double the energy is the same as half the mass, for example. It also shows that neither can be zero, for if there is no mass then no energy can exist or vice versa. Does this means that there is no condition for mass not to exist, or energy not to exist? Both are intrinsically related in a form of mass-energy. So as space-time exists as a concept here it is equivalent in a sense to mass-energy, the concepts are both related. If mass tends to zero, then energy tends to infinity or on the other hand in an entropy sounding way, if mass tends to increase, energy tends to minimise. Is entropy another way of showing that the equation is in fact universally in motion and tending towards mass.

Of course the strange thing about the equation and the most significant part of the (the ‘equals’) is that it requires energy to change it. Entropy enters into this mystery too. If energy is required to change the equation of some point to another then are we looking at a one way equation overall? Or is there some mechanism in quantum physics whereby mass comes into existence thereby creating the energy? IF that is so then we have to consider the definition of the universe and what it is – for example in concept isn’t it simply, everything?

Now the equation as a universe in itself shows that it includes the universe itself, it applies to everything within it. I know the equation is often used in a sense of a part of the universe, for example when you work out the energy locked up in decaying radioactive material, but it applies to the whole as well as the part. So we have a change in energy or mass in one part of the universe is absolutely related to a change in energy or mass in another part, meaning that there can be no separation of an event in one place to an event in another. It seems the universe is both a single point and infinity at the same time that the communication of change in one part of the universe has to be fulfilled in another. This in itself is an interesting point of exploration.

The curious bit to me is why time is squared at all, where we live in a universe of three dimensions of space and one of time. Is there a fault with that thinking? Is the concept wrong? Especially when thinking about the constancy of the speed of light. This part of the equation is not going to change, ever, in any part of the universe. So why then are they connected in such a fundamental way? What must be accepted in this equation is that the distance squared and time squared portion of the equation nothing can ever change, they are fixed in a curious way, whereas energy and mass appears freely to transform from one to the other because they are in a sense equivalent anyway.

Let’s consider what is missing from this equation and think it through. I am missing? The ‘I’ that is writing this is a concept that doesn’t exist within the equation at first glance. However, the equation is universal, so ‘I’ must, or it’s truth in unfounded. So I am some part of the equation, existing as energy-mass within it with everything else. Any change in me, affects everything else and vice versa.

Randomly picking something out of existence and questioning the equation with it may actually sound absurd, but again, it is meant to be a fundamental equation after all. What of information where does that appear in this micro-universe of formulation? Is it outside of it and nothing to do with energy-mass or space-time? Is the universe missing something else? Does its existence impact upon it in any way at all?

The 20 minute timer has gone off but I feel I want to explore further, maybe another time J …

I do remember playing with these ideas as a teenager, that information is in fact responsible for time and its direction, mainly because it does in fact need to be part of the equation as it occupies in part the idea of energy having a certain state, whereas the absence of information is another state. The difference thereby creating causality…

There that was fun … much easier than writing product descriptions J

Sounds like I am going to talk about the mighty pen and all the massively thought provoking and artistic posts and articles about the web doesn’t it.

Well No! I am going to talk about me … Hey – I can do that, it’s my blog … Don’t like it Huh? Get yer own then … This is my patch! … Who needs visitors anyway … Right – That’s got rid of him…

I have decided for myself that writing is definitely an art.

Not that what I write is artistic in any mature sense of the word but it seems that the whole relationship between me and writing has changed over the years and now I am certain – ‘Writing is an Art’.

I never really found writing hard surprisingly until I came to do it as part of learning about Internet Marketing. It was only until then that the writing rabbit froze in the headlights of the writer’s block. It was only then that it took me an inordinate time to get anything done – 14 hours to write my first 400 word article and it was rubbish. You see – it only got bad when I started taking it seriously. I found I could write reams of ramblings on and on until it even bored an accountant. I used to write stories when I was at school, poetry even when the storm of teenage emotions arrived, lyrics and songs when I used to sing and play keyboards (badly).

So writing was not a stranger to me…

Later I could write wonderful technical reports on the assembled interrupts of any pretending to microprocess and everything informative and detailed. I always scored, at least when I had the time to do them properly, consistent high 90 percents in matters scientific and mathematical in my degree studies. The one thing that really took over me was when I had an idea about something, when I was creating something new or exploring something I still like to call the ‘conceptual landscape’ – that’s really just ideas and their connections to those more reality based than myself.

So why could I not write for Internet marketing? Why did I suddenly turn into a bumbling idiot and spend hours researching, rewriting, rehashing, restarting anything simple like a blue widget product description. For of course my site about blue widgets, that totally lacks any pages on blue widgets except for a few rambling attempts at writing how everyone must have a blue widget because they are great…

Why indeed…

Well – I don’t know?

Sorry – I really do not understand why that happened. Though I do know that I have wasted so much time on it. Seriously…

The only way I managed to beat it was to just write anything… Really, just to let go and let whatever come out… You can investigate the Internet for the most detailed and most interesting information about blue widgets, and research and listen to the experts and guru’s who will tell you how exactly to write about the blue widgets. You can read everyone elses work on bluw widgets. Go really deep and structured making up a database or spreadsheet of blue widgets, comparing them in all sorts of interesting ways. You can do all these things, all day long, to make sure you write the ideal and most search engine friendly piece of blue widget script that there ever was. But, if you were like me, you ended the day, with a head full of blue widget ideas, a disk full of blue widget data, but a site full of – well – it is horrible to think of it – a site full of another empty day, wasted, with nothing to show for it.

So time passes … You blue widget page gets lonely sinking lower and lower in the SERPs, getting no attention, no visitors, not even from a robot…

Each day passes, with good intention, to write about the blue widget, maybe sell some… and that horrible feeling at the end of the day gets a stranglehold on you after a while as you persist in the madness, the feeling of not achieving anything.

You keep doing this – and believe me I know – you will begin to feel a failure. After a while you will ‘know’ that you are a failure. Why? Because everyone else seems to be able to write about blue widgets so easily, without any problem, some within microseconds of turning their machine on apparently have posted blue widget posts to their blog, blue widget snippets to the social web, have got likes and clicks abounding from places where the blue widget doesn’t even shine. You realise you must be a failure, because you cannot even do that… Why are you even trying? Yes – I know the feeling so well.

My subsciousness I feel is getting squashed into the back of my mind throughout this process and saying ‘WTF? This is all wrong!!’. Well – I am not absolutely sure is my subsciousness would swear like that, just that I certainly would if I was my subsciousness! Something is very wrong when a singular act becomes the measure of a life, especially when it is when you measure yourself up to this…

But, let’s cheer you up after that sad person’s admission… Writing is an Art…

You remember the paintings you used to do in kindergarten?

No – I don’t either, but I see the wonderful beginnings of it with my own children, some of which are pinned up in my office. These drawings will never win any arts prizes, they are beautiful though in their imperfections, I see clever things in them, their ideas and thoughts made visual.

They may or may not be art to anyone else, but they were done, practised, created, time and time again. Each one, any amount of steps forward, or backwards in any measure of art but ‘they are art’.

It is the act of creation.

The act of making something, even if full of imperfections, but consistently – THAT IS ART.

Art is truly a Verb in this context. It is to be done.

Badly at first – as all art is, that is its nature.

To stop the art is to stop creation. To spend so much time getting it absolutely right first time, second time, any time, defeats the artistic process. It seems to be an incremental building of creativity. Something that is never quite right but once done – IS DONE. It just needs to be done!

This is the lesson that I found hard until very recently. It just NEEDS TO BE DONE.

Especially of course if your independence, health, comfort, happiness and other choice factors depend on your action.

ART NEEDS TO BE DONE – TO BE ART

So to writing. It is an art. It needs to be done. Doesn’t matter if it is absolute rubbish – sometimes people see the beauty in even that.

“Spring is sprung, The grass is riz, I wonder where the flowers is. The boid is on the wing — Absoid! Of course the wing is on the boid.” – Anon, New York, 1946

In trying to get it right sometimes you can waste so much time.

Just treat it like an art – and think of a child’s picture – it just needs to be done.

GO DO SOMETHING NOW – hopefully writing because if you came here for advice on blue widgets I am so sorry, they only had a walk on part in this plot and nothing of values exists here for any of blue widgetkind.

GO AND WRITE ANYTHING – ABOUT ANYTHING and switch off that most unkind of critics – self-analysis. Keep doing it and enjoy the freedom…
Believe me I have written some rubbish…

What do you mean ‘Including this’?!!!!

Some Interesting Reading if this didn’t help you:

• What Gets You Worked Up Enough To Blog About It? – Writing this weekly column for the Blog Herald has been a new challenge for me — I’m not used to blogging “on demand.” On my own blog, Publishing 2.0, I just waiting until something gets me sufficiently worked up that the blog post …

• How to Get Unstuck: Overcoming Writer’s Block – Break the Procrastination Habit Today. Does this ever happen to you? You sit down to write or create something and you end up doing everything but writing and creating. And then suddenly it’s the end of the day and you think “How did …

• When a blogging slump hits… | Randa Clay Design – What do you do when you hit a blogging dry spell? Have you ever felt like you just didn’t have any good ideas for posts anymore… what was once a deep well of.

• Academic Productivity » Book Review: How to write a lot (Paul Silvia) – This is a short book that one can read on a flight (I did), but it packs a lot of good advice. Silvia is sick of ‘self-help-like’ books on writers block, etc., and it shows. He writes from the point of view of a seasoned author, …

• 20 Surefire Ways To Beat Writer’s Block – Daphne Gray-Grant knows writing. As a Publications Coach she works with corporate writers who want to do their work faster and better. So we know she’s faced writer’s block. If you’re a blogger, a business owner, or a writer of any type …

Update: 12th December 2010
Now I did put this post forward on Reddit and Digg, in an effort to expose it a bit and in an effort to truly help anyone else who has suffered the mind-numbing inactivity that seems to come to the afflicted with doing any writing on the Internet. I got it real bad!!! But now know how exactly it is broken…

Anyway – I did really upset someone by having Optincrusher running on the blog with an opt in to a newsletter I was working on, so I took it down for a while. However, now I am bringing it back properly. I am hoping to interest those who really want to push their Internet marketing to the limits but have been stuck on ‘Guru Reliance’ for too long. These people are probably experts in the breadth of SEO and know so much more about it than any of the gurus of which they follow. I have finally worked out in principle what you have to do in these circumstances to win through and break out of all reliance on anyone but themselves… but I only want a certain kind of subscriber in my list, – those who agree in principle that once they are winning they go out and help others who desperately need this kind of help…

All sounds a bit odd in short … I will make a proper post about it…

But for now – please don’t get annoyed by an optin bar appearing on the page It will have a purpose  – and not one to cheat, annoy or anger anyone – honest…

The idea of thought streaming came up on a blog recently, I haven’t thought about this subject for about thirty years but I remember my imagine was just as strong then. Is it possible to get information from the brain, or the mind, unintrusively. Continue reading →

Another idea from 2004 in the Wayback Machines’ OpenOutsource May 2004 archive ‘It’s a game…‘.

Could an interface be worked out that took the cognitive decisions made in playing a game on one side and connected it to generic task based decision making on the other. The outcome would be that by many people playing a game actual work could be done. These work tasks could be valuable elsewhere…

Continue reading →

In the vein of useful ideas – here’s one. SMA Tins Make Great CD-DVD Storage Tins.

These metal baby and toddler milk tins make great storage space for just over 100 DVDs or CDs. Useful for archiving off and backing up all of your videos, photos, software etc..

The idea is this, a story that unfolds sentence by sentence each week. Each sentence can be suggested by anyone who takes part but finally chosen at the end of the week simply by the number of votes cast. Each week the new and chosen sentence is added to the story.

The site containing this could carry on indefinitely running itself, adding new sentences every time there is enough new material voted on.

Having looked around there is a site at http://www.theneverendingstory.co.uk – nearly the same idea.

You probably get to see many of these in your Inbox – especially if you are involved in the industry, but do you wonder how many of them actually work? Well I have an idea that needs a few Internet skeptics like myself … Continue reading →