Paul Jacobson

I haven’t really paid much attention to Gary Vaynerchuk before today. This morning I sat down to watch his keynote speech at Big Omaha 2009 and I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention sooner!

Vaynerchuk made a name for himself talking passionately about wine and built up a tremendous following. I guess that is why I didn’t pay attention sooner, I am not a big wine drinker. What I realised this morning, watching this video, is that while he is a wine expert, he is a powerful inspiration to me now because of his passion. It could have been directed at paperclips and still have the same effect. He is completely engaged in what he does and is completely happy doing it. When he speaks, he is a force of nature and you can’t help but be drawn in by his passion for wine, the Web and just being passionate about what you do. He has published a book recently about just that. It is called Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion (there is an affiliate link in there and you support me just a little more if you get the book through this link) and I am going to lay my hands on a copy as soon as I have a chance. I would love to have an audiobook version just because it would probably be an incredible experience having Vaynerchuk read the book.

In a way Vaynerchuk speaks to what I was rambling on about a little while ago when I spoke about evangelism and passion for the stuff you talk about. Comparing myself to Vaynerchuk would be a big stretch but he sets an example worth learning from and aspiring to. You rarely come across people who are so passionate about what they do and who they are that they infect you with that passion just being in the room with them. One person in SA who comes to mind is Rich Mulholland who is unconventional and brilliant. Any time he speaks I pay attention, regardless of whether I agree with him. I have a constant sense I am learning something valuable when I listen to Rich. We need more people like Vaynerchuk and Mulholland, they teach us more about passion and living a fuller life.

… something, I am sure.  I don’t like predictions for the new year.  People often think they have a handle on what will strike it big in the new year and they are rarely right.  Industry analysts in particular don’t really have a clue and probably pick predictions from a hat and add a couple new buzzwords in an effort to sound knowledgeable.  Bah humbug!

Here are a couple things I would like to see happen this year.  They aren’t predictions but if I turn out to be right, I told you so.

• My son will smile at me and he will start to sleep for the 5 or 6 hours (or more!) he sleeps at my mother in law;
• I’ll start my new part-time gig in just over two weeks and that will prove to be a challenging and life-changing experience for me and my family;
• This year’s iCommons Summit is in Sapporo, Japan and I look forward to going;
• I plan to build stronger ties to people in the iCommons/Creative Commons ecosystem (there are some really amazing people working in this space) and become more vocal about the possible uses of Creative Commons licenses in many areas of our culture, not to mention contributing towards a greater awareness of legitimate uses of content subject to copyright;
• The emphasis of my law practice will change from more run of the mill stuff to a stronger new media advisory role;
• We’ll see Google Android devices and I will start thinking of things to sell so I can buy one, just before I come back down to Earth and decide to wait a couple months;
• Neotel will talk more about the stuff it has under wraps while other providers surge ahead and present a decent alternative to Telkom;
• Did I mention my son will start sleeping longer hours?

There you have it.  The things I’d like to see happening this year.  They might happen, they might not.  This list may also grow and shrink depending on how I feel about things.  Other than all this, I will continue to blog, try out new services, develop my ideas about the Social Web (and whatever else pops up this year) and work harder at building a better life for my family.

(Image: Isaiah’s Lips Anointed with Fire taken from Wikimedia Commons – it is in the public domain)

Tags: 2008, predictions, wishlist, things, stuff, ideas, family, baby, icommons, creative commons, commons, google, android

You have probably noticed I don’t blog as much as I used to (although even that is relative). I have been incredibly busy the last month or two and I am probably only going to be busier next month and the next and the next. I have also been giving some thought to the direction my work has been taking and the projects I am involved in and have decided to shift my focus.

I thought I’d give you a snapshot of what I am working on at the moment before I launch into all the changes I am making and where my focus areas are:

I have already closed down the Biztips blog and have moved its content here (although Riaan told me a few posts are missing so apologies for that). I have also decided to place a few projects on hold/the backburner/the shelf for the time being and these include my fledgling companion podcast to this blog, GeckoVox, and my micropublishing business, 3puppies media. 3puppies will continue to aggregate my feeds for those of you who still receive the combined feed. I just won’t be pursuing that business avenue for now.

There are also a couple newish projects which I have been contemplating/working on which I am going to open up completely and let you and the rest of the community drive, if you want to. The first two are the SA Rocks wiki Nic and I launched recently and the SA WiFi wiki that went up the other day.

I have another project I have been keeping in the wings which I’d like to set loose and this is the SA Publishers Association (temporary name!!). The wiki is here and is pretty self-explanatory. Basically, the idea is to create a representative body for all of us bloggers and podcasters (and any other independent content creators/publishers). After the SA Blog Awards controversy it really hit me how important it is for us to be credible in the eyes of the general public. Consider how often bloggers are maligned in the media (the most recent example is the De Lille story). It just seems to me that we, as a community, could be better served by a community driven body that represents us all (a bit like the Online Publishers Association) that could help present a better image of the community. Take a look at the wiki if you are interested in getting involved and let’s change the perception of bloggers and podcasters.

I thought that if I scale back in some areas this picture would look a little better. Alas, it is still a bit crazy. As you can see my two primary focus areas now are law and policy (this includes my law firm, Jacobson Attorneys, the Legally Content podcast and my new work with iCommons / Creative Commons South Africa) and chilibean. I also write for The Times and there is this humble blog.

Although my life is still pretty crazy at the moment, it made a lot of sense to me to refocus my efforts and group my activities into focus areas. I am also a lot more comfortable with my chosen profession because I will be spending more time on new media law (at least the law pertaining to new media) and less time on the drudge work that makes me want to flee anything resembling the law (on that note, keep an eye on the Jacobson Attorneys blog in the coming weeks for a few changes).

Another decision I have made is to blog to promote my work interests and politics/beliefs rather than to build traffic and make money from blogging itself. That decision take the pressure off me to post every day so you may see fewer posts on my blogs than in the past. I like to think that when I do post to my blogs, I will post something worth reading and not just to keep the hits up.

I also find I am using my tumblelog a bit more often to publish smaller posts. I also post a bit on Twitter and all of my feeds run into my Jaiku stream (which is probably the single best feed to subscribe to if you want to track what I am doing on the Web).

So I am basically still around (in case you were wondering). A lot.

Technorati Tags:
busy, consolidation, jacobson attorneys, law and policy, chilibean, new media, jaiku, twitter, tumblelog, law, focus, let’s ride bikes

We have seen movies where there are hostages taken and special police units brought in to free the hostages and get the bad guys but somehow that feels like inadequate preparation for a video of a real-life hostage drama taking place in our own cities. Here is a scary video that was just posted on Zoopy:

Not like the movies at all. The Zoopy guys were there and blogged about it.

Technorati Tags:
long street, hostages, hostage drama, cape town, reality tv, real life

I had lunch with Heather today and we chatted about projects we are collaborating on, might collaborate on and we are working on on our own or in our own organisations and it struck me how much I enjoy being a digital socialist. I love the thought of working on a project that will make me absurd amounts of money, sure, but I really love the idea of doing work that has as its focus making a real contribution to the community itself. This is the stuff job satisfaction and the warm fuzzies are made of …

Technorati Tags:
warm fuzzies, musings, giving back, digital socialist, job satisfaction, part-time capitalist, icommons, heather ford

I blog to make the world a better place, most of the time. I am pretty idealistic and, some might say, a bit naive and I am ok with that. My hero is Superman and I believe in the ideals he represents (I even have a Superman t-shirt for every day of the week). I remember when I applied for entrance into Wits’ LLB program I said something about the legal system being a tool to improve society and wanting to be part of that process. The point is I have this notion that I can do my small bit to make this world a little better and the public tools I use are my blogs and my podcasts.

Blogs used to be almost exclusively online diaries and were still described as online diaries in the South African press until some time in 2006 when the media embraced the idea that blogs could be more than a diary. To me, blogs are the children of the principles of The Cluetrain Manifesto. They facilitate the expression of an authentic voice that the authors of Cluetrain spoke about, as well as the direct feedback from readers of the blog. Blogs make it really easy for anyone to publish their thoughts on the Web and to have those thoughts received and transmitted to a potential audience of millions, perhaps even billions. It is probably pretty rare that billions, or even millions, of people will actually read a blog post but that is ok too. If a thousand people read something I write and some of those people do something meaningful then I have done what I set out to do. Sometimes just talking about an issue is important. The main thing for me is to make a difference of some kind, however small. Sometimes I slip up and I write in a destructive way but I’d like to think those times are few and far between.

Bloggers have received some pretty negative publicity in the last few months in response to the way certain hot topics have been dealt with by local bloggers. Responses have varied from rational analyses of the issues to wild and outrageous personal attacks on the personalities involved and more. This hasn’t helped the nascent blogosphere’s credibility with mainstream media as the gateway to the general public. Ideally I would like to see blogs embraced as legitimate sources of commentary, entertainment, news and information about what is going on in our world. Through blogs we can publish information far quicker than the press and to a potentially broader audience because we are not constrained by geography and production schedules. A blog post can be on the Web in a matter of minutes and there could be feedback within minutes after that. I have published posts in the past, stepped away from my laptop for half an hour and have returned to find a dozen comments already and I don’t have tremendously popular blogs. Good feedback for me on my most popular blog, Wired Gecko, is half a dozen posts. A dozen posts is great and more is a runaway success for me. Regardless of the small number of readers who frequent my blogs, I see those people as my partners in helping to make the world that little bit better because the people who frequent my blogs tend to share some of my ideas and passion.

The ability to share my thoughts and passion with the people in the cloud and to do that authentically are two powerful advantages of blogging and two of the big reasons why I blog in the first place. I am becoming less and less dependent on the quantity of readers of my blogs and more focussed on the quality of those readers and to attract those readers I aim to write better quality posts rather than posts aboout topics I know will attract a bigger audience and yet fail to contribute to my overall goal of making a real difference. That being said, I still post about the popular, pointless stuff from time to time so my blogs are by no means paragons of social awareness blogging. Members of the press have commented on the fact that they are paid to write good quality content for their papers and bloggers are not paid. Furthermore, you pretty much get what you pay for and since bloggers are generally not paid, the implication is that the posts those bloggers publish are poorly written and of little value. I have to wonder whether not being paid for my blogging means that I am free to publish posts that are aligned with what I believe and not with what sells better. How can you expect to publish something truly meaningful when your primary motivation is to publish something that will make more money? Sometimes the important issues are not the popular ones and yet they still need to be talked about.

Joi Ito published a post a couple weeks ago titled “Mindful Writing” where he took a look at the Buddhist principle of Right Speech and applied it to his blog posts and in a way it was both ironic and a synchronicity that I first saw his post on a day when the blogosphere was going ballistic about the latest attack on it. He quoted a passage from a book titled “The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching” by Thich Nhat Hanh on the topic of Right Speech which I’ll quote a little from:

“I am determined to speak truthfully, with words that inspire self-confidence, joy, and hope. I will not spread news that I do not know to be certain and will not criticize or condemn things of which I am not sure. I will refrain from uttering words that can cause division or discord, or that can cause the family or the community to break.”

This quote expresses ideals I aspire to. They are worthy ideals for bloggers to aspire to. There has been so much talk about codes of conduct for bloggers and the fatal flaw with all these codes is that they are external and intended to be imposed on the bloggers in some way. The only code that will have any real effect is the code we internalise, believe in and express through our actions. Perhaps when enough bloggers practice some variation of Right Speech and Right Action our blogs will have greater credibility in the eyes of our intended audience.

Blogs are vanilla these days. They can be used as personal diaries and corporate communication tools. They are really just web publishing platforms and are defined by what they are used for. They are used maliciously and they are used to promote positive ideals. I blog to make the world a better place and sometimes I have a very small impact on an issue I am passionate about and that makes all the time I spend on my blogs worthwhile.

Technorati Tags:
why i blog, what blogging means to me, blogging, right speech, the cluetrain manifesto

I just read a post by Ilan Pillemer titled “Tefillin embarassment” where he discovers a truth about marriage and wives. Wives say they are always right (some add that even when they are wrong, they are still right). In my short time with Gina I have (reluctantly) realised that she is right most of the time and the occasions when she is wrong are so rare that they are statistically irrelevant. The lesson to learn from all of this is to listen to your wife, she is never (really) wrong. It will probably save a lot of stress and aggravation later.

Technorati Tags:

wives, wife, listen, marriage, never wrong