Five days later since my last post…

…as I continue my current immersion, eyeballs glued to my connected screen, exploring the very wide and deep world of web-building resources; seeking those solutions that best fit my intention for my social site.

Now coming up for air here to report on the development journey — more in the line of the traditional personal blog where I have the luxury to be subjective like this. Although I will strive to express a ‘voice’ in the curated content on the social Howard site, it won’t be a space, a place for this kind of tone.

Making good progress on the curation track. While curation-as-product may be obvious on popular sites such as mashable and lifehacker, I did not appreciate the power and attractiveness of this process until I decided to step into the curation arena myself.

I have amassed a serious whack of social media sources for news, views and trends. There sure ain’t no lack of ’em in this historic phase of the web’s emergence, in these early days of mobile and the Internet of Things.

The intensive inter-connectivity we are enjoying amongst each other today, as individuals, groups and as cyber-commmunities — first on our desktops since the mid-nineties and rapidly exploding in this 21st century out onto smartphones and tablets — will continue to expand enormously in the months and years ahead.

Information ‘hubs‘ on the web will grow in value in our frenetic world, where readers can visit selected sites to catch up on the news about their particular interests.

Relevance, Consistency and Trust

I like to compare our present times to the wild frontier one hundred years ago when newspaper advertising was an unregulated, anything-goes approach to the publishing of display ads back then.

Not wanting to go off on that tangent in this post, however there are definite comparisons between the (literally!) snake oil patent medicine ads in those days gone by and the plethora of get-rich-quick-schemes in today’s wooly world of Internet marketing.

I guess the point I am making is the vital importance of reputation. To build enough trust where my readers keep returning cuz the stuff you are reading resonates with you. To establish trust in the choices that I make on what is relevant and important.

And of course consistency is paramount. Good food well prepared just like the restaurants we keep returning to…

So, until my next post, I will disappear again down the rabbit hole of discovery.

Next tunnel is the visual element — finding sources for copyright-compliant pictures to add to the prose.

I really do look forward to getting the social Howard site up and running soon, so that I can start using this here blog to muse on other topics as well — to decrease the devJournal obsession that owns me now.

Although, upon reflection, I must surrender to the reality that development, in all of its forms — as an integral part of learning — is a constant, never-ending activity in life.

Would really like to think that perpetual learning helps to keep us young — well, keeping the mind fresh, anyway…

Gosh! It’s been six days since my last devJournal post. On the one hand, I would prefer to post more frequently. On the other, I’ve been the busy beaver, immersed in ‘the build’ as I continue to determine and deploy the various components of my social site project. I very much look forward to ending this mystique and simply disclosing the domain name, however gotta be patient and make sure that I am properly prepared for the show, even though, to start, it will be a ‘soft launch’ for the good folks who are patiently following the journey here…

So what’s been accomplished in the hiatus since last Friday’s post?

Some essential steps, actually.

WordPress publishing platform: there’s a new kid on the block in the crowded world of WordPress theme providers, and I’ve been lucky enough to find myself as an early user in the first phase of a new start-up. It’s a ‘Swiss Army knife‘ soup-to-nuts all-inclusive solution for WordPress site building. I am keen to promote Shane’s elegant initiative, however – after a very brief introductory window of one week (this week!) – he is going dormant for a period of time after this Sunday, 16th February, to absorb the feedback that us beta testers are providing in his User Forum in order to continue to tweak his plugin‘s broad functionality. So here I am cloaking something else! My thinking is: why publish a link to a provider’s site if it’s not currently responsive (for the techies, that’s an intended pun), so I’ll ballyhoo Shane’s endeavour when he’s ready to go into his public release.

Learning resources platform plank: I mentioned earlier that the intention for the social site is twofold; firstly, to curate milestone activities in the prolific world of social media, and; secondly; to offer learning resources for individuals and business that guide and support best practices and effective use. To do that requires two transactional components, a shopping cart and a payment gateway. Well, I have set up accounts for both parts, and they will be built seamlessly into the ‘back end’ of the project site. A big step forward…

Amazon: I griped earlier about the 7-headed giant (7 countries, 7 separate stores, 7 different links for any e-book I want to recommend). So to get my puppy walking, I’ve set up an account with the US site, Amazon dot com, and we’ll get going for my readers here who have accounts at amazon.com and progress from there…

Email list management: I have set up an auto-responder account to effectively facilitate access to the learning resources that will be available on the social site. The thinking is to prepare for scale rather than to risk getting overwhelmed using manual email if this dream child actually finds some popularity. Shane’s theme plugin integrates with the auto-responder (its inherent in his theme design, actually — which is a key factor in my choosing his plugin solution).

So! Next steps will be to start meshing these gears together (just how many mixed metaphors I can get away with remains to be seen).

I admit my age when I recall the cliffhanger movies we went to on Saturday afternoons when admission was 99 cents…

Since 2007, I have been quite active on Facebook — alongside about a billion other people and counting! — to keep in touch with family, friends and with work colleagues spread all over the world, especially considering the kind of work I was doing before starting this Internet venture.

However, in the past couple of months, I have started to immerse myself in that other social network — Google Plus.

G+ will play a large part in the social media website project that I have been describing in my first few posts here.

One cool tech thing that can be done with G+ posts is to embed them outside of the Google ecosystem itself — which Google makes really easy to do cuz this draws people back into the Google-verse. To interact with these posts – to comment or to follow the author – one has to have and be signed into a Gmail account.

So, here’s my first of what will be ongoing Google Plus embeds on various topics that attract my interest (other than social media, which will be the focus of my other developing website project):

So my preference would be to to roar ahead here in my development journal log for the project website, noting all the to-do’s as they get done and get checked off of the list. But the risk, I guess, in being true to this public accountability also looks like it includes admitting to the challenges as well as the achievements.

As I examine the options for the e-commerce ‘back end’ of my social media project site, I am starting to realize that there are several decisions to be made that will affect the ‘build’ – the site architecture – as well as the amount of time to both construct and maintain this aspect of the endeavour.

One example: I am looking forward to describing several e-books about social media that have had an influence on my own thinking and direction that I would be confident to post, along with an Amazon Affiliate link. The amount of earnings from that effort would be very incremental, but at least would start to develop that dynamic part of the site.

However, after I created my Amazon.com Associates account last night, it became apparent that links to e-books on Amazon.com do not work for UK or Canadian or Indian customers of Amazon (the English language Azon sites) who have accounts to shop in their respective online stores.

All seven Amazon sites are totally separate. The support rep I spoke with late last night was very helpful in explaining the issues. In my own experience, Amazon customer service deserves their top-notch reputation. So now I must decide whether that small revenue-generating machine part is worth the time and effort — to post four links for every e-book that I describe.

It’s fine for an author to do that, as you can see here at the bottom of the page in this link where David Amerland is promoting his book, The Social Media Mind.

But for me to do that as an affiliate, its pennies of commission per sale.

So we shall see how I resolve that particular issue.

Why it’s a conundrum for me is that there’s just so much time in a day (and night), with many parts to assemble in this machine (and miles to go before I sleep, according to Robert Frost).

Also, as I mentioned yesterday, I want to produce a lively curation of the trends and newsworthy activities happening in the hubbub of social media, in order to earn your attention. That in itself is an investment of time to read and select what to publish.

And then there’s the learning products, the social media how-to’s for getting the most out of Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, etc. — both for personal use and for business. I’m making steady progress in collecting some useful resources to offer for purchase downloading, however there are several choices for installing the e-commerce transactional plugins and/or third-party services to enable that.

And then there’s the webinar track, which represents a huge potential for building a specific niche expertise. It is my own expectation that online video in all of its usages will be the next big disruptor. Google’s announcement just yesterday of their new web conferencing appliance, based on Hangouts, is one good example of what’s in the broadband pipeline.

So I must also allot enough time to build skills for producing Hangouts on Air as my webinar platform.

Anyway, enough kvetching. I need to get on with it and install a contact form and a comments section on this site so that I’m not just talking to myself here.

By the way: just out of curiosity, I checked my Google Analytics before heading to sleep last night (earlier this morning, actually), and was thrilled to see a first trickle of visitors. A bit of a mystery cuz this site is not showing up yet in Google search, and I have not yet linked howardarfin.com to my Google Plus profile in order to boost my Author Ranking in search, and I have not mentioned nor publicized this nascent effort to anyone yet. So where is the traffic coming from?

Speaking of Google Author Rank, my Authorship Profile – complete with photo – started appearing in search for my Google Plus profile yesterday, which for me was humbly awesome. Here’s a screen grab of that:

So I’ve decided to publish a ‘development journal’ to describe the learning process I’m experiencing as I build my first Internet project that’s currently being set up in parallel with this blog.

As I wrote yesterday on Day One of stepping out here into cyberspace, the project’s implementation is the result of some arduous exploring of what’s possible and consequently what’s required.

Among the measures of online success, apart from the enjoyment of simply writing, would be readership, as measured in the analytics, and – if there is something of tangible value being offered – then it could be the success of an e-commerce venture, which is the underpinning of the project.

This core blog, howardarfin.com, begins as a candid effort of personal expression. The e-commerce project is an attempt to introduce a more practical if somewhat ambitious endeavour: curation and learning resources in one of the biggest ‘niches’ on the web — social media.

Here’s a list of the project’s components, what I’m calling the machine parts; the nomenclature is inspired by a non-fiction, early tech thriller I read many years ago called The Soul of a New Machine:

* choosing a domain name – done

* selecting a hosting provider – done, same one as this blog: BlueHost

* deciding on a publishing platform – done, an easy decision: WordPress, same as this blog

* site configuration – theme, plugins, widgets, social share buttons, author ranking, etc. – work in progress

* contact email set-up – done for this blog and getting done for the project site

* list-building – need to decide which auto-responder to use

* e-commerce offerings – filtering through a huge inventory of social media learning resources to select quality content for ‘stocking the shelves.’ This is a critical reputational issue for me: to deliver value!

* e-commerce transactions – I’m researching a basic WordPress plugin to keep it as simple as possible

* e-commerce gateway – PayPal, of course, which also includes the major credit card merchant accounts

* service offerings – to differentiate myself in an effort to build ‘authority‘ beyond the provision of helpful social media learning resources, I’m also studying how to produce webinars based on Google HangOuts on Air. More on this later…

There are other bits and pieces such as whether to create a Gravatar, and stocking up on royalty-free and public domain photos and graphics to add visual appeal. I’ll document the various machine parts in my devJournal as they get selected, configured and installed.

Definitely a full plate, if I may be allowed to mix my metaphors between the building of an Internet machine and the pleasure of food.

As I wrote in my first post, I intend to use this space, this place, as my core personal presence on the web; to write about whatever comes to my attention that I deem worthy to share here.

And to note, at this nascent stage,  that I have not yet enabled the comments functionality cuz I first want to ‘find my feet’ and get comfortable with the technical underpinnings. In a little while, I will very much look forward to receiving your feedback.

So, apart from this blog serving (pardon the pun) as a platform for content curation — for publishing interesting links with descriptions about my own myriad interests — I will be creating a specific category named devJournal to write about, and to track by means of an open journal, my first focused Internet project, which I am currently building side-by-side with this blog.

Since finishing what was my last ‘mission’ as an international humanitarian aid worker — I’m ahead of myself here; I will be preparing a backgrounder About page that describes my previous life; but today is my charter day as a blogger and I’m keen to post my first entries — so since finishing that last contract, I have been on this sabbatical in Goa, India, doing a deep dive (on the Internet as well as in the ocean, ha ha) into the realm of project possibilities based on web opportunities.

And there are many such opportunities indeed! I must admit that the net (yes, another pun) got spread very wide as I cast about seeking what would resonate with me. There is so much hype and so many grand fortune-making promises out there. I found myself falling down several rabbit holes before coming up for air.

But now, after many twists and turns, I am breathing the fresh, clean air blown in from the ocean. In the devJournal posts to come, I will begin to describe that project, and I’ll also launch it from this blog when its ready for prime time…

Hello.

This blog has taken a long time to arrive here. A lot of thought (probably too much thinking!) about the why and the what for doing this.

WordPress makes it relatively easy to set this up. All the blogging advice (and blogging how-to is a burgeoning industry in its own right) says that you gotta have a particular topic to attract a readership. The buzzword is “authority.” And as the web techies know, Google has developed the means to establish technical authorship so that – if you do it right – your name and photo appears in the search results based on the keywords closest to you.

To thrive on the interweb, its a miasma of keywords, back links and guest posts.

Hmmmm. Wonder if keyword copywriting for epitaphs is a niche opportunity for establishing cybernetic eternity…

So anyway, fool that I am, I am plunging into this blogosphere against the popular wisdom. Inspired by the James Altucher approach to just put oneself out there as one is. Not exactly naked, but at least as honest as one can be.

By the way, I look forward to name-dropping the good folk I happen upon here in cyberspace who are influencing my own sense of Internet identity. This global, virtual town square called the Internet — where great thinkers, profound  wisdom, and a good dollop of the inane to balance things out — is truly a great wonder of our time.

And with the launch today of this blog, I now formally and officially make a commitment to best effort in creating some value for you who choose to invest your own precious time in reading these musings…..

Tuesday night, February 4th, 2014, 21:00 hours, south Goa, India.

Posting some words here to have something on the screen with these first tiny steps into starting my blog. Been a long time to arrive here, and much learning ahead…..