If you have someone reading your posts that is a big deal — it means that person finds value in your content and appreciates it, if that doesn’t make you happy as a blogger then I don’t know what else will

Keywords: Blogging Tips , bblogger , beauty , beautyblogger , blog , blogger , blogging , inspiration , life , lifestyle , makeup , tips , tipsandtricks , writing

You don’t reach happiness when you accomplish a certain goal or dream of yours when it comes to your blog. I personally think if you feel that way then you won’t have anything to look forward to afterwards because blogging in itself is a journey without a finishing line or destination. Happiness is a concept we created so we have something to strive for in general.

https://new-lune.com/2022/07/05/how-to-cultivate-happiness-when-blogging

Feeling at Home with Indigenous Feelings

Why are gut feelings so often the best, the most reliable feelings? Why are they so often difficult to express using words? It might be foolish to jump to conclusions, to bifurcate into right and wrong, but a careful investigation of what we do and / or ought to base our decisions on might be very useful.

This is a big part of one of my new projects, Indigena — a view of information based in natural science and something like native intuition:

Indigena and propaganda are long-standing concepts based in the Latin language. They are basically opposites. Indigena (from “endo-” + “genus”) means inborn (either as adjective or as a noun). Propaganda is a term from the point of view of the propagandist — meaning essentially to propagate something (such as Christianity) in another environment (from its own native environment). In a zero-sum world, concepts are either native (indigena) or foreign (propaganda).

https://indigenous.news.blog/2022/05/07/propaganda-information-technology-vs-indigena-information-technology-the-basic-idea

Indigena information is information we feel at home with, it is expressed in our own native language, it corresponds with our own gut feelings. We can feel at home in many languages, and as we expand our horizons, so too our own community expands with our own expansion of communications. We need not have information forced upon us, nor do we need to force information upon others. We communicate freely and easily the more we interact. We gradually become more and more native in more and more contexts — it is as if fluency is the currency we use to exchange ideas with one another (see also “Linguistic Empathy & Community Boundaries” [ https://socio.business.blog/2022/05/15/linguistic-empathy-community-boundaries ] ).

Speaking of which: WordPress CMS is the new Online Layout

Josepha is a communications expert — that is a very broad statement, and Josepha has a very broad scope.

She communicates very well, and does so on a wide variety of channels. She speaks. She gesticulates. She uses facial expressions. Intonation. She listens, empathizes, considers viewpoints, takes on perspectives. She writes, she reads, she leads and directs. She publishes — naturally, this is to be expected. Why? Naturally, because she is Executive Director of the WordPress project.

Why do I mention all of this here and now?

In just under two months we will both be participating at the WordCamp Europe (WCEU) conference in Porto (Portugal) … together with many other leading participants not only from all across Europe but from all across the globe.

Personally, I aim to be leading discussions and conversations primarily related to natural language search technology and also about the impacts such technologies have on the global media landscape (cf. “Literacy = ! { an on-off switch }” [ https://socio.business.blog/2022/04/09/literacy-an-on-off-switch ] ) … and also about how WordPress — since WordPress has become the open source machine that powers so much of the online world [1] — how this particular and popular standard CMS is now on the verge of establishing open source as the lingua franca of a wide array of technologies (and for me the most significant among these technologies remains natural language search technology).

For more about such Great Expectations, please see leading.business.blog

For more about Josepha and her expertise, please see josepha.blog [ https://josepha.blog ]

For a quick review of my remarks related to natural language search @ WCEU in Paris (2017), please see http://fun.freezine.org/2018/02/22/woohoo-wordpress-advanced-search

[1] The WordPress open source CMS is very widespread and is also the template for many courses and classes worldwide — so this “online” technology is quite analagous to the way that standardized keyboard layouts became the standard machines a century or two ago, and also much in the same way that the scientific method made open publication the sine qua non of science three or four centuries ago.
Featured image via https://josepha.blog/about/speaking
Porto image via https://europe.wordcamp.org/2022/centuries-of-porto-at-your-disposal

My “Social Business” Project

I have been quite involved with starting another one of my many dozens of concurrent projects over the past few weeks, so I’ve decided to also feature it here.

Let’s start with my own slight variation on a theme coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau a few hundred years ago:

People are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains

https://socio.business.blog/social-business/what-is-the-primary-goal-of-social-business

While I myself tend to hang out pretty far at the liberal end of the socio-economic political spectrum (having been born and also having grown up by and large in the freedom-loving “land of the free” United States of America), I am not so naive to think there is anything “natural” about our (or Rousseau’s) notion of “freedom” — as in the classical “noble savage” view. On the contrary, I would place that closer to ignorance of scientific facts than anything like enlightened thinking.

These issues are immensely complex, so this is not something I entertain to address — let alone tackle — in a single blog post. Therefore, I have created a “Social Business” series … which I expect to reach book length before anything conclusive might actually spring from it. Note I said book-length rather than book. If you choose to follow along, you should prepare yourself more for a dizzying and meandering magic-carpet ride than for a walk in the park.

To whet your appetite towards drowning yourself in the vast floods of daydreaming, here a small addendum to the above quote:

this is the puzzle this project is all about: How do we (best) reconcile this contradiction? We cannot have complete freedom, we cannot have complete regulation. Any fanatical fantasies of dictatorial power ought not to cloud our judgement that we must reject such ambitions vehemently whenever and wherever they may occur.

https://socio.business.blog/social-business/what-is-the-primary-goal-of-social-business

Oh, another thing: You will probably easily recognize that I have so far put zero effort into the visual design of the site. All I have done so far, I guess, is to feverishly write in short whimsical sprints whenever I find the “free” time (usually these bouts are weekend happenings).

To Disrupt or Not to Disrupt — that is one of Charlene’s Questions

Charlene Li has many questions. I came into contact with some of her ideas when she was working closely together with Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester, finally publishing the book “Groundswell” together with Josh Bernoff well over a decade ago.

Recently, I discovered an interview with Charlene done by Bob Buday … and I have already written about a number of aspects of the many topics covered (see, for example, “We saw with the pandemic that some organizations that struggled with change, and others that changed quickly” [ https://networks.business.blog/2022/01/06/we-saw-with-the-pandemic-that-some-organizations-that-struggled-with-change-and-others-that-changed-quickly ] ).

Here, I would like to share yet another one of Charlene’s insightful remarks shared in that interview .. in which she touches on the delicate dance she does with her notion of disruption:

If it’s about you, if it’s about your thoughts and your ideas, it will never resonate. If it’s about how you are helping people, if you’re really clear about who you are helping, and understand that they have pain points and needs, and that you’re writing very specifically to those pain points, you will always resonate.

Charlene Li [see link above for interview, ca. 17:00 – 17:30 ]

Charlene continues to explain that she thinks of the way her target audience (or more precisely her typical reader) “wants to know how she can move things forward without upsetting the apple cart.” Later in the interview she notes that she (Charlene) feels like “in every interaction — even this conversation here — I’m learning so much from it.”

So there are a lot of ideas peppered in short soundbites throughout the discussion. It is only once we (as readers) become aware of the intricate connections between these individual ideas that the complexity of the big picture among those individual puzzle pieces becomes clear. In this particular instance, it is the question about whether you wish to disrupt others or whether you wish them to disrupt you — whether to be disrupting or to be disrupted. If your job is to sell apples from your apple cart on the deck aboard an open sea-faring ship, then this is indeed quite a difficult dance to engage in.

Charlene’s expertise is in the field of business, so she is well-versed in speaking the language business leaders can easily understand. I feel she is herself a leading expert in such hand-holding while embarking on a wide variety of journeys a wide array of businesses envision in their own immediate futures.

Whereas I myself am more prone to extrapolate much further out towards the end results (such as how the revolutionary changes brought about through business networks based on natural language search will ultimately lead to the eradication of brand names as significant and/or trustworthy phenomena — see e.g. the wiki about “Social Business” @ http://socio.biz 😉 ), Charlene is probably much more adept at explaining each individual step business leaders should take in the near term in order to optimally sell their apples on their apple cart aboard their IRL brand name ocean liner.