(Compare: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything – NPR ).

This is the fundamental equation you have to understand about the information economy, and Attention being its only scarce resource: While supply of content of all types is going to infinity, the total amount of available Attention remains essentially static. Thus, the price for content must by necessity trend toward ZERO.

As for Curation, here is the money quote from Kevin: “Instead you will pay Amazon, or Netflix, or Spotify, or Google for their suggestions of what you should pay attention to next. Amazon won’t be selling books (which are marginally free); they will be selling their recommendations of what to read.”

We are beginning to see many examples of this already, e.g. here: “Not #free, but close: Amazon is selling digital downloads of Lady Gaga’s newest album for 99 cents -> j.mp/jRhhZz “.

Also, there are plenty of enterprising young artists that are bypassing the old structures entirely, and are going straight to FREE + Social Media Marketing + Monetizing the value-added back-end in the ways that are the only ones predicted to work with FREE (See: Gerd Leonhard on The Future Of Selling). E.g. here: “Stanford-educated rapper embraces fan piracy – Video – CNN Money -> bit.ly/k2B3Iv“

And Apple has been busily buying up deals with most of the major music labels, to presumably offer an Apple-branded “cloud-based” music streaming service very soon [this was unveiled as iTunes Match in the fall of 2011]. If they are smart, they will price it within what I call Impulse Purchase Territory, ideally somewhere between $1-5/month.

I’ve said previously that e.g. Sony is making a huge mistake by not going the $1/month route for complete/unlimited streaming music access with their own new offering:

Because “that would put it in the complete impulse purchase, don’t-need-to-think, will-likely-never-cancel-for-any-reason category. What if they could thereby garner 100 Million users, thus spending about $1.2 Billion, or in other words about 20% of what still is left of the global music industry?!”

If Apple doesn’t do it, then someone else eventually will. Only then will some in the #Dinomedia come to see, that the race was not about who was still going to eek out some residual “crumbs” profits from the Old System, but who was going to wholesale import the masses into their Ecosystem…

Instead of dumb ideas like the New York Times Pay Wall…I mean Fence, that only prove the deep denial that many from the Old Guard still find themselves in, because… well… the good old days, they were so very nice…

While they lasted. Looking at all of these examples I can’t help but be reminded of one of my favorite quotes by SciFi author William Gibson: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Better wake up quick, because, as Seth Godin says, “Whining isn’t a scalable solution.”

The Satisfaction Paradox

…What if you lived in a world where every great movie, book, song that was ever produced was at your fingertips as if “for free”, and your filters and friends had weeded out the junk, the trash, and anything that would remotely bore you. The only choices would be the absolute cream of the cream, the things your best friend would recommend. What would you watch or read or listen to next?

In theory, you would not choose since it does not matter. Leave it to serendipity, since every option is wonderful. If your filtering/recommendation system really is working, then anything you accept from them should be satisfying.

This is the psychological problem of dealing with abundance rather than scarcity. It is not quite the same problem of abundance articulated by the Paradox of Choice, the theory that we find too many choices paralyzing.

…what outfits like Amazon will be selling in the future. For the price of a subscription you will subscribe to Amazon and have access to all the books in the world at a set price. (An individual book you want to read will be as if it was free, because it won’t cost you extra.) The same will be true of movies (Netflix), or music (iTunes or Spotify or Rhapsody.) You won’t be purchasing individual works.

Instead you will pay Amazon, or Netflix, or Spotify, or Google for their suggestions of what you should pay attention to next. Amazon won’t be selling books (which are marginally free); they will be selling their recommendations of what to read.

You’ll pay the subscription fee in order to get access to their recommendations to the “free” works, which are also available elsewhere. Their recommendations (assuming continual improvements by more collaboration and sharing of highlights, etc.) will be worth more than the individual books. You won’t buy movies; you’ll buy cheap access and pay for personalized recommendations.”

In the last 7 months most of my blogging and curating has happened on Google+ (find me here and add me to your Circles), but for various reasons that I will explain later (one of them is that the affordances for longer, more serious posts with multiple images or screencaps are still very poor there), I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to revive this blog.

As a first step, I am going to republish (and update) a number of key posts from both my Amplify and Google+ streams, those with the most evergreen value to refer back to in future posts, of which I have quite a few in the pipeline.

Here are the topics I have been writing most frequently about, designated by #hashtag for easy recognition on all services (Blog, Google+, Twitter, asf.):

#Dinomedia – issues around Old Media still trying to resist the digital age, and is still confused about the problem of

#Freeconomics – how to still charge for something when everything digital is trending toward $0.

#Content – the overall problem of Content Overabundance and the Content Creator’s Dilemma, and how they relate to #Blogging and #Curation.

#MobileWars and #TabletWars – Apple’s iOS against… well, mostly it’s just Android now, even though as I predicted, the going is much tougher for Android on tablets than on smartphones.

#PatentWars – especially in Mobile, but in general in technology and software. In the past I have also filed many items under #PatentlyAbsurd, and sometimes under #CopyWrong, where we are dealing more with the issues of Copyright in the Age of Freeconomics and Moving The #Freeline.

#GeoWars have been a subsection of Mobile topics, and while they aren’t burning as brightly as they did in 2010/2011, we’ll keep our eyes on the developments there. Basically, Foursquare has been pulling away in the space, in part due to its keen understanding of #Gamification.

Last but not least, I always collect and write about #Mindhacks (especially Business Mindhacks such as #Pricing and #Branding psychology that has reared its head in a big way for the would-be iPad competitors), #Lifehacks, and Productivity / Getting Things Done ( #GTD ).

I will very likely include a new/updated detailed “pillar post” for each of these. The Business Mindhacks blog is also going to get a visual redesign in short order, including an overhaul for better rendering/readability on Mobile devices.

By the way, today 31 / 366 = 8.5% of your year have already expired. Time to get busy. Tick tock…

Best wishes – Alex Schleber

Why? Because Gamification has not only been one of the trend words of 2010/11 in tech, but also one of the very real trends in the actual designs of user experiences/user interfaces (UX/UI).

Here are some key excerpts from a great recent post, The Gamification of Life, the Universe and Everything by Allan Patrick:

As the first “Gamification” workshop in London was held today, I thought it might be interesting to look at this rather fascinating Fortune article about Seth Priebatsch who:

…sensed something three years ago that most of the rest of us did not: that a generation raised on video games would want to keep playing a game in real life. “I found out that basically the real world was essentially the same game as Civilization [an old computer game], just with slightly better graphics… and slightly slower.”

[...] ”I have a much broader definition of game than most other people,” he says, explaining that games are just systems of challenges, rewards, and biases.

So it turns out that a lot of this straight-up Behaviorist thinking is very important in the development of technology, more important than most people realized before the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, and more important than most of us would like to admit to ourselves. Because… well… we like tho think of ourselves as more evolved than simple stimulus/response “machines”.

But the fact is that whenever a game or game-like structure is presented to people, people as human beings will tend to play them. This fact is of course much older than Social Media, or than the above-mentioned computer games, though Seth may be right that the acceptance of game mechanics in all manner of contexts could have only gone up, not down, from these societal developments.

In fact, The Wall Street Journal wrote recently that “some analysts claim 50% of businesses will be gamified by 2015″!

One recent example of what I call an “indirect game mechanic” is the Twitter “follower count game”, which a lot of people were “playing” rather vigorously ca. 2009-2010. The fact that this count metric is presented front-and-center on the services main user pages, keeping score like a pinball machine, enticed users to jump through all sorts of hoops in their quest to gain more followers.

But even the micro-blogging activity itself on Twitter could be described as having game-like aspects, because 1) the activity is short and regulated (the 140 character limit on Twitter had more implications than people realized).

And 2), there are instant feedback loops such as the tweet count (“score”) going up, your tweet becoming an instantly visible “result” in your and other people’s update stream, and further intermittent/irregular-schedule feedback by other people responding to your tweets, or passing them on as Retweets.

Twitter’s @ mentions tab is the Behaviorist’s irregular reward-schedule mechanism of sorts, because we are literally pre-programmed to check for our reciprocal attention “reward” often. Behaviorists such as Skinner and Pavlov figured out long ago that such an “irregular reward schedule” was the most reinforcing of all.

So it comes as no surprise that the micro-blogging activity has become so self-reinforcing (in other words: addictive) for a lot of people, that they do things subsumed under it that they heretofore shunned. For example, doing a form of short-burst knowledge management (KM) inside of corporate organizations or more loosely-based interest groups.

Twitter clones like Yammer and SalesForce.com’s Chatter have sprung up since 2009 that propose to piggy-back on these effects, and are creating real changes to internal information flow and exchange: It turns out that with all previous iterations of corporate KM attempts, people were simply not incentivized in a way that “made them” actually do the desired activity…

Here’s a key quote I curated in 2009:

[W]hoever acquires Twitter will in essence take possession of an army of… tens of millions… of humans who are actively, accurately, and enthusiastically meta-tagging pages. In the arena of human-augmented search, Mahalo is a useful wheelbarrow, while Twitter is a fleet of 747 cargo planes.

The key word here is “enthusiastically”… why? Why is anyone enthusiastic? In large part due to the underlying gamification “rewards” as described above!

It is very important to understand all of this if you want to think yourself into the “games” of current and future social media. As Allan Patrick states:

The trend will be to build in more gamification by adding in more games for people to play:

- There are no badges and mayorships in SCVNGR [Priebatsch's own gamified geo-location-based service similar to Foursquare]. There are points, and you get these points by not just checking-in, but also by doing various crowd-generated “challenges” while you’re at the place you’re at. [...]

- He started a pilot program in Boston and Philadelphia that gives users better and better deals as people continue to come back to a restaurant. “Pure [geo] checking-in isn’t going mainstream,” he says, and is working on a Groupon-Gamification called Level-Up [...]

There is no doubt that the “white hat” attraction of Gamification is to get people more hooked on your online businesses rather than the competitor’s, and also [...] the “black hat” attraction of getting your hands on more of people’s personal data, the New New Gold.

I would have to agree. Some of it will be explicit, in the form of games that are identified as such. But much of it will be more implicit, or “invisible game mechanics” not consciously perceived as real games, but of game-like character.

And either way these will get you and hundreds of millions of other people online to do certain activities, billions of times a month. Still think you can afford to not understand Gamification?

Is Blogging dying, or at least on the decline?

The article has sparked a good bit of debate, prompting e.g. GigaOM to retort: “Blogging Is Dead Just Like the Web Is Dead .”

But rather than latch on to the specifics of some percentage gains or losses, that may well be semantically arguable as pointed out in the Times piece, I believe the key quote to be this:

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

Which is both an argument for the type of Curation-plus-commentary-plus-community activity I’ve been advocating for on my current “mini-blogging” platform of choice, Amplify.com, as well as apt to highlight what I have come to call “the Content Creator’s Plight” or Dilemma (I’ve been cooking up a longer, substantive post on this for a few months, but ironically always find myself dragged in other directions…):

It is difficult enough to keep up with our 21st century information “maelstrom” to begin with. And to arrest the flow of the real-time Web long enough in one’s mind to write much of substance on rapidly emergent, “newsy” topics, so that a post might persist in providing value for longer than a day or two. The other day I curated a post that aptly coined the term “content decay” in this regard.

In a way, it represents a massive act of will, especially in the face of what is now a fair number of professional “blogging machines” (like Techcrunch), that do nothing else.

Now add to that the fact that without already having sufficiently large, built-in audience, which very few bloggers ultimately achieve, the motivation for these “acts of will” is very quickly used up… Notice the second sentence in the above quote, which points out that many find such a built-in audience, and hence at least perceived affirmation, on their social networks of choice.

A service like Amplify, and intelligent curation tools in general, can solve at least the first issue, and while many of its curation peers are neglecting the community/conversation angle, this is where Amplify ultimately shines in solving the second problem to some extent as well.

Going back to the original question, one could say that blogging is most definitely evolving, though also certainly still alive and well:

[B]logging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.

Ultimately, people are still expressing themselves online, in however long or short a form (though the trend has certainly gone toward the Twitter- or SMS-like micro-blogging), and the main differences are merely the User Interface (UI) metaphors used.

For example, Amplify has been wrestling with the issues of providing easy-to-use, elegant metaphors, while still maintaining a modicum of depth and relevance for conversation. Bigger services such as Tumblr (another mini-blogging tool) or Twitter have grown so rapidly precisely due to the extreme, push-button simplicity with which content could be created or curated, and passed along socially.

As I’ve argued before, Simplicity Wins, but there is also a fine line to walk to provide both simplicity, as well as still allow for the depth that at least some of us crave.

So how did they get here: By understanding something about human psychology, and then HACKING it for all its worth.

1) Addict people with SIMPLE, low learning-curve games, that 2) are social in the way you might have played certain board games in real life in the past, and that 3) have Irregular Reward Schedules (these are the most addicting forms of behavioral reinforcers, read up on your Behaviorism 101…).

THEN, 4) offer them little ways to essentially cheat in the games (making things go more smoothlyfor you), that 5) can be purchased for amounts that fall within the Impulse Purchase threshold, i.e. below the price level where your conscious mind kicks in fully and begins to wonder whether this is really a good idea, asf.

Read the following quote at least 3 times to yourself: “Zynga makes all its money selling virtual goods…Tiny amounts of money make the games progress faster.” (From Business Insider.) If you get it, you’ll know that tons of companies have been neglecting/violating the lessons therein to their considerable detriment.

I just argued yesterday that Sony is making a huge mistake by not going the $1/month route for complete/unlimited streaming music access with their new offering:

Another example that I saw just yesterday: Clever Twitter service “Buffer” ( @bufferapp ), which allows you to in essence do a bit.ly-like bookmarklet share to Twitter WITH automatic posting throttling/buffering built-in, so that your tweets are dripped out over time even though you can batch collect them all at once over, say, your morning blog reading hour:

All great, except that they are mispricing their premium levels very badly: 10 tweets in buffer, 3 tweets a day is Free. $5/month for 50 tweets in buffer, 10 tweets/day dripped, and $30/month (crazy…!?) for all unlimited is simply not going to work for them IMO. [See: http://www.bufferapp.com/pricing ]

$5/month is outside of impulse purchase range, while $1/month = Bingo! Sold! At $5, your mind is beginning to ask: Do I really need this? Is it worth it? Can I justify it directly via increased ROI? Where/how am I even going to measure this ROI?

All questions that you DON’T WANT your prospective customer asking at the entry point!! Which is exactly what Zynga has realized so brilliantly, and to such obvious success. The proof of the (psych) pudding is still in the eating… Zynga: “Would you like to improve your position in this game you are already playing for 10 cents?” – Unconscious Mind: “You bet I would.”

Which brings me to another of my pet points about successful online advertising/selling: Offer people only things which make sense in the context of what they were ALREADY doing. In this case, don’t try to offer them after shave, bracelets, or cars while they are playing Farmville, offer them something to do with Farmville!

Disclosure: I don’t play Farmville or CityVille, and have never tossed sheep or vampires at my Facebook friends. I do however study these phenomena very closely… :)

CHART OF THE DAY: The Death Of The Music Industry

This stunning chart needs to be put in some context to understand the true nature of the upheaval facing what I like to call the “Dinomedia”:

1) Forget About Buying Music Online – People Don’t Even Want To STEAL Music!

2) FREE can actually work, with a little creativity: “How Girl Talk mashes up the Music Biz”.

3) Sony’s new “idea” to launch a me-too Music subscription service priced the way they are proposing is 1) Doomed, and 2) fails to take the reality of the above chart into account:

“Sony believes its huge userbase and retail presence can help its subscription music service succeed where countless similar services have failed.
…
The Basic tier of service — which will cost $3.99 per month in the U.S. — gives users a set of curated music channels with the ability to fast-forward and rate songs. That’s very similar to what users can get for free from Pandora and countless other Internet radio stations, as well as the free music channels on digital cable TV systems.

The Premium tier — $9.99 per month in the U.S. — is the same price as countless other subscription services (Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, Microsoft’s Zune Pass, and so on) but doesn’t have any mobile story [yet].”

Their retail presence?! Really? That is exactly the portion of the music business that is dying completely. I thought Denial was usually one of the earlier stages of the “5 Stages of Grief” model…

Why can’t they understand that they have next to NO PRICING POWER left? (Again: Many cannot be bothered to STEAL their product anymore…).

That they are much better off gaining whatever Attention Pie/eyeballs/earballs they can for their music ecosystem (and make further back-end sales there later on, similar to what ONE LONE, yet innovative DJ is able to do)?

For example, what if Sony were to do something bold, and price the “Premium” subscription at $1/month, no contract. That would put it in the complete impulse purchase, don’t-need-to-think, will-likely-never-cancel-for-any-reason category.

What if they could thereby garner 100 Million users, who would be spending about $1.2 Billion, in other words…about 20% of what still is left of the global music industry?!

At that price, could they get 200 Million users? One would hope so. Given that Apple is expecting to sell 40M+ iPad tablet computers costing $499 and up this year alone…

Wake up, #Dinomedia, before it is forever too late…

(Read my original post on why 100 Day countdowns are meaningful and actually work here.)

As you may have noticed, I’ve taken an extended hiatus from blogging this summer, and am just now finishing up a 6 week project that took a little longer than expected.

But I am back, and determined to finish out the last 100 days of 2010 STRONG, which includes posting regularly again.

BTW, I have remained somewhat active on Amplify.com curating the Business Mindhacks relevant goings on from across the Web and the Tech world. You can catch up here:

alexschleber.amplify.com

I had already been bringing key excerpts along with quick comments and footnotes through Posterous to my Twitter followers, which proved useful and popular. Amplify has been taking it up a notch in terms of intelligent Curation, as well as a great community with much engagement all around.

OK, back to the 100 Day Countdown and finishing the year out strong:

Decide right now what you want to accomplish until then in your business and/or personal life, and you’ll be doing yourself a much bigger favor than if you were waiting around to making those typically flimsy, rapidly forgotten New Year’s resolutions on December 31.

As SelfGrowth.com editor David Riklan once wrote in a newsletter email:

What if I were to follow you with a camera crew for the next 100 days while you went for your goals? I bet 3 things would happen…

1) You would START doing the things you say you need to do.
2) You would STOP doing the things you know you shouldn’t be doing.
3) You would MAKE monumental performance gains and change your life.

Here’s to your finishing strong!

Best wishes

- Alex Schleber

Mind boggling, isn’t it?

So the question is, how can your message, product, or service break through the noise?

I found this great Social Media counter widget in Jim Long’s (AKA @NewMediaJim on Twitter) thoughtful post The End of Innocence – Why Social Media Is the New Corporate Media, where he writes:

As social media has matured, I get the sense that [...] now we’re back to where we once were. Brands just want access to us and the transaction remains the same.  Look, I understand that companies need to make money and that investors need to get returns [...]. But I’m struck by the rapacious speed with which social media, its adherents, and platforms are pursuing the buck. Ironic to me, considering that it was dissatisfaction with traditional media and “push” advertising that in many respects gave rise to social media.

So, what are your thoughts? Is Social Media already dying as a marketing strategy due to relentless overcrowding, in essence a form of the “Tragedy of the Commons” principle?

Are hyper-localization or micro-niches the only possible answer to this onslaught?

One of the few things that appears to still work reliably on a grander scale is deep Archetype Branding, of the kind that Apple, successful Hollywood movies, and even some New Media personalities (like Gary Vaynerchuck, Unmarketing, or iJustine) have in common.

Any other ideas?

Still working on modifying that habit to posting here instead… :)

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt: More proof that (c) copyrights are mostly only killing your ideas – these stats are shocking, the question is, will you heed their message and Move The Freeline?
• Excerpt: Smart take from Scoble on the coming #geo-location service wars – (Geo)-Location was all the rage at SXSWi this year, and will be for the rest of the year into the future. Are you staying on top of this?
• Key excerpt from: “Dear Google Buzz team..” + my footnotes – Google Buzz made a lot of mistakes on launch, so many that it may yet damn Buzz to obscurity. Here are some thoughts on what needs fixing YESTERDAY.
• Key excerpt from: “Twitter Ad Platform Imminent” – We didn’t get the much inticipated news on this from SXSWi, so the question of what it will look like is still the Elephant in the Room…
• My comment on: “15 Features Apple Must Build Into iPhone OS 4 -> An Amazing Mobile Ad System” – Everyone thinks a sort of gimmick will fix digital advertising (whether mobile or regular internet doesn’t really matter). The only thing that can work is…

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

Still working on modifying that habit to posting here instead… :)

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt on Google’s non-social DNA from: “Why Google won’t give Twitter or Facebook a buzz cut tomorrow” Google has been struggling with creating their own successful Social Media, and there is a reason…
• Scott Stratten demonstrates a potential Geo-Location Mishap in: “@Unmarketing’s 4 Point Social Media Future” Geo is only gaining in importance, but the potential pitfalls and even outright dangers should keep those companies on their toes.
• Key Twitter-relevant excerpt from Scoble’s: “Google’s two-front war with Apple and Facebook”
• Steve Moses..I mean Jobs..comes down from the mountain, and..the Tablet is busted?! Did Steve Jobs finally reach the limits of his presentation magic? Is the iPad “a bridge too far”?
• Key Moving The Freeline excerpt from: “5 Essential Blogging Tips from Confucius | Copyblogger” More validation for a concept that is the key to winning in the Attention Economy.

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt on Hyperlocal Advertising from: "2010 Predictions – ReadWriteWeb" Yet more reasons for Rupert Murdoch to shake in his boots…
• Key excerpt from: "What Matters Now" – Gary Vaynerchuck validates Moving the Freeline I preach the concept, nice to see it validated by a social media "big deal".
• Pretty Funny From A Frank Kern Email – FTC Christmas Cards… Half in jest, fully in earnest as they say… this topic will occupy us in 2010 more and for longer than a lot of people are realizing.
• Key excerpt from: "FTC trains government focus on..bloggers – HotAir.com" – gov’t overreach in action More on the FTC’s overreach. A whole new class of complaint will likely get added to our already over-developed litigation menu.
• Why would Twitter lie this blatantly about its broken "Retweets by others" UI? Strong words, but this post struck a nerve. Twitter has been acting a bit too Orwellian of late. The issue has been fixed since then, the PR black-eye remains…

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

We get into the subjectives of what makes natural-born blogger [NBB]. Here are some of the ideas.

1. An natural-born blogger doesn’t wait for permission.

2. A NBB explains things, even when they don’t understand. An NBB is often proved wrong, to which the NBB shrugs his or her shoulders and says something like ["So what"].

3. NBBs go first. If there’s an NBB around you don’t have to wait for a volunteer.

4. NBBs err on the side of saying too much. If you find yourself wishing someone would just [shut up already] you’re very likely looking at an NBB.

Note: Small edits for colorful language… :)

At first sight, it would appear that these points, while well taken, apply only to blogging. And almost in a too-obvious fashion at that.

Unless you have concerned yourself with all manner of business building and entrepreneurship mindset issues, like I tend to do, and take a second look.

Then it becomes clear to you that these are among the most important guide posts for all entrepreneurial activity, and by extension for success in life in a more general sense:

1. Successful people don’t wait for permission

They don’t wait for someone to appoint them to something important (which almost never happens anyway). They give themselves permission to go ahead, they self-appoint.

If you’re uncomfortable with that idea, then you have just identified an important mindset block that is very likely massively holding you back in your business building efforts or aspirations.

I guarantee that almost no one will ever appoint you the expert of your market niche, you have to give yourself permission to be that expert. Of course, you have to make sure you can back it up, else a self-proclamation will ring hollow over time. But the initial catalyst lies within you alone.

2. Successful people shrug off failure

Successful people shrug off failure as if it means nothing, because… well… it doesn’t. All you ever get is a result, all subsequent meaning of that result exists almost entirely in your head.

Any misstep means only that you must be getting closer to your goal than you were before (when you didn’t take any action at all). And of course hopefully you learned something in the process.

The only thing that truly IS tragic is not failure, but being caught in paralysis due to fear of failure. It keeps you suspended in an infinite “possibility loop”, never wanting to find out the truth by either getting proof-of-concept, or not, and moving on to the next concept. It’s a form of addiction to and idea or ideas we have come to hold dear.

Best to find out this week, this month if that idea is only robbing you of precious psychic and other energy…

3. Successful people are ahead of the curve

In branding/positioning there is the well-proven concept of “first mover advantage”, which tends to bestow disproportionate rewards on those that “show up early to the party”.

While the inventor doesn’t always get financial rewards, the Category Leader, the person or business that can install themselves as first for that category in the minds of the consumer (to be taken in the broadest possible sense of a marketplace here), almost always does.

Hence we get Microsoft being more or less unassailable in the business and consumer desktop computing space, while Apple became nearly as dominant in new categories that it either early and decisively jumped on (the iPod), or more or less created (the iPhone).

Anyone else piling into those categories is fighting an uphill, near impossible battle.

And all of this applies to your small business, or solopreneurship as well: Be first, or at least VERY early in something. Ideally by creating a whole new category, which is otherwise known as innovating.

4. Successful People Move The Freeline

While Dave Winer does not explicitly state it here, the idea of erring on the side of saying too much implies the principle I like to call “Moving the Freeline”:

You have to say AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE about what you are trying to get across to people, which means that you have to, in a sense, give your best ideas away!

You can’t hide them behind a Pay-Wall (and even $1 may be too much for people to begin to listen to what you have to say, what you have to offer).

You can’t operate in a way that says: “Once you pay, I’ll tell you something useful or important”.

You can’t drop mere hints about what you have to offer, you have to give away A LOT of the real thing.

Most marketing copy gets this wrong when it merely focuses on trying to persuade, rather than just showing a lot of the goods.

You have to give every possible reason for the other party to do business with you by telling them (nearly) everything you know that could apply to them, free of the irrational fear of being ripped off or plagiarized somehow.

Only then do you have a real chance.

And in order to be able to do this, you have to apply a mindset that most successful people have, what Eben Pagan would call “feeling wealthy right now”.

You see, unless you get to that point of feeling abundant in your ideas right now, you will hold yourself back from getting the business you deserve, because the other party cannot ascertain whether a transaction would be worth their risk.

Does Moving The Freeline Make You Nervous?

In case this kind of openness makes you nervous, you can calm yourself by understanding a few key truths:

The fear that someone wants to rip off your ideas is nearly always an illusion, usually you have the exact opposite problem, that of getting ANYONE to give a dear about you, your business, and your ideas.

Also, the so-called “Curse Of Knowledge” has you systematically underestimate how far you are leaving the non-expert audience behind as an expert in a given arena (see Heath & Heath, Made To Stick).

Even if they wanted to, almost no one would be in a position to replicate your deeper ideas from scratch, without incurring a very significant learning curve.

Of course, if they REALLY wanted to (which is a big if), they could catch up eventually. Which is where the “show up early” principle comes in.

But in the interim, you can, as a consultant say, tell a prospective business EVERYTHING you might do for them in great detail. And it still would be much more likely that they would hire you to work with them, rather than trying to turn around and execute all of these details themselves, cold, from scratch.

To finish up with an example, a prolific tech blogger like Robert Scoble is constantly giving his best ideas away. And certainly a lot of people would say that he can err on the side of saying too much. But that is also how he creates massive value up front, and keeps people engaged with his idea process.

Money and profit become side-effects of his massively “Moving The Freeline” in this way day in and day out. Do thou likewise…