Procrastina… tion
One of the biggest enemies of bloggers is procrastination. With no one breathing down on your neck for your deliverables, it's so easy to just log on to facebook and stalk, i mean, friend people.
Well, you can do that, you just have to make sure that's not what you end up doing for the next 8 hours. A website named MinutesPlease.com will allow you to open a website and give you a self-imposed time limit! Try it out! It also has a bookmarklet you can save on your toolbar -- any link you drag on to that page will be opened and given a 10 minute time limit.
Minutes Please
Try it out!
Be Creative!
When people are "being creative," it normally involves a lot of pondering, waking around, and waiting for inspiration to strike. It seems that you just have to wait for your muse to arrive, there is no way to trigger creativity. Or is there? (ooh ominous)
In a study conducted in 1998 by Ap Dijksterhuis & Ad van Knippenberg, they showed that you can actually precondition the human mind to act a certain way.
In a study in 1998 those volunteers who were primed with a professor schema by asking volunteers to spend 5 minutes writing down a few sentences about the behaviour, appearance and lifestyle of a professor, whilst the other group did exactly the same for a football hooligan .
Everyone was then asked about 40 trivial pursuit questions. The results showed that those primed with the professor schema had a 60% success rate vs. 46% primed with the hooligan!
- Mark Hogan from The Magic Cafe Forums
In another earlier study in 1996, Bargh & Chen also got similar results:
In 1996 Bargh and Chen primed a group by asking volunteers to unscramble several sentences in which the words were in the wrong order. Half the participants were shown mixed up sentences containing words relating to the elderly, such as “man’s was skin the wrinkled”. The other half of participants were shown the same mixed up sentence but the one word relating to the elderly was replaced with a word not associated with old age, such as “man’s was skin the smooth”.
Once participant had carefully worked their way through the sentences and had been thanked for taking part the experimenter gave directions to the nearest set of elevators and secretly recorded how long it would take for the volunteers who were primed with the ‘old’ schema versus those who had been primed with the ‘young’ schema.
Those who had been primed with the old schema took significantly longer than those who had been primed with the non-elderly sentences.
- Mark Hogan from The Magic Cafe Forums
If you can prime the mind to become smarter, more violent, slower, or quicker, certainly you can prime it to become more creative, right? Yes you can!
In another study by Jens Forster from the International University Bremen, Germany, he found that certain pictures can indeed boost creativity!
A guy called Jens Forster and his colleagues were interested in the effect of looking at various images on people’s ability to think more creatively. They had a hunch that objects or pictures that relate to the concept of deviance in some way, such as a photograph of punk, would be likely to increase creative thinking.
This hypothesis was tested in a study in which participants were allocated into one of two groups. Participants in Group 1 were seated in front of a poster that had 16 ‘X’s of the same colour arranged in a 4 x 4 matrix. Those in Group 2 were seated in front of a similar poster, with the sole difference being one of the Xs was a different colour to the rest. All participants were then asked to come up with as many uses for a brick as possible.
Those who were seated in front of the ‘Deviancy’ poster came up with ideas that were independently judged as being around 25 percent more creative than the ‘Conformity’ group. In addition, the Deviance group came up with significantly more ideas than the Conformity group.
They conducted a few other experiments in which a picture of a punk was used, among other deviant images. The results were the same – deviant images boost creativity.
Forster explained that the reason for this effect occurring is because the anomalous X activates unconscious thoughts in people that relate to deviance and originality. And it is the activation of these thoughts that fosters a greater quality and quantity of ideas.
- Amantha Imber from Anthill Online
(On a side note, now you know why the website is named "DeviantArt")
To get you started, I looked for some images that can help boost your creativity:
Now you need to be careful. You have to make sure that you don't set your sights too high. A picture of Leonardo Da Vinci actually does the opposite of making you more creative -- seemingly making you realize how uncreative you are compared to ol' Leo. You also have to make sure you're relaxed as any anxiety removes any potential positive gain from the picture.
So once you have your generic punk picture and that relaxing spa scent going, you're all set! Go be creative!
Useful Freeware for the Blogger on a Budget
magkano?
Freeware is software that's, well, free. Needless to say, these applications are God sends for all bloggers, especially those just starting out. I'm listing the most useful freeware applications that I'm using:
- KeePass Password Safe: Allows you to store all your passwords in a database that's protected by a master password. In other words, you just have to remember your master password. It's also all encrypted so you can be sure your passwords are safe.
- 7-Zip: A pretty powerful file archiver that not just unzips or unrars, it decompresses just about any archive file format.
- Notepad++: For those brave enough to venture into the world of php and javascript, this application is essential. It's basically Notepad on steroids. It's most useful feature, at least for me, is full syntax highlighting (for supported languages).
- GIMP: This is an open-source alternative to Photoshop -- you know that wonderful graphics software that costs an arm and a leg? This one is not only free, it also comes jam packed with features and scripts. Almost all Photoshop functionalities are covered and then some. Plus there's a wide user community that you can tap if you have any questions.
- WordPress: Of course! Everybody's favorite blogging platform is very easy to use and it's wide adoption (i.e. many people are using it) means that there are a lot of plugins & themes available.
What other freeware apps do you use? Or better yet, can you think of paid software that doesn't have a viable freeware alternative?
(photo by kalandrakas)
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Link Love – Should bloggers dofollow comments
Everyone has the same basic idea of how Google works - the sites that have a lot of other sites linking back to them are ranked higher. Of course, it's much more complicated than that but the basic idea is there. You want a higher rank because the higher your rank, the higher you appear in Google's search results - the greater the possibility that searchers click a link to your blog. Hence more readers. Google still dominates the search engine wars with, depending on which site you check, processes about 50-75% of all searches on the intarwebz, so you definitely wanna get in on that action.
(added: 06/27/2010)
First of all, what does it mean to allow "dofollow" on your blog? By default, links on WordPress comments are tagged as "nofollow." When Google's spiders are crawling your website, they see links that are dofollow and "give a point" to those links (your blogroll, for instance). On the other hand, when Google's spiders see a "nofollow" link, they essentially DON'T give a point to those links. This means that by default, any links in comments posted on WordPress don't get any points. The question now is, as a blogger, should you allow Google to "dofollow" comment links and hence give some points to the linked blogs?
As with anything, there are pros and cons. Let's start with the cons. The biggest disadvantage, you become a walking spam target. Dofollow blogs usually get comments that seem to make sense but are in reality, just left for the sake of leaving a link. It is very possible for your blog to become a virtual ghost town -- seemingly filled with people who read but actually aren't really there. Naturally, a sense of community does not develop in such a case because conversations rarely develop.
The pros, of course, is that you give back to the commenters. It's a simple way of encouraging comments and, at the same time, rewarding the community that develops because of your blog. Commenters are encouraged to come back and keep conversations going. If you're able to sustain the momentum of your blog with quality posts that actually become good conversation pieces, then you have a veritable marketplace in your hands.
In my case, I've decided to dofollow my comments. I will still filter for spam, of course, but I've decided to give some love back to my readers. How about you? What are you going to do?
*I edited this on June 27. Hope you guys understand my post a little bit better!
(*pic from hunterseakerhk)