Fan To Pro - The Blog of Professional Geekery

Why You Shouldn’t Keep Your Projects A Secret

As someone who works with intellectual properties, and someone who knows a lot of people who also work with intellectual properties, I can safely say that a lot of us like to keep our ideas to ourselves.  There is a fear that if your idea is leaked, then there’s a team of coordinated and efficient coding enthusiasts that will take your idea and do it faster than you.  Probably better than you too.  And they all wear sunglasses and matching black leather uniforms with lightning bolts...

Where was I?  Oh, right, the fear of being copied.  This fear has a less-paranoid-but-still-paralyzing twin: the fear of someone coincidentally doing the same thing as you, making you look like the copycat nonetheless.

My advice to you is to fight that fear and show off (or at least talk about) your works in progress.  There are several reasons why this will help you rather than hurt you.

Interview with Smultron of Hawaii Kawaii

Smultron Rydstedt, the creator of Hawaii Kawaii , talks about how to make and market an image-based blog.

The Benefits of Blogging: Learning Again

I've been blogging here for going on three years (man, has it been that long?) and it's been been pretty informative. So, since I'm in a bit of a nostalgic mood as the third anniversary approaches, I wanted to share some of my insights on blogging with my fellow progeeks.

I often advise people to try blogging – sure it's not for everyone, but I find it's very useful to pursue, because if it is for you, you'll gain a lot of benefits. So, don't take this as pressuring you towards blogging, but I want to share an interesting professional benefit about blogging as I do–on careers and so forth.

One of the benefits of blogging is that you learn something twice.

A Chance To Get Some Writing/Web Experience?

A new game site (focused more on non-electronic games, but they're still open on that subject), Ministry Of Entertainment, just opened.  I know one of the founders, so I wanted to mention it since it could be good career experience!

http://www.minient.net/

- Steven Savage

Usage Based Billing is an Unfair Bad Bargain

And now, News from the North* with regard to Usage Based Billing and the coverage thereof.  First, a long and boring intro for those who are unfamiliar with the situation.

All of the radio, TV, Internet, etc in Canada is run by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, or CRTC.  That is, if it involves using electricity to send information a long distance, it’s the CRTC who manages the connections.  Why is it set up like that?  The same reason that everything in Canada is set up as a Crown Corporation and not a bunch of small competitive businesses.  Because, in the early days when Canada was just getting itself together, there was this massively powerful emerging country to the south whose competitive businesses could easily stamp out our own.  Therefore, Canada stuck whatever resources it had all together, so we would have something that would survive and remain Canadian.  The fact that we use our Canadian media to tune into American content anyway is one for the Irony Files. 

Fear not that I have painted a picture of Soviet Canuckistan as a socialist wasteland.  It is required, by law, that our big ISPs (Bell, Rogers, and Shaw) must lease some of the infrastructure to smaller companies.  Even though it’s the big guys who built our infrastructure, they have to allow for some competition.  Now, these little guys often offered better deals and lower prices, until one day...

Dun dun dunnnnn.

How to Jumpstart Your Career With a Blog

(This is a guest post by Lauren Orsini.  Thanks Lauren!)
       
If you read Steven’s interview with me, you know that my blog was an important part of landing a new job. I always knew that blogging was a great way to record and share my passions, but I didn’t realize that it could also get me work.
 
I started my short-lived NaNoJobMo (a riff on NaNoWriMo) blog on November 1. The basis of NaNoWriMo is that anyone can be a novelist in a month as long as they plug away at it every day for 30 days. I thought I could apply the same logic to my job hunt. I would apply to a new job every day for 30 days, and I would do it publicly so the world could hold me accountable to my vow.
 

Predictions: Media and Publishing in 2011

Last year's predictions are here.

And for this year .  . .

Steve

• The Kindle will continue to dominate, but it will need to expand its offerings.  Look for further-expanded Kindle features in later 2011 with a super-deluxe version ready for Christmas.  This may be the last big push for Kindle independent technology before Amazon focuses on a far broader strategy.
• eReader software will be everywhere, but the specialty devices will continue to be used for their special features, light weight, and comparatively low price.  People will also use eReaders for "non-download" reading more and more in areas like business reports, fanfic, etc.
• There will be some moves in later 2011 to try and expand the formats eReaders display.  I'm not sure if this will work.  ePub and PDF are the likley formats, which will again raise the spectre of Adobe controlling publishing.
• Amazon will continue to expand media services, or at least try to.  However some of their initiatives will be half-baked or confusing.
• Barnes and Noble and Borders might team up to form a large, boutique, book chain that focuses on events, special deals, etc.  Basically the anti-Amazon.  They may make sure their resultant reader covers more formats, and might be a specialty tablet.  They will attempt to add many in-store features.
• With eBooks, eComics/eManga, there will be some more experimental books done up as Apps (ala this Dracula one: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dracula-the-official-stoker/id397702573?mt=8).  Many of these will be flash-in-the-pans or failure, but some will suggest new features, and in late 2011/early 2012 "what's next" will be a rallying cry for ePubishing.
• Small press and self-publishing will continue, with more companies getting in on the game.  Talk of consolidating or merging some of the companies will spring up mid-to-later 2011.
• Video online is going to be bigger and bigger, and "kill your cable" will become more and more likely.  In turn internet provides will battle for share over who provides the best service for streaming.
• Various attempts at paywalls, subscriptions, and other monetization will be tried in media, eBooks,  news sites, and more.  A lot will fail - perhaps all.
• Trust in news will continue to decline, especially for the network news.
• News will continue to go local and online.  The Big Three News will become increasingly irrelevant and directionless.

Bonnie:

Media:

• I was going to predict that the biggest geekonomy story of 2011 would be the Kill Your Cable movement bursting into full flower, fueled by Google and Apple’s stream-to-your-television technology and increasing consumer frustration with cable-vs.-network tiffs like this fall’s Cablevision/Fox debacle.
• That was, of course, before GoogleTV suffered a major setback – networks pulling their programming from the service, complaints about the technology itself, and ultimately, Google putting a hold on further built-in-TV releases of the service until they retool it. One of their main competitors, the BoxeeBox, was panned royally by Wired.
• So Kill Your Cable has hit a stumbling block, but I believe that in the third or fourth quarter of the year, the companies involved will be able to retool, refine and strike the necessary agreements to get the ball rolling again. I predict that by the 2012 Olympics, a very good chunk of the audience will be watching the festivities not through a cable box, but through a streaming service.
• And speaking of streaming? Apple’s long-delayed cloud music service will finally debut in the first half of the year. Now that an unrelated company is offering iTunes-based streaming, it’s pretty much forced their hand to make it happen.

Publishing:

• Digital will be the word here, too, as magazine and newspaper companies will begin flooding the iPad with electronic editions to the point where it will seem a bit overwhelming – both for the staffers of the publications themselves and the consumer faced with an enormous variety of choices.
• The ones that survive will be the publications that are able to make the smartest use of computers’ multimedia capabilities – and the winner may not necessarily be one of the big boys in the industry. Look for small and clever companies to rise and become the Zyngas of E-publishing – people who saw a niche and made the most of it.
• Niche and genre fiction will continue to sell like crazy even as mainstream fiction sales flounder – especially in traditional print form. Look for the romance industry to continue leading the way as far as innovation is concerned, experimenting with different types of iPad books, including “enhanced fiction” with animations, music, video clips, etc. Also, my out-on-a-limb prediction for Harlequin: They will announce a line of male/male romance fiction by and for women by the end of the year.
• The self-publishing revolution will continue, and a lot of self-E-publishing companies will spring up to help novice writers navigate the difficult world of multiple E-book formats (including some that turn out to be scams, leading to an erosion of trust in this sector of the industry).

- Steven Savage

Rage Against the Dying Of The Site

I was doing another round of link research for the blog (you'll see some new resources soon), and once again Bonnie and I ran into another round of dead sites.  You've heard me rant about this before - there's so many blogs and sites out there they would be awesome, interesting, and progeeky if they were actually updated.

In ranting to a friend, he simply said, "Oh, like Geocities?"  That stopped me in my mental tracks.

Blogs in The Boneyard: Better Off Buried?

You've noticed one of the things I do here is collect useful resources for you, our loyal readers.  Heck, I do it for our disloyal readers too (but seriously, come by more guys).

This also means that I encounter what I've christened "The Blog Boneyard".

The Self-Help Book Paradox

A lot of the best books for advising people are not actually reaching the people that need them.  Sit back, I'm having a bit of a rant.

We see those books on finance, time management, business, etc. all out there stocking shelves in bookstores.  We know there IS a lot of good stuff because we read the good ones (and occasionally the bad ones).  We also wonder just why people that need this advice are NOT reading it when we are.

I've come to realize that a lot of books advising people on careers, time management, and all the stuff I talk about here are not getting into the hands of people who need them most.  This is an odd paradox of the "career/life self help market" that people that need the most help DON'T read the books.