Ian M Rountree

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Archives for January 2011

How to Master the Power of Voice and Become a Blogging Muad’Dib

January 23, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Who's Your Mahdi? - Alec Newman as Paul Atreides from Frank Herbert's Dune

The Voice Must Flow!

The power to be in many places at once. Perfect memory. The ability to see the future. None of these count for anything without the power to inspire action with just a few phrases, delivered with perfect pitch, modulation, frequency and poignancy.

Anyone who knows anything about science fiction will know about Dune. In Dune, Paul Atreides – the heir to a ducal title – is cast out of his place by the betrayal of a lesser Baron (the piggish Harkonen) and goes on a journey of self-discovery, eventually learning that he is the Ultimate Power Embodied – the Kwisatz Haderach!

Voice isn’t only about displaying personality, it’s about directive communication.

Bloggers talk about creating a voice all the time, and in many cases, we’re referring to the same things;

  • Humour, or lack thereof
  • Opinions, or sets of beliefs
  • Passion, or clarity of desire
  • Engagement, or how easy it is to turn a statement into a conversation.

HOPE hard enough and you’ll get a certain kind of success – but to be a real master, you need more than hope.

All of these things matter, but they’re not the core of The Voice.

In Dune, the Voice is an arcana very few are trained in – and the fact that Paul Atreides is trained in even its rudiments is almost heretical. Masters of the Voice have the skills to control anyone they have face-to-face contact with, after just a few minutes of exposure. They must gain this power over each individual person they wish to control, and do so by keen observation of body language, cataloging of reactions to some initial prods, and above all else, listening to the words their subjects use.

By this process of pre-communicative observation, practitioners of the Voice can easily understand the motivations, weaknesses – and potential of a subject. So, when she finally does speak, she can use the entirety of subtle inflection, posture, micro-expression, tone, pitch, metre… Every verbal and non-verbal tool physically possible to such a high effectiveness, that the subject is helpless to argue or disobey.

As a blogger, you have more tools at your disposal than text formatting, multi-media, your usual level of eloquence, or your standard subject matter.

You’ve got more than just your words. You have the spaces between then-the long dashes creating suspense, the ellipsis… Hanging out and doing it’s thing. You’ve got direct address writing (which most of this post is written in), choice of gendered or genderless pronouns… All of these things, once you know how to go beyond vocabulary and work pacing, verbal innuendo, and inflection by way of grammar into your writing… There’s power, just waiting there.

Consider the following passage about a remote bystander observing the initial attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001:

When James burst into the room, yelling this and that about being under attack, I didn’t even know what to think. Who was attacking who? Had he been playing paintball again? I mean, seriously. It wasn’t even seven in the morning. I got a real shock when I followed him to the living room. He wasn’t kidding – one of the towers was falling on picture-in-picture, and not ten seconds after my eyes hit the screen, the second plane hit the other tower.

What sense do you get from the above paragraph? There’s information there. There’s a hook (the attack) there’s characterization (the remark about paintball), there’s narative (first-person). It’s concise, informative, and to the point.

How about this?

“Guys! We’re under attack!”

The door shook – great. James’d put a crack into it with the heel of his boot. A muddy crack. Double great.

“Seriously, guys, get up! One tower’s just come down, and they keep saying there are more planes! More damned planes!”

What was he on about, anyway? I levered myself up and threw on a shirt. If he’d found some new video game to spend his rent money on…

No such luck. One look at the TV left my mouth gaping. Under attack indeed. I forgot about the muddy boot crack in my door.

What’s different? The details are identical in form to the first paragraph – the attack, the two towers… You know exactly what both are getting at. But the two passages may as well have been written about different people. There’s the focus on dialog, the broken-up structure of the second passage, completely different use of timing…

And we’re just comparing two very short pieces, essentially stating the same facts; the narrator’s roommate bursts into his room, waking him/her with what seems like nonsense – but is very quickly proven to be terrifying truth.

While the examples I’ve used are semi-fictional, the same thing applies to blogging, or writing of any kind where format restrictions are loose. Journalists with word count limits need to be ultra-direct. Bloggers, authors and other writers benefit from other tools, like using the tonal changes that pacing and directive writing can create.

It’s up to you, young pup!

Using the power of Voice in writing is more than just what you choose to write about, and the words and phrases you use to express your opinion. Leaving it at phraseology and opinion may be enough for some – but if you really want to master your power of Voice, going beyond and asserting control over your very tone and inflection in writing is the next step along the Golden Path.

Being serious about the development and use of your Power of Voice is a good idea. Knowing how to produce tone, inflection… Even a little – necessary hesitation just with words and grammar can make your writing stand out as much more human.

Still. It never helps to lose the humour all together. Am I Right, Dunecats?

I Are Dune Cat - I Controls Teh Spice, I Controls Teh Universe

Top image: Modified screenshot from Sci-Fi Channel’s “Frank Herbet’s Dune” (well worth watching)
Bottom image: Dunecat. Source; the interwebs.

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: Blogging, learning, social media, social-networks, sociology, voice, who's your mahdi, writing

How To: Turn Your WordPress.org Blog Into An Event Manager

January 19, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

If you spend any kind of time out in public, doing stuff, you’ll appreciate that keeping your calendar not only up to date, but accessible is important.

"Events, Places I'll Be" section in my blog's footer area
Simple, dynamic, maintainable

For example; I’ve been getting out and doing stuff more often lately (and this will continue in the future), and I wanted to display this information here on my site. for a while, I just edited text in my footer (pictured to the right) – but that’s not sustainable, really, and not efficient.

Then, I read this tutorial from Devin Price (@devinsays on Twitter), explaining how to build a Custom Post Type into WordPress 3.0 to handle events. Perfect!

Here’s how it works, in short. You’re going to need a little knowledge of WordPress theme development to get this done – or have access to someone who knows. I’d call this a “intermediate” difficulty task – you need to know your way around, but don’t need to know too much.

It all hinges around code in two files (and one image for nice display). I’ve included a download link at the end of this post.

The code in the events-function.php file needs to be added to your WordPress theme’s functions.php file. Here’s what it does:

  • Adds a custom post type called “Events” to your WordPress backend.
  • Changes some of the admin info within the post editor to better suite the Events post type
  • Modified WordPress defaults so that posts in the future (scheduled posts) can be displayed
  • Note: You, or whoever is doing this adjustment for you, will have to modify the path to the calendar-icon.gif file, otherwise it won’t appear.

The code in the events-display.php file can be added to your theme wherever you want to display your events. As it’s set up now, it does the following:

  • Grabs the four Events with the highest date numbers (most recent or farthest in the future)
  • Displays the date and the content of the Events entry
  • Note: This code comes right out of my theme, you’ll need to style the Events area to suit your own site.

That’s it for theme modification – not terribly difficult at all. But here’s where it gets really interesting.

Editorial Calendar displaying Events post type in WordPress backend
Look at that! There's my next event!

Some WordPress plugins to amazing things on their own – and some of them jump through some really awesome hoops at unexpected times.

Install the Editorial Calendar plugin for WordPress – this helps schedule posts, and normally lets you keep a better handle on your posting schedule. However, with the Events post type set up, something interesting happens. Because we’ve set the Events post type to “post” – the Editorial Calendar plugin fires for our Events!

The result of having both the Events post type – whether you display your events or not – and the Editorial Calendar plugin amounts to a super-simple, portable, personal event organizer.

There’s a lot of opportunity to expand on this which I’ve intentionally not taken – changing the display code to show the next three events, for example (for people with many more events than me), or setting up a taxonomy to display only events labelled “Public” on the blog, and keep “Private” appointments from showing up. One could even build an entire events calendar page template, to do the job the Editorial Calendar plugin does in the back end, and let site visitors see all your events, past and future.

I stopped where I did with my work on this because, for now, this does exactly what I wanted it to. What else would you add to this?

Download the code (and the image) – and make sure you give @devinsays a shout-out for the handy stuff!

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: Blogging, calendars, events, hacking, platform building, programming, wordpress

How To Start a Global Business in 2 Simple Steps

January 16, 2011 by Ian 1 Comment

1. Set up a website. You are now global.

2. Make money. You are now a business.

What? It’s simple, right? The trouble with simple is that it often fails to be anything that human endeavour is; simple is rarely interesting, attention-getting, or successful. I’m not saying it’s impossible to be any of these things with simplicity – but it is rare, and it’s never easy.

It’s not just about getting clients, securing contracts, or delivering… well, deliverables.

It can’t just be about doing the business for a while, developing a professional speaking career, and retiring into consultancy.

It should never be about the money – insofar as we always need money, anyway.

It should never, ever, be centered around the transaction and nothing else.

A global business needs to be about communication; anything with that kind of intended reach has to be. And if it’s about communication, it’s also about community – and by extension people, socialization, and relationships.

If you can figure out how to build global relationships that make money, you can figure out a global business. There’s just no other way.

Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: business, communication, delivery, platforms, relationships, shipping, websites

On Deciding Our Own Lessons

January 15, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

You know what? I’m tired of talking about failure.

I’ve spent most of this month thinking about how to move on, to learn, to grow from setbacks – and that attitude hasn’t been helpful at all. Sure, I’m learning and growing, but I’d be really worried if I weren’t.

What we learn from our experiences is largely tied to how we treat them, both in the moment, and in hindsight.

We have this awful tendency to vilify the things that enact our setbacks, or to make golden the things that appear to have helped us succeed. Is this productive? Probably not, unless we live by way of avoidance – and that’s not productive. No matter how attached we are to praise, or unconcerned with whether people think we’re snobs online or not – retroactive adjustment is usually a bad idea.

Productivity – rather than just activity – is far more interesting, and far less tied to dedicated learn-by-failure kinds of work than one might expect.

I’ve been thinking about theory a lot lately. Applying theory to practice, adjusting our theories to match our work… These are all good things. But one of the things theory allows us to do – if we have a strong grasp of it anyway – is to conduct some analysis on our failures, and the failures of others…

But there we go again!

We need to shift our verbiage – instead of talking about our liabilities, let’s talk about our deliverables. Same thing, far different meaning. Instead of crossing things off your to-do list, highlight them – same action, entirely different mental trigger (and thank Susan Hurrell for that one).

It isn’t just how we react to our opportunities for improvement that impacts how we improve; it’s also how we react to our opportunities to show our strength, and opportunities to analyse whether it’s strength or improvement we’ve got.

Stop mitigating your weaknesses, and start bolstering your strengths.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: community, group dynamics, positive, productivity, strength, weakness

Obviousness Obviates Obfuscation

January 12, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

Let me explain.

“There are two ways to build any system; either make it so complex that no defects are obvious, or so simple that there are no obvious defects.”

You dig? There are basically two approaches to systems creation; finding the simplest, most basic route and building outward in an organic way… Or the other way.

The other way is how most people get things done. You assess individual tasks on a requirement basis, and find solutions for individual problems. If you find that a set of solutions works toward the same, larger problem – you’re likely to bolt the solutions together, and call it a system.

The problem with systems is that they have cracks – all of them. Any set of solutions developed for specific problems and repurposed for larger problems is bound to be flawed – within the scope of the new problem. So what do we do? We patch. We band-aid things, add adjustments to compensate for the cracks, and call the mortar “polish” or somesuch. But it’s still flaws, all the way down.

How do we accommodate for this? We can’t necessarily redevelop solutions for every problem, there’s a lot of waste there.

Instead, I’d suggest we encourage publicness – build out from our cracks without hiding them. Allow for them, manage expectations instead of adding polish.

First step? Catch yourself, the next time you start polishing with phrases like “it’s not that simple,” or “there are reasons for this” – weasel words and obfuscations are polish, intended to hide the flaws in our haphazardly built systems. What we don’t realize is that haphazard is a pseudonym of organic in almost every instance.

If you can learn to recognize the polish for what it is, and allow the cracks to be obvious, you’ll stand a much better chance of recognizing when, how, and why things call through them.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: 2011 themes, recovery, theme 1

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