Ben Roy

It's funny, if you spend time on message boards for just about any hobby, sport, craft, job, or anything else you can imagine, you'll see the exact same thing happening: a few basic questions are asked over and over. They tend to be the most basic of questions, asked by new visitors to the site.

Depending on the community, these repeated questions are met with a variety of responses, from derision and ridicule to patience and understanding. In most cases, they do get answered in one form or another, and the newbies graduate to harder questions and more advanced topics.

I've been working on getting one of my sites to rank for a pretty competitive keyword (around 1,000,000 results for the quoted term). I've been parked about the 8th or 9th page for a long time, and just finally decided I was going to get serious about a week ago.

The other day I picked up 'The Tao of Chess' and was flipping through a few pages. (No need to stop reading if you aren't a chess player, I'll keep it light on the chess details) I happened to principle #46, which says, "Superior development increases in value in proportion to the openness of the game."

For any chess-newbs out there, it's basically just saying that as more pieces clear out of the center area of the board, it's increasingly valuable to have your pieces out and able to attack.

I'm not following that many people on Twitter, but even with only a few hundred people the amount of updates coming across is unmanageable. Given a finite amount of time to spend watching Twitter, I'm plagued by the feeling that I'm missing important tweets.

Sometimes when I look to see what's gone by, I see something interesting and feel good about using Twitter. Other times, I'll scroll through 100+ updates and not see anything compelling. But I have this nagging feeling that there were other tweets just minutes before that I didn't see which I would have enjoyed.

I remember the first time I saw a mind map. It was at the office and we were doing some kind of brainstorming exercise (around what, I can't recall, maybe testing?) and someone was manually capturing it in the form of a mind map. Then someone pulled up some mind mapping software and used it to record the information. It seemed pretty cool, but I didn't spend a lot of time doing brainstorming.

I'm a notch more excited than usual because I'm putting the pedal to the metal in a couple major areas. First, I've been planning to create a product of my own for a while now, and in the last week or so I finally got down to business. This isn't something I've done before, which made it a mildly daunting task.

My position on Twitter has been to be careful about trying to connect with people in a meaningful way. I don't follow many of the people that follow me because they don't look interesting, appear to only be interested in selling stuff, or just all around don't give me a reason to follow them.

My last entry I was talking about my first broadcast on Ustream. There was one other story I wanted to share. As soon as we started the stream up I posted the URL on Twitter and at least one of my followers (who was in the room at the time) immediately retweeted it. We also sent a few emails out within the company to people that might be interested.

Today wasn't my first interaction with Ustream - I've tuned in to watch other people's broadcasts. But it's been pretty casual, and I never took any time to look around the site itself. Today was different though. Today I came at it from the other side.

I've been thinking a lot about people in the Internet Marketing business and how they've set their businesses up. Having talked to people all over the spectrum, one perplexing observation is that it seems very few people focus on putting their businesses on auto-pilot. In fact, many of them have major time commitments involved in keeping their business running.