Interfacing with the dream world

I forgot to mention in my previous post that I seem to have been interfacing with my dreams a lot the last several months, maybe even the last year or few. I have been noticing it more the last few months as I keep seeming to wake up with memories of thoughts that seem to relate to some overarching theme that has apparently been concerning me, at least in the dreamworld, for quite some time.

A lot of it seems to have to do with language. Of course a lot of it seems clear as I awake then fades rapidly as I focus on the waking world, so I am not sure how clear it really is or was, but there seems to be quite a bit of consistency over time. That is what gives the impression that my sleeping mind is working on something. It seems to be coming back to much the same kind of stuff day after day, week after week, month after month. I have the impression that it is getting somewhere with it, not merely going round in circles.

I think it is partly because writing has been on my mind a lot. I want to write something that is worth writing, and much of the kinds of stuff I would like to write about is difficult to formulate clearly (if at all). I have been studying and practicing magick and mysticism most of my life and maybe it is getting toward time for all of that study to come together into something.

-MarkM-

Taking up Writing

Wow, it has been a long time since I have written to this blog. Sorry about that. I have had a lot of thinking and re-thinking to do. My career on the web started from a system administration and programming angle, but over the years the web has become more and more clearly a publishing medium and it has become more and more clear to me that trying to be a one-person publishing-company is sure to be a case of biting off more than I can chew.

Accordingly I have been thinking more and more about the writing - the authoring - part of it. For years now I have followed with interest various groups who have been taking a web-business approach, which has more and more become a matter of promoting and advertising. I have watched that with interest but truly my heart has never really been in the promoting/advertising side of things. So lately I have been thinking long and hard about sheer writing.

For a long time now i have ad the opportunity to write articles about almost anything I wished to, purely to make some money. I have not gone into that though because to me it has seemed to much like a kind of web-spam. Simply churning out "copy" does nto appeal to me. Sure there might be a bit of money in it but is it really so different from having a script churn out "copy" to attract search engines?

I recently discovered that some people whom I know here in Halifax are into writing and publishing. Real books, even poetry. Later today I hope to be seeing them and will inquire a little into that world. I am actually excited about the idea of getting back into writing, I have written before but not really for publication yet. One of the things I plan to do is review some of my earlier works and map out some options of what exactly to write about. i actually have an entire roleplaying world, D'ydii, with years and years of week by week calendars of the activities of various players' characters, and a whole world of maps. Most of that material is out at my country house in Sheet Harbour, but that jut gives me yet another incentive to get back in touch with that too-long neglected residence.
I hope to start putting together some web-pages about D'ydii soon, if only to get some of what I remember about its various nations and famous people written down. Although the material out at the country house would help a lot with that as I have a lot of written material about it out there.

I have been back into the Kingdoms mult-user text-mode roleplaying game ("Multi User Dungeon") quite a lot lately too, developing a few different characters exploring some of the "professions" they offer. In fact I have been spending too much time at that.

I have also recently read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" and "Quicksilver", which my father sent me. They are huge books but have been a good read. "Quicksilver" is just the first book of a trilogy, wow, huge. I shudder to think how much sheer writing goes into a project like that, let alone the research involved! I do not aspire to writing anything on the scale of those! The publishing folk that I hope to talk to like books based right here in Halifax so I have actually been toying with the idea of writing about a kind of local school of magic. Yes, I know, it is kind of an obvious attempt to capitalise on the popularity of the Harry Potter books. Another option of course is to finally get around to completing my most popular unfinished work, "The Faery Queen's Knickers"...

-MarkM-

Nanotechnology, Nanomedicine, Robotics...

I've been putting in a lot of background material circling around the central topic of determinism and free will. Stuff like Evan Harris Walker and G. I. Gurdjieff and automatic people and quantum mechanics and classical mechanics.

To think I started to do this stuff about ten years ago and kept getting driven off course by rabid money-addicts! Ouch! Fact is the idea was sound, as Wikipedia has proven. Its just that the money-addicts around didn't want me to build a Wikipedia for some reason. Oh well, their loss. If they'd helped me out or at least not been such a hindrance we could've been where Wikipedia is. Oh well.

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services (over 25 years in business!)

Sheet Harbour Nova Scotia

I finally got around to starting a section about Sheet Harbour Nova Scotia, which is where my country-house is.

Yeah yeah, this should have been done years ago, like when I first bought the house, but the pressures brought to bear upon me over the years each time I tried to actually develop web-content were mindblowing. Starting way back when I first started building an Internet Service Provider.

Hopefully I will be weaving it together with the home, kitchen and garden sections as well as the cooking and gardening sections as soon as I manage to get out to the house to putter about out there. Or maybe sooner if I just go ahead and wail about all the activities that I am missing out on due to not managing to get out to the country-house the last few years. (I hear it has been broken into and is being used as a hangout by local drunks, or somesuch...)

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services (25+ years in business!)

Home, Kitchen and Garden

Today I have been doing more background work for the CookingWeb and GardenWeb teams; mostly setting up a section about home and within that sections for kitchen and garden.

In the course of doing that I also did some touching-up in the activities section, mostly in the cooking and gardening sections.

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services (More than 25 years in business!)

Recreation, Travel and Vacation Activities

Looks like today is the day to get some work done on the recreation, travel and vacation subsections of the activity directory.

This is of course partly to provide some content areas relating to the TravelWeb team but also of course we will be using it in the process of looking for Leading Guides in these subject-areas (also known as niches, especially within the internet marketing community).

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services.

Leading Guides Project Blog Updated

It has been another busy day for me. A lot of what I've been up to is logged on the Leading Guides blog, being as how much of it was related to the Leading Guides project.

I have also started a revamp of the Make Money project. When if began it was basically about automating the process of making money. But two things happened that caused the scope to be expanded. One was the urgency that many people have when they search for material about making money. A huge number of our visitors were not really interested in the automation project, they just wanted to make some money as soon as possible and as fast as possible and of course to make as much money as possible.

Thus the whole universe of get rich quick schemes came into view. Wow! Amazing what is out there. Making money is a very popular topic. Because of our homeschool site we also have a lot of contacts and visitors who are interested specifically in making money at home; running a home business of some kind or another.

Thus as soon as we seriously looked into (and document on the web) the whole concept of moneymaking we found it necessary to provide help for people who wanted to go ahead and make money manually instead of helping to work on the automation project or just sitting around waiting for the automatic making of money to be perfected for them.

It also seems possible that in a somewhat fundamental way - maybe the bottom line - the concept of money involves the concept of human effort or human energy or some kind of human involvement, and that human aspect might somewhat 'put a spanner in the works', so to speak, of the idea of ever totally automating the making of money.

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services (25+ Years In Business! ;))

Recent Changes

A nice feature built into the Wiki system is the tracking of recent changes. Kind of convenient eh?

Today someone brought SunRoot Farm and Eco-Solidarity Association to my attention. Check it out, there are a lot of topics mentioned that need expanding... if you are into cooking or gardening, get in there and do some WikiWeaving. In case you had not noticed, Wikipedia has lots and lots of high rankings in the major search-engines. The Internet Marketing folk have certainly noticed, so get involved; you surely must know they are going to building their own Wiki into a massive backbone. Right now is your early-bird chance to get in there and make sure those folk know about your special topics and niches and keywords and so on.

Here's the list of recent changes again, look it over, it might trigger some ideas for you.

-MarkM-

Actual, Imaginary and Virtual Things

Digitalis Data Services has finally gotten around to having me divvy up the things section of the Graphic Omniscient Device into actual things, imaginary things and virtual things.

Heh well although I said "finally", really the delay was mostly a matter of watching how the places section had worked out, being as how it had already, since the start, been divided into actual places, imaginary places and virtual places.

Oops, almost forgot to mention that I also received an email out of the blue from Turkey and took that as a fine excuse to whip up a Turkey section, in which I have pasted the email that triggered me to create that section.

Now of course I will be on the lookout for more resources about Turkey. ;)

-MarkM-

Issues

Issues: the plural of Issue. Nuff said?

-MarkM-

Hey, no open in new window?!?!

Hey, cool, I did not know this before. I tried to make the links to All Hallows Blood Bank and Magickal Mystery Tour in the previous post open in a new window; blogger seems to suppress that. Cool! No wonder blogger is considered a Classy Place! ;) :)

-MarkM-

Did a lot of cleanup all over the place...

...Including Websites Knotwork's little Niche of Niches experiment.

Yes, it is a "scraper site". It is just a small one, and it gives me a timeslice of what was going on in various keywords at the time of the scraping. I prefer that because I can take as long as I like to thoroughly appreciate the timeslice.

The links were scraped from Yahoo Search, and so far I am surprised at the quality of them really. Yes I see some repeats that might be caused by the use of heavy-handed "SEO" practices but really not too bad. Not like the bad old days, when they were spewing off-topic stuff everywhere. This 'targetted spam' kind of stuff at least looks from the anchor-text and descriptions as if it might be OK stuff. Maybe it is just the SEO-spammed stuff that clawed its way to the top though. It is going to be interesting to see as I delve further into it to find out what is out there. While re-writing the blurbs too I expect, although supposedly part of why scraping was so popular was that it actually concentrates the keywords or something. When I checked out Traffic Hurricane I was amazed at how MSN and Yahoo used to love that stuff. I guess Google must've loved it for a while too as fortunes were made with it.

I have also defined a NON_CONTENT_PAGE macro and have been putting it into my "menu" or "stub" pages as I go along. All it does it turn off AdSense, but as a result the default Pagan banners are now on all the NON_CONTENT_PAGE pages. Oops, I think maybe some Internet Marketing folk might prefer seeing AdSense ads to seeing weirdo Potteresque stuff. ;) :)

Been up for days, ought to try to sleep I suppose... but wait, what the heck is sleep? :)

-MarkM-

Internet Marketing Wiki

Internet Marketing is moving into the Wikisphere!

-Knotwork aka MarkM-

Beware the Sharks of the Net!

Someone posted stuff on Net Marketing Forum that put me into a great 'ranting' mood...

[quote]Actually, you'll have more time and money to buy traffic, upgrade in exchanges and gain more JV partners if you have your own product/service.[/quote]

I find that very unconvincing. We get told all kinds of garbage on and on and on. Buy a suit. Cut your hair. Wear XYZ cologne. Have a phone. Have an email address. Have a website. On and on and on. In reality the reason 'they' want to know what your product or service is is so they can provide it themselves so as to cut you out of the picture. The legends of there being money on the net seem to be untrue, in reality the people on the web are simply preying upon people who have jobs in the brick and mortar world. There is no money online, just a few 'payment processors' that are interfaces to offline money.

I had a product and service: internet connectivity. I knew at the time that it was only a limited time opportunity because I knew the phone and cable companies would try to take it over, followed by the wireless and satellite companies. I proposed that by the time that limited time opportunity was over the place to be would be content. That is, instead of selling the on-ramp to the information highway be the reason people wanted to get on that highway in the first place. Because the next move would probably be for the people who had the content to bypass the people who offer the connectivity. Afterall, most people don't buy a phone or cable or wireless for its own sake, they buy it because they imagine it will provide them with content that they want or need.

I gave up having a phone because phone became a gross waste of time. Most people do not seem to want to pay by the minute or hour or whatever for telephone consulting/support/conversation. If someone wants to be able to reach me (rather than an answering machine or voicemail or neighbor or third party retailer/dealer/intermediary) by phone I'd want them to pay me a whole lot more than just what a phone costs.

I am getting toward the same thing with internet connection. The quality of people on the net has gone down so much over the last ten years or so that it is getting to the point where it might be time to abandon the internet as just another waste of time and money. Why? Because the content has been steadily degrading and being destroyed. Much of the good content that was available ten years ago has been hidden, concealed, destroyed, or driven off of the net.

If you do in fact have a product or service you might be much better off NOT telling anyone on the net what it is, because they will not buy it, they will clone it. They do not need or want you, all they need or want is your concept of what constitutes a product or service and, of course, any 'money' you might happen to have access to. Their objective is to eliminate you while appropriating anything of value that you cause them to become aware of the existence of.

That might be why so many do not appear to have a product or service. They are defending themselves by not publishing the nature of their livelihood.

If you look closely at the so-called products or services most who do have 'their own' are offering, you will, at least if you are not as ignorant as most newbies to the net seem to be these days, likely notice those products and services are inferior imitations of better, maybe even 'classic', products and services the existence of which they attempt to conceal from you in order to try to convince you to buy their inferior imitation.

They are deliberately and systematically destroying people's minds and conditioning people to want to be ignorant. There is less and less point in writing any truly informative material because there is less and less chance that there will be anyone left in the world who is capable of understanding it due to the deliberate process of depriving people of the background necessary to understand anything. The objective seems to be to develop a population of consumers who are incapable of understanding anything other than "insert another coin for another two minutes". People who know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about anything. It actually even seems as if part of the objective might be to make reading and writing obsolete. The slave castes will be illiterate again ('like they were always meant to be in the first place' maybe?) and might only have very small vocabularies, if any, even in sound. Possibly only heard sound not spoken sound, as in maybe muting them might also be planned, "afterall we do not need them to be making noises, we only need them to be hearing the noises that we make".

Now that others among my peoples are on the net there is less and less need for me to be on the net. Basically it comes back to the classic observation 'there is one in every crowd'. Nowadays some crowds have more than one, but one is usually enough. Crowds that try to insist that more than one of us join them seem usually to be crowds that are not in fact truly interested in the information that we are capable of providing or offering. They want to know about more of us so that they can attempt to destroy us or exploit us, not because they actually have any valid need to have any more than one of us be their contact-person through whom to obtain what we can provide.

To put more of us onto the net than are actually necessary for whatever purpose we deployed people onto the net to accomplish would be a waste of good troops who might well be far better deployed elsewhere; or it might simply waste more money than need be wasted, since afterall each person that we deploy onto the net costs us connectivity/bandwidth fees or the time and effort required to provide and maintain our own wires or wirelesses.

I think I might actually be starting to look foward to admitting that I have in fact been relieved of the onerous duty of operating a net access terminal so that I can finally leave that to someone else and get back to something more important. Like maybe helping the food banks to increase their farm holdings so they can produce more food thus feed more people thus freeing more people from the tyranny of the money-mongers? Hmm, interesting idea...

-MarkM-

Another lead toward Haligonians?

Ooooooooooooo, looks like maybe someone at TranQuilEye might have some Haligonian connections! Seems to have heard a thing or two about a street or few of Halifax at least... :)

-MarkM

Synergetic Propensities?

"Our goal is not to find reasons to reject your article but to speed the processing for members that submit quality product :-)" - Michael Russell of MGRcentral.

Everyone's an author nowadays. ;)

You might've noticed that one of the current fads in various Internet Marketing niches is "article marketing".

Huge numbers of articles are being churned out, hopefully resulting in at least some people out there someplace learning a little about the art, craft, science and activity of
writing.

As a member of Michael Russell's Massive Passive Advertising Machine (MPAM) I don't have to wade through any more of those interminable sales-letters promoting yet another article-pushing site.

Actually that is not quite true if I choose to help the Due Diligence Department vet such offers. But the point is that I have the choice. If I ever get tired of trying to find another MrFire, Joyner or Midas
Marketer I can let go of the obsessive-compulsive reading reflex conditioned into me by their hypnotic neuro-linguistic programming (honest I can, no problem, its just that the Predilection of a Warrior happens to be make a million dollars) and go do something else. Like, uh, hmm, well OK, how about making a post to my blog? :)

-MarkM-
--
Pro Pen Cities? ;) Pro Pen Sitties? :D

Info: Art: Writing

I have been quite busy since last I posted.

Oops, writing is an activity, it is what is written that is art. Or is it? Hmm... ;)

-MarkM-

A problog runs the gauntlet

This is a followup to my earlier post titled What, you don't have a problog yet?!?.

What is a problog? Apparently it is a blog with "professional-quality content".

Well guess what... the same chap that I heard about problogs from has put
one of his own problogs "under the gauntlet".

What does that mean? It means he has asked for some "tough love" from his fellow online-marketing professionals. This is your chance to critique a problog and to see vicious professional marketers critique it too. This could be quite educational for anyone who is interested in the world of "professional" blogging.

-MarkM-

The Leading Guides project now has a blog

The Leading Guides project now has a blog: the Leading Guides Blog.

Wow it has been a while. I have mostly been hanging out at Net Marketing Forum.

-MarkM-

The Illuminati!

Hey, nice conspiracy/illuminati blog! It even has a cool link to something that claism to be a precise exegisis! Plus an explanation of the term Neo-Conservative.

Yeah I am finally back at blogger. Sorry, been very busy lately with the awesome folks at Net Marketing Forum... no doubt some of the up and coming leaders of the new "secret government"! Hahahahahah! ;) ome on over and help blow their puny little minds into new dimensions and inner riches!

-MarkM-