If you happen to use the awesome Chosen-plugin for jQuery in combination with the asset packaging gem Jammit for Ruby on Rails – be sure to not include the minified version of Chosen in your config/assets.yml-file.

It took me a good amount of time to actually pin point what was going on since a lot of my javascript just stopped working (ajax forms not firing, other jQuery-plugins not loading etc). So, just to make it super-duper clear — include chosen.jquery.js AND NOT chosen.jquery.min.js in your assets.yml-file to prevent this issue from happening.

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If you haven’t got a Google+ account yet, drop me an e-mail at me@sebastianjohnsson.com and I’ll send you an invite.

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As a first step of getting back into blogging I’ve redesigned the blog, now using the theme JournalCrunch by Site5 instead of my previous custom theme. The past few months I’ve moved more and more towards just using stuff other people made (and just making minor changes) rather than spending hours creating my own themes etc. from scratch.

When it comes to blogging – it more or less comes down to content anyways right?

As a personal challenge for now I’m going to post at least once every week and not get hung up on ‘that I have to write on a specific topic’ or that ‘I have to at least write xxx words’. I don’t know why, but blogging has become quite a burden for me since I’ve put a lot of restrictions on myself – and I can’t really understand why.

I’m just going to write what I feel about (but still generally sticking to the topics of lifestyle design, passive income, internet/affiliate marketing, seo and other stuff I enjoy).

All right, talk to you soon.

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Chaweng Beach

I’m right now in Thailand and I’ve been here for a little more than a week. I’m currently staying in Chaweng which is the major area/beach here on Koh Samui. It’s a little bit too much touristy for my taste (it’s quite similar to Kuta Beach on Bali where I went 2009). Fortunately I’m staying at the quieter and more relaxed southern part of Chaweng, about 15-20 minutes away from the main ‘tourist ghetto’.

The mission with this trip is not to see how many buckets of Red Bull & Vodka I can drink before I become insanely drunk (even though I will dedicate 1-2 days to empirically study this phenomenon) but rather to work remotely from here. In Sweden the weather was about -10 to -5 degrees celsius when I left, and it’s +25 to +30 degrees celsius here in Thailand. Suffice to say, it pretty much was a no-brainer going here.

I do really enjoy myself here, and I love hitting the beach for a few hours, having a swim, and just plainly relax. After my usual early stay at the beach I’ll usually head to my adopted office (the guest house’s café/restaurant) where I’ll do a few hours of work. It is a lot more comfortable working from an office back in Sweden, but adding in the weather and atmosphere here, Thailand wins hands down.

Chaweng Beach

Another major and very prominent reason for heading to Thailand is that I’ll be a part of something called Paradise Business Camp. Paradise Business Camp is very similar to Project Getaway and the idea is that a few entrepreneurs meet up at some exotic location and work remotely from there. Everyone works on their own projects, but we’ll help each other out, share ideas and generally have a super awesome and inspiring time together.

I’ll meet up with the Paradise Business Camp (PBC) guys (and girls) somewhen between the 24th to 29th of January. We’ll probably be staying in Hua Hin or Koh Chang, the final location hasn’t been set yet. I’ll mainly work on Hemmalivs (the e-commerce store selling groceries online) while occasionally working on improving RoboBlogger and launching quite a few sites/blogs using this plugin.

The return flight home is booked the 6th of March, but if I really enjoy myself here (which I’ve done so far) I’ll probably extend my visa another month, re-book my flight and have another month of awesomeness.

If you happen to be around Hua Hin or Koh Chang in February, March, or April — drop me a comment or e-mail and I’ll gladly meet up for a beer or something.

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RoboBlogger has been in private beta now for a few weeks, and I and a few beta testers have been testing out the new centralized platform. In these few weeks, RoboBlogger has been responsible for generating more than 103,469 blog posts (at the time of writing this blog post) on the series of blogs the plugin is running on.

I’m slowly and steadily opening up new beta slots and if you’re interested in trying out an awesome auto-blogging plugin for WordPress that will make you money while you sleep — you should pretty much sign up to the beta list now.

You can also follow RoboBlogger on Twitter for updates.

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Hemmalivs – Started selling groceries online

In January I joined up as a co-founder/partner for a company called Hemmalivs (literally translated as ‘Home grocery store’), which sells groceries online.

It has been quite hectic, getting all the infrastructure set up, getting the logistics right etc. But it has been a great learning experience as well as being really fun.

RoboBlogger – Awesome WordPress Auto-Blogging plugin.

Besides my e-commerce activities, I’ve also been writing a WordPress Auto-Blogging plugin called RoboBlogger (not launched yet). It’ll import YouTube videos, Amazon Products, eBay Auctions, Articles, Yahoo Answers + A LOT of other content to your WordPress blog.

I’m running the plugin on a few test blogs, and it’s making some decent chump change on complete auto-pilot for me. It’ll will be available for beta testing in a month or two.

Twitter Projects (Tweet-o-matic, Socialize, Twickstart)

I’ve previously talked quite a bit about my Twitter project Tweet-o-matic/Socialize (yeah, that project that never gets finished). I’ve put it on the back burner for now, since a lot of the core functionality in that software is banned from Twitter (auto-follow, auto-unfollow etc.).

I created a free version with some of the functionality from Tweet-o-matic and released it as TwickStart a few months ago – but that app didn’t last long. Twitter shut it down pretty much after 2 days. That’s what happens to you when you’re not paying attention to their ToS, rightfully so.

Promotomatic

Instead of just throwing all the legit functions of Tweet-o-matic/Socialize/Twickstart away, I’m going to incorporate them into a back linking/promotion tool set I’m calling Promotomatic. Promotomatic will pretty much function similar to SE Nuke, XRumer etc. and will automatically post blog comments, bookmark your site/pages on social bookmarking sites, create forum threads/profiles, schedule Twitter & Identi.ca/Status.net messages and a lot more.

I’ve not done that much on the app, but I’ve currently got Death By Captcha and Decaptcher-support for solving captchas, a rapid indexing tool (submitting a site to 3000 who is/DNS/site worth sites for easy backlinks) and some other stuff.

Promotomatic will probably be available as a beta early 2011.

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This blog isn’t dead and neither will it be. I’ve just been busy with a lot of client projects, redesigning my company websites, fiddling with other projects as well as talking to a lot of people with interesting ideas.

How this blog will change

In January I’ll redesign this blog from scratch and completely change the focus of it.

This blog started out as a way for me to share stuff about my trip to Australia with my family and friends. Gradually it started to more and more revolve around social media, twitter and my Twitter application. One key thing I learned in the last few months is that a blog isn’t about you – it’s about your readers.

As a proof of this, the undoubtedly most popular content on this blog has revolved around Twitter and Social Media. And not directly shocking, the least popular content has been about my specific life.

The Quest for Freedom

So — in January this blog will focus on a mission, a quest, that I guess a lot of us are pursuing — the Quest for Freedom.

Freedom (and specifically the freedom of time, choice and place) has always been my primary goal. Unlike a lot of my friends and my family, I’ve never, ever, felt that an ordinary job, and in extent an ordinary life, is something that I would ever feel happy with pursuing. I’ve been self-employed my entire life and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Even though I’m self-employed, I still haven’t attained the freedom I desire. I might have achieved the freedom of time to one extent (I do my consulting from home and I choose when I want to work) but I’m still far away from having as much freedom of choice as well as freedom of place (I’m still stuck in Sweden, duh) as I’m striving for.

Next year I’m going to put a lot of effort into transforming my business as well as my life. I’m going to transform my company from a software consulting company into a company that creates highly scalable and valuable products and solutions. I’ve slowly started to implement my plan for this but the most substantial changes will probably happen next year.

The Chronicle

As you probably can imagine, one aspect of this blog will thus be a chronicle of my personal quest for freedom. I will as transparently as possible tell you what I’ve done, the results I’ve got — and if the results are awesome — how you could go about replicating them.

To put this into a clear context, here are a few subjects that I’ll frequently write about as soon as I’ve launched the new blog:

• Social Media – Social Media has inevitably proven to be a topic my visitors love to read about.
• Entrepreneurship – Tips and golden nuggets on how you can get started on your entrepreneurial journey.
• Internet Marketing – I’m spending a lot of time testing various internet marketing methods right now and if everything goes as planned, a substantial part of my income will be generated by Internet marketing projects by the end of next year. I’ll share the methods I use and the results I get with you.
• E-commerce – I’ll probably partner up with a great company next year and set up an e-commerce operation. As I’m kinda new to e-commerce, this will be a great learning experience as well as something you can use as a resource if you’re thinking of setting up your on shop.
• Outsourcing – One goal I’ve set for me personally for the next year is to do more outsourcing and stop being so micro-managing-esque. If you’re thinking of doing the same, you’ll obviously pick up a few tips and tricks from my trial and error.
• Traveling – I’ll still keep a journal of the traveling I do (I do believe people like to read about new and exciting places) and share tips of stuff I’ve learned while traveling.

Your Participation

Since we’re living in the age of Social Media and User Generated Content, I’ll try as much as possible to turn this blog into a communications platform where you as readers can connect and empower each other. One quite obvious idea is to set up a forum, but I’m also thinking of other ways to enable you as a reader to participate in a discussion rather than just reading a blog post.

Another thing that I’d also like to change is the source of the content for this blog. Inevitable I’ll be responsible for the majority of the content, but I’m going to work on getting content from awesome ‘guest bloggers’ (I’ll also do some blogging on other blogs) as well as publishing some golden info nuggets from my readers. If you’re setting up a related blog and want to cooperate on some material, shoot me an e-mail and we’ll work something out.

Tweet-o-matic — What’s going on?

First of all, I’m really thankful for all the comments you’ve made about Tweet-o-matic as well as your interest.

One thing I’ve decided in the past few months is that I will not launch the application as Tweet-o-matic. First of all, the word ‘tweet’ might eventually be trademarked by Twitter and secondly, a name like that would pretty much target the platform to exclusively use Twitter. The new name for the project is Socialize and this is mainly because the platform also will feature other social media outlets (Plurk, Identica etc.) further down the road.

I wish that I could say when I’m able to release it but unfortunately I’m not in a position to do so. There’s just too much uncertainty right now regarding a few projects I might start working on.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress though!

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I’ve just spent the last two hours reading Chris Guillebeau’s (@chrisguillebeau) manifesto “A Brief Guide to World Domination – How to Live a Remarkable Life in a Conventional World” and going through the related material.

All I can say is wow, that manifesto really makes you think about things. At its core, the manifesto (as well as Chris’s movement The Art of Non-conformity) revolves around one core principle:

You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to.

Two Questions

Besides the core principle, the manifesto also revolves around two very important questions:

1. What do you really want to get out of life?
2. What can you offer the world that no one else can?

These questions are designed to help you realize how you can become or create something truly remarkable and live life on your terms, not someone else’s.

What do you really want to get out of life?

This is probably THE most important question one should ask themselves. What is your ultimate goal in life? What is your purpose?

One thing you definitely should do (and something that’s also recommended in the manifesto) while trying to answer this question is to go through Paul Myers’s “Ideal World“-exercise.

It’s a great goal setting-exercise that revolves around the idea of visualizing an ideal day in your life and then making adjustments to make it happen.

What can you offer the world that no one else can?

This can actually be a really tricky question – it sure was (and still is) for me. Basically, it’s about realizing how you can turn your passion or your interests into a specific expertise.

You really need to devote as much time as it takes to find out what you can offer the world that no one else can – and when you’re ready – the world will be amazed by your awesomeness.

Challenges

In the manifesto, Chris mentions a few obstacles that one should be vary of when they’re starting their journey of non-conformism. According to Chris, one should be ready to be challenged by:

• Gatekeepers – people whose purpose is to control or withhold the flow of information and the ability to create change, and
• Critics – expert pessimists critical towards anyone else who thinks differently than they do.

The Toolkit

When starting out on the journey to be remarkable, Chris mentions that a few tools are necessary:

• Relentless Passion – You must have an intense passion for your cause. You have to be willing to give your all, and fail and fail again. There will a long period of time with potentially few rewards.
• A Very Specific Goal – Why are you different? How will you make a difference?
• Expert Status in Skills That Help Others – You have to add value to others, or no one will want to help you. You need skills that will radically improve the lives of others.
• A Small Army – You need to start a following or recruit an army of believers that will aid you in your cause.
• Enough Money – You need enough money to accomplish the goal – no more, no less.
• Enough Time – You have to be able to devote a lot of time to improve your skills. You’re striving to be remarkable, not just ‘good’ or ‘decent’.
• One-Way Communication – You have to be able to speak to your following/your army directly through e.g. a blog or a web site.

What you do not need

Contrary to what most people believe, Chris mentions that the following isn’t needed:

• Qualifications
• Introductions
• Endorsements
• … or other credentials that are commonly required in the “normal” world.

What you need to do

Take action. Just start doing something – fail, learn, improve.

The choice doesn’t matter – just do something.

Now, go read the whole manifesto and take over the world! And oh, I highly recommend you to follow Chris on Twitter as well.

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Matt (according to his site) “is a 32-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames”.

After quitting his job back in 2003, Matt decided to explore Asia until the money he saved up ran out. During a trip to Vietnam one of Matt’s travel buddies gave him the idea to perform his (now quite famous) dance while he was filming:

The video eventually spread virally, and in 2006 the gum manufacturer Stride Gum got in touch with Matt to see if he was interested in doing another round of spontaneous dancing around the world – a trip they would pay for.

This video also became a viral success but Matt still wasn’t satisfied. After doing his last tour around the globe a lot of people wanted to participate while he was dancing. So he came up with the idea to do another round of dancing, now mixing in locals in his dance routine. And yeah, Stride Gum sponsored the whole thing once again:

So in the end Matt got two trips around the globe paid for and his videos have collectively been watched over 38 million times on YouTube. Friggin’ awesome!

And oh, he also wrote a book about his experiences with making the videos.

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