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!

Related posts:

1. A few screenshots of Tweet-o-matic
2. A Brief Guide to World Domination

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.

Related posts:

1. Things to come

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.

No related posts.

So what do you think? Does it look like something that could be useful to you?

Related posts:

1. Things to come

I’ve noticed something very disturbing in the Twittosphere lately. A lot of people are promoting a bunch of insanely dodgy sites that claim to get you tons of followers and let you become a Tweetelite in no friggin’ time at all.

Getting heaps and heaps of followers on Twitter seems to be something that a lot of people desire (I’m also guilty of this) and a select group of these people are so extremely interested in this that that they’re willing to give their password to complete strangers in order to achieve this objective.

Here’s the catch though: A lot of these sites (I’ve linked to a few of them above) promising you to “get a lot of followers for FREE” (or insert- random-bullshit-catch-phrase-here) are generally operated by a bunch of scammers, spammers and down right internet trolls.

What has happened is that a lot of people have signed up for these sites in the quest for hundreds and thousands of new followers. If you take a look at some of the infected accounts, you’ll clearly see that the creators behind these follow-applications have used these accounts (and loads of others) to virally spread the message of their scam application and thus infecting and (potentially) taking control of even more accounts.

Why you should never give your Twitter password to complete strangers 101

Just to explain something here: as soon as you enter your username and password on one of these sites the people behind them can store your credentials, do whatever they like with your account and ultimately, log in to your account and change your account password. Awesome Twitter account be gone!

And that’s not even the worst part. By logging in to your account these people can find out what your email address is, and if you’re like a lot of the people online who have the same password for all their online presences, they can hijack your email account as well.

All you wanted was to get a few more followers and now suddenly you can’t access your e-mail account where you’ve stored a lot of personal information and if you’re unlucky, credit card information and usernames and passwords to other accounts as well. Hey, I might stretch this to the furthest, but it was actually something like this that lead to the leak of 310 or so confidential documents about Twitter.

The solution: Oauth, baby!

Something I think a lot of tweeps aren’t aware of is the fact that you don’t have to supply your password in order to use applications that integrates with the Twitter API.

Twitter has been supporting the authentication protocol Oauth for quite a while, and using this protocol you grant applications access to your account instead of supplying your password. There’s no exchange of passwords whatsoever.

Another awesome thing with Ouath is that you’ll be able to revoke access (and also change read and write permissions) for the applications directly from your Twitter account (Click on the ‘Connections’-tab in the settings section).

If you grow tired of an application, you can just revoke it’s access from there - there’s no need to log in to the third-party application and delete your account and stuff like that. Neat! Basically, the only way to do this using the password-based approach is to change your account password.

My policy

When dealing with third-party applications I have the following policy:

1. Never ever (and ever, and ever…) enter my password for a web-based third-party application. If the people behind the app is legitimate and serious about their application, they’ll authenticate accounts using OAuth. Pretty much how WeFollow, Tr.im and soon-to-be Tweet-o-matic (shameless self-promotion :D) does it.
2. Only supply my password to trusted desktop clients (I haven’t really done a lot of research about this, but the desktop clients are lagging behind in implementing OAuth based authentication).

I might be pretty darn biased, but this seems like a very healthy policy :).

Spread the word

If you’ve signed up to any of these sites, opt-out if that’s possibly or as an ultimate resort - change your password. There will be no warning from the scammers when they’ll suddenly decide to steal and lock you out from your account.

And please spread and RT this post on Twitter if you want to stop people from getting ripped off.

Related posts:

1. Things to come

Last week a reporter from one of Sweden’s largest news papers, Expressen, called me and asked me a few questions about Twitter and my Twitter account.

He was working on an article about how companies and politicians are adopting Twitter to extend their reach to potential customers and voters using this very popular medium.

I’m not tweeting for a company and I’m not a politician, so I guess I was chosen to be interviewed because I probably have the most followers on Twitter in Sweden.

The article (the translated version - weird translation though - is available here) talks about companies (Zappos, Chevrolet etc.) that uses Twitter to reach out to new customers and how Barack Obama used Twitter in his presidential campagin. The article also covers a little blurb about me, my Twitter account and how I attracted 23,000+ followers.

If you’re curious about the details on how I got all these followers, be sure to read my earlier blog post ‘10,000+ followers in less than a month - Yeah, it’s possible!‘.

No related posts.

The other day I found Shelfari, an awesome site that enables you to keep track of your books and connect with fellow book lovers.

In my last post, I still suck - just less, I wrote that I was aiming to read one hour each and every day. I haven’t really been able to make this a consistent habit yet, but hopefully with the help of Shelfari I’ll be able to.

Shelfari enables you to add all your books to your own virtual book shelf, keeps track of what you’ve read and your reviews, helps remind you what you’re supposed to read next and it also enables you to connect with people reading the same books as you. Kinda neat, huh?

If you’re into books and if you’re reading the same stuff as I am (there’s a sneak peek embedded to the right), be sure to add me as a friend on Shelfari and we can read a book together or just discuss the principles and ideas presented in some of the books.

Related posts:

1. Matt is awesome
2. A Brief Guide to World Domination

So I just realized that I haven’t posted anything regarding my GTD-experiment for over a week - FAIL!

The last week was in some ways a relapse back to what I was trying to get away from. I wasn’t entirely consistent with getting up at 7am and I haven’t been completely strict with cutting down on checking my e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and stuff like that.

But compared to where I started at, I still feel that I’m making a progress towards being more productive. Suckiness, be gone.

Since I haven’t really mastered the whole early riser-thing - or cutting back on Facebooking/Twittering/etc. for that part - I guess I have to focus on these things yet another week before moving on to fully incorporating GTD and the app Things into my life.

To have something productive to do instead of the Facebooking and Twittering I’m going to schedule one hour of reading every day. I purchased something like 100 books a year ago and I haven’t even read 25% of them through and through.

I guess it’s time to get started.

No related posts.

No related posts.

I’ve been doing my little productivity experiment for almost a week now and I’m actually getting some results out of it.

I’ve been pretty much 100% consistent with getting up at 7am and I’ll probably start getting up at 6 am soon as well.

Besides becoming an early riser, I was also supposed to cut down on reading e-mail, Facebooking, Twittering and randomly browsing the web.

Most of the time I’ve been able to limit the time I’m reading and responding to e-mail, keeping track of what’s going on on Facebook, Twitter etc. and instant messaging to one hour between 12 pm and 1 pm.

Something I haven’t yet figured out though is to be 100% consistent with this. It’s dead simple to avoid these things in the morning (I tend to be a lot more motivated and get more stuff done in the morning) but during evenings I find that I become pretty easily distracted and have a tendency to fire up Facebook or MSN Messenger and just waste time.

I can’t really figure out why it is this way, but it would be awesome to track down the reason. So during this week I’m going to challenge myself to find a way to stay productive and focused during evenings as well.

Do you have any tips and pointers on how to achieve this?

Related posts:

1. Things to come