Isn't it ironic

Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything's okay and everything's going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think everything's gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face 
Alanis Morrissette - Ironic

Just when I got to my hundred posts and started to brag about such a meaningless achievement, I had to keep two week break of my blogging. I turned quite sick and I just can't blog when I'm sick. I actually didn't have the energy to even visit my blog once while I was laying on the bed and sofa.

I really love the lyrics of Alanis Morrissette Ironic. It really gathers the way life teaches you. When you're playing it real safe, then it hits you much more certainly than if you wouldn't. If everything goes really well, life reminds you also on the worse side of it. If everything is going wrong, life will help you to feel bit better. It's ironic, but that what makes live so interesting.
 
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

One Hundred Posts

I promised myself that if I ever get to hundred blog posts, I'm going to blog about my blogging. My blogging started March 2010 and after first half year I started to blog much more often and I got to hundred in in year and two months.

I can't exactly remember why I started blogging. I've been following blogs for years and years, but never really felt like blogging. I first tried with sports related blogging about two years ago, but it never really got off. No one read it and I didn't really like it. So I changed my language to English and started to blog first about books and then gradually moved to anything interesting.

The subject in question

One thing I used to think a lot was a subject for my blog. What would be the key thing to blog about. Most of the blogging tips where saying that concentrate on niche subject to get more readers. Also most of the blogs I followed was one subject blogs. I tried and tried to come up with an specific subject for my blogging, but never did. Finally I thought that I rather constantly lose many of my followers because I blog about so many different things, than try to stick with one thing and then lose my interest to this all together. I've noticed many many times that I lose readers due to wide variety of subjects I blog, but that's true me. I rather be myself with fewer people than try to please everyone.

Why I blog

At first it started with this personal branding type of an idea to get more visibility if I ever would decide to change job or start my own business or something like that. Soon I found out that I like it and blogging came a true hobby for me. For me it's like hanging out with my thoughts. It's so nice to be able just concentrate on things I feel interesting and just be totally me. Actually I haven't even told most of my friends about my blogging, just because I want to write to web, not to some guys I know already. It makes me more to be me, because I'm not writing for any known audience. Again I could get quite many more readers from my friends if only they would know I'm blogging, but that's not my point at all, so I haven't done so.

Tips - or how I blog regularly

There's couple of small things that makes possible that I get a blog post that regularly. I tend to try to get at least 2 posts out in a week, hopefully 1-2 more. I do work for living, I have two small daughters with whom I try to spend all their wake up time with, I try to exercise 5-6 times a week and I use too much time watching sports from TV. Still I tend to achieve my blogging goals. I'm not going in details of my priority management, but my main points related to blogging are:

• Write when you  have time and energy for it. When I get to the mood, I tend to write multiple blog posts at once. Then I publish those later. I normally have at least one blog post ready for publishing. Lean experts might say that this inventory is waste, but I don't see any other alternative to publish regularly, since interval to find time for blogging varies so much.
• Always write your thoughts down. I currently have 18 blog posts with some texts or ideas written down in blogger. Then I have couple more on my mobile's notebook to be transferred to blogger. This way even when I'm not right away inspired to blog about something specific, I check my drafts and most often I find some post to complete from those.
• Follow inspiring blogs and web sites. I really often get ideas for new posts when I'm checking some videos or reading something. I do follow twitter streams also, but I'm not sure if I've ever got any ideas to blog about from twitter. Good old Google reader and RSS feeds, with proper longer blog posts with images and videos work much better to inspire me.

Thanks

It's been fun to notice that there have been more and more people checking my blog out and hopefully there's some people who really enjoy it. Either way, I'm not gonna stop because of too few readers or anything, since I really like this. Thanks for you too, if you really read this post this far and have been reading my posts some other time also.

I wanna say special thanks to Vasco Duarte, who is a colleague of mine, he's been (most probably he don't know this) a kind of a role model for blogging to me. In the beginning I was checking his blogging a lot and got some good ideas from there. I know he's been reading and commenting on my posts once in a while too, so thanks Vasco for that.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Giving an online training - thoughts on it's challenges

I'm not a full time trainer, but I've been keeping some trainings in different places. Recently I had to give my first training totally online, so that it was only me and my computer using screen sharing with participants. That training was the hardest I've kept so far. There's so many challenges with online trainings which I wasn't aware of. Here's my learning's:

Whole situation seemed really strange. I knew some of the guys online, but there was about half of them I didn't know. It felt absurd to talk alone in my room and try to get people to learn something. For me, it's so much easier to go in front of the crowd and adjust and collaborate with the crowd to get the message through. And by no means it's really easy for me to go in front of the crowd, but it's just so much harder to do it totally online without true connection to the people.

With online training there's almost no connection to the people you are talking to. You don't see their reactions, you can't read from gestures or body languages that are the guys understanding you or would they need some more explanation. Or in the worst case they might be totally bored and they would need something to wake them up.

Also with online communication,  people tend to mute their microphones and you don't even here the slightest sound of laughter, when you try to be funny or you don't hear the moment of silence when they are possibly processing about something controversial or surprising you said. It's just you, your slides and silence. It's truly scary.

You are left with your voice and slides. You can't use your body language and the space to move around, you normally have in face to face trainings. You have to try to use just your voice to get the message trough. It is really hard. I've worked whole my career with multicontinent projects and I'm really used for using online tools and telco's for communication. I still never would have guessed how hard keeping training with these tools is. All the credit for those guys who do this more regularly.

I want to highlight that keeping training is so much different than meetings and presentations via online tools. In meetings and presentations the topic is often better known, there's natural conversation, microphones are open much more and you can hear and feel more about what others are doing. So I'm only talking about the difficulty of online trainings, the other stuff is much easier.

With the experience of two online trainings I'm not a good expert to give any tips how to perform better in those, but here's what I will do differently next time:

• Setting the stage. I will try to get much more people to say something in very beginning. I'll try to get some expectations and knowledge about their competence in the area in question out before I start. That may help collaboration further during training.
• I'm going to change my slides to contain less information. Even with face to face trainings, people tend to be reading the slides when you are talking to them, I can just guess how much they are concentrating on slides when that's all they see. Maybe less data in the slides will help the people to focus on listening. This is just me guessing, but it's worth of trying still.
• I might be looking if there would be some way to get feedback during the training. Maybe vote buttons or some red, yellow, green lights for the users to be able to say when they've heard enough about subject or would like some more explanation. Even it might feel artificial, it could still give important feedback to me, to decide how to progress.

I guess it's obvious that I prefer face to face trainings and I guess everyone else does also. Sometimes still the subject is such small and focused that it's much more convenient to try to keep online training in 1-2 hours, than use many days or weeks to travel to keep face to face training. So I bet it wasn't my last training online.

I always like to try new stuff and learn new skills. This event was actually quite useful learning for me. I learned a lot about the teaching. I noticed many useful things when I was missing some important ways to communicate. From now I'm much more aware on those and I will try to concentrate on using those more wisely when I have the change.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Amazing timelapse video by Terje Sorgjerd

Amazing and really beautiful video shot in many different locations (Check the Vimeo site for details). One of the most amazing ones I've ever seen.



The Mountain from TSO Photography on Vimeo.

Here's the Facebook fan page of the artist TSO Photography.
 
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Disappointed to notice amount of copycats in the web

When I was doing the investigation for my previous blog post about this one site which had suspiciosly similar content from other sites, I noticed that similar things is ongoing in much larger scale than I expected. It seems that it is really common that same article is shown in many places with minor differences. For example all of the following websites had the exactly the same article, only differences where the title, pictures within the text and whether the writer and source was mentioned or not.

http://lovelyra.com
http://greenpitchmusic.com
http://advancedguitarlessons.org
http://www.syncrat.com
http://teddmusic.com
http://countryguitarlessoninfo.com
http://www.positivearticles.com
http://www.musicinfo4all.co.uk
http://www.freebie-articles.com
http://www.darulz.com
http://netview.blogsome.com

Here's the exact links to those article's and you can see that those really are the same article.

Acoustic Guitars – Picking Out Your First One
A Guide to Buying an Acoustic Guitar
A Guide to Buying an Acoustic Guitar
Buying an acoustic guitar
Music Guide - A Guide to Buying an Acoustic Guitar
A Guide to Buying an Acoustic Guitar
A Guide to Buying an Acoustic Guitar
Advice on Buying A Guitar
The Secrets and techniques To Owning A New Acoustic Guitar
How To Buy An Acoustic Guitar
Acoustic Guitar - Picking Out Your First One

Here's citation how they all start:

Knowing how to choose the right guitar and how to identify a bad one, will save you from countless headaches, not to mention finger aches.

Acoustic guitar bodies come in basically the same hourglass shape, with some variations, but they do vary in size, color, wood-type, style, and extra features. You can even buy an acoustic guitar so small that fits into a hiking backpack.

Guitars ( Acoustic Guitar, Bass Guitar and Electric Guitars) come in a very wide range of prices, but when it comes to instruments, in general, you get what you pay for, especially ...

Couple of these articles mentions that article was written by Ian Williamson. Most of those doesn't. In most of those you have no way to realize that article is originally from another source. I'm not accusing these sites for anything, but I'm just disappointed. Disappointed for the guys who really create unique content. That content will get less and less visibility if articles which are seen popular are copied to multiple web sites over and over. The different unique content might be pushed down in search results because the ones copying their content can release so much more often than the ones who really need to write something to publish it.

For the internet is almost the same if there is 100 times the same content or not. Main thing is that people will find what they are looking for or find things that are interesting for them. Main disadvantage there is that this type of activity might lead to people actually producing less and less content unique content and internet will get much poorer.

Maybe all of us bloggers, who create our own content and do remember to mention the source if some content is borrowed, should have a unique badge on our blogs. Here's challenge for someone to create snippet that could be added to these unique content blogs.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen