Monthly Archives: November 2006

How to Not Work For a Living

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on November 29, 2006 – 2:12 pm
Filed under Money, Work and Business

Recently I’ve been reading Steve Pavlina’s very interesting Personal Development blog. Now I don’t agree with everything Steve says and have also sometimes thought he may be a bit of a quack, but what I do know is that Steve knows how to write convincing articles. One such article is ‘Ten Reasons You Should Never Get a Job‘ which I would really like to rename ‘One Really Good Reason You Should Never Get a Job’.

And what is that reason? You are trading your time for money and only getting paid whilst you work – this is impractical and inefficient. To me that sounded odd at first as surely that’s what earning a living is all about, right? Well, now I realise that I was wrong and it’s obvious really – I just needed it to be pointed out to me. Why should I only earn an income while I’m working, especially as I have, or can easily gain, the expertise and knowledge to earn it constantly? Getting paid whilst eating, sleeping and enjoying myself is quite the attractive prospect.

To do this one must build a system that can generate a passive income (of sorts) 24/7 – possibilities can include starting a business, building a web site (Steve earns £20,000 from his blog per month!), becoming an investor and generating royalty income from creative work.

To paraphrase Steve, this system must deliver an ongoing value to people and have a way to generate income from it so that once it’s in motion it runs continuously whether you tend to it or not. Essentially the system model must involve a fixed-time investment that people can extract value from continuously so that the bulk of your time can be invested in increasing income (by refining the system or spawning new ones) instead of merely maintaining it.

I would like to look into some of these possibilities and see how viable one of these systems would be for me. The problem is, my time isn’t very flexible at the moment so to implement and generate an income stream in this way would be quite difficult - learning for the future is always a good idea though. Got any ideas?

The Genericide of Google

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on November 28, 2006 – 10:03 am
Filed under Sci/Tech, Work and Business

Talking of humour (previous ‘irony’ post), it may seem to many that Google have recently been lacking their sense of it after it emerged that they have been setting their ‘brand police’ on a number of publishers and dictionaries who use their name as a verb! This may seem a bit over-the-top, but in reality it is common practice – Google must protect its usage to protect its trademark.

When “Google” entered the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary earlier this year, the Washington Post noted that the word is becoming a descriptor for the search sector as a whole. You have probably misused the word too, saying something like “I found out when I googled it yesterday”.

On this subject, Google wrote that they must avoid what they call “genericide”. This occurs when a trademark becomes synonymous with a group of products – it is the generic name for that commodity – and as such its brand is taken off the trademark register and the company is left without rights. Then we could start googling at Yahoo or Microsoft!

Google is not alone in writing to the media, worrying about genericide: Hoover, Perspex, Portakabin, Frisbee and Jacuzzi (and Band-Aid, Kleenex and Xerox in America) are all still registered trademarks that already seem like a generic name for a type of product.

Escalator, cellophane, pogo and many more common ‘items’ are all past victims of genericide whose trademarks were long ago struck off the register. More recently, Sony too have been told that Walkman is no longer a trademark after losing a legal battle with an Austrian company after they labelled rival personal stereos as Walkmans. Now the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has defined Walkman as a noun, without reference to Sony.

Getting your brand into everyone’s vocabulary might seem like the ultimate accolade, but it is dangerous.

Washington Post Article
1 | 2 - Lists of misused and lost trademarks – You’ll be surprised at some of them (heroin and petrol at least – they were medications!).

Irony (Def: Iron-Like)

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on November 27, 2006 – 11:29 am
Filed under Everything Else

The Register, one of my online hangouts, is a great website concentrating on Tech news, infused with very British humour and some eccentric stories (see Suicide Squirrel In Opera-Hating Kamikaze Bike Spoke Mangle). Because of this combination, El Reg (as it is affectionately known) often receive confused emails from readers who find it hard to differentiate between the serious and the tongue-in-cheek. As for their readers, they say:

This is not to say that they’re thick - just that humour does not always successfully cross international boundaries. Let’s face it, we smarmy and sarky Brits will throw in a bit of ironic drollery at the drop of a hat. And if you don’t get it, well, that’s when unfortunate misunderstandings can occur.

To combat this, they have come up with this ingenious ‘humour tagging’ system when writing online:

  • Droll insinuation will be sage green
  • Mild sarcasm will be burgundy
  • Smarminess will be ultramarine
  • Irony will be lavender
  • Flippancy will be sunflower orange
  • Biting sarcasm will be pillar box red
  • Humour liable to cause offence will be in an insipid yellow which you can only read when you highlight it

Let’s hope that this can be adopted by W3C as a standard and we can prevent further sudden sense of humour failures in our online neighbourhoods (usually accompanied by equally sudden surges of self-righteousness).