Sharing information changes our culture and history. Whether it’s the use of Twitter in the Arab Spring, Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride or hard-hitting newspaper journalism, information sharing changes how we see the world, and what we can know of it.

What follows is a series of articles, each focusing on an important part of the narrative of information sharing:

1. Writing
2. The mail service and the telegram
3. The telephone
4. Email
5. BBSes
6. The web and modern social media
7. The future of information sharing

We are neither at the beginning nor the end of this development. The narrative has been playing out for millennia, and it’s nowhere near over.

Recently I’ve been watching a lot of videos with Louis C.K. As I watched this video, I instantly connected it with this article by Leo Barbuta, that I read earlier this week.

Louis is talking about how George Carlin advised him to throw away all his material every year and come up with something new. Before that he had been gradually developing material for about 15 years, and some of his jokes he had kept in the routine for that long, with limited success. But as he starting forcing himself to make new material every year, he started tapping into deeper and deeper stuff. Observational humor gradually transformed into jokes about deeply-held feelings everyone can related to. There may be no comedian alive today that captures white middle-class angst as well as he does, and hes had enormous success with that as his material.

What does that have to do with an article on writing for others daily? Plenty. If you formulate your thoughts regularly and put them out there for others to read, you can’t allow yourself to keep abusing the same poor old tired thoughts. You can’t write the same article twice, so when you’ve captured a certain set of thoughts in writing, you give yourself permission and motivation to move away from them and go further. Hopefully deeper.

Much like Louis C.K. throws away his material every year, you can “throw away” your habitual thought patterns every day and move on to something else.
It doesn’t mean you discard them, but that you no longer continue to concentrate on them. You are building up a “body of thought”, much the same way Louis is building up a body of work. This will benefit both of you for the rest of your lives.

I don’t think this is isolated to writing and comedy either.

• If you are stagnating in the gym, you can participate in a competition, or help train someone else.
• If you are stagnating in your finances, take a snapshot of your current situation and document every dollar you spend for a month.
• If you are stagnating at work, you might want to mentor someone, or offer training in something you are already good at.

The philosophy is always the same:

1. Take stock of where you are now, through writing, teaching, seeing an expert, etc.
2. Put yourself out there. Show your status sincerely to someone to you trust. Make it public when appropriate.
3. Figure out where you want to go from there.

The last step doesn’t have to be goal-oriented. Can you move in a direction that feels good, even if you have no idea where it will lead?

Before we put things down on paper, in a form that we’d be willing to show to someone else, our thoughts tend to circle around the same topics and we get stuck in a rut. But sharing and analyzing regularly make sure that you keep moving ahead. How many if your thoughts are new today?

Google glass is kind of cool, but the current version suffers from an input problem. It’s voice activated, which isn’t super-practical. I’m not very interested in writing my text messages with that, and like someone said on Reddit: “I can’t wait to run into the office bathroom and yell ‘OK glass, take a picture and upload to Facebook’”.

Microsoft has been working on a bracelet that can sense hand-gestures (sort of a Kinect for your wrist), and Apple is probably joining the soon to explode Smart-Watch market.

Now let’s put all this together:

Smartwatch:

• Flexible screen shows you notifications and allows simple touch-input
• Hand sensor detects the location of your hand and fingers down to a fraction of a millimeter, allowing for precise gestural inputs
• Motion detectors, self-facing camera and whatever else they think would be useful on there

“Glasses”:

• Screen with a controllable transparency or in eye laser that can show stereoscopic images (3D)
• Can also record everything you see (in 3d?)
• Can be placed on/over normal prescription glasses or shades OR has cameras and lenses that self-correct to give you 20/20 vision when worn

“Phone”

• Computing hardware with a touchscreen, much like our current cellphones

The glasses and smartwatch will be optional, but you need the phone as a computing/storage center.

There used to be a time where I couldn’t see how all the input and output problems of wearable computing could be solved, but now I’m getting really excited. All that’s left now is figuring out the details and designing actual products.

Frontline: Afghanistan

Return to Afghanistan

In search of pirates

Favelas

Middle East: Israel

Glue Kids of Kenya

The impressions show

Extreme World: Chicago

Extreme World: Mexico

On Gangs: Poland

On Gangs: Brazil

On Gangs: Belize

On Gangs: Los Angeles:

On Gangs: MS-13 and Jamaican gangs

Bonus: Extra’s episode starring Ross Kemp

Biggest Stores

Kindle (Amazon)

Submit through their KDP site.

While they recommend .doc or .prc formats (they publish in .prc), Amazon lets you upload in ePub, .txt, .moby, htm, html, .pdf or .rtf.
See more guidelines:  and a simple formatting guide.

50mb size limitation.

Offer KDP Select. Your book is made available in their lending program (with royalties paid for each time it’s lent), as long as it’s exclusive to Amazon for at least 90 days.

Royalties are variable. One can choose a 70% royalty scheme, where they can lower the price of your book and affect the royalties, or a 35% model, where you always get that amount of your listed price, no matter what they sell it for. Caveats apply.

They pay out through electronic transfers or checks.

Nook (Barnes and Noble)

Pubit is the webpage they use to allow people to self-publish.

They use the ePub format but they will convert automatically from Word (.doc and docx), HTML, RTF and TXT and have a 20mb size limitation.
After uploading you can use their emulator to see what it will look like on an actual Nook.

“Note: PubIt! is currently for U.S. publishers. PubIt! requires a U.S. Bank Account, U.S. Credit Card, and a U.S. Tax ID that are all tied to a U.S. address.”

Nook Royalties:

• Books with a List Price below $2.98 or above $10.00 will receive 40% of the List Price in royalties (i.e. A book with a List Price of $20.00 will earn $8.00 for every sale.)
• Books priced between $2.99 and $9.99 (the “sweet spot”) will receive 65% of List Price in royalties (i.e. a book with a List Price of $9.99 will earn $6.49 for every sale.)

Kobo (Chapters/Indigo)

Kobo does not have an automatic process to submit eBooks when this is written, but they do offer a manual process: http://www.kobobooks.com/companyinfo/authorsnpublishers.html

Use the ePub format, and at the moment seem to only accept books in that format.

iBooks (Apple)

Apple requires that you use their tools to format and upload the books, but it is possible to convert from Word documents or ePub.
You will need to have a Mac to use their delivery tool, though there seems to be a manual way around it. (unconfirmed)

Google

Accepts both .pdf and .ePub.

Instructions on how to submit books to google. 

They reserve the right to change the retail price of the book, but will pay your royalties according to the list price you give them.

Get paid by check or electronic funds transfer.

Tools

Sigil is Open-Source Software that contains a wysiwyg editor to let you write directly in the ePub format, rather than write in Word and then have to convert your format.

Calibre is a tool that lets you convert and preview ebook formats on your own machine. Also a library management tool and allows you to sync files directly to readers :

Create well-formatted .moby files with MobyPocketCreator

Alternatively, you can use services that take care of the legwork for you:  Smashwords or FastPencil. In fact, there are services such as the Sony store and the Diesel store, which will not accept self-publishing unless it’s through Smashwords.

Other sellers: eJunkie, clickbank

In Summary

Everyone supports ePub by now. This should be your primary format to work in, or at least export to.

If you don’t want to do the legwork of submitting to all the different sites, look into using services like Smashwords or FastPencil.

It’s important to note that while you can sell .pdf files and other content directly from your website, you can’t sell ebooks directly onto readers or apps without using the related publishing services. I.e. if you want deliver directly to the Kindle, you have to go through Amazon. If you want to sell an ibook, you have to go through Apple.

Songwriters earn passive income when they get royalties for songs they’ve written in the past, bloggers do it when they get ad revenue, and investors do it when they get interest or dividends.

So I’ve set a goal that I mean to achieve.

By September 6th 2012 I will have created a passive income stream that generates $100 a month on average over at least 5 years.

How I will achieve this, I have no idea yet. But people have done much more than this, and I’m certain I can find a way and execute on it in time.

To coach me on, I’ll use Steve Pavlina’s series on Passive Income, and I would appreciate if friends and family bugged me regularly and asked “Hey, hows that passive income stream coming along?”.

I’ll write more once I know what the hell I’m doing to realize the goal. What matters now is that it’s out there.

I like to think about what people will say of us in the future. Of course, they’ll have their own nonsense to deal with, but it’s fun to figure out what it is we take for granted today but will be considered ridiculous later.

There must be a lot of things, but let’s take the holiest of holys: The Economy.

The Economy is a sacred thing. Everything that benefits it is good, and everything that damages it is evil.

The first commandment of The Economy is: Thou shalt have a strong GDP.
The  GDP simply measures all the stuff a country makes and all the services it provides over a year. A high GDP is good for the economy. But what does that mean?

• If you get a new mobile phone every 6 months and throw the old one away, you are increasing the GDP. Good consumer. (as long as you don’t give your old phone to someone)
• If you reuse plastic sacks as garbage bags, instead of buying special ones, you are lowering the GDP. Bad consumer!
• If you save money, you reduce the GDP. It’s much better for The Economy that you keep as much debt as you can handle.

The best things that ever happened to The Economy was when the guys that make our stuff realized that if they just make it last for a short amount of time, we’ll buy it more often. The shorter it lasts, the better for The Economy.

Razors have been made that staid sharp for years, printers that lasted for decades and even lighbulbs that have lasted over 100 years. Of course, these things are horrible for The Economy. Why make just one lightbulb when you can make a hundred? Efficiency and environment are of no concern, we must consume!

Of course, The Economy is a measurement of how well people live in a given country. So for people to live well, we sometimes need to make sacrifices for The Economy. Acting frugally is selfish and ignorant. Consuming is the one and only commandment. Surely if you take on another job you can afford to rack up more debt and buy more stuff? For The Economy.

It’s pretty hard and I have a long way to go, but the great thing about drawing is that even something half-decent feels great to see and to show off. It’s a lot of fun no matter how good you are. (or aren’t)

Check out my gallery on DeviantArt, but don’t be shocked, live drawing means nudity: http://froztwolf.deviantart.com/gallery/

When we were children we always progressed. We learned to crawl and to walk, to talk and later to read, write and do math. As we got older we were expected to get better at all these things.
As young adults we move away from home, we start making more money, get careers, have intimate relationships with people outside our family. (hopefully)
At this point we have been progressing all our lives. Always keeping what we have and moving beyond, adding new toys, extra skills and more developed relationships.  We expect this progression to last forever.

It doesn’t. 

Suddenly we lose a job and have to take a step down in our career. Suddenly a relationship ends and we have to go back to dating idiots. Suddenly a market crash wipes out our savings and takes away the nice new car. (And God forbid…the XBOX)
We all know these things can happen, and yet we don’t expect them to happen to us.
And when they do, we become upset. With life and with ourselves.

How can we be taking a step back? We are supposed to be progressing. Everyone else is.
The time it takes to recover feels like wasted time.
You started smoking again? You stopped exercising? You feel like you just wasted all that hard work.

It feels great to progress, to get a promotion, to get married, to run a one-minute mile; and this is why games offer constant progression. They are an idealized version of life. This is what we would expect if life was perfect. And we get really annoyed when it isn’t.

Life is rarely perfect. Or rather, life rarely meets our expectation for what we want it to be.

We need to come to terms with the fact that sometimes we regress. Sometimes we find ourselves in a place we have been before. Sometimes we lose the cool toys we had worked hard to acquire.
This can be painful. And that’s fine.

I could make big statements here about how we should learn to live in the moment, enjoy things while they last and embrace the concept of impermanence.
And while all that is true, knowing it won’t prevent the pain of the loss, the frustration of regression.

What we really need to do is to accept the pain. Accept the frustration. There’s no sense in kicking ourselves when we are down. Rational or not, we do have the expectation of constant progression. And when we are reminded that this isn’t a realistic expectation, it hurts. But that’s fine.

It’s supposed to hurt.

But it’s peculiar that either of these should be the measure of a man: How much stuff he can amass, or how much he owns. Can you imagine a society that were focused on honest expression rather than money and dead items? This may be a flight of impossible utopian fancy, but let’s indulge it for a brief moment.

You see, we all modify our behavior and our personality to fit into society. Anyone not doing this would be eradicated swiftly. Most of us don’t go around inflicting violence on those we dislike, or sex on strangers we do like. We let it slide when our parents say something unintentionally offensive, and we keep our mouths shut when a stranger’s child hurls obscenities at us.

Freud would have split us into three parts: Our ID, which houses our animal wants and desires, our carnal urges and all base needs; the Superego, or society at large, with it’s expectations to conform and behave in an acceptable manner; and lastly the Ego, which bridges the gap. The ego represents our perceived status in society, helps us negotiate through it and attempts to sublimate the urges of the ID, giving us a way to express them in a way that matches the expectations of the Superego.

But all this work towards “fitting in” is taxing. There is a tension that builds. If you pay attention you can sometimes feel the sensation of an over-inflated balloon. The air needs to come out somehow and this is what honest expression is all about. We need a respite from the superego, a vacation for the ego, and to just express ourselves from the ID. And we all already do this to some extent.

Some of us do this through writing, playing music or painting. But for those that never found themselves in artistic endeavors, there are other ways. Partying, smoking or even masturbating can bring about the same tension relief.

You know you’ve found an activity that works for you if, while engaging in it, you forget all about the things you “should” do, if you forget about how to be proper and respectable and do it because something in you yearns for it to happen. You know it’s an honest expression of yourself if you feel that the tension of living in a society has been lifted, perhaps just incrementally. If a little air has been released from the balloon when you are done.

Be advised though, that the form of expression you may be using now can be bad for you in other ways. Is this why you still smoke? Or why you overeat? If it’s something you have been trying to cut down on, replace it with something more wholesome. You can indeed teach an old dog to sit, and you can learn new activities with ease, as long as you focus on the expression they allow, rather than becoming “good” at them.

And why do we do this? So that we can throw ourselves at that nebulous challenge called “life” again with full vigor, safe in the knowledge that our individuality will be preserved, even if we need to make compromises with it occasionally. So that we know we have a safe haven, in the midst of life’s uncertainty. Without the mundane and painful parts of life, this expression is meaningless. Without this expression, we get no respite from the pain and uncertainty.

“Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
― Stephen King