Know-How Exchange : Other

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Dear Sharon

My previous posting to you was from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and it encapsulates many of my thoughts about your posting.

For I will be old fashioned in this reply. How delightful to see a free spirit amongst we, the number crunchers, the plan makers, the forecasters and the writers of dreary tag lines for even drearier realtors (Whatever they may be). And your use of the language – syntax holds few bounds for those whose ideas spill out faster than the keyboard can cope.

Your question seems to be about giving people the means to contribute something to your site-to-be, whist confronting their fear of doing so. You need to give them confidence to present their ideas, the space and the time to do it and technologically the means to load a scintilla of their thoughts into your space whilst the have the courage to do it, lest a moment of procrastination makes creative input one of those things they wish that they had done, but having failed to seize the moment can not turn time backwards when they should have squeezed the universe into a ball to roll it towards some overwhelming question.

OK, that’s a paraphrase of another bit of the poem, but in it he is agonising whether to do something important

Do I dare? And do I dare?
Time to turn back and ascend the stair

So what you seek is something which will allow people to grasp the moment and shedding their fear make that visit.

Any website can have a portal – this one has many. The means to contribute can be set with a high threshold – “please supply name, address, email and phone number” or it can be a low threshold. But beware; many people will take advantage of an easily accessed forum to spread their twaddle, so you will have to moderate what gets published. Look at the drivel which swamps the golden nuggets in myspace.com where you host your current pages.

The technology is easy to access, the moderation is hard work and attracting the right contributors will be a taxing marketing job, but one which you should relish.

Good luck with what you are attempting – I’m sure that if you persevere that you will end up with something interesting, but it won’t be what you started out to do. The world is too chaotic for that, even if you try to control it! James Joyce had the same problem when he was writing Ulysses and I’m not sure that he really understood what he’d done even long after he’d published.

Best wishes

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions

Life coaching seems to fit with other 'make over' industries.

Offer your services at Gyms, Finishing Schools, Jails, Head Hunting agencies .... seems everyone is searching for that certain ingredient or alloy often call Un-obtanium!

Cheers