Great thoughts as she answers this with her opinion on the subject.

I think a key for me that you mentioned in the reply to Mitch is niche. Even though you were talking about media and aggregating content, I think that does apply to business owners (particularly micro/sme)… there is so much competition in every industry, and now that the likes of social media, blogging etc have made the world so much smaller the competition is even more fierce.

By finding context in our own niche, we can find ways to become needed by that niche (and therefore have value they’re willing to pay you for). I see many business owners trying to spread their net too wide, hoping to catch anything and everything and not being specific enough to be truly deemed an expert. People will only pay for what has value specifically to them (that goes for both on- and off-line).

So Ben, I totally agree that knowledge given for free helps to establish the level of skill you hold (and that can’t be a bad thing?). Your skill – whether it’s advice, ability, product, service etc – then needs to be set in a valuable context to be able to sell it. It seems to me that in business, value is determined by your niche, rather than the wider audience.

Thanks for helping me see this more clearly – you’ve helped me clarify my point of view on this subject!! :)

The question (paraphrased) is: If a persons skills or products are their value, they can share (give away) knowledge for free. But if advice is their product how can they not charge for it?

To answer that, take the example of Mitch above, he gives away knowledge on his blog Twist Image, makes money from his book Six Pixels of Separation and consulting fees.

Others do the same, like David Allen (famous for Getting Things Done) who gives away knowledge via twitter, his blog and podcast. He makes money by selling other products, books, seminars, kits etc.

I’ve heard it said “that if content is king, context is god” (link?). Sharing knowledge is the content. Just because you’ve shared it, doesn’t mean the reciever ‘gets’ the context, the application to them. They may get a glimpse, but they’ll pay for you to explain the context, explain and show how it applies to them so that they can benefit from it.

As far as media companies surviving, I agree they either need to charge for content. Or adapt in some other way. I don’t believe that getting a goverment subsidy is an acceptable business model, ok for a short term, unforeseeable event, but not as an ongoing business model.

Aggregating content is worthless without thoughtful curation. That is, unless a deliberate bias is introduced people won’t be interested. To use my example above, people won’t stick at a site that aggregates content about anything to do with skateboards. But the site that aggregates content about skateboards and curates that list so that it’s bias is toward reducing pollution, that will appeal to that niche, better again is curation that add’s commentary, thought provoking asides or shows application/use of the information.

I believe the media industry is undergoing an ‘adapt or die’ phase now. How it turns out is anyones guess. Perhaps Sorrell can foretell that future than we can. But either way, as you point out, we’re not in the ‘media’ business, and sharing our knowledge is essential if we’re going to prove to our prospective and existing clients that we know how to do our thing well.

Ben.

I’ve heard of this kind of thing before, but it is obvious the tools are available to make this kind of implementation of game psychology into everyday business, a reality.

All it takes is a bit of creativity, which is the fun part anyway! :) I’ll be chatting to a couple of colleagues about this later.

1. The support staff in Sage Business Solutions Melbourne (bless ‘em) gave me a pointer that if “Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile” is installed it gives troubles. Therefore they suggested uninstalling it prior to commending an SQL 2008 install. I don’t know why or what but this was step 1. Note that just doing this still gave me a failed SQL install. I’d love to know more about the ‘why’ here. I’d also like to have been informed earlier instead of after me jumping up and down and making phone calls. But that’s a topic for another day. For now I’m very happy with their suggestion as it does appear to have contributed to a successful install, which is GOAL NUMBER ONE.

2. During the install you get the option to set which account the SQL Server Database Engine uses, instead of setting to NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM as per Sage KB26994, leave it as the default. After the installation is complete you then go to services.msc and change it to Local System then.

3. As per Microsoft KB955666 you can’t use a ‘number’ or ‘pound’ (#) sign in the path name. Now I did NOT have a pound sign in the path, but there was a space in one of the folder names and a ‘plus’ sign (+). So taking to heart Microsofts admonition, I copied the installer to a folder C:\SQL2008ExpR2\*.* and ran it from there.

Follows is a list of the various errors I’ve seen during this process:

“MsiGetProductInfo failed to retrieve ProductVersion for package with Product Code = ‘{4AB6A079-178B-4144-B21F-4D1AE71666A2}’. Error code: 1608.. ” See here and here.

“Wait on the Database Engine recovery handle failed. Check the SQL Server error log for potential causes.” See here.

“Error: 15209, Severity: 16, State: 1. An error occurred during encryption.” See here.

Attempting to open registry subkey Software\Microsoft\PCHealth\ErrorReporting\DW\Inst​alled
Attempting to get registry value DW0200
Submitted 1 of 1 failures to the Watson data repository
Refer here, here and here.

Hope this helps someone short cut the time to resolve their SQL install.

Ben.

They call it XPUnlimited as a trick to fool buyers into buying something that they cannot use. The legal issues are normally skillfully passed on to the end user so that the software company is not actually the one breaking the law but the person installing the software

Source: community.spiceworks.com

Also, to make it more readable, I’m using the Consolas font at 15 points in Silver on an almost, but not quite, black background.

Loving it.