If you can’t make up your mind what business area you want to occupy, why not become an Originative Intellectual Worker, a phrase coined by H.G. Wells.

It is said that most blogs are read exclusively by other bloggers. At first sight that may not seem very remarkable. After all, there are more than 100 million blogs out there and like generally attracts like. But at a deeper level we’re seeing an irresistible convergence. A convergence of supplier and buyer, of producer and consumer. Communication is becoming conversation, not lecture. Big Media is downsizing into widely-distributed personal media.

Essentially, what we’re now observing is the whittling away of the conventional categories that have sustained literature, journalism and, more recently, broadcasting, for centuries. Top writers do still write and let their agents and publishers manage the rest. But they are becoming a smaller and smaller minority, held in thrall by the big guns of marketing and the “blockbuster” mentality.

Increasingly — down there in the long tail — writers typeset and copycheck their own material themselves, and often publish it on a blog, or through on-demand printers. They are now the largest revenue earners for the new open-market mechanisms, like Amazon and eBay.

At the limit, as the mathematicians say, writers are also photographers, graphic artists, publishers, and the principal marketers of their work. Writers are no longer just writers but, in H.G. Wells’s term, “originative intellectual workers”.

Finding a top-gun agent or publisher is all but impossible these days. On the other hand, the originative intellectual worker (OIW) quickly masters a skill-set allowing proficiency across crafts and technologies. The OIW emerges on both sides of the track, as producer and consumer. In blogging it’s almost impossible to separate the two. With the demise of Excite, the long tail is beginning to wag the beasts of medialand. The world will never be the same again.

Addendum : Here are two extracts which refer to the term “originative intellectual workers”. The first is from H.G.’s autobiography :

“Most individual creatures since life began have been ‘up against it’ all the time, have been driven continually by fear and cravings, have had to respond to the unresting antagonisms of their surroundings, and they have found a sufficient and sustaining interest in the drama of immediate events provided for them by these demands. Essentially, their living was continuous adjustment to happenings. Good hap and ill hap filled it entirely. They hungered and ate and they desired and loved; they were amused and attracted, they pursued or escaped, they were overtaken and they died.

“But with the dawn of human foresight and with the appearance of a great surplus of energy in life such as the last century or so has revealed, there has been a progressive emancipation of the attention from everyday urgencies. What was once the whole of life, has become to an increasing extent, merely the background of life. People can ask now what would have been an extraordinary question five hundred years ago. They can say, ‘Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but what do you do? . . .’

“In studies and studios and laboratories, administrative bureaus and exploring expeditions, a new world is germinated and develops. It is not a repudiation of the old but a vast extension of it, in a racial synthesis into which individual aims will ultimately be absorbed. We originative intellectual workers are reconditioning human life.”

Here is an extract from Colin Wilson’s Beyond the Outsider:

“H.G. Wells had another explanation for the unsatisfactoriness [many of us feel with our lot in life]. Men like himself, he says — ‘originative intellectual workers’ — find normal human existence boring because they long for a more meaningful kind of existence. ‘We are like early amphibians, so to speak, struggling out of the waters that have hitherto covered our kind, into the air, seeking to breathe in a new fashion and to emancipate ourselves from … necessities. At last it becomes a case of air or nothing. But the new land has not definitely emerged from the waters, and we swim distressfully in an element we wish to abandon.’”

Interesting stuff, and just as relevant today, and applicable, I would say, to the modern world.

When starting a new business it is vitally important to know what your ultimate aims are.

Entrepreneurs tend to fall into five types, depending on their personal psychology and what type of business they want. However, personal satisfaction is often more important to them than growing a major company or brand. You need to sort out the psychology first and stick to it.

A well-known acronym for these five types of startup entrepreneur is SMILE.

S is for System. They are usually happy to buy into a proven idea, such as a successful franchise where everything is provided and the franchisor takes care of advertising and much else as well.

M stands for Money. If cash in the bank is your only goal — and why not — then you should know that this is the measure of your success and avoid all distractions and constantly bear down on costs.

I is for Innovator. New ideas and developments are your prime concern. Make sure you are equipped with the technical skills for the task, or be prepared to hire them.

L is for Lifestyle. Such would-be entrepreneurs often want to exploit their hobby. This can be very successful, but make sure there is a demand for your product.

E is for Empire builders who want to create a brand and spread it widely around.

Bear in mind that you might fall between two, or even more, of these categories. That is not a problem provided you create the right mix of ideas.

A new study by Standard Life suggests that “olderpreneurs” are choosing to set up business on their own rather than seek retirement.

Up to a third of people aged 45 to 65 want to work on when approaching the normal age to take it easy. It’s no coincidence perhaps that this is the “baby boomer” generation.

The more wealthy ones are the most likely to fall into this group.

Policy experts said the research showed that given the right incentives, a new class of “olderpreneurs” could help pull Britain out of recession.

Those approaching retirement age were twice as likely as their parents to choose to continue working, the poll found.

Andrew Haldenby, director of the think tank Reform, said the findings demonstrated a “quiet revolution that is turning traditional ideas of retirement on their head. Policy-makers need to take notice of this fundamental shift in ambition, and instead of telling this generation to slow down and retire, incentivise them to kick start our economy. If all the older people who wanted to set up their own businesses succeeded, the number of UK firms would rise by 50 percent.”

He urged politicians to harness the potential of “the greying end of the population to form a new group of enterprise champions”.

With pension entitlements shrivelling up in the current economic climate, isn’t this the kind of enterprise we need for these hard times?

In a Sunday article which made waves around the blogosphere, The New York Times claimed that internet entrepreneurs, writers and bloggers are keeling over thanks to the strains of the 24/7 global internet culture.

The general consensus on Techmeme.com was that this was nonsense.

The NYT writes :

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

Of course, to be scientific, you would have to subtract from these few examples the number of deaths and heart attacks in the general population to arrive at a guesstimate of internet publishing’s real rate of attrition.

No doubt there are serious stresses and strains working in the new online environment, but anyone who has worked for newspapers to tight daily deadlines will recognize the same pressures and symptoms.

Try slaving in a factory, repetitively doing the same tasks thousands of times a day. Or surviving the water-cooler politics of office life. Worse, the back-breaking toil of farm work. There are no easy options in “the world of work”.

I think the problem lies, as ever, with meetings, travel, networking and other inconsequentials of the wired-up sector. Networking for the internetizen means Twittering and Tweeting incoherently to hundreds, maybe thousands, of “followers”, mostly without a shred of benefit to the bottom line. Email is another source of stress and should be stamped on ruthlessly, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote last week.

The Times has this quote from him, “‘I haven’t died yet,’ said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,’ he said.”

It all depends on how you do it, naturally. Some people concentrate only on the essentials, others adopt the “4-hour Workweek” by outsourcing everything from triaging email to washing their socks. But, sensibly, it is possible to contain the stresses of the internet life.

You don’t need to be on top of every development, or go to every conference or gig. Internet entrepreneurship can be very rewarding if you can organize your time appropriately.

So what’s new?