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.

A version of this article by John Evans first appeared in Syntagma.

Many small businesses are web-based now. Some use weblog technology as the centrepiece of the enterprise.

However, the outlook is not sunny for these businesses during this recessionary interlude. What, then, does the future hold for small-to-medium internet business?

Another week, another blog network wraps itself up. This time it’s the business network, Know More Media, which was particularly hard hit by Google’s ranking penalties.

Like BlogNation, a UK-based outfit, they simply ran out of money. I can think of many others that suffered the same fate, but will spare you the litany.

Even the few networks that professionalized themselves by raising VC funding and bringing in experienced managers, are finding the going tough right now. Earlier predictions of another dotcom bust are not off the table yet.

I’ve written many pieces here over the past three years on the choices faced by network owners and the chances of success. Most warned of this present crisis. As a result, Syntagma was ahead of the pack in diversifying into specialist information products on subscription terms. We have not yet felt the full force of the U.S. recession-in-progress.

The coming steep downturn in the UK will have minimum effect on us, except if the pound sterling falls relative to the dollar, in which case we will see our income rise on a windfall.

In America, the startup industry is losing momentum fast, although there’s no shortage of brave souls willing to chance more than their arms.

So, what’s to be done if you have invested heavily in an internet business, whether content or blogging-based or not?

The answer is to spot the second bounce of the ball.

As the economies eventually begin to turn around and a slow recovery takes place, most people will be looking out for “little green shoots” to signify a return to economic growth. In the early 1990s those shoots were a long time coming, and when they did, they grew slowly like hardwood trees, not the swift pines we were hoping for. I suspect the little shoots will keep us waiting even longer this time.

Green shoots may be interesting, but watching for the second bounce of the ball is usually more profitable. If the first bounce online for many of us was mass publishing technologies, what could the second be?

Providing content on your own platform as both writer and publisher makes sense because it cuts costs. Hiring other writers to do it for you made sense three years ago, but with advertisers shunning small-to-medium operations it’s probably easier to flip burgers.

Now we need a second bounce to reflate the whole business of working successfully online.

Forget social media. Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted: The Erosion Of Attention And The Coming Dark Age highlights the price we pay — including actual brain damage — for standard multi-tasking and trying to keep abreast of the information space.

As in my own book on the subject, Mediate Yourself, this is now becoming a common theme whose time is about to come. Finding ways not just of sifting and processing information but relating it to people’s essential requirements is a major path forward. Limiting individuals’ needs to interact with screens is probably more relevant still.

Simplifying the lives of knowledge workers is the big leap forward that will take us to the next level.

So far technology and software have complicated human life immeasurably. The constant pressure to upgrade and learn new tricks is mind-mashingly painful for most people — hence the brain damage.

The truth is, there may be no single second bounce this time, but a series of mini-bounces, with no one golden goose presenting itself for carving.

At Syntagma, we have our eyes on a variety of possibilities. To use a rugby term, all it needs is for someone to pick up a ball and run with it. As I write, there are not many runners out there.

A New Series on Business Startups — Part 9

Many people dream of quitting their day job and starting their own business on the internet. It seems simple enough, doesn’t it : working from home, low costs and boss of your own time?

But what about the technical side, the long lead-in to a decent income, and the flakiness of many internet projects?

John Evans, boss of Syntagma Media, has given an interview about the trials of creating an online content business to Gerry Reynolds, business consultant and retail analyst.

Here’s a preview :

Gerry : What are the economics of an online income stream? [...]

John : If you set no upper limits, you’re really at the mercy of events. It’s no good having a $10m business if your costs are $11m. Mr Micawber defined that problem 150 years ago.

The trick is to set an upper boundary that gives you the best split between receipts and obligations, building in the vagaries of the tax system, of course, and depending on the amount of effort you can comfortably provide. Everyone will reach a different conclusion, but it has to be within your comfort zone. You are, after all, in this for the long haul.

Gerry : So you’ll not be selling the business?

John : I’ve personalized the business so much, it’s hard to see who would buy it now. But the idea of creating an empty shell of a company, with no branding, so that anyone can buy it, just isn’t how I do things. I’ve always preferred chocolates to boxes.

Read both posts here : #

It’s reported that few small business owners turn to the internet to find contacts or for networking.

Social networking sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, have little attraction for the business bosses.

New research from Barclays Local Business indicates that 60 percent prefer traditional network events when looking for support and advice. Only 8 percent consider going online to discuss their business.

John Davis, Business Marketing Director of the Barclays outfit, says, “Many small businesses are sole traders and organized events allow you to meet others and discuss issues face to face, something a chat room will never do.”

Small Business Booster wonders, though, whether putting effort into the business itself might not be a more productive exercise?