I think the tagline says it all, “the best ideas get paid”. So what is this all about then? The website www.ideabounty.com says it short and sweat:

Clients: Get thousands of minds thinking about your brief and only pay for what you use.

Creatives: Get paid for your best ideas with no long term commitment from you.

Crowdsourcing is a growing scene which is maturing of late, but locally we are yet to tap into the vast intellectual and creative ocean out there. I’ve had the idea of an ideas network for a while, like many I suppose, and though mine has a slightly different spin on it, it’s encouraging, though not surprising, to see a company of Quirk’s stature venturing into this kind of territory.

I’ve just registered, check it out and see what you think.

found on http://www.theethicalagency.co.uk

No this is not my business, of course not, not yet that is. I’ve come across quite a few UK based agencies of this nature in the last few years and it’s been my mission for a while to start one here in South Africa.

TEA – The Ethical Agency, is a UK based ethically motivated advertising company which promotes ethical business and lifestyles and does so in a really thought provoking manner.

Visiting their site has pricked my imagination somewhat and helped further crystallise the idea which has been brewing in my head for way too long.

So who out there has any ideas regarding ethical business?

Does this interest you, do you see a need for it?

Anyone passionate enough to take it a step further and do something?

We are all agents of change in our own right and have the responsibility to create a better space for all of us to live in.

I found these inspiring quotes on TEA’s website:

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, for as long as you can. -John Wesley

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. -Greek proverb

This is the start of my nomadic BLOGUMENTARY, a journey through the world of the web, creative thinking, social networking, business strategy and personal self discovery.

On this digital journey I aim to take myself from amateur blogger / professional web designer with little direction, to what I always envisioned myself to be. I aim to become an agent of positive change and innovation, and to find true meaning and purpose to what I do.

How do I plan to do this you may be asking yourself?

I’m still in the process of figuring all the steps out and plotting my course ahead. I know coming out with this self challenge is a brave move, one I could very possibly be very sorry for if I don’t keep up with the challenge, or fail to achieve the goals I set.

Therein lies the secret. I plan to drag you all along on this journey, get your feedback, give you advice and ask for some as well. I might even involve a few of the Guru’s out there to help make this journey an action packed adventure, which we can all benefit from.

I hope to cover everything from the initial idea / vision phase, on to a little bit of a business plan with clear goals. I will be developing a strategy including the steps which I will need to take to achieve certain goals.

What will I be sharing with You

• my Brand building endeavours and the lessons I learn
• selecting & shaping my niche
• the technologies & methodologies I will be using
• the tutorials, tips & advice which shape my decisions
• my favourite resources & influences
• The tools I use to make my tasks easier

Sharing the Experience

I’ll be sharing the troubles I encounter along the way, the feelings of failure if any(I’m sure there will be), the stumbling blocks & challenges faced and the stresses I experience.

Sharing the successes, stats, milestones & profits

Any success achieved along this perilous journey will be shared with all of you. I’ll let you now when I earn my first paycheck, which I hope will be soon, in fact I desperately need it to be soon. I’ll tell you about what this project does to my web stats and when I’ve made a major breakthrough in learning or self development.

What do I want from YOU

the visitors to this site have pretty much kept their identities to themselves for their own specific reasons. I hope this will change.

Involvement. I hope you will share this journey with me. To this point the visitors to this site have pretty much kept their identities to themselves for their own specific reasons. I hope this will change and that you will start to engage with me and get to know me as well as help me to get to know you better.

Feedback. I’d like to know what you think about what I have to say, about the decisions I’ll make and the advice I’ll be giving. I plan to put in place a few incentives if and when I am able to make it worth your while to get involved. I started with a little experiment in the form of the Logo Design Q & A competition which I ran recently.

Inspiration & Advice. We can never achieve much on our own. We achieve things by learning from others and benefiting from others, and then by sharing this with others. I hope we can develop a mutually beneficial relationship where we influence each other and inspire each other to achieve great things. Where there are areas which you could help me I’ll appreciate it and if there’s anything I could do for you I hope to be able to help as well.

So where do we Start?

Well we kind of have started already. I’ve met some great people already and have a few of you subscribe to my RSS feed. I’ve just crossed the 4000 hits mark since starting out blogging more seriously a few short months ago and have a few more RSS subscribers but have no idea who they are.

I’ve just completed negotiations with a few parties to get into my own office space and have just moved in. I’m also in the process of re-designing my website to empower me on this journey.

I’ve gotten started on a few post series and have some great ideas for interesting and value adding content to help you guys out there with your journeys.

What I’d like to know from you guys is this:

Who are you all out there?

What Can I do for you?

Do you have any advice for me in getting started?

• Who are you out there?
• What do you guys do for a living?
• What can I do for you out there?
• What would you like to see on this site?
• What would you like to hear about?
• How can I empower you all to excel in what you do?
• How do we develop a platform or community which can be a springboard for us all to achieve something good?
• Do you have any advice for me in getting started?

Lets start talking and start something meaningful!

The person should be independent, or looking to go independent. Someone with a wide skills or knowledge base and a solid network of strategic connections would help. Someone with previous experience in advertising, brand development, web development or journalism would be suitable.

Are you an entrepreneur in the making? If you’ve thought about starting an agency or consultancy more than once a month in the last few years, then this may be your chance to do just that. If you don’t need to do a wikipedia search to know what Design Thinking means then I’d love to pick your brain and maybe develop a business together.

Someone with a highly ethical approach and positive outlook on the environment and development of positive values in society would be ideal.

Interested in chatting, mail me on nur@nomad-one.com or contact me on skype with “one-nomad”. Looking forward to chatting soon.

I have ideas on a daily basis, ones which I think are great and just have to be acted upon, but a host of reasons prevent me from acting, mostly procrastination and lack of motivation or just feeling bogged down by earning an immediate living. I’ve decided to document these ideas and share them, to see how others react, see what kind of feedback I can get and maybe if I can find some interested parties to collaborate or invest in them or just as a bouncing board.

IDEA # 1: Mobile Office for knowledge/web 2.0 workers

With so many of us taking the plunge into self employment or just being on the go and out of the office it has become increasingly difficult to find the right places to meet with our clients or peers, to sit down somewhere and get some work done away from our couches & beds at home and to just have a place of refuge when the creative juices are being dried up by our dry surroundings.

Onto the scene walks the office away from the “home” office (This is my idea). Imagine a few centralised spaces where you can go, pay a small fee for an hour or 2 or 3, have some coffee, plug in and do what you do best. It’s designed to suite the modern knowledge worker, it allows for booking spaces in advance, you can take your clients there. There’s an open plan area for collaboration, brainstorming, networking & the like, as well as some private or more quiet spaces for concentration or to cut yourself off from the world.

They offer office services like faxing & printing, places to plug in your iPod and watch the latest TED talks or listen to your favourite podcasts. They sell the latest gadgets which keep us drooling on a daily basis. They have a few techno savvy guys & gals to help with any glitches & bugs. Maybe they even have a few in house businesses running, which offer supporting services to the knowledge worker community like people who know how to set up blogs, wiki’s etc.

You can go and have a video conference, shoot or record something for your latest podcast. It’s a web 2.0 worker paradise. Think it’ll work? Anyone got anything to add?Anyone got some moolah to throw at an idea like this or know some open minded investors? Jump in and throw your 2 cents or 20 million at this idea. Lets see what we come up with. If anyone’s got connections at any of the big malls or centers maybe get them interested in the idea. I’m sure they wouldn’t sneer at getting peeps like us interested in spending more time in & around their malls.

Does anyone know of something like this which really exists? If so and it’s based in Cape Town I’ll by you a coffee & a Muffin if you point me to it in the next month.

The *Camp builds on the 2006 BarCamp Cape Town, the GeekDinner movement started post-BarCamp Cape Town, and the 27dinner phenomenon of finding new ways to get people together to learn from each other and to learn _of_ each other, to help build the Cape as a leader in business and technology.

For those of you not familiar with these events, they are a new (well new to many) style, think tank/collaborative events or (un)conferences. The participants organize the event and set the agenda. It’s a great way to learn from others, share ideas and get involved with people you may never otherwise interact with.

Visit http://wiki.geekdinner.org.za/wiki/Star_Camp/Cape_Town_2007 to see all the details and sign up to attend. If you have any comments or ideas for the logos, let me know by submitting a comment on this post. You also stand a chance to Win a Brand Spanking new Logo Design by entering my Logo Design Questions & Answers competition. Click Here to enter.

Below is one of the recommended modified Logo Designs requested by benevolent dictator Neil. What do you guys think of this one?

Some more options based on feedback from those commenting on this page.

Firstly on www.adii.co.za I’ve won a copy of adii’s new premium magazine style wordpress theme which is one of the best magazine style themes I’ve come across so far. The competition entailed commenting on some preliminary designs and giving adii some constructive criticism on how he could improve certain areas. So myself and another person were tied first place and have both been awarded a copy of this excellent Premium News theme. I’m hoping to use this theme which I’m going to modify graphically for my www.one-project.org site.

The second prize i was just notified of is from Cerebra.co.za “South Africa’s leading dedicated social and mobile media company” who ran a comments competition toget some constructive criticism on their website which was recently redesigned. Guess what, I’ve won an iPod Nano Woohoo!!! I’ve wanted one of these for ages but just couldn’t afford to spend money on some thing like this. Thanks cerebra, you guys rock.

I’m gonna try to track down my comments which won me these 2 cool prizes and post them here for your viewing pleasure.

Constructive Criticism

The name of the game is constructive criticism and in many cases your viewers are the best source of advice for what you may be doing right or wrong as they’re the people you’re trying to please. Many times there are things we miss because we are caught seeing things from only our own perspective so asking others is a great way to get good feedback. The trick however is to know what is good feedback and what is not. The way these 2 competitions were structured is they rewarded readers for the best, most constructive feedback and because of this incentive the comments were purposely written to be as thoughtful as possible.

It gives me some great insight into my first competition I’ve just launched last night in my Logo Design Q & A section. The basic principle is, you need something others have and you reward them for giving it to you, their clicks, their feedback, their thoughts are valuable to them so if they’re not getting anything from giving these to you they won’t offer what is valuable to them.

Commenting is one of the areas of web 2.0 which has really changed the dynamic completely. If you don’t get it right you could be in for some heavy criticism, if you don’t allow comments you’re cutting off an important aspect of your interaction with your site visitors, but get the recipe right and your site could experience phenomenal growth and popularity. A plugin release recently by Web Addi(CT)s rewards readers for commenting by displaying commenters names in a commenters cloud with the names weighted according to number of comments. It’s an interesting way to stimulate a mutually beneficial relationship between blogger & commenter.

Engage your readers and the general community and you’ll have valuable partners and business supporters by default.

The news of the facebook developer’s garage which recently(30-10-07) took place in Cape Town has made me think a little further about the possibilities which lie in the facebook platform and community. All these plugins and extensions, linking up with other online applications and services and people developing any and every type of functionality imaginable, most of which I think is a bunch of nonsense though others seem to be making use of it from vampire bites to fluffy gifts etc.

An area where I think facebook should allow more play and developers should be focusing their attention is customization. Now I know the blue bar at the top and the standard layout has become somewhat familiar and that’s fine for most, but I think it’s about time we were allowed to play a bit with our personal spaces, brand them, colour them, change layout a little more and give them a bit more of a stamp of individuality. It should make no difference to the owners of facebook, as long a their ad spaces are maintained in their places what the rest of the thing looks like.

I’d go out there as saying that this could be one of the most significant changes that could be included into the platform. I mean, it’s about us, about the individuals, their uniqueness. If i had even half the development skills needed to get stuck in on this area I’d dive in, any takers?

What do you guys think?

1. Identify problem

• What are we trying to achieve
• Objectives, aims, goals
• Define the problem from different angles
• Define the criteria for a successful solution

2. Highlight the known, obvious, straightforward stuff, and common keywords

• Ask & answer as many questions as you can
• Known information/data
• Type of product, service
• Target Audience
• Competitive environment etc.
• Obvious Key words & concepts associated to client/brand/service
• Keywords Associated with the problem

3. Make associations, extend thoughts

• Key ideas & words in different categories
• Follow thought patterns illogical directions
• Add more words which are linked to what you already have in some way
• Extend the obvious & known with “what if” type of thinking.
• Don’t be shy, be unconventional & silly.

4. Lateral thinking; go outside the known bounds or norms

• Taking info from point 2 & 3 and turning it upside down
• Redefine the elements and concepts you are discussing in new & more meaningful ways
• Redefine things in ways you’ve never thought of before
• Pick out weird & wacky characteristics of your goals, information and ideas and examine them as if looking at something through a microscope.
• Compare everything in front of you to things with very minor similarities
• Compare what you have with things completely unrelated
• Write down whatever happens to come out

5. Mixing, matching, combining & engineering key phrases, key ideas/concepts

• Taking all findings from 2, 3 & 4 and jumbling them
• cut & paste them together in random or thoughtful ways
• engineer phrases, structures, images made of these mixtures
• make sentences, write short stories, using all you have gathered
• highlight those which stand out from a conventional point of view
• highlight the good the bad

6. Discussing the initial outcome

• highlighting strongest elements from the previous exercises
• analyzing pros & cons of best options
• why good, why bad, what might be missing
• criticize, analyze
• pull them apart & put them back together

7. Best Choices
What you are left with should be the ideas which hold together throughout the process and those which evolve and become stronger. You may find that there are gaps or problems with what comes out.

Repeat if necessary!