Wikistrat is my ninth start-up, so I've been through this process a few times. You have to go with what works. The power of example is compelling, so model the ideas that you want someone to understand.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Wikis and social networking are just tools.
A lot of productivity is capturing ideas. I use a wiki - it's more valuable than e-mail for running a company - and I have a page for every person with whom I interact frequently.
If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.
Most of my work is, I get an idea, and, with the help of Wikipedia, I can write. I don't have to leave my apartment.
I have a very long pre-writing process where I'm jotting down ideas in a notebook and ripping out relevant newspaper articles - a long fact-finding mission.
Getting an idea for a book is not the problem, but you need 300 ideas - an idea a page.
I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.
I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together.
To be honest, what I struggled with in my degree is what's so helpful when it comes to social media in that I lack focus. I'll start reading about evolutionary biology and end up on quantum physics. While that makes writing your dissertation very difficult, for a page like IFLS, that's amazing because I get a wide range of everything.
A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.
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