I want to know your opinion and your argument. Here’s why:

To me creativity subtracting out all logic is at best, misguided, and, at worst, stupid. It doesn’t matter what you are trying to be creative about; a problem, a written work, a piece of art – all of these require some level of logic.

Problems

Solving a problem is, in and of itself, using logic to come up with an answer.

Thinking out-of-the-box is no just making intellectual leaps to possible answers to the problem. Even if they seem illogical, surely they’ll require to enact the solution.

Written Works

Books, articles, poetry. These all have logic too.

Stories must follow a flow. Without it, authors would drive readers crazy and they would have no audience.

Articles need to be informative and follow logical flow for the same reasons that stories do. Without appealing to logic, there would be no readership.

Poetry is emotional in a lot of cases, but still, there is flow. The poem makes sense to the poet, it’s a vehicle with which to elicit emotion. It’s logical.

Art

I’ll admit, artistic works are the most difficult to pinpoint where logic comes into play.

In my opinion, most of this is due to the fact that the goal of art is to leave the meaning open to interpretation. The artist deliberately obscures the true meaning of their work so as to give others the joy of coming to their own understanding of the piece.

But isn’t color selection, choice of media, or venue a logical choice, one that furthers the goal of the artist?

Creativity can’t exist without logic!

Show me I’m wrong. Tell me how logic and creativity can exist separate from each other. I want to know.

In person, you spend time asking questions and developing an understanding of what exactly is being communicated. Online, you can spend time leaving comments on blog posts, following up via Twitter and discussing topics in forums. This is great as it helps you get to know the meaning of specific posts, and others can join in on the conversation providing real community involvement helping you get noticed.

How does this help my online reputation and SEO?

It helps your reputation and your own SEO by providing a useful resource for others to read. Think about it. You leave a comment and leave a link to your site. If you provided something of value to the conversation, either by posing a clarification question or expounding on the original post, you’ve provided something of value and other readers will consider checking up on you. Now, this won’t necessarily, directly increase your SEO performance just by posting a comment, but, it will likely get you visitors, if you provide enough value, the blog owner may get in contact with you or even write a post about your comment and link to your site. Now we’re talking.

Take it one step further and get involved outside of blog posts on Twitter or Facebook. Even though not everything is indexed by Google and others, the conversation value and pass-along value transmitted through these services offers a significant amount of benefit to your online reputation. And, as always, more hits means better SEO and more publicity across other people’s blogs and Twitter accounts as well as their Facebook pages. That brings me to another point which I will cover in another post in the near future: Social Networks pass information based on trust.  A link or piece of information passed through a trusted friend is much more likely to get clicked than a link all by itself. Social networks hold massive amounts of power in this respect.

So get involved!

Read blog posts, post comments, share information via Twitter. Become a fan of something on Facebook and create content that is valuable to others. If you give you will receive. It will take some effort, but the internet is a world-wide community of people looking to share something. Content is king. Contribute and get noticed.

Quality over Quantity – ALWAYS!

Like I said, I was following the steps, but I wasn’t being choosy. I was just hammering away at followers, but not really getting anywhere. This program works, there is no doubt about it. I’ve gotten my fair share of relevant gurus and followers, but I need to be more selective.

For those of you that may not know exactly what I am talking about, Twitter Rocket is a step-by-step guide to reaching more people using Twitter. It isn’t some scam or a purchased block of followers. It’s a real program that guides you through the process of attracting attention by being useful to the Twitter community. I think I have been useful, I just didn’t choose the best people to follow and I have learned my lesson.

Here’s to a new start with Twitter Rocket and finding the quality people to follow!

Now, Twitter is an awesome service and an awesome resource, but Project ReTweet seems like a bad idea when all is said and done.

Dan Zarella has a good writeup on the project at his blog. And Mashable has two writeups to help you understand the project better as well, details and analysis.

I agree with both of these writeups in that it doesn’t seem like this is a problem that needs fixing. It would be great to be able to see ReTweets directly in your Twitter feed for quick overview purposes and it would be great to have them formalized, so to speak. But if that shatters the way that information is exchanged, someone should step back and take a closer look at how to implement Project ReTweet.

My suggestion: Essentially the same as Dan’s. Add the APIs, formalize ReTweets, but don’t change their behavior. Twitter is and always will be about democratically disseminating information. That importance of that information is given weight based upon who ReTweets it. I would much rather read a link from one of my friends than from someone I have never seen on my feed before, which is what this formalization intends to do.

What do you think about Project ReTweet? Is it a good idea to formalize ReTweets? Would you more or less likely to read something new from someone you never heard of as opposed to your friend?

The book decimates a lot of “conventional” knowledge and wisdom surrounding the process of building software, but really, the principles apply to everything in business and life. I’m a big proponent of this because I hate to waste time planning and would rather do something. Plans are really nothing more than guesses in this day and age. The ubiquity and instantaneous nature of the internet have caused a major shift in the way businesses develop. Overnight successes such as Twitter are common.

For that reason, I submit to you that SWOT is the only analysis you need to do regarding your business.

Strengths – Know what you are good at. This is probably, or at least should be, what you are focusing your new venture around. Take stock of these items and focus on them each and every day.

Weaknesses – What do you need to work on or even avoid in order to perform at your best? Heck, if you’re horrible at accounting, get an accountant to handle everything or use a service like Shoeboxed. Don’t waste your time on what you are not good at.

Opportunites – This list should give you a good basis with which to start your marketing and business development. Grab a hold of every opportunity you can get your hands on and evaluate it.

Threats – Who’s in your way? What’s in your way? Do you work with them? Avoid them? Maneuver around them? Take them head on and prove you’re better? It’s up to you, but knowing and learning from your competition can be a huge help in your own business. Learn from their mistakes and do better.

I use SWOT so often that I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s just natural to look at an idea and apply the methodology. If you use it effectively it won’t slow you down and it is one of the few business analysis tools that work so efficiently.

The Perfect Business is Investing/Trading. Think about it… you wake up in the morning, log on to your favorite investing site and make some trades. You do well and you make money. Occasionally you have some slip ups, but, on the bright side, there are no employees to argue with and no customers to deal with. Just you and your computer.

It’s fairly simple to get started and usually requires a few thousand dollars to open a trading account, but you can start making money instantly.

I actually need to correct myself. Another perfect business is Twitter Rocket. I’m loving it!