How about you? What do you wish you had known or done earlier?

I’ve gotten to the point where I no longer care if people rip my content because it all ends up coming back to me anyways

Aaron Brazell

I am a vagrant in San Francisco and I have been receiving free voicemail from GrandCentral. I cannot overstate how inconvenient this outage has been for me.

Fortunately, the free wifi at the Starbucks on Howard St. means that I can use my MacBook Air to stay in touch with all the people who matter to me.

Homeless Man

i would pay to have a middle finger icon on skype IM

Mike Arrington

If life hands you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Kick life in the ass and tell it you don’t want lemons. Put on your big boots and stomp all over the lemons. Then go get yourself a cup of coffee, and get back to work.

Brett Legree (via Dave Navarro)

PS – I’ve been toying with the idea ever since I started doing these “overheard” posts of starting a new blog just for them. I’ve decided to take the plunge and do it! Details coming in the near future…

The danger I see is this: if we’re suckers for aspirational marketing at every turn it becomes easy to start treating those posts like comfort food. We feel as if a given post or blog is worth the time investment because it makes us feel like we’re becoming better at something, but if you never actually do anything as a result of what you’ve read, if you don’t make changes and act on advice, if you’re not inspired or meaningfully informed by it (meaningfully being information you later use), you’re doing the digital equivalent of eating a bucket of ice-cream.

Skellie

Do not comment when drunk. Do not blog when drunk. Do not tweet when drunk. Keep in mind, you can be a little silly and tipsy, but if you’re a snarky drunk or an angry drunk or a maudlin drunk or a stupid drunk — and let’s face it, most of us can be described as at least one of these — get yourself a bottle of water and walk away.

Naomi Dunford

I refuse to converse with idiots who wear Bluetooth headsets all day

Henry Rollins

I’m just saying, Twitter is serendipity squared – and not reciprocating followers is just… anti-discovery.

Chris Pirillo

Allowing excuses to remain in your life is equal to planting the seeds for regret and watering them faithfully every single day. Don’t be a sucker. Do whatever it takes to push past them.

Dave Navarro

There is no problem so complex that it can’t be exacerbated by hitting the “Send” button.

Anil Dash

I’m tired of reading about crap that people don’t put into practice. I know too much about what goes on behind the blogging scene.

Bloggers don’t often practice what they preach.

Harrison McLeod

The blog acts as a long, long presentation—as long as a potential client wants it to be, really—with absolutely no pressure, since folks can just lurk for months if they’d like. The calls we get are from folks who’ve already sold themselves.

Kelly Erickson

A blog isn’t a business any more than a building is a company.

Liz Strauss

The thing is, people seem to be getting burned out on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, but I have been running into non-techie folks who are starting blogs and loving it.

James Ohmdal

Think about it – if you haven’t “gotten around to it” in the last six months … what makes you think you’ll do it in the next six months? It’s not as if time is going to magically free itself up.

Dave Navarro

As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we’re surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper. Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it’s obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways).

Chris Anderson

Anyone here from PayPerPost? You need to kill yourself. I’m kidding. Well, I wouldn’t mind it if you did.

Jason Calacanis

You’ll have to take my word for it, but the more popular the Blogger is, the slower they are respond and, for the most part, I often don’t get a response at all.

~ Mitch Joel

If you are selling creative services, one of the things that can get in the way of clear pricing is the belief that what you charge is related to your value as a person. Wrong! It has nothing to do with you.

~ Ilise Benun

Most of it works. Typo spamming, keyword stuffing, social network spamming, video spamming, google spamming, parasite seo, link spamming. It ALL works.

~ Mark Wielgus

Warning… if you leave me a mostly meaningless comment with a keyword in the name field, I will hit the SPAM button and Akismet with cause you pain across the entire WordPress install-base. You have been warned. Moreso, if your comment is added to one of my older blog posts with good pagerank, I will be doubly unforgiving!

~ Alister Cameron

Excellence is highly overrated. The vast majority of clients do not want excellent or amazing or The Best Ever or Jesus Himself Couldn’t Have Written It This Good. They can’t afford Jesus. They can afford Better Than They Could Do Themselves. This means they can afford you.

~ Naomi Dunford

Where are all the viral videos for Hillary or McCain?

Erick Schonfeld

Social media participation is not a one night stand, it’s a stable relationship.

Tadeusz Szewczyk

To continue on with my series on ridiculous blog posts from Seth Godin I give you his latest blog post “Tribe Management”.

Scott White

I feel like working from home, doing what I love, is a fabulous sparkly present and I’m stomping on it daily. I feel like every time I fuck something up, little bits of sparkle wash down the drain and soon I will be left with nothing.

Naomi Dunford

There seems to be a very passive attitude by the crowd that mentions SEO. They are the same people that say they tried an ebay script or made a blog and nobody showed up at their site.

Mark Wielgus

When you look at how much Yahoo has put into their Panama system but yet they have dumb shits running the affiliate program can this really be a surprise?

Jeremy Schoemaker

Google has one goal, ruling the internet in an unchallenged top-down dictatorial manner. If you stand up for yourself and challenge them, they will do everything in their power to smack you down, until you submit to their will.

Michael Gray

Brand management is so 1999.

Brand management was top down, internally focused, political and money based. It involved an MBA managing the brand, the ads, the shelf space, etc. The MBA argued with product development and manufacturing to get decent stuff, and with the CFO to get more cash to spend on ads.

Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world.

Seth Godin

If bloggers said juicy stuff like this more often, you would see more “overheard” posts here. Quality, not quantity.

Forget about trying to find something radically different to explore, some new topic or subject, unless you are
authentically compelled to do so. Forget about trying to crank out another list, product, service or widget and then market the hell out of it.

Focus instead, on the much harder work of developing your voice. (Jonathan Fields)

Everyone has noticed recently (over the past few years and in particular lately) how dominant Wikipedia is in Google results.

Well, I guess Google’s noticed too, and decided it wants to own the second click, as well as the first. (John Batelle)

Hazinski goes on to say that bloggers and folks in the wilds of social media “can be valuable addition to news and information flow” if the protections of regulations and journalism schools are used to “certify citizen journalists in proper ethics and procedures.” Are these the proper ethics and procedures that Mark Halperin and Dan Rather adhered to during the last presidential campaign cycle, I wonder? What about the Fox News Channel? What about Helen Thomas, who can barely form a cogent thought during White House briefings, yet somehow is afforded the honor of first chair status in the briefing room. This is from whom I’m supposed to take my criticism? (Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins)

Societal ideals around what constitutes ownership over art are changing. People who try to protect and silo off their work are simply being ignored. Those that embrace the community, and give back to it not only allowing but asking for their work to be mashed up, re-used and otherwise embraced are being rewarded with attention. At the core is a basic implicit understanding – if you want to be part of the community, you have to give back to it, too. (Michael Arrington)

Yes, it’s been a while since the last Overheard in the Blogosphere. You know why? Because it’s about quality, not quantity. Please enjoy responsibly. Whatever that means (as an aside, what a coup of marketing propaganda that slogan is!)

Facebook is pushing themselves into a position of being viewed as ungrateful data hogs: amassing tons of information, selling it under false pretense, and not sharing it with the folks who gave it to them. (Jason Calacanis)

My Dad bought me my own C64 when I was 3. I actually won second place in the National Science Fair with an artificial intelligence program I wrote. I was 12. That was before the sex change. (Naomi Dunford)

A lot of people are shy about entering large markets and stick with niche blogs. I would much prefer to own 1% of a huge market because you can own 50% of it on a day when you release some unique news. (Patrick Altoft)

Most bloggers never even try to set themselves up as authorities and instead opt for repeating and reporting. If you are simply repeating what top bloggers in your industry are writing, you are adding to their authority and taking away from your own. (Courtney Tuttle)

Julie is the most determined finisher on the face of the planet. It is so strong that she is very cautious starting anything because she knows she will be driven to finish it. So telling Julie I am going to quit anything is like trying to tell the Pope that you have been thinking about it and your are going to have a little gay sex, but that it is ok and you are still a good Christian. (Shane Pearlman)

Grow up and stop acting like a bunch of petulant spoiled children, who now have to share their favorite toy with the rest of the kids in the playground. Here’s a newsflash real businesses adapt to changes in the world around them, they don’t dictate that the rest of world capitulate to their whims just because they say they are warm, fuzzy, and “do no evil”. (Michael Gray)

Photo: Patty Colmer under CC license