Archive for the 'For writers & non-technical readers' Category

Quotations about curiosity

Friday, March 24th, 2006

I keep six honest serving-men,
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
~Rudyard Kipling

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why. ~Bernard Baruch

The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity. ~Dorothy Parker

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. ~Albert Einstein

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.–Marie Curie

The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing.–Oscar Wilde

When curiosity turns to serious matters, it’s called research.

For non-technical readers

Friday, December 23rd, 2005

If your interests are not in the hard sciences but rather in words, language and other “right brained” categories all is not lost. Free or inexpensive tools are available which will enable you to find fun and profit on the internet too.

I am writing this using a free program called Wordpress. The site is running at a webhosting service which costs less than $10.00 per month. I have seen postings by high school student who earn money finding an interesting topic, researching and writing about it, generating income by placing ads on the site and then selling the developed site.

The program is designed for non-technical users and the author has gone to great lengths to make it as easy as possible to setup and use. Inevitably, it still requires some knowledge to install and configure, but this is minimal. If necessary, you can always find a geek friend to install it for you.

Where do you start. Get on the internet and do searches on subjects that interest you. When you find good writers read their work and see how they generate their income. Keep looking for a subject which you find interesting but which is not being thoroughly written about. Start writing, editing, and re-writing. That will polish your writing skill, help you learn about the subject and give you practice using to program.

In regular publishing you try to be certain everything is perfect before you go to press. On the web you can always go back and change or delete your previous work. That means something is always better than nothing and you should publish your work before you have polished it as much as you would like.

It takes time for search engines to find and index your site. If you have something for them to find they can start this process. If the search engines have some of your material in their index there is a chance potential readers will find it and visit your site. If they like what they find they will link to you. The search engines see these links as a “Vote of confidence” and reward you by indexing your pages more frequently and including more of your pages in their indexs.

During this time you continue writing, editing, polishing your pages and your site gets better. Over time this can produce income, increase your readership and be fun.

No one besides myself and my committee has ever read my dissertation (which is probably for the better). This year more than 100,000 people will read the web pages I wrote about how to reapir a mobile home. The internet is a wonderful opportunity for aspiring writers of all sorts!