(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

It’s always great to learn about new people, especially when they have as much experience as Dave Gray of XPlane fame. XPlane is a “visual thinking” company and an early web adopter.

Dave’s advice is very good for people who don’t have a crystal-clear idea of what they want to do, but they are dead certain they want to do it! This is contrary to almost everyone else’s advice, which asserts you need to have a clear picture before you start.

Bait your hooks, cast your lines

In contrast to Matt Cutt’s “Katamari Principle” recommendation, Dave Gray recommends writing about everything you can. Like fishing, the more lines you have in the water, the more likely you are to get a strike.

Dave asserts that it isn’t necessary to know, in advance, exactly what you’re going to write about, exactly what services or products you intend on offering. Sort of like fishing… you may go out to just see what you can catch, and come home with a stringer full of crappie. While catching few black bass might be considered “more successful,” at some level, catching fish is catching fish.

More hooks, more lines

Actually, Dave’s advice isn’t that far from Matt’s: you can only add so many lines at a time, and very few people can start huge. So as you master the process of delivering content in once niche, keep going, and start delivering content in other areas as well.

Perhaps you’ve mastered the techniques of catching crappie, and want to move to bigger fish, say, bass, or muskie, or sailfish. Your success in one area can be a basis for building success in another area. The most important thing is that to be successful at fishing, you need to keep fishing… even when everyone else goes home. When you’re the last man standing, you benefit from the “scale-free network effect,” as Dave explained in detail.

Internet is scale-free network

Dave hammered over and over that the internet is a scale-free network. This means the rich get richer. Here’s how it works:

• In a very small network, most of the nodes (i.e., websites) are equal linked
• As the network grows, some websites get a few more links than other websites
• As each new website comes on line, the more popular websites get more links, but the new websites don’t get any links

Use Google as an example. Just about every website of any consequence at all links to Google somewhere on the site. But who does Google link to? Does Google even link to anyone? They might, I don’t know. But they certainly don’t need to.

This could be depressing… but there is hope: most people who start blogs and websites give up. Dave used Sergey Brin’s website, which has 2 (!) posts. No, I’m not going to link to Brin, he has enough mojo already. You can find it using Google if you’re really interested. As Matt Cutts briefly discussed, longevity is important, and people giving up is part of why longevity works.

The AESOP method for growing ideas

AESOP stands for Awareness, Engagement, Sharing, Ownership and Promotion. I wasn’t able to follow Dave all that well on this topic, so what follows is what I understand from his telegraphic presentation.

The AESOP notion is when have an idea, and you believe it’s a big idea, your first step is making people aware of the idea. Then engage them and share ownership to promote your idea. Repeat this process for different groups of people as the idea gets bigger and takes hold. The AESOP process is probably a good way to explain “virality,” especially how WordPress itself hs grown. The ownership aspect is a very important part of WordPress, and is enforced by the GPL license. Your contributions to WordPress can never be taken away from you!