The entire Doxmart team would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
We hope Santa brings you everything you were wishing for. Of course, if there’s anything you wish to see on Doxmart, not just during the festive season, but all year round, please let us know!
Three UK headlines caught my eye today as I scanned the news. First a move bring creationism back into schools. Then a story of a supply teacher being sacked for telling Year Three children at Blackshaw Lane Primary School in Oldham, Greater Manchester, that there is no Santa. The children were very upset by the news.
One parent said: “My son came home and said that his substitute teacher had told the class that Santa doesn’t exist and it’s your mum and dad that put out presents for them.”
The third story was about UFO sightings over the West Midlands in the UK. Many people simulataneously saw unusual bright lights flashing across the sky and several made videos. The Ministry of Defence, records alleged sightings but does not believe in anything beyond natural phenomenon or ‘lights off other aircraft’. It is not investigating. Not exactly Mulder and Scully is it?
Still, all three stories are really about faith or believing in things that many believe in yet that others either don’t believe in or can’t see or imagine. Faith is very real to people of faith yet can be seen as subjective by others.
Knowledge is objective and a tangible commodity but this has not always been valued. That’s why we are spearheading the move towards monetising your intellectual property. Let’s face it, skilled and talented individuals from all walks of life benefit from these skills, look no further than a Premier League footballer or leading pop star for examples. So let’s see those with knowledge share it further and benefit in the process.
At this time of the year with goodwill to all please no theses on why Santa can’t possibly exist! However, any video footage of the alleged UFOs over Dudley would make for interesting watching.
Keep the faith, whatever it is you trust and believe in. And keep sharing your knowledge.
It is Christmas and I was thinking about gifts.
The thought about giving the gift of knowledge popped into my head. When I was a child my Auntie Winnie would always give me a ‘Look And Learn’ annual. I loved it until I was a teenager and then I wanted a much more trendy Jackie or Blue Jeans Annual but secretly I still liked to dip into my book of knowledge.
In my early PR career I handled the PR for Encyclopaedia Britannica and this was fascinating. This was in the days when you bought a shed load of mighty leather (or leather look – depending on your budget) volumes containing, well, just about all the knowledge in the world. Or so it seemed. EB were slow to get onto the online and epublishing bandwagon and so Wikipedia, the people’s encyclopaedia, emerged quickly.
And now we have so many sources of knowledge it is difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff much of the time. Enter Doxmart. Get user rated (more on this soon) documents that are quick to find and offer a description and partial preview before you upload.
So I was wondering about gifting the knowledge pool that we already have. I suppose referring a friend to the site is a good start. Also by getting friends etc. to sign up for the ezine you can keep abreast of new and interesting documents and developments to the site. On a more philanthropic level, once we have our first selection of charities on board next year, you could decide to gift part or all of your knowledge in the form of your chosen document to a nominated charity.
I am going to take a look at my archived documents on my computer and in files in my office over the quite period inbetween Christmas and New Year and see what further gifts of knowledge I can give. It is a start on a knowledge legacy.
We are now in the countdown for the launch of our first foreign language version of Doxmart as the Italian version of our site will go live in late December! Our analytics have shown a large Italian following for the site, not in any small way affected by the fact that one of the Doxmart founders, Vito Fortunato lives in Milan and has been promoting the site to his extensive network of personal and business contacts.
Maybe it is also because the Italians love language and words and really embrace (in the passionate way that makes the Italians so wonderful) the Doxmart concept.
Interestingly, we also have a large following in India. In this instance we are sure that it is due to the fact that India is a nation that respects highly knowledge and education and also words and sharing information (just check how many daily newspapers there are in India if you are in any doubt!).
We recently targeted a number of UK students with news of Doxmart. Many have now signed up and are uploading their papers. One that has received excellent feedback is described as: ‘a glimpse into the distant past of a once untamed land and the truly ancient people who first explored it.’
Life & Death within North American Indian culture by woodycowboy
Categorised as focusing on Native American Indians, Burials, Archaeology, History, Anthropology, Indian culture and tribes, the paper examines the burial methods and funerary rites of the Sioux Indians, the great Mississippian culture and the archaic period which they belong to. It also describes the attitude of congress and archaeologists of the time (early 18th -19th century) and why archaeology had to change. Its is priced at £2.00.
We were drawn to this featured Doxmart document having read an excellent posting on Seomoz.org about why SEO is hot again now that we are in a period of economic downturn. Take a look at the blog…
So our featured business document this week (at a mere 50 pence) is Search Engine Optimisation by bpatient.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important marketing tool. For both organisations and individuals who put information on a web site, (whether it is on the form of a brochure or if it even provides interaction), it is important that it is designed in such a way that people are able to find you. That is what SEO is about, and through this informative guide you will find an overview of some of the key points that you should be addressing to maximize your site for this crucial activity.
We tracked down bpatient and found that he is Antonios Pavlakis, a Phd undergraduate. He is passionate about web development and has worked across Europe in IT Development and support.
He is now working as a Web Applications Developer at Go MAD Thinking in partnership with De Montfort University as part of the Knowledge Transfer Partnership government scheme.
The spirit of the entrepreneurial “garage” was celebrated at the recent Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford event, held at Saïd Business School on 20 November 2008. Doxmart founders Clive Mendes and Vito Fortunato were there to learn and share with other leading web masters.
Says Clive Mendes: “The keynote message that really struck a chord with me was that the forecast is that the successful web sites of the future, particularly in these recessionary times, will be those that help people to monetise what they are good at.
“This is exactly what Doxmart is doing and our new generation site, due to be launched early next year, will really offer this to our members. It will provide tools for people to publish their expertise, promote their skills, get answers and solutions to challenges and make useful contacts.
“Furthermore, by offering documents for translation (or offering translation services to members) we will encourage the sharing of knowledge between language cultures worldwide.”
Refer three friends, who subsequently register to Doxmart, during December and we will enter you into a free prize draw to win a fantastic MP3 player! The draw will take place on the 3rd Day of Christmas (27th December 2008) and the winner informed by Doxmart message on that day.
I had an interesting weekend involving Coldplay and church.
I caught the Coldplay concert at Sheffield Arena on Saturday and loved it. It exceeded my expectations as they made the event (all seating), a lot more active than I had imagined. The lighting was fantastic (giant Chinese lanterns with live video projected on them) and Chris Martin was as energetic and bouncy as Tigger. Plus they sound fantastic, have great songs and moving lyrics. The crowd knew as many of the words to the songs as the band that demonstrates the power of words and the power of sharing the emotions they evoke.
At church we had a guest speaker. Muriel Shelbourne had to be helped on stage as she was frail but then had me transfixed with the strength of her words as she spoke about Catching a Dream. Aside from obvious references of Joseph (the dreams and technicolour coat) and Martin Luther King, I enjoyed being reminded of the power of dreams and finding our purpose. We are all made for something bigger than ourselves and I suppose that the lucky ones are those who find this out and put it into action. Those unreasonable enough (not to settle for being ‘OK’) or those who rise to challenges (such as Lance Armstrong coming back to win the Tour de France after terrible cancer) they never anticipated.
I liked Muriel’s comment that: ‘We are all made to be history makers – to make new history in the world in which we live’. It made me think of Doxmart. The founders’ vision is to leave a legacy where quality knowledge can be offered and found to help solve problems of all kinds. We all know that there is loads of knowledge out there but finding the right stuff at the right time is always the issue. We could all say that there are lots of internet info sites but we are mad enough to believe that we can offer something better (Muriel observed that you have to be sufficiently mad and compelled to do things that have not been done before to really make a difference so I guess we are covered on this one then!).
As Michael Angelo says: “The problem with most of us isn’t that we aim too high and miss it, but that we aim too low and hit it”. Interesting.
I need to trawl thought those files on my computer that are literally gathering dust and see what knowledge I can share again. I like to think that my advice has been of benefit and hey, it’s nearly Christmas, so the revenue will come in handy too!
There is still time to qualify for our December Refer A Friend prize draw. Simply refer three friends, who subsequently register to Doxmart, during December and we will enter you into a free prize draw to win a fantastic MP3 player! The draw will take place on the 3rd Day of Christmas (27th December 2008) and the winner informed by Doxmart message on that day.
This would make a great late Christmas present to yourself and give your friends the chance to share and profit from their special knowledge too.
Remember what Matthew Sparks, journalist at PC pro said about this function: “We’re in a knowledge economy now, so I’m told. Unfortunately, capitalising on knowledge can be hard. A new website intends to change all that by becoming a kind of eBay for information. Just as the original auction site allowed you to turn the old junk clogging up your attic into cash, Doxmart will let you flog all those Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, images, videos, thoughts and ideas that fill up your brain and hard disk.
“It’s a wonderful idea – transcribing the knowledge that you’ve spent years collecting into an easily consumable digital package, and spending the rest of your life comfortably living off of the revenue. The reality of this depends entirely of the worth of the knowledge you have stored up there.
“One interesting aspect is that if you refer users you get to take 4% of the revenue from their documents – out of Doxmart’s share – forever. That means that if a cure for the common cold, award-winning novel, best-selling album or scandalous photograph of Gordon Brown is uploaded by someone following this link, I can retire early. “
Original article at http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/08/15/ebay-your-ideas/
You can go directly to the Refer a Friend page on www.doxmart.com by clicking the link below:
http://www.doxmart.com/send-to-friend.aspx