Streamlined Mind is Looking for Writers

In a few days Streamlined Mind will be one year old! It’s been an interesting year and an interesting experience. We’ve had some popular posts, we’ve made it to the front page of Digg, I learned a lot about blogging, the internet and how a website can slowly grow.

Now I would like to speed things up a little bit. I’ve been quite busy with other projects lately, and I don’t want this website to suffer from that. It never was my goal to write a post every day, the last year it was closer to a post a week most of the time, but it shouldn’t become much less than that!

So Now I’m Looking for Writers

To help me keep Streamlined Mind alive and active I would like to ask for your contribution. It would be nice to have more posts, shorter posts combined with a longer more in-depth post now and then. The main focus of the website will not change: Helping out students and others who are in a learning situation accomplish their goals in a streamlined way and providing helpful tips, tricks and hacks to keep things going, get inspired, stay motivated, get things done.

What I Ask For

Motivated writers interested in subjects like: life hacking, web2.0, networking, organizing, writing, GTD, simplifying life. I’m an avid Mac user so most of the software I discussed has been OS X software, but if you’re a Windows user that’s fine too, reviews of related Windows applications could also be added. You don’t have to be an experienced writer, as long as you have something to say about these subjects that are helpful to our readers.

It’s preferable if you are in any way affiliated with a school/university/learning situation, as a student or as a teacher, but being passionate about the subjects you write about is most important.

It would be nice if you could contribute regularly, writing a few short posts or one longer post a week. But if you just want to start with one post and see how things develop, that is also fine! It would also be nice if you could do a little promotion for your own content to attract more visitors. If I can get a few people helping me with that, we can make it grow much faster!

What I Offer You

If you have your own blog, you will get links to your site with every post you write, as well as permanent links on the sidebar if you become a regular writer. If you don’t have your own blog, this could be a good opportunity to develop your writing skills, develop your online profile and learn about blogging.

You probably noticed there are some ads on the site. They don’t generate a lot of revenue though. What I earn is used for hosting the site. But the site grows, and some months more people are visiting.

So for when we get bigger: Future revenue will be split up and shared with all contributors, depending on their input. So if I write four posts a month and you write eight posts, I’ll get a third of the revenue and you get the rest. The better we promote the site together the higher the amount will be.

Interested?

Are you interested? Please send me an email using the contact form. I would like to know what your background is concerning the subjects mentioned, and I would like to read some of your writings. Send me the URL of your own blog or write a short article. I’m eager to see your work! I’ll get back to you right away.

Picture by: karindalziel

Get Feedback on Your Creative Work

While working on an assignment it’s very important to know if what you’re doing is going in the right direction. It’s easy to get stuck if you don’t get feedback at the right moment. Is there anything you can do to make sure this doesn’t happen?

Feedback Afterwards

You finished an important assignment. It took you a lot of time so now it’s time to find out if you did it right. You deserve it, and whoever gave you the assignment owes it to you, especially in a learning situation. It gives you the opinion of a professional with the intention to teach you something. For a student this is essential as it provides new ideas to improve his/her work. [Read more]

Enhance Your Presentations with Mouseposé

If you ever have to demo a piece of software or record a screencast, Mouseposé by Boinx Software can help you make it look a bit nicer and easier to follow for your audience. Here’s a review. And in this short screencast you can see Mouseposé in action:

Although this is my first screencast ever, I’ve been instructing a lot of groups in situations where a good thorough explanation of software is needed. While sitting at my desk and showing things on a beamer there is no way my students follow every single thing I do, unless I say it. It’s very helpful to explain every single keyboard shortcut, but there simply isn’t enough time. So having them visualized on the screen could help a lot. [Read more]

Move Your Stuff Up in the Cloud

You might have noticed it’s been more than two weeks since my last post here on Streamlined Mind. Time flies when there’s a lot to do. And when there’s a lot to do there are a lot of emails to be sent, there’s a lot of text to be written, notes to be made and shared with others, and to streamline this process I’ve been changing a few things in my work flow lately.

My recent switch to Gmail made me think about the way I’m used to work with my computer. Switching to Gmail doesn’t just mean switching to a new email system, it also means I don’t have my email on my own hard disk, so I have to trust Google to handle and backup my data well. I don’t know how they do this, and for a person who is used to organizing his stuff on his own hard disk this is quite a shift. [Read more]

Why I Switched to Gmail

Last week I switched from my trusty Mac OS X email client, Mail.app to Gmail. After ten days I can already say this has been a wonderful decision and I will not go back. In this post I will tell you why.

I have been using Gmail before, but just as an account on the side for subscriptions and mailing lists. I left it at its default setting and never really looked at it extensively. I heard people talk about using Gmail solely for all their email, and I didn’t understand why someone would use web mail, as web mail always seemed to me like a thing people use if they don’t know how to set up their mail clients properly. Now why do I like Gmail so much? [Read more]

17 Reasons to Avoid Technology (for a few days)

Can you live without the internet? Can you stay away from your daily intake of RSS feeds, email and Twitter? Are you addicted to your social networks? There are many reasons why I think it’s good to shut down your computer for a few days and live like people lived before the time we all had a broadband connection, or even before there was TV.

Holidays are a perfect time for this ‘experiment’. We have a few days off, how are we going to spend them? We’re so used to being entertained all the time. We can listen to the radio, watch TV, surf the internet, play a computer game, rent a DVD, and our vacation will be over before we know. We could also spend those days to find out what’s really important in our lives. Let’s leave that laptop alone for a few days and: [Read more]

And the Winner of a Poken is…

It’s 2009, time for a new year of productive learning! And time to give away two Pokens in the giveaway contest! I used a random number generator to pick the two winners.

And the winners are:
Cher and Palma

Congratulaions! Your Poken is on its way.

Have a Wonderful 2009!

Avoid Distractions: Keep Your Desktop Clean

For some time now, my MacBook Pro’s desktop is totally black. There’s nothing on it. No Dock, no menu bar, no hard drives or inserted CD’s, and most important of all: no files and folders.

Two years ago Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte discussed the ‘Undistracted Mac‘ on MacBreak. The Undistracted Mac basically means you hide away as much unnecessary items from your screen as possible so you’ll not get distracted by anything on your Mac except for what you’re doing right now. [Read more]

Giveaway Contest: Win a Poken!

Since I wrote about Poken in my article “Poken: The Future of Social Networking?” a lot of people responded, and some people seem to like it a lot while others don’t understand what all the fuss is about, as you can read in the comments on digg and on my article.

For the end of the year I’ve decided to give away two free Pokens to readers of Streamlined Mind. To enter the contest you just have to do two simple things:

• Sign up to receive new Streamlined Mind articles by email, using the field in the sidebar on the right of this website;
• Tell me your New Year’s resolution by leaving a comment on this post.

That’s easy isn’t it? The contest will be active till the end of this year, so you can enter before the 1st of January 2009. You can enter only once. [Read more]

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