I imagine it would be the same regardless of the medium. In my case, of course, I'm talking about code, but I remember my grandfather as a professional photographer when I was a child. He was the photographer for the Phillies and the Blue Jays. Both teams had spring training in my old home town, and so while my grandpa was taking their pictures for baseball cards, flyers, all sorts of promotions, and god-knows what else, I would sit in the dug-outs with the players and just be having the greatest time in my life. To me, the reason he took pictures was so that I could hang out with major league baseball players. I imagine that that wasn't really his intention when he started in his craft four decades before my birth.
My grandfather died several years ago, and the only thing of his that I own are some pictures of the Grand Canyon that he took. They are stunningly beautiful, and remind me baseball...
At this early stage of Propits, it's fun to see new people sign up, and with the relatively low number of users we can take the time to check out people's web sites (a lot of cool stuff, actually) and watch people's habits and figure out what we need to do to accommodate how people are actually using the system instead of how we imagined that people should or would. Most of the feedback that we get from people is not in the form of actual emails or phone calls, but rather in habits and patterns that we have to use to try to get our heads wrapped around what people are thinking as they use the system. We are standing behind the plate with a camera watching an intricate dance, all the while trying to figure out what a five year old is doing in the dug-out with a bunch of foul-mouthed roid'ed-up adults. There's a joke about the internet in there somewhere, but I'll let someone else make it.
The real trick is that the child in the dug-out is the most important person on the field. If something were to have happened to me on those outings with my grandfather, he would have never have forgiven himself. But at the same time we all have our normal jobs to do, our lives to attend to; an endless array of distractions all clawing for our attention. And, those are partially the things that we are trying to uplift with the Propits ideal of supporting the people and things that we love.
So this blog update is all about those things. There are things in our lives that take all our attention. There are things that are temporary distractions. There are an endless array of everything in between. The goal is to have all of that simplified by allowing the things that are really important rise to the top. Make sure that the child is having a good time, and then worry about taking the picture that actually pays the bills. An economist would tell me I was insane, but as normal people moving through our lives, we can all see the value in a trust-based network of friends that all work to uplift each other.
When you get your Propits account, put your button on those pages that you own. Pass the word along to the people that make you happy. The player will swing the bat plenty of times. In these confusing and tense times we need to make sure that we get support for the things that really matter. It takes just a few moments to copy and paste a bit of text onto a website, and in the end it makes the whole field and everything on it exist just for you.
I've run the baseball metaphor into the ground about as far as it will go, so before I start rambling, I'll just say this: The real power of Propits comes from people being able to tell you you are cool in a real way. For them to do that, they need a button (at least until we can make computers read your mind... That's version 2.0). Log into Propits, and on your home page on the left, you will see options for your button, and some text to copy and paste onto your websites. Without it, it strikes out.... Sorry. I had to throw another one out there.
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