Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The word “interest” has a few meanings. In one case, it means something that holds our attention. In another case, it’s an increase in value on an original sum. In some cases, interest can be used to the positive: “I found the piece very interesting.” In other cases, it can be a burden: “My credit card payments wouldn’t be so bad, but the interest is killing me.”

I think there’s something interesting in both terms as they apply to how you do work. I’m struggling through two different projects where I’ve said yes when I should have said no. In both cases, I’ve made commitments that require that I see them through. In one of the cases, the work is interesting enough that I can deal with the interest of time and pressure that the project has added to my life. In the second case, the interest that is building up over time is taking my interest away from the project. (Does that even make sense?)

I know this is wordplay, but there’s something more to it. If you work on projects you shouldn’t have said yes to in the first place, I believe that the negative sense of “interest” starts building up. I think that it compounds and advances and builds even more. I think there’s also a negative build-up if you tax people by requiring too much of their attention, by trying to hold someone’s interest for too long.

I’m not sure. The thought is only halfway there, and so I brought it to you for consideration, to see if you would fill it out in the comments. Do you find yourself with these two different types of interest situations in your life and projects? And how do you work to pay them off?

No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.

Why then, is writer’s block endemic?

The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.

We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn’t, and if we’re insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker’s block after all this practice?

Writer’s block isn’t hard to cure.

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

I believe that everyone should write in public. Get a blog. Or use Squidoo or Tumblr or a microblogging site. Use an alias if you like. Turn off comments, certainly–you don’t need more criticism, you need more writing.

Do it every day. Every single day. Not a diary, not fiction, but analysis. Clear, crisp, honest writing about what you see in the world. Or want to see. Or teach (in writing). Tell us how to do something.

If you know you have to write something every single day, even a paragraph, you will improve your writing. If you’re concerned with quality, of course, then not writing is not a problem, because zero is perfect and without defects. Shipping nothing is safe.

The second best thing to zero is something better than bad. So if you know you have write tomorrow, your brain will start working on something better than bad. And then you’ll inevitably redefine bad and tomorrow will be better than that. And on and on.

Write like you talk. Often.

Either can work, both do, but don’t confuse them.

The shoemaker/copywriter/plumber who seeks a regular itinerary of gigs is building a job, a job with multiple bosses at the same time there is no boss, but it’s still a job. You wake up in the morning and you do your craft, with occasional interruptions to do the dreaded looking-for-work dance.

The entrepreneur is in a different game. For her, the gig is building the gig.

I’m late writing this blog post. I don’t have any “extra” posts in drafts waiting to go. But I’m also due to send out my Blog Topics newsletter, which people have paid to receive. I also have work to do in promoting my other projects like Kitchen Table Companies. I also have to give my part to the HBW newsletter that we send out Tuesday.

On top of all this, I owe some email responses to people. I owe a post to American Express OPEN Forum. I owe a submission to Entrepreneur magazine. I owe many people many things, and none of that goes towards the new projects I’m working on launching in a few weeks (all parts of HBW – don’t faint).

But which tasks matter most? How do you decide? What are you doing in your own business to decide what matters most?

It’s not as easy as saying one should do the tasks that pay you, because you also have to do the tasks that bring in new buyers, so that more people will pay you. It’s not as easy as saying do all the prospecting first, because you have paid customers who expect something from you (no matter what your business is, really). The answering of emails is above and beyond and you just must do this, because it’s no longer cool to gripe about being too busy.

So I’m asking you. Which tasks in YOUR business matter most to you? How do you organize your day?

Tomorrow, I’ll share how I do mine.

News Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch took the stage at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City Wednesday morning to unveil The Daily, a newspaper designed specifically for the iPad.

Murdoch has sunk $30 million into the project thus far, and says it will cost less than half a million dollars to produce each week — meaning that The Daily will cost approximately $53 million to produce in its first year. Subscriptions, priced at $0.99 per week or $39.99 per year, are expected to generate the majority of revenue; Murdoch hopes that, in time, advertising will come to make up half of that figure.

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A Magazine, Not a Newspaper

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Murdoch and his cohorts stressed that The Daily is, first and foremost, a newspaper. Most content will be released in a single update in the morning, but breaking news will be added throughout the day and could include, for instance, a live feed from Twitter to deliver updates, executive editor Jesse Angelo said.

There are two problems with this strategy: one, that most iPad owners don’t use their iPads to access breaking news, and that The Daily, in its current iteration, isn’t really a newspaper; it’s a magazine.

Let’s take a look at the first issue. A recent study conducted by Read It Later found that most reading on the iPad occurs during “personal prime time”: typically, between 8 and 10 p.m., after users have left work and eaten dinner. There’s also a small spike in the morning, but otherwise relatively low usage throughout the day.

Ray Pearce, VP of circulation at The New York Times, noted similar habits among readers of The Times‘s iPad app in a recent conversation with Mashable. “Usage is heaviest in the early morning and evening,” he said, noting that the app attracted more readers on the weekends than during the week, as well.

As such, it would have made more sense for The Daily to focus resources on end-of-day and weekend content — which, it appears, is precisely the opposite of what it’s done.

As it stands, the news section is extremely weak. The first edition contains precisely two real news articles, one of which (a story about Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s global address) had been thoroughly covered by all the major news outlets the previous day; the other, about the snow storm currently hitting the U.S., was borrowed from the AP. (The third and fourth listed news articles, one about a prison where convicted murders make kid toys, and another about a late-night doggie disco in Manhattan, fail to qualify as “real news,” in my opinion.)

In general, there is far more visual content than editorial content, and the editorial content that exists is poorly written. Of the $30 million Murdoch says he has sunk into the publication thus far, little, it appears, has been invested in editorial talent, despite having pulled in editorial staff from admirably well-written publications like The Economist and The Atlantic.

The writing also lacks a consistency in quality and a cohesive editorial voice. Molly Young’s unauthoritative mandate to “pick stripes” in the Arts & Life section feels worlds — not a handful of swipes — away from Reihan Salam’s on virtual entertainment; one belongs in Lucky, the other could have appeared, possibly, in the “Talk of the Town” section in The New Yorker.

The strongest section is clearly the Sports section. It’s also the biggest. Still, it’s not anything you couldn’t find for free — and at far greater depth — on the web.

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Multimedia

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The Daily‘s biggest strength is clearly multimedia. It’s got a nice magazine layout with plenty of videos, slideshows and clickable graphics. (As for the quality of the videos, I can’t say: Every time I clicked “play” on a video, I was met with an error message.) Somewhat counter-intuitively, users must rotate their iPads to horizontal mode to actually view the slideshows. In the future, Murdoch says, full-screen, 360-degree photographs will grace its pages.

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Social Integration

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Social media was, at best, an afterthought for the developers of The Daily — disappointing, given the opportunity they had to essentially reengineer the news media experience on the tablet.

Yes, one can share articles to Facebook and Twitter, which non-subscribers can view on the web. Yes, one can leave written — and even audio — comments in the app (or so it appears; I wasn’t effectively able to register), although one won’t be able to see the comments in-line with the article. One can’t copy text (it’s not selectable) to share to social networks, one cannot share to Tumblr, one cannot clip articles to Instapaper, one cannot enjoy live chats with fellow readers, and one cannot surface content that one’s friends are reading — among other things.

One can pull up team tweets in the Sports section, but they aren’t streaming and lack context.

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Conclusion

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The Daily is a beautiful, multimedia-rich daily magazine. But I expected more from a product with such an enormous budget, produced in collaboration with Apple’s own developer team. Still, I could have forgiven all had the quality of the content itself been better, if it had offered one item I couldn’t have found for free, and more intelligently written, on the web.

Content is still king.

Google has begun testing display ads in Gmail user accounts, the company confirmed Thursday.

“We’re always trying out new ad formats and placements in Gmail, and we recently started experimenting with image ads on messages with heavy image content,” a spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to Mashable. Google began running the test ads on Friday, January 21.

The news came to light when Greg Sterling, a contributing editor at Search Engine Land, shared a screenshot of a display ad that appeared in his inbox this morning:

Google has been looking for ways to expand its display ad network, and Gmail is a logical next step. Google can serve ads based on keywords that appear in a user’s personal Gmail (Sterling was served an ad for organic men’s tees after opening an e-mail from a clothing retailer), although those ads will no doubt be distracting for many Gmail users. Yahoo Mail already serves display ads in users’ inboxes.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pavlen

Not sure why you would want to reinforce the noise in your head that tells you not to speak up, stand out and do work that matters, but if you do, a surefire way to do it is to focus your attention on every piece of negative feedback in your environment. Or to imagine every possible disaster that could befall you, and to do it repeatedly. Or to carefully study anonymous comments, tweets and online reviews from people who don’t like the work you’re doing. Or focus on the one paragraph in your annual review called ‘weaknesses’. Or spend the day thinking about the one slip of the tongue you made this morning…

You can listen to your customers murmur about you online, except that pleased customers tell a few people, angry ones tell everyone. So it’s really easy to misinterpret a few as a deluge.

On the other hand, once you accept that this is self-sabotaging behavior, you might choose to deliberately ignore interactions that amplify the very noise you’re trying to avoid.