In my persuit of a way to pay for college I’ve opened a Cafe Press shop here. It’s certainly nothing spectacular, but it’s a start.

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, February 1, 2005. Originally published 2/1/2000
Easy Transfer Copy

But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus doesn’t even have to mate — he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

1
11
1111
11111111
1111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined

What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.” While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won’t try. The term “viral marketing” has stuck.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com” and,
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4. Who see the message,
5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

Let’s examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services

“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free “cool” buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the “pro” version. Wilson’s Second Law of Web Marketing is “The Law of Giving and Selling” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm). “Cheap” or “inexpensive” may generate a wave of interest, but “free” will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit “soon and for the rest of their lives” (with apologies to “Casablanca”). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they’re easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales easily from small to very large

To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you’re okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated “Netscape Now” buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person’s broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others’ resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others’ websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others’ webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else’s resources are depleted rather than your own.

Put into practice

Viral marketing is (fairly) easy to define, but very difficult to accomplish successfully. MarketingSherpa’s How to Viral Market toolkit is the best book available on the nuts and bolts of developing a successful viral marketing campaign. Strongly recommended for serious marketers. Dr. Wilson’s review Buy the book.

I grant permission for every reader to reproduce on your website the article you are now reading — “The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing” (see http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles-clean.htm for an HTML version you can copy). But copy this article ONLY, without any alteration whatsoever. Include the copyright statement, too, please. If you have a marketing or small business website, it’ll provide great content and help your visitors learn important strategies. (NOTE: I am giving permission to host on your website this article AND NO OTHERS. Reprinting or hosting my articles without express written permission is illegal, immoral, and a violation of my copyright.)

When I first offered this to my readers in February 2000, many took me up on it. Six months later a received a phone call:

“I want to speak to the King of Viral Marketing!”

“Well, I’m not the King,” I demurred. “I wrote an article about viral marketing a few months ago, but that’s all.”

“I’ve searched all over the Internet about viral marketing,” he said, “and your name keeps showing up. You must be the King!.”

It worked! Even five years later this webpage is ranked #1 for “viral marketing.”

To one degree or another, all successful viral marketing strategies use most of the six principles outlined above. In the next article in this series, “Viral Marketing Techniques the Typical Business Website Can Deploy Now” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-deploy.htm), we’ll move from theory to practice. But first learn these six foundational principles of viral marketing. Master them and wealth will flow your direction.

“Copyright © 2000, 2005, Ralph F. Wilson, E-Mail Marketing and Online Marketing editor, Web Marketing Today. All rights reserved. Permission granted to reprint this article on your website without alteration if you include this copyright statement and leave the hyperlinks live and in place.”

I just thought this was cool. It’s a device for zapping radio frequency ID tags. http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/24/rfiddler-zapper-kills-rfid-tags-dead-the-hard-way/

Geert Wilders gives a speech on Islamization in California. Wilders is a Dutch politician in the Netherlands, and is probably the formost European fighting against the spread of Islam.

Turning Back Islam’s 1,300-year Assault on Western Civilization

By Bevin Alexander, May 30, 2008

There has been nothing in history like the war of annihilation that Islam has waged and continues to wage against all other religions and cultures, but especially against the Christian West, its most formidable opponent. Present-day Islamic attacks are identical in concept to past attempts, only different in tactics. But they can be stopped by resolute action.

The West’s historic position has been to contain Islam, not to destroy it. Islam’s historic position has been the opposite: to wipe Western Civilization off the face of the earth. The West, for example, is trying to influence events the Middle East, but not settle it with Westerners. Fundamentalist Islamic imams or leaders have precisely the goal of populating Europe with Muslims, converting it to Islam, then using Europe as a launching pad to move against the United States.

The true war between Islam and the West is being fought in Western Europe.

Fundamentalist imams have chosen Western Europe for their battleground because they do not have sufficient leverage in the U.S. to open a new front, since there are many fewer Muslims in the U.S. than in Western Europe. Accordingly, the United States can defend itself best by joining with our European allies to stop the advance of Islam in Western Europe.

The U.S. will have to take the lead. Europe is divided and lacking in resolve. For example, only a minority of NATO countries are permitting their forces to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. One Dutch unit has a policy of withdrawing every time the Taliban fires on it.

In Western Europe today, Muslim imams are trying to force governments to apply Islamic laws and customs to Muslims. Western governments must resist this effort, and insist that only European laws be applied to all people, including Muslims. If the governments of Western Europe allow Muslims to be judged by their own laws and customs, the imams will insist that Islamic laws and customs be applied to all the people. There already have been efforts to bring this about.

In 1988, for example, the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death warrant against the English author Salmon Rushdie because his book, Satanic Verses, was critical of the Prophet Mohammed. Khomeini’s pronouncement set off wild protests in Muslim lands and forced Rushdie to go into hiding for years. In 2006, Islamists all over the world rioted, demanding that Western newspapers and stations not show Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, thereby challenging press freedom and freedom of expression everywhere in the West. Islam is a religion of extreme intolerance. The history of Islam shows that subdued populations either accept Islam, or they die. Christians and Jews, being considered people of “the Book,” can be accorded a degree of tolerance—but not equality.

Despite these threats, the West has great strength, and can turn back Islam’s advance.

The West should reduce its presence in the Middle East drastically, and concentrate on thwarting the Muslim advance in Europe. We can do little to change conditions in the Middle East anyway. The people of Iraq will stop killing each other only when they decide to do so themselves. Western military forces cannot influence this decision, and they should be withdrawn. The West should focus on reducing its imprint on Muslim lands, not increasing it.

We should abandon our efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East. Muslims have a world view that sees the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed as the source of all laws and all actions. Muslims deny people individual choice. They repress their women. They believe that Allah, speaking through their imams, is the only authority they should respect.  Democracy, like a lot of other Western values, is alien to Islamic thinking and Western efforts to change it are useless.

The aim of Western policy in the Middle East should be to stop threatening Muslim efforts aimed at the West, but otherwise to allow Muslims to live as they wish within their existing territorial bounds.

The resurgence of Islamic attacks in Europe is only a continuation of a drive that started with the rush of converts to Islam out of the Arabian peninsula on the death of Mohammed in 632 a.d. Islam’s aim has always been to destroy all other religions and societies, especially the West, which has been the main barrier to Islamic advances, and against which Islam has directed its greatest efforts and animus.

Islam experienced a meteoric expansion in its early centuries primarily because of the fanaticism engendered by the charismatic leadership of Mohammed, and by his teachings that promised everlasting pleasure in heaven to those who died in holy war against the infidel. No other religion has been able to inspire so many persons to be heedless of death and of personal danger in battle. Although this spirit was suppressed or lay dormant during the century and a half of Western imperial dominance of Islam that ended after World War II, it motivates a renewed assault on the West by Islamic fundamentalists and inspires suicide bombers today.

Muslims blame the West—not their own anti-democratic, anti-rational, repressive and misogynistic impulses—for their failure to advance economically, or to provide more than a small minority of their people with the standards of living enjoyed by most Westerners.

No encounter of Western Civilization with any other culture or civilization has come close to the threat posed by Islam. Western Civilization has never faced another opponent with Islam’s relentless hostility and drive to destroy it. Muslims want no peace treaty or modus vivendi with the West. They want total submission. They believe theirs is the only true society and their goal is to eradicate all false societies.

In 1993 Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington said that there are deep divisions between civilizations and predicted: “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” The collision of the Christian West with Islam commenced well before either had even become a civilization, and it has been ongoing. The conflicts between the two did much to shape both civilizations and to distinguish one from the other. Each hostile encounter threw up examples of what one was and the other did not want to be.

Muslims state flatly that Islam is the religion of Allah and needs no justification. Thus, it is superior to all other religions, and the Koran states that Muslims, when they gain control, can tolerate Christians and Jews only under limited terms and conditions. The Islamic faith is based on the concept that sharia, or Islamic law, must be observed by all people. Sharia—which calls for punishing persons with 50 to 100 lashes for small offenses, cutting off the hand of a thief, and stoning adulterers to death—encompasses every sphere of human activity and supersedes all governments, economies, and moral and spiritual institutions.

The laws and rules of secular Muslim states, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Tunisia, do not fully implement sharia, because to do so would mean their extinction. Sharia does not recognize secular states. It would require the abolishment of states and the establishment of a caliph (or successor to Mohammed) who would impose a religious dictatorship and sharia law on everyone.A caliphate would be a universal society based on rigid religious rules of behavior and thought. Fundamentalists regard secular Muslim states as defenders of Western society and as alien bodies imposed on Islam by the West. The basic Islamic viewpoint was expressed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who set up an Islamic state in Iran in 1979: “If laws are needed, Islam has established them all. There is no need after establishing a government to sit down and draw up laws.”

Fundamentalists, therefore, are fighting two separate battles. One is to destroy the states that encompass the Muslim world—Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and the rest. The other is to attack all aspects of Western society, which they consider to be sinful.

The chances of the fundamentalists abolishing all Muslim states and establishing a caliphate are small, because the kings, emirs, and dictators of the Muslim world have great power, and because large numbers of the populace would oppose living in a rigid religious society. Resolution of this issue should remain an all-Muslim affair. The West should not take sides, except to prevent disorder from spreading beyond the region.

The West should concentrate on preventing terrorist attacks on our cities and on stopping fundamentalist imams from trying to force Islamic ideas on Western societies. Governments in Europe have been slow to respond. Among the Muslim methods being used is insistence not only that nothing disrespectful of Mohammed be printed or broadcast, but that women cover their heads or even more of their bodies in public.

Imams are pushing for Muslims to be ruled by sharia, not Western law, as the first step in imposing sharia on all Europeans.  In March 2007 a German judge refused a quick divorce to a Muslim woman on the grounds of abuse by her husband. The judge concluded that the Koran says that “men are in charge of women” and are allowed to beat their wives if they are disobedient. Although the judge was removed from the case, her willingness to apply Islamic law in a German court shows the extent to which Islamic thought has penetrated into Western Europe.

More than half a million immigrants are coming into Spain (and thus into the European Union) annually, mostly illegally, and mostly from Islamic west and north Africa. A major reevaluation is going on in Europe today to decide how to reverse the penetration of Islam into the continent. The entire West needs to launch a full-scale war to protect traditional Western rights of free speech and free expression. Europe and the U.S. cannot continue to crumple to Muslim protests, as they did over Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet.

European states are realizing that a large percentage of resident Muslims, under the influence of fundamentalist imams, have not become part of the culture and are unwilling to live under the laws and customs of the West. In Britain, for example, many Muslim women are wearing the niqab, a form of dress that covers the body from head to toe in flowing black gowns and allows only a slit for their eyes.

The Muslim world view is at the opposite pole from the Western world view.  Muslims believe in polygamy, subordination of women, and the death penalty for apostates and gays. They suppress any conduct they do not like. For example, the Iranian Supreme Court exonerated six persons in April 2007 for killing five people they considered “morally corrupt.”  A young couple engaged to be married were selected among the victims because they were walking together in public.

The Princeton Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis calls the Muslim approach to religion “triumphalist,” in that Muslims consider their views entirely right and all other views entirely wrong. Christianity also originally possessed a triumphalist approach, but in recent centuries it has become much more relativist, defined by Lewis as: “I have my god, you have your god, and others have theirs.”

The collision between the West and Islam has been marked by war and conquest.  The conflict has been continuous since the first encounters in the Mediterranean in the seventh century. The first Arab-Islamic invasions conquered the then-Christian lands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, and surged into France, to be stopped by Charles Martel and the Franks at Tours in 732. The Arabs were thwarted from overrunning the Byzantine Empire by the walls of Constantinople and by Greek fire in 672 and on later occasions.

But in the eleventh century the Muslim Seljuk Turks conquered Byzantine territories in Anatolia. Byzantium and Eastern Orthodox Christianity retreated slowly before the Ottoman Turks, the successor regime to the Seljuks. The Islamic advance in the West, however, generated Roman Catholic rejoinders: the Reconquista in Spain, and the Crusades into the Levant. The Crusades ultimately failed to hold the Holy Land for Christianity, but they did succeed to some extent in opening the Mediterranean to Western trade.

The Spanish threw out the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, in 1492. The Ottoman Turks continued to press into southeastern Europe, capturing Constantinople in 1453, and driving to the gates of Vienna, where they suffered a culminating defeat in 1683. Thereafter the Islamic flood receded, to be followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a great European counterattack into the lands of Islam, an assault that usually goes by the name of imperialism.

The last major imperialist imposition on Islam occurred in 1948, when the West established a Jewish state on half of the territory of Palestine, and then armed this state with modern weapons. The creation of Israel is analogous to the establishment of Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land during the Crusades. That is, Western power was inserted into the heart of the Muslim world. Opposition to Israel set off an upheaval among Middle Easterners in general and among Arabs in particular that has accelerated in recent decades.

Islamic fundamentalists have taken the leadership in assaults on Israel. Attacks there and elsewhere represent an Islamic form of Reconquista, exemplified today in al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the al Aqsa Brigades—but also in the deep penetration of Muslims into Western Europe.

In Europe we have the means to stop the Islamic advance. What we are lacking in sufficient degree is the will. This must change.

The war against the Islamic advance in the West has been complicated by the attacks of fundamentalist terrorists. They have launched a guerrilla-like campaign in Europe and America. Such a war is characterized by sneak attacks against ill-defended or undefended targets, as for example the efforts to blow up two cars near Piccadilly Circus in central London in June 2007.

We may seem to be unable to prevent such attacks, except by fortuitous chance. But this is not so. Guerrilla attacks can be sustained indefinitely only in a country where guerrillas have a large base of support among the native population. Although there is a large Muslim population in Western Europe, most Europeans are scandalized by sneak attacks and support the governments in their efforts to locate terrorist cells and destroy them. We can never entirely prevent suicide bombers, but strong public opposition and firm police intelligence work can reduce their occurrence to a minimum. Terrorist strikes into Europe and the United States, while not impossible, are much harder to pull off than strikes against American and NATO forces within Iraq or Afghanistan.

The West has never possessed a goal to destroy Islam. The West has generally warded off Muslim attacks, in the hope that Muslims and Westerners could live in peace.

Only rarely has the West advanced into Muslim territory on a permanent basis. In the majority of cases, the West’s aggressions were only to recover territories that had been seized by Muslims—examples include the Reconquista in Spain, the Crusades, reoccupation of Sicily, and the long effort to reclaim southeastern Europe from the Turkish Ottoman Empire after its defeat at Vienna in 1683. Only in the imperial period did European powers seek to control Muslim lands. The collapse of imperialism after World War II resulted in withdrawal from Muslim lands other than for temporary military operations. The only exception was the West’s establishment of Israel in 1948, and its support of Israel thereafter.

The West’s refusal to embark on a war of annihilation is a valid strategy, and the West’s best defense is to withdraw as much as possible from the Middle East, but to resist strongly all attempts by Muslims to impose their views and their laws in the West.

<< More Commentary by Bevin Alexander

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_netherlands_young_sailor

The girl who wanted to sail around the world and was denied by the courts, went missing a few days ago and has now turned up in the Caribbean! Let’s hope for the sake of Western civilization that there’s lot’s more Dutch youths with that kind of guts, we’ll need them.

Israel has threatened the use of military force to stop Israeli settlers according to the AP

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091220/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_settlements

My comments: The Israeli government may well exert military force against the settlers, in pursuit of peace talks with the Palestinians. They may well succeed, but in doing so they will have undermined their source of legitimacy with the Jewish people. The Israeli government will become increasingly obsolete as time goes on. The Jews and the Palestinians are on a course of massive collision, there will be no peace, there will be no diplomatic reasoning, and any attempt to do those things will eventually fail. The Jews and Palestinians cannot peacefully coexist under current conditions. Period. They both want the same thing, and they are both willing to fight, kill and be killed for it.

The Israeli government is the only real thing holding the waters back, but it won’t last forever. The right wing Jews will likely organize something like the Palestinian Hamas. As the government loses control of the Jewish people, more and more attacks will likely be carried out on both sides. Hamas will send in suicide teams, fire DIY rockets, set IEDs, and just generally destroy anything they can. The right-wing Jews will probably respond with their own guerrilla and paramilitary forces, fire DIY rockets of their own (probably from DIY UAVs), and clear the area of Palestinians as fast as possible. When this all starts to happen the Palestinian goals will be to 1) stop the Israelis from clearing Palestinian people from land they occupy by attacking Israeli units more or less directly 2) to demoralize the Israeli people through attacks on Israeli cities (suicide bombers missiles etc.) until they are willing to cede Jerusalem, West bank etc. 3) To destroy the Israli economy through attacks on Israeli buildings 4) to bring in foreign intervention form the Arab world (jihad) and from Palestinian sympathizers from the west.

The Jews strategic goals will be to 1) Clear as much Palestinian land of their people as fast as possible. 2) Prevent too much bad press (maintain moral cohesion) 3) To cut Hamas flow of weapons  and money 4) Ensure alliance with the Zionist movement in the West

There’s room for debate over these strategic goals, but they serve as a starting point. From a tactical standpoint I would say that the Israeli’s have the edge. The Israeli’s have proven themselves to be an extremely innovative and resourceful people. As far as weapons and tactics go, I’m certain the Israeli’s will come out on top. However, this conflict won’t happen in a vacuum. It won’t be isolated. We live in a global system, so intervention by other outside factions will have a lot to do with the eventual outcome. From a strategic perspective I would say that the Palestinians have the upper hand. First they can draw from other Islamic people’s around the world. This includes Muslims in France and England, as well as groups like Al Qaeda, and the oil wielding nations like Saudi Arabia. They also (more importantly) have a throttle on the Western media. Their propaganda is broadcasted through the BBC, CNN, FOX and every other news network (remember the images we were shown during the attacks on the Gaza strip?). Because of this, they will be more likely to draw intervention or aid from Western peoples who will see the Palestinians as oppressed. The Israeli’s have no such advantage, aside from the Zionist movement found within evangelical Christians, they have no one that will be able to help them, or feel too sorry for them.

The outcome of something like this would be terribly uncertain. What is certain is that it will likely be bloody, and most of the blood spilled on both sides will not be combatants. Unless one side can establish a decisive advantage, like intervention of outside factions (Palestine) or lightning fast, super effective operations (Israel), it will likely just be a massive blood bath until both sides are tired of it. It will be two non-state entities fighting a possibly decisive war, something that hasn’t happened in modern history.

“Sweat save blood” – Erwin Rommel

I’ve decided to teach myself C++ I’ve found a site Teach yourself C++ in 21 days. I’m kind of dense, so I doubt it will be that fast but we’ll see. My goal is to learn C++ in order to get work as a freelance programmer ( $$$ = ). I’ll be posting about my learning experiences as I go along. For the record I’m using Micrsoft Visual C++

Up to this point in time this blog (which I rarely post on) has been mainly about abstract military theory, art, science, maybe some thoughts on the state of society, and occasionally politics. I’m going to try something new for a while now, something more relevant to my life, and hopefully yours. Over the course of the next few days I’m going to be doing some serious changes to this blog, from the look, to the subject content. Although I plan on continuing to post every now and again on subjects of such abstract thought, the primary subject of the blog “Knight of Rook” will be more about day-to-day activities of a 15-year-old homeschool student pursuing whatever the Lord lays before him. Subjects of posts will include things as diverse as life planning to whatever I’ve happened to learn in that day.

I’m changing the subject for two reasons: number one is that I hardly ever write (and the subject of my articles are rarely of interest to anyone), and two is that it will help me collect and organize my thoughts for the benefit from others. Even a fool can learn from his own experience, it is my belief that the wise learn from others experience. That is my goal, and it is my hope you will learn from this blog as I take it in a new direction……..