Just a heads up that Ali Luke (née Hale) has released The Blogger’s Guide to Freelancing (née The Staff Blogging Course).

I reviewed her Staff Blogging Course nearly two years ago. (Has it really been that long?) Whenever someone asked me how they could make money blogging, I would always point them to that ebook, because it’s the best way I know to get all the information you need in one place.

Now she’s updated and expanded it to make The Blogger’s Guide to Freelancing. While I haven’t read this new version, I have no doubt that it’s even better than the original.

It looks like my old discount code, HNreader, is still good for $5 off. And when you buy it, you get a $10 discount code for another ebook of hers, The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing. And you get a six month money-back guarantee, so there’s practically no risk to try it out.

Oh, and if you previously bought the original version, you should have already received the new one for free. If not, just leave a comment, and she’ll take care of it.

Since I liked Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers so much, I’ve been meaning to read some of his other books. I finally got around to his first bestseller, The Tipping Point.

It’s about the idea that “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do,” becoming epidemics when they reach a critical mass, or their tipping point. But what causes something to tip?

It happens though the efforts of a small number of people with very specific talents: connectors (social networkers), mavens (information specialists), and salesman (persuaders). If something is spread by the right people, and if it’s “sticky” enough, and if it’s delivered in the right context, it reaches a tipping point.

He shows how his theory explains the tipping points of a number of epidemics, including Paul Revere’s midnight ride, the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, Sesame Street, Hush Puppies shoes, New York crime rates, syphilis in Baltimore, suicide in Micronesia, and smoking in the U.S.

You probably won’t find it very practical, but it’s very thought provoking. I found it good, but not as good as Outliers (although I’ve heard other people say the opposite).

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that 99.999% of the planet is living under a rock. At least, that’s the only conclusion I can come to, based on how far we’ve lowered the bar for using this opener.

The bad news? As cultured and sophisticated as you are, you can virtually be assured that you are living under a rock. The good news? It’s apparently a really big rock, and there’s lots of company here.

So how can you find out for sure if you’re a resident of this vast world under the rock? I did a search to determine the criteria. At first, I found a few suggestions that it only takes minimal awareness to separate yourself from these people:

• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade or so, you are familiar with the concept of the internet.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware that America is in the midst of a recession.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Justin Bieber.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard of Susan Boyle.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Michael Jackson died.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock you are almost certainly familiar with Facebook.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of The South Beach Diet.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month or so, you know that today is Election Day.”

OK, this is pretty reasonable. Maybe there was room for me above ground. Or so I naively thought. When I looked deeper, I saw that being a surface dweller requires an impossibly diverse knowledge base:

• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you are aware of the Bokeh effect.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Microsoft finally signed off on Visual Studio 2005 and that it’s available now (or soon) to MSDN subscribers.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware by now that an endocrine disrupting chemical known as Bisphenol-A (BPA for short) has been popping up in all manner of consumer goods.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you know that I have been busy developing a library that will, hopefully, make OpenGL development as painless and fun as possible.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that one of the Skrull infiltrators (and the Empress herself) in Marvel’s Secret Invasion is none other than Spider-Woman.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, you know that the VMA’s advanced mixed choir, Powerhouse, was invited to perform on the Oprah Winfrey Show, for a special Glee episode.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about The Audience Conference, taking place in NYC on Friday, November 6th at the Hudson Theater.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Katie Holmes performed a tribute to Judy Garland on Fox’s dancefest competition So You Think You Can Dance last night.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past six months, you’ve heard of US interaction designers and strategists ZURB.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve seen pictures of the beautiful all-new 2011 Cadillac CTS and CTS-V Coupes.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve already played Madden NFL 09.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Lars von Trier is the premier author of the Danish Dogme 95 manifesto.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week, you’ll have noticed that Google’s App Engine now lets you run Java web apps.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you’ll know that the big news this month has been the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 6850 1GB and the ATI Radeon HD 6870 1GB.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve seen the blogosphere cooking and baking their way through Dorie Greenspan’s gorgeous new cookbook Around My French Table.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are well aware that Bora Zivkovic left ScienceBlogs 24 hours ago.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware of the controversy over CW Skimmer.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately you then know Dead Space 2 hit shelves this week.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have heard about the Andy Gray & Richard Keys kerfuffle/scandal.”
• “Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have heard the recent brouhaha over Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Notifications update to Windows.”

Give yourself a pat on the back if you were aware of most of these things. But remember, all it takes is one gap in your knowledge to banish you to a subterranean prison. I hope there are enough cavefish for all of us.

Here’s an interesting article about the advantage of dual identities. (Thanks, @introvertzone!)

Vladimir Nabokov is best known as the author of Lolita and other works of fiction. But he had a dual identity as a lepidopterist. He frequently described his life pleasures as “the two most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.”

The article is about what Stephen Jay Gould called “the paradox of intellectual promiscuity.” Nabokov had proven himself as a writer, and he couldn’t have gone wrong by sticking with that. So did his interest in butterflies have a positive, negative, or neutral effect on him?

Some possibilities:

• He wasted all this time on butterflies instead of writing another Lolita.
• Don’t worry, he didn’t waste too much time on butterflies.
• Lolita was great only because he studied butterflies.
• His work on butterflies was more important than his fiction. Lolita was the time waster.

To Nabokov, these two fields weren’t even all that different. They were just two puzzles he solved in the same way, using his deep passion for detail and precision.

His crazy hypothesis about the migration of a particular group of butterflies didn’t earn him much credit as a scientist in his lifetime, but modern technology recently proved him right. So in this case, we can score a win for lepidoptery and intellectual promiscuity, though more than 30 years after Nabokov’s death.

I think the right answer can only be decided on a case by case basis. I don’t know if there’s any hard and fast rule as to whether we should be chasing our butterflies.