I was feeling nostalgic and going through some of my older posts on this blog. I made a post over two years ago about giving your all in business and life, and realized yet again how important the advice Russel gave is.

I have been running Fuseware for over two years now, and I would be lying if I said it was an easy journey. I have given my mind, heart and soul to it because it perfectly connects my two passions of technology and psychology. I have done the 16 hour a day, 7 day a week thing. I have lost friends and girlfriends because of my chosen lifestyle. I even landed up in hospital just over a year ago after being overworked and overstressed. And I came quite close to giving up on several occasions.

But I stuck to my guns. There is no better feeling than watching something you have worked on for so long finally start to ripen. I still work very hard, but due to having great partnerships and working with smart contractors I have balanced out to roughly 10 hours a day, and even take most weekends off. The network I’ve built, the high level discussions I have with influential people, the thought of doing something that might change the world in a small way – it all makes the long journey worth it. If you don’t give up and keep riding the crests and absorbing the troughs, your dreams finally start coming true.

The point of this blog post is to note the importance of never giving up. This is a key point that many successful entrepreneurs talk about, and I have realized it from direct experience. Running your own business takes everything out of you, so if you make the decision to go into it make sure you are prepared to go all the way.

If you have a dream,  the market conditions are right, and are prepared to absolutely never give up and never stop learning, I can guarantee that you will find success. If you have recently started a business and want some words of advice, or would like to connect with me and just get to know my story better, I will be glad to assist where I can.

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

If you look at a brilliant musician play, he does not have to consciously think about where his fingers need to go to play the next note. It just happens seamlessly and subconsciously, with them being completely immersed and connected to the present moment.

A similar thing can be said about letting emotions take hold of you – be it love, anger, fear or excitement. These also have ways of taking away your conscious thinking and completely immersing you in the moment. Similar to an animal that can be angry, excited or scared, we can let these emotions completely envelop us (sometimes negatively).

One of the gifts of being human is that, using our conscious awareness, we can choose which states we can put our conscious mind in, so that the subconscious mind obediently follows. In this way we can reach a positive state of flow where we maximize our outputs without the need for constantly consciously double checking ourselves. Malcolm Gladwell mentions this state in his book “Blink”, where he describes how we can make fast and accurate decisions without having to second guess ourselves and over-analyze the situation.

What is the ideal human state for maximum productivity? It is this state of flow – of being fully in the moment with an energized focus. An experience of being in flow consists of the following ten factors:

• Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
• Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
• A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
• Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
• Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
• A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it)
• Absorption into the activity, narrowing of the focus of awareness down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

My Tips for Getting into Flow

1. Minimize or eliminate any and all distractions that would take your focus away from your task. Social media breaks, checking websites and news all need to go. I found that music helps put me into flow, as long as it doesn’t have distracting lyrics that take my focus away.
2. Have clear goals for what you are doing. This adds conscious direction and structure to your task which is fed back into your subconscious processes.
3. A confident understanding of the task at hand and your abilities to carry it out. Ideally the task needs to have a high level of challenge that matches an equally high level of skill that you possess to carry it out.
4. Clear and immediate feedback, so that any errors that you make are corrected immediately and without a break in state.
5. Elimination of ego and self centredness. Judging yourself, others or your work just gets in the way of what you need to be doing.
6. Using NLP techniques once the state has been reached. I personally use a concept called anchoring, where I attach my experience to a physical sensation. For example, when I’m in flow I hold my hands together touching the  front of my face. This anchors the physical sensation to my experience. When I want to get in flow faster in the future, I simply act out the anchor again.

If you think someone you know could find this blog post useful, please share it!

SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, C-11, info secrecy bill, Twitter’s censorship policy – the governments and powers of the world have jointly decided that the golden age of free and fair information needs to come to an end.

I don’t want to tell my grandson one day the story of an open Internet that contained all of mankind’s human knowledge, instantly accessible – later locked down and sanitized to the tune of 1984, or probably more accurately a ‘Brave New World’. I don’t have much power, but together people have always been superior once mobilized with a common cause. We know our cause – free, fair, easily accessible information.

I don’t have a solution, and am not advocating revolution – all I am saying is please be aware of what is happening around you and spread the word. I really fear we are approaching a tipping point that may either enslave us Huxley style, or give us a sort of information enlightenment with which to better understand the human condition – perhaps leading to greater peace and compassion for our fellow man.

With the unprecedented boom of social media, many brands are still trying to figure out the space. Ad agencies have jumped on board this band wagon and tacked on social media to their offerings, including social ad campaigns, account management and online reputation management.

We can probably all agree that social media brand presences can be used to connect with their audiences, share relevant content and keep their consumers in the loop with what’s happening. However, brands have not yet come to realize that they are sitting on a goldmine of data ready to be mined.

I’m not talking about social media monitoring, which is also critical to keeping up to date with a brand’s health in realtime. I’m talking about a relatively new market opening up – social media analytics. Its about extracting social media consumer insights from the wealth of online conversations, profiles and connections. These insights can be aligned with the brand’s marketing and social media strategies in order to maximize the effectiveness of things like advertising spend, audience identification, discovering unique trends and maximizing return on engagement of brand related content.

We all know that advertising is not dead – advertising budgets are shifting to the digital and online ad spend is set to surpass traditional. Both Facebook and Google earn an overwhelming majority of their revenue from advertising. Social media analytics can be used as a tool to increase the ROI of ad spend by aligning content, copy and distribution of ads according to the insights given from social media audiences.

When a brand starts using social media as a research tool a lot of interesting insights become available.

Brand Auditing

One can evaluate brand related conversations on social media channels to better understand how the brand is being discussed in those channels, the differences across the channels and whether there are notable circles of influence in specific channels that can be engaged with.

Audience Identification

More than just demographic profiling, one can identify existing consumer segments or discover new segments within social channels that have not been optimally engaged with. Understanding a brand’s audiences’ emotional affinities and interests paves the way to laser focused social media and advertising campaigns that target the individuals that would respond most to that message.

Brand Perceptions

One can discover what resonates with the brand’s audience based on the way the audience interacts with and mentions the brand on social media channels.  With a large enough profiling of conversations, it is possible to determine market perception directly from the word of mouth of the brand’s online followers. Additionally, imagine the possibilities of connecting these perceptions with niche interests the segment may have, such as certain celebrities, music, fashion, sports or food.

Trend Discovery

Finding trending topics that your customer base is talking about is critical to understanding the kind of content they want to engage with. Social media is very much a real-time medium, and if a brand can stay on top of the trends as they occur it becomes very easy to resonate with their audience.  You can also determine unique insights such as the reach and engagement of each piece of content to determine the media equivalent value (MEV).

Facebook has finally revealed its intentions to go public today. Its seeking to raise $5 billion in funding through a massive $100 billion initial public offering. At that level, the company would trade at 25 times 2011 revenue, compared with about 5 times for Google, whose market value has jumped eight-fold since its IPO.

Revenue from Zynga games contribute 12% of Facebook’s bottom line. Facebook said it made $3.71 billion last year, so almost $500 million of that came from Zynga, which includes both users buying virtual goods and services within the games via Facebook Payments as well as “direct advertising” that Zynga bought.

One of Facebook’s largest ad deals was for Transformers: Dark of the Moon last summer, paid for by Paramount Pictures. Facebook said the studio was able to reach 65 million users in a single day.

Like the network itself, Facebook’s revenue is also going international. U.S.-based companies contributed to 62% of the company’s bottom line in 2010, but that figure shrunk to 56% in 2011. Facebook says it’s because the number of international users is growing faster, and due to Facebook opening more sales offices and payment methods abroad.

I love Mark Zuckerberg’s public statement regarding Facebook’s “hacker culture”, and the sort of values he has instilled in his company. These are exactly the kind of values high growth tech companies need to hold onto:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Mark ends the letter of with an inspirational thank you:

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Seneca, Roman Philosopher

“The things we fear most in organizations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity.”
Margaret J. Wheatley, Management Consultant

“Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal .”
Albert Einstein

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.”
Sven Goran Eriksson

“When you compete with a person, you only have to be as good or better than the person to win. If you compete with yourself, there is no limitation to how good you can be.”
Chu Chin-Ning

“Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy.”
Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab

“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.”
Dee Hock, Founder of Visa

“If things seem under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”
Mario Andretti

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Charles Darwin

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
Thomas Edison

“You do not lead by hitting people over the head – that’s assault, not leadership.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

“With ISO 9000 you can still have terrible processes and products. You can certify a manufacturer that makes life jackets out of concrete…”
Richard Buetow, Motorola

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
Mark Twain

“They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
Andy Warhol

“Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it.”
Stan Smith

“Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
Albert Einstein

“Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.”
William Lyon Phelps, American Author

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”
Charles R. Swindoll, American Writer

“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.”
Herbert B. Swope, American Journalist

“If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.”
Charles Kettering, Engineer

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Alan Kay, father of the personal computer

“The customer is a rear-view mirror, not a guide to the future.”
George Colony, Forrester Research

“In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer, American Social Philosopher

“Judge a man by his questions, not by his answers.”
Voltaire

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
Winston Churchill

“People get into a rhythm that makes them resistant to change. To understand the mind-set, try switching hands when you brush your teeth in the morning.”
Gary Gesme, Deere & Co.

“The minute you’re satisfied with where you are, you aren’t there anymore.”
Tony Gwynn, Hall of Fame Baseball player

“Customers, I realized, don’t care about functions or specific activities that occur within our organization. The end game is whether they are getting the right product at the right time at a competitive price.”
Max Guinn, Deere & Co.

“If all you have is a hammer in the toolbox, everything looks like a nail.”
Bernard Baruch, Financial Genius

“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”
John Locke

“Speed is useful only if you are running in the right direction.”
Joel BarkerFuture Edge

“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
Paul Valery, Poet

“Individuals and organizations that are good react quickly to change. Individuals and organizations that are great
create change.”
Robert Kriegel, Sacred Cows Make The Best Burgers

“The only thing certain about any negotiation is that it will lead to another negotiation .”
Leigh Steinberg, Sports Agent

“How fast you are moving is more important than where you are.”
Guy Kawasaki, Rules for Revolutionaries

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”
Dr. Carl Sagan, Astronomer

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
Mark Twain

“Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.”
Zig Ziglar

“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”
Norman Vincent Peale

“You can’t improve anything if you can’t define it.”
Max Guinn, Deere & Co.

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what
you’re doing.”
W. Edwards Deming

The American SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), is a flagrant abuse of power held by the American government and corporations. It would allow for the government to censor any and all information and domains it feels are in violation of online piracy – a term that can be used very loosely. According to the Wikipedia entry:

Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites.

Americans have not taken this bill sitting down. There have been nationwide (and worldwide) protests against the implementation of the bill, citing that Internet censorship will cripple the Internet and destroy the fantastic infrastructure of free flowing information we have created.

Several companies have promoted the bill, and have since experienced service boycotts and retaliation from their customer bases. Many large Internet websites that are against the bill are set to completely black out their websites on January 18th. If you log onto Wikipedia tomorrow to finish that assignment of yours, don’t expect there to be much more than a black page describing SOPA and what the Internet could potentially look like with it in force.

Here are some of the larger websites that are participating in the day-long blackout tomorrow, and as such will be unavailable for use:

1. Wikipedia
2. Reddit
3. All Cheezburger sites (Fail Blog, ICanHaz, Memebase etc.)
4. Boing boing
5. Mojang
6. Major League Gaming

How to voice your opposition against SOPA and black out your own website on January 18th

If you have a WordPress enabled blog, a plugin makes it very easy to black out your site in support of free speech on the Internet. Simply install the SOPA blackout plugin.

The Internet must remain freely accessible for everyone around the world. It is, bar-none, the greatest tool we have ever created for the distribution and categorization of mankind’s information. The powers that be, as always, want to control it, hoard it and censor it for their own ulterior motives.

One can hope that John Gilmore’s famous quote from Time magazine in 1993 will still hold true:

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

The following is a complete list of the sites known to be blackout out on January 18:

Reddit.com
Tucows.com
The entire Cheezburger Network
Destructoid.com
Hacktivist group, Anonymous
Red 5 Studios, developer of the Firefall MMO
Mojang.com and Popular MMO, Minecraft
NLB Creations – my own site
Webmaster community Admin Forums
Web design company, Skytemple.com
Gaming site Video Game Generation
Right Angle Recording
All sites in Major League Gaming’s network
GamingBus.com
Errata Security
XDA Developers
Gaming site, GOG.com
Hey It’s Free! – confirmed via email
Harder Blogger Faster
Colossal Mind
Sonic Retro
BrentAnderson.info
Working It Out
e-cloudy.com – confirmed via comments
Seibertron.com
NewGrounds
Through the Eyes of a Pirate – confirmed via Pirate Party
Cynical Brit
Platform Nation
Digital Suicide – confirmed via comments
Kahn Labs
Jamacast
CryptoCat
Joyblind – confirmed via email
A Much Better Way – confirmed via comments
[H]ard OCP Gaming Community – confirmed via comments
GamersTube.com
Boing Boing
Inkerro – confirmed via comments
The Weekly Gripe – confirmed via comments
Leslie Networks – “We will not be preforming a full black out but will be displaying a SOPA message on our site and possibly more.” – via comments and Twitter
WordPress for Business Websites – confirmed via comments
Simply Fixed – confirmed via comments
FriendStream – confirmed via comments
TacticalCraft – confirmed via comments
RedStoneHost.com – confirmed via comments
RaGEZONE – confirmed via comments
Raspberry Pi – confirmed via comments and site
LazySlob1
GeNyaa – confirmed via comments
Rational Responders – confirmed via comments
Brian Sapient – confirmed via comments
Celebrity Atheists – confirmed via comments
Purpose of Christmas – confirmed via comments
Atheism United – confirmed via comments
Emerald Angel Comics – confirmed via comments
Fairy Tail Episode – confirmed via comments
Vanilla Forums – confirmed via comments
Icrontic – confirmed via comments
New Buddhist – confirmed via comments
This is Xbox
CnC Fansite – confirmed via comments
Castle-G.com – confirmed via comments
Faio.org – confirmed via comments
egoArchive – confirmed via comments
Olivero Broadcasting Group – confirmed via comments
BHR Hosting – confirmed via comments
Red Dawn Movie News
Splitkick – via Twitter
Kona’s Korner
Radioactive Nerd – via Twitter
Talking About Games
Avast!
Cheapitarianism - confirmed via comments
Shaking the Tree - confirmed via comments
Hypocrites In Politics - confirmed via comments
Queeffr.com - confirmed via comments
Farttr.com - confirmed via comments
Quandu - confirmed via comments
PieceOfTheWorld.org - confirmed via comments
The Damned - confirmed via comments
Ian’s Brain - confirmed via comments
BitBid - confirmed via comments
Open Of Course - confirmed via comments
Tech Humanity - confirmed via comments
The Freelancer Today
Nerd Reactor
Stumble Down Under
Sfera Hosting - confirmed via comments
Tekeremata - confirmed via comments
Partido Pirata - confirmed via comments
Jovenes Piratas - confirmed via comments
Pirata Salocin - confirmed via comments
Amanecer Sombrio - confirmed via comments
Kobra Photography – confirmed via comments
Wikipedia - confirmed via Twitter
Super Seed Box - confirmed via comments
YourDegree.com - confirmed via comments
RootzWiki - confirmed via comments
Regretsy - confirmed via Facebook
LoganMifflin.com - confirmed via comments
What Time In - confirmed via comments
SubGurls.com - confirmed via comments
NimBusters.com - confirmed via comments
RivitCity.com - confirmed via comments
Eclipse Guild - confirmed via comments
Mobile Express DJs - confirmed via comments
RyanWhitman.tk - confirmed via comments
GirlGamer.com - confirmed via comments
Ani.Me - confirmed via comments
JoHarrington.co.uk (and also her Wizzley and Suite 101 profiles) - confirmed via comments
The House that a Girl Called Johnny Built - confirmed via comments
Jo’s Library - confirmed via comments
Merch Gwyar’s Blog - confirmed via comments
Council of Elrond  - confirmed via comments
3World
MemeStreams
DoodleKit
Political Buddies
John Shaw Computers – confirmed via comments
John Show for Florida State Senate – confirmed via comments
The Economic Populist – confirmed via comments
That’s Wut She Said – confirmed via comments
Bollywood Chat – confirmed via comments
Double Cross Reviews – confirmed via comments
Blamonet – confirmed via comments
Anonymous Iberoamerica – confirmed via comments
The Grindery – confirmed via comments
ROCKET-IT and subdomains – confirmed via comments
AfterLifeLochie – confirmed via comments
Sanguinus.org – confirmed via email
TechnoBuffalo – confirmed via comments
Brony Farm – confirmed via comments
MLPF.im – confirmed via comments

Additional sites via Reddit (thanks Cori!):

GOOD Evening
Rage Maker
FreakOutNation
TheLeakyWiki
Doxie Lovers Club
Twitpic – They won’t be going completely black, but will be posting censored versions of their site.
Age of Coins – A Minecraft server and forum
A Softer World
This Is Why Im Broke
Cake Wrecks (via Twitter: Cake Wrecks will be joining @reddit in going dark on 1/18 to protest #SOPA. Have a blog? Then join us! http://bit.ly/z2KkSx)
Dance Top 40
Code Labs
MediaMyriad.com
The Ikids Blog
MMO Melting Pot
Inficron Technologies
SeekMyBeat.com
Geek Culture and the Joy of Tech comic
Identi.ca
Quiet Speculation
Shdon.com
IHateVodafonEgypt.com
AnimeWallpapers.com
AnimeForum.com
AnimeLyrics.comAnimeGalleries.net
Trigger Pit
SmokeE
Random Software

The future is here. Ladies and gentleman, take a look at what the world’s best tech companies are coming up with to make our lives even more exciting, streamlined and connected!

Samsung’s Smart Window

Check your Twitter, browse the web, view the weather and even close your virtual blinds on Samsung’s knockout “Smart Window”.

WaterBlock coating

A thin film coating applied to a phone or other device’s electronics allows it to be completely submerged in water without breaking.

Google TV

Google seems to be entering every tech space imaginable these days. With Google TV, your TV turns into an interactive media centre – the next evolution of Youtube brought to your home screen.

Gorilla Glass

Super thin, super strong glass for your smart phones and other screen-equipped devices. This finally life-proofs our mobile gadgets that we tend to drop all over the place.

Sony Crystal LED Display Tech

Sony’s latest TV has a screen made entirely from tiny LEDs. This allows for a very smooth picture with a much higher number of different colours, lighting and contrast.

Toshiba 4K Display

Extremely high resolution TV that claims to emulate 3D without needing glasses. 4K is extremely high definition technology that will make any video appear almost life-like.

Makerbot 3D Printing

A modestly priced device that is capable of creating and colouring 3D objects. Designed for the consumer market, anybody can download 3D models and print them into real life objects. Imagine being able to custom design and create your own chess set, from the comfort of your couch.

Intel Ultrabooks with Microsoft Kinect

Intel’s new line of notebooks are super thin, super stylish and super powerful. They also have Kinect technology integrated into them, allowing us to use hand gestures to interact with the device.

I love it when technology is put together in new and innovative ways. 3D projection mapping allows for a 3D animation to be played by a projector onto any building.

3D projection mapping, according to Wikipedia, “is any method of mapping three-dimensional points to a two-dimensional plane.” Using this technique, video artists are able to match video to buildings that they are projecting on and create cool 3D effects, making it look as though buildings are crumbling, changing their structure and more. It really is amazing.

It is currently taking the world by storm, but I haven’t seen anything in South Africa yet. Big brands should be jumping on this – imagine the kind of exposure you could get by projecting great video content onto buildings.

Google search results are increasingly becoming heavily filtered and personalized for each individual. This makes it a little tricky to check where your site ranks without biasing it towards you.

I tend to always see articles written by me, and posts about my companies near the top of results – mainly because I have shared them through my various social networks. Google, through its various tracking cookies and algorithms, detects who I am and what content I have created and shared, and tailor makes search results for me. Google has become extremely smart in its algorithms, and it scares me knowing that what we see on the web is becoming an increasingly smaller fraction of the available content, tailor made by automated algorithms that detect our interests and show us what we are most likely to enjoy. What’s worse is that Google tends to skew results in favour of its own networks (such as Google+).

The changes effectively create customized search results for people who are logged in to Google. A person who searches for the term “Hawaii,” for example, might find private photos that their friends have shared on Google+ as well as public information about the islands. Overall, this is not a healthy way of exposing the Internet to consumers, since it tends to lock down and filter content that changes the way people see the world – in the same vain that the traditional media companies have been doing for centuries.

How can you counteract this? I present a few options to get filtering algorithms out of your search results and have a more anonymous browsing experience, from the least to the most extreme.

Method 1: “Porn mode”

Chrome’s Incognito feature (a.k.a. Porn mode) means that no cookies from your previous sessions are brought into your experience. You are browsing on a clean slate that is not linked to you, essentially anonymously – however if there is a service that is tracking your IP it can still link you back to you. To activate this mode in chrome, simply press ctrl-shift-n. Search for things you normally search for in this mode, and you may see quite a different set of results. This is the method I use when testing unbiased SEO rankings.

Method 2: Turn off search history personalization

You can turn off personalized results in Google, by clicking through to your preferences. Here, disable web search history at the bottom of your preferences. This may still bring in results from your social networks, such as Google+. You can turn Google+ results creeping in by clicking on the globe icon in your search results, as shown below:

Method 3: Tor

Tor is a way to browse completely anonymously with no personalization or identification whatsoever. By installing the software, it will route all websites you visit and Internet traffic through a multitude of anonymous servers around the world, essentially giving you an anonymous experience.

Check your data

It is useful to know exactly what the Big G is tracking on you. You can go to your Google Dashboard to see everything that Google knows about you – it could end up looking quite scary! Google History also shows what Google knows about sites that you have visited.