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Tulsa entrepreneurs are unique in the world. How have your endeavor(s) added value to our community and the future of Tulsa?

Tulsa and its past, present, and future have been the major focus of my writing at BatesLine and elsewhere over the last seven years. My site's motto is "Tulsa Straight Ahead" - the title of a Western Swing tune by Jimmy Hall for Leon McAuliffe and His Cimarron Boys. It expresses my desire for genuine progress for Tulsa's quality of life. Tulsa straight ahead also means rejecting proposals that would waste our resources on detours and dead ends.

In my writing, I've drawn on my years of involvement in neighborhood and zoning issues and city politics and my love of Tulsa history and urban planning to provide deep, detailed analysis of issues facing Tulsa and to connect readers with sources of information for their own research.

Part of that mission is observing the successes and failures of other cities. On BatesLine, I seek out the conditions that enable another city's successes, so we can accurately and successfully apply those lessons to Tulsa's unique circumstances.

Preparing for our city's future also requires an accurate understanding of how we got where we are. At BatesLine, that means digging through primary sources to look at a forgotten episode in Tulsa history or to correct a popular misunderstanding of Tulsa's past, for example, Greenwood's post-Race Riot history.

It's my hope that, by covering issues that other media overlook, by providing a depth of background not found elsewhere, and by providing an alternative point of view, I am contributing constructively to Tulsa's civic discourse.

If you aren't failing, you aren't succeeding. Share with us some of your failures to better understand how you have taken the lessons learned and applied them to support getting to where you are today.

One of the things I've learned is the value of final control over my own creative output. It's thrilling to have someone offer to pay you for what you produce, and it's tempting to sell your copyright for the proverbial mess of pottage. But when you're a freelancer and your product is creative content, when you are defined by what appears under your byline, no amount of money is worth surrendering your rights to control your creative output. A freelance writer, photographer, graphic designer, or artist who submits work under "work made for hire" terms can't use that work in a portfolio to show potential clients, can't use it as part of an anthology or retrospective. Work made for hire means the buyer can change what you submitted and make it look like your work or run your work under someone else's name. When you accept work made for hire terms you not only sell yourself short, but you make it harder for your fellow freelancers to find work under more favorable terms.

Being creative is vital to an entrepreneurial endeavors success. Share an out-of-the-box experience that has made you stronger as an entrepreneur.

There are plenty of search-engine optimization consultants who will promise to transform your page rank. Although I've never made a concerted SEO effort, search engines seem to like BatesLine, which is one of the top results on many of the topics I've covered. The key seems to be headlines, link text, categories, and tags that accurately and precisely describe the contents. Clever, punny headlines are fun, but accurate headlines help readers find what you've written on a topic of interest

For example: In 2003, I turned a bit of websurfing into a rambling piece about a British novelty song from the mid-1960s called "Weather Report" - a forecast sung as an Anglican chant by the Mastersingers, a group of English schoolteachers, and produced by Beatles producer George Martin. I had gathered into one blog entry as much information as I could find on the song. It quickly became the top Google result. After posting the entry, readers from around the world wrote to tell me even more, and about four years after it was first published, the wife of one of the singers emailed to give me the definitive history of the Mastersingers and the novelty records they recorded. My entry reporting her email is now the top result for the song.

I've seen the same dynamic with the more substantive pieces I've written about Tulsa politics and history. Search engines like high-quality, in-depth content, labeled accurately better than sites that seek to game the rules.