Color me flabbergasted.  On Friday I finally had time to set up a Twitter feed and Facebook page for this blog.  Imagine my suprise to find the term rawhabit taken on twitter.  Following the links there I found rawhabits.com.  Wow! It is very similar to my blog here.  Both in content and look and feel. What an amazing confluence of intentions.

My first response was despair and self-flagellation.  I had checked Twitter and Facebook when I started this blog in August of 2009.  My day gig is in the information technology  field.  I know that I need to include social media with any blog.  However, I work at this blog in my (rare) spare time.  I’m not especially savvy when it comes to web marketing and all of the various hot social media sites.  Nor am I adept at the art of inter-linking my blog posts to jack up search engine traffic.  When I started, the term rawhabit was open at Twitter. Feeling safe I became too complacent at getting around to setting up the appropriate accounts and getting the links between the blog and tweets established.    I knew there were was a risk that somebody might create an account with the same name.   Somehow I figured it was a unique enough term that nobody would think of it before I got around to it.    I take some blame here.

I also didn’t purchase domain names that were similar to this one.  I am paying off debts.  I wasn’t able to spend a lot of money squatting on domain names for spec. I know domains are cheap cheap cheap.  I bought as many rawhabit domains as I could. But if you have to buy a bunch of variations it can add up.  Especially with taxes and critical services like auto-renewals, domain protections etc.

I’m building my dreams with this blog.  As I’ve said in my bio, I feel a calling to help others incorporate living foods into their daily lives.  I’m in raw culinary school.  I’m on a 5-10 year plan to finish that up, define specifically how I’m going to manifest my dream, and make my best life happen.  My plan for this web space was to write it as a personal blog until I’m done my courses at Living Light and then change it around to support my livelihood — either as a restaurateur, a cook book author, a personal chef, a raw food coach, or all of the above.

With that mindset, I saw rawhabits.com as a threat.  What gives? Has the author seen this site? I assume so. One doesn’t go to the effort to purchase a domain without at least google-ing similar terms. One probably doesn’t go to the domain registrar to buy rawhabits without seeing that rawhabit is already taken (and then take a curious look-see).  I read her bio.  She was a marketing exec. She probably knows enough about web promotion and search engine optimization to bury any “competition” so far into the Internet ether that it would never see light of day.

But one can’t assume.  The words ass and me aren’t in assume for nothing.   It’s possible that she didn’t find this site.   I was deliberately keeping it low profile until I could build up some content, get my own css rather than the out-of-the-box wordpress template, figure out which social media sites to target with updates, figure out non-obnoxious ways to build “link-love” and improve search engine rankings, etc.

I cried for an hour when I saw what she had done.  I was so upset.   The shock did wear off though.  And I made a conscious effort to see the positive.  The living foods community is full of loving wonderful people who only want to share the gift of good health.  The universe is an abundant place.  There is room for all of us.  There is no competition. Our sites are NOT exactly the same.  Similar yes. Same no.   Why not believe that both sites can benefit from synergy? Sure we’re both all about habits and goals and making change.  We see with different lenses.  I approach habit/goal/change from the making yummy food angle. She approaches it through formal worksheets and exercise challenges.

I’m sure there are many creative ways to help each other out. At minimum we can acknowledge each others existence, make online friends, and link to one another.  What about a meta-site which incorporates both rawhabit.net and rawhabits.com? What about  a feed aggregator?  I haven’t yet a found a raw foods “Planet”, only mega-lists of all the raw blogs .   A planet is a type of software that auto-generates a feed aggregation of blogs.   Or we can do a mash-up with Yahoo Pipes or something.   Just brainstorming here.   I don’t know what will manifest or if anything will manifest at all.

I do know that I can’t take it so personally.  I do know that I’ve learned a very hard lesson about web presence and marketing.  Let’s see what comes.