Netizen

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Blogging = Learning + Teaching + Churning + Entertaining

Okay, this is not E=mc^2, but I think I got something here. I managed to throw a "2" somewhere in there.

Blogging = Learning + Teaching + Churning + Entertaining (2 way)

There is research to prove blogging is good for your brain, like running is good for your thighs. Has to be. You can intuitively conclude. You don't need research for that. And by blogging, I mean blogging. That includes podcasting, that includes videoblogging. That includes micro-blogging, of course.

The Internet is the Ultimate Media. Every moment of every life can be recorded, technically speaking. But what if you are not interested in the mundane, what if you are only interested in ideas? What if you don't care if they are mixed up?

A blog is a web log. The web is the interweb - I got that word from Morgan Grice a few days ago - and it is the web that is key. How you log on to it, how you latch on to it, does not matter. Every netizen is a producer, every netizen is a potential consumer.

The netizens suck on the nipples of Mother Web for nourishment. Netizens produce knowledge, perspectives. Even when nothing groundbreaking is happening, even if it is just the proliferation of existing knowledge, something fascinating is happening.

Like I have said many times, you can not bring all Nepalis to MIT, but you can take MIT to everyone in Nepal. If all textbooks, if all journal articles, and all lecture videos are added to the soup called the social web, how much will you be missing if you are not on campus?

And the blog is the center of that action for each individual netizen. If nothing else, it allows you to display your ignorance.

The interweb is not just about putting faces in front of computer screens. It is about taking group dynamics to a whole different level. Barack Obama rode the internet all the way to the most powerful office in the world. How much more real does it have to be? Grassroots governance is going to be more exciting than grassroots campaigning.

The blog is where it gels for the netizen. That space is your space, and it has all the wheels of media. It has the feel of a classroom. It is in your face like a microphone. It is expansive like air, water, space. It is casual like gum. It is private. I mean, if you are struggling to get page hits.

Spamming Om Malik
Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts
Blogging Several Times A Day
Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

The United States Of Entrepreneurs

Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World
That StartUp Mentality (2)
That StartUp Mentality

The Economist: The United States Of Entrepreneurs
Special Report

Heroic entrepreneurs Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant ......... entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well. ...... in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation. ... The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. ....... TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 ....... Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford ....... somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. ....... “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. ....... “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. ....... entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity ........ flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston ........ Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines ........ the average boss was 39 when he or she started ....... Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. .......... Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections. ....... some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products ....... Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. ....... Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow. .......... downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways. ....... The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years. ....... advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry. ...... Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression.
Managing entrepreneurship
Time for entrepreneurship
The United States of Entrepreneurs Google and Facebook barely existed a decade ago. .... America was the first country, in the late 1970s, to ditch managerial capitalism for the entrepreneurial variety. .... willing to sacrifice old certainties for new opportunities ...... the world’s most mature venture-capital industry ..... Highland Capital Partners receives about 10,000 plausible business plans a year, conducts about 1,000 meetings followed by 400 company visits and ends up making 10-20 investments a year, all of which are guaranteed to receive an enormous amount of time and expertise. ......... Stanford University gained around $200m in stock when Google went public. ..... 52% of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants, up from around a quarter ten years ago. ...... In 2006 foreign nationals were named as inventors or co-inventors in a quarter of American patent applications, up from 7.6% in 1998. ......... “patent trolls”—lawyers who bring cases against companies for violating this or that trumped-up patent ........ rising xenophobia is making the country less open to immigrants. ....... wealth-creating universities, such as Harvard and Stanford ...... Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs, who cut their teeth in Stanford and Silicon Valley, are now returning home in ever larger numbers, determined to recreate Silicon Valley’s magic in Bangalore or Shanghai. ......... Goldman Sachs is spending $100m over the next five years to promote entrepreneurialism among women in the developing world ...... —the EU and Japan—are far less entrepreneurial. ....... only 5% of European companies created from scratch since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest EU companies by market capitalisation. The equivalent figure for America is 22%. ....... different cultural attitudes ...... When Denis Payre was thinking about leaving a safe job in Oracle to start a company in the late 1980s, his French friends gave him ten reasons to stay put whereas his American friends gave him ten reasons to get on his bike. In January last year Mr Payre’s start-up, Business Objects, was sold to Germany’s SAP for €4.8 billion. ......... cultural problems are reinforced by structural ones. ..... A depressing number of European universities remain suspicious of industry, subsisting on declining state subsidies but still unwilling to embrace the private sector. ......... America has at least 50 times as many “angel” investors as Europe ..... In the 1990s Silicon Valley’s moneybags believed that they should invest “no further than 20 miles from their offices”, but lately the Valley’s finest have been establishing offices in Asia and Europe. .............. technological breakthroughs are being made in many more places ....... applying American methods to new economies can start a torrent of entrepreneurial creativity. ........... The success of Skype, which pioneered internet-based telephone calls, was a striking example of the new European entrepreneurialism. The company was started by a Swede and a Dane who contracted out much of their work to computer programmers in Estonia. In 2005 they sold it to eBay for $2.6 billion. .......... the Japanese have been less successful than the Europeans at adapting to entrepreneurial capitalism
Entrepreneurs in India and China Bollywood produces 1,000 films a year that are watched by 3.6 billion people (the figures for Hollywood are 700 and 2.6 billion). .... In 2003-05 some 5,000 tech-savvy Indians with more than five years’ experience of working in America returned to India. ...... The British introduced the ideal of meritocracy to India; Jawaharlal Nehru gave it a technocratic twist by launching the Indian Institutes of Technology; and India’s natural love of argument did the rest. ......... When Wu Yi, the country’s then vice-premier, visited America in 2006, she took more than 200 entrepreneurs with her. About 60 Chinese companies are now traded on NASDAQ. ....... So many Chinese expats have returned in the past few years that Valley-slang has given them a special name, B2C (back to China). ....... Baidu is a Chinese Google; Dangdang is a Chinese Amazon; Taobao is a Chinese eBay; Oak Pacific Interactive is a mishmash of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Craigslist; Chinacars is a Chinese American Automobile Association. .......... Baidu’s founder, Robin Li, raised funds from American venture capitalists and offered stock options to his earliest employees. ......... Jeff Chen has developed an internet browser which has attracted venture capital from Denmark and is available in 20 languages. ......... Some of the most innovative entrepreneurs are working with mobile telephony ....... the Chinese reportedly maintain three sets of books, one for their bankers, one for their accountants and one for the government. Businessmen often neglect their firms because they spend so much time cultivating political connections.
Lands of opportunity
The formula for entrepreneurship would-be Silicon Valleys: Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Glen in Scotland and even, depressingly, Silicon Roundabout in London. ........ the anchor-firm model ........ People become entrepreneurs when the economy stops supplying jobs. ....... the local-hero model ...... culture makes almost all the difference ....... economic policies matter too .... culture can be changed ..... India and China have become the second and third most entrepreneurial countries in the world, trailing only America ......... a vibrant higher education system .... openness to outsiders. Emigrés have always been more entrepreneurial than their stay-at-home cousins: the three most entrepreneurial spaces in modern history have been the ones inhabited by the Jewish, Chinese and Indian diasporas ........... they mix and match knowledge ........ Shai Agassi, an Israeli-American businessman based in Palo Alto, California, is promising to upend the car industry by going electric ........ local cultures matter
Entrepreneurs doing good
The entrepreneurial society

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Spamming Om Malik

Om Malik and I used to be Facebook friends. Mitch Kapor used to follow me on Twitter. Those were the days.

TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter

GigaOm
App roundup: 10 iPhone weather apps (The AppleBlog)
What RSS subscriber numbers really tell us (WebWorkerDaily)
Review: YouTube’s new premium shows design (NewTeeVee)
Sprint starts marketing the Palm Pre (jkOnTheRun)
How to get reliable clean energy from variable resources (Earth2Tech)

I guess I have not exactly arrived yet as a tech blogger.

Om, I got news for you. I am not trying to be a tech blogger. I just happen to have a blog. I am a startup guy.

We have mutual friends in Sree (Five Years Of Gmail: What Would Gsus Do? ) and JP (I Get Twitter).

And a not so mutual friend in Kristi Fundu: https://twitter.com/relaxmedia/status/1558133194 (My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher)

Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts

Add digg button to each of your blog posts | Bloganol.com
Cranial Soup: Add a TwitThis Button to your Blogger posts

Add This

I just added these buttons to my blog. I figured they will help spread the word out a little. Although my blog has best served me for small group communication purposes. This is no mass traffic blog. It is a communication tool. Helps me get my point across. And also speaks to my blogging hobby. It is both business and pleasure, like James Bond says in a movie: "Hopefully both!"

You do want a larger audience. You do want to build a community around your blog. Post it and they will come does not cut it. You have to go where people are already assembled.

You add the buttons and it is one step easier for visitors to help you spread the word if the spirit might move them.

One glitch for me now is the two buttons work for individual posts only. Otherwise your general blog URL is what gets tweeted. Still, no complaints. So if you want to tweet/digg a particular blog post, get on the web address with that particular blog post, then press the button.

Blogging Several Times A Day
Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

Friday, April 17, 2009

My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher

Kristi Fundu Intro on Facebook: "For all the long lost friends, a brief synopsis of the last decade: graduated from BC in 2000, returned to Macedonia in 2002, started my own business in 2004, one brief marriage 2006."

https://twitter.com/paramendra/status/1546305581

Image via Wikipedia

Ashton Kutcher just became the first Tweetizen - Twitter citizen - to have more than a million followers. He was in a race with CNN, and he won. And I think in the interest of full disclosure it is kind of important that I come out making it clear to the world as to my relationship with Ashton Kutcher which is that Demi Moore and I signed up on Twitter the same day: I Get Twitter.

https://twitter.com/paramendra
https://twitter.com/aplusk
https://twitter.com/mrskutcher

https://twitter.com/mrskutcher/status/1547615546
https://twitter.com/aplusk/status/1548011384
http://twitter.com/paramendra/statuses/1409287115

Twitter Is Not Micro
The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Free live streaming by Ustream

The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing

Image via Wikipedia

Web 1.0 was, well, offline you had posters, online you had websites. That was so rudimentary and geeky, cheesy. That was early stage.

Web 2.0 has been way more exciting. we realized the web was meant to be populated by human beings. People like you and me. The ordinaires.

So it bothers me when people talk of a possible Web 3.0 as a way to get back to machine language. They talk of the semantic web.

Web 3.0 has to be even more about people than Web 2.0. That is a vision worth fighting for. The vision war has to be won. People matter.

Web 2.0 has been 2D, Web 3.0 has to be 3D. People are 3D. The rectangle on the screen is too confining. We ask for liberation.

What would Facebook be today without its 200 million people? Facebook is no spaceship to oggle at. People matter. We are the web.

Each human being is unique. That is a scientific truth. No two snowflakes are alike. The web is poorer for every human not yet online.

https://twitter.com/ScienceTweets/status/1547445376

Web 3.0 is about getting more and more people online. 3.0 is about getting every human being online. 3.0 is about seeing the vital center.

Web 4.0, I don't know. I call it next generation software. I don't have the foggiest idea. Web 5.0, though, is face time. Circle complete.

All along, through 2.0 and beyond, what we were really trying to do is communicate, to reach out, to meet, to talk, to converse, to express.

We were trying to hear, to be heard, so we should really value it when we do meet. Web 5.0 is face time. Face time is godly.

In physics there is nothing faster than the speed of light. On the web there is nothing past Web 5.0, past face time. Semantic web is 2.1.

Blogging Several Times A Day

For the past few days I have been blogging several times a day.

Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

April 17

My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher
The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing
Blogging Several Times A Day
Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World
That Plateau Feeling

April 16

Blogging Tips
0 Tweets, 30,000 Followers: Could That Be Oprah?
That StartUp Mentality (2)

April 15

That StartUp Mentality
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Twitter Is Not Micro
Cupcake: Android 1.5

April 14

Skype: Hub
The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element

The idea is to spill your stream of consciousness thoughts, ideas, perspectives into that collective stream. Curiously that also jacks up your blog's status with the search engines. Yesterday I googled up "sites that pay you to blog" and my post on the topic showed up in the top 10 results.

Sites That Pay You To Blog

It is almost as if for the past few days I have been spending more time blogging than tweeting. But then I discovered something else. When you download about four blog posts in a row into your Twitter stream, suddenly you get 10 new followers on Twitter. That is not like Oprah getting 50,000 new followers before her first tweet, but it is something. Like they say, it adds up, and it is organic growth.

0 Tweets, 30,000 Followers: Could That Be Oprah?

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