One of the great things that you can do in a blog is you get to gauge how people respond and comment, of which understanding it thoroughly is an essential requisite to success. I think one of the great ways to be popular and successful is knowing how to emphathize or putting yourself in another person’s shoes. When people feel that you understand what they think and feel, they are more open to what you have to discuss with them.

I have been testing on differences of what I think and what others do. Primarily, I check out blogs, and see how Read the rest of this entry »

I received this among the Christmas  messages, and thought this is a great story.  This is a note that helps us get the proper perspective on what is important in our lives.

I guess it is always good, in life as in business, to quantify so that you can measure and improve!

I still have ( on my own counting and based on the averages he put down) over 1,700 marbles.  How many do you have, and what do you intend to do with it?   You don’t have to buy physical marbles. There are now lots of computer software that can do that virtually. But the thing is, it is good to be reminded constantly!

———–

“Let me tell you something that has helped me keep a good perspective on my own priorities.”

And this is my theory of a “thousand marbles.”

“You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average personlives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.”

“Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900 which is the numberof Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now stick with me , I’m getting to the important part.”

“It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail. And by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays. I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy.”

“So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round-up 1000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside of a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear.”

“Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away.”

“I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life. There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.”

What do you think?

I have always thought that it is a lot of fun to give than to take, and many times, I tell people to do it since it makes us happier.

But maybe, this is something that can be sold better if we have some change in terminology.  Instead of asking people to give ( their time, their resources to others), why not just tell them to share? 

It is the same thing, but implies of course, that the thing you are making available is jointly enjoyed by you and also by your recipient.

What do you think?  Instead of Give something this christmas, why not Share something this christmas?

Google’s Blogger adds privacy options - Yahoo! News

Google Inc. has released a new version of its Blogger service, adding privacy settings that restrict readership to a predetermined audience.

Users can choose to have blogs accessible to anyone or just to themselves.

Or they can list the e-mail addresses of the people they want to let
in. Those readers would need to register for a free Google account —
the same used for its Gmail and other services — and would sign in with
their regular Google passwords.

Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds | CNET News.com

technology firms are using a modern twist on this idea, called prediction markets, as a way to save money, harness the distributed knowledge of their rank-and-file employees, and even answer questions like: When will this software ship? And what will memory prices be like in a few months?

After a good amount of debate on the net, PayPerPost decided to make it a policy for bloggers to disclose if the post is sponsored.

Bloggers must disclose sponsored posts - Yahoo! News

Before this week, advertisers were barred by PayPerPost Inc. from telling bloggers they can’t disclose the sponsorship, but bloggers were able to decide on their own whether or not to do so. Under the new policy, bloggers must disclose that they are accepting payment, either in the write-up or in a general disclosure policy on the blogger’s Web journal.

“Ever since we launched, there’s been a lot of controversy about disclosure,” said Ted Murphy, PayPerPost’s chief executive.

Besides other bloggers questioning the ethics of receiving payments without disclosure, the Federal Trade Commission said in a Dec. 7 staff opinion that failure to disclose could, in some cases, violate consumer-protection laws on deception. The FTC did not single out PayPerPost or say whether it would launch any investigation.

Battle of Leyte Gulf was said to be the largest naval battle in history.

Live Talk: Thomas on a WWII Naval Battle - Newsweek Books - MSNBC.com

During World War II, nearly all sea battles in the Pacific were fought at great distances by carrier-based planes flying many miles from their ships. A bloody exception was the battle of Leyte Gulf, where a dozen Japanese battleships and cruisers engaged a lightly armored convoy of American cruisers and destroyers. In four days of fighting in the seas around the Philippine island of Leyte, Allied forces scored a decisive victory over the Japanese in what was to be the last major naval engagement of the war.

Gartner: Blogging to peak in 2007 - Yahoo! News

One of the research company’s top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide. The reason: Most people who would ever dabble with Web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have gotten bored and moved on, said Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow.

I just gathered from Time Magazine that $5.9 million dollars was the amount of money British people throw into wishing wells every year.  Practically 1 in 5 people regularly throw coins….

As a partner of Microsoft, I ocassionally get into debates about open source.

I must say that Open Source as a movement has been successful, and there are circumstances and applications in which using Open Source may make a lot of sense, but as a technology provider, what is also always in my mind is that — does it also make sense to build a business on top of offering services for Open Source Technologies?

It could - but the good and bad thing about it is that you don’t own the technology, so even if you work hard to build adoption, you are not always the one that benefits or gets the rewards.

With the recent issues at Red Hat, what do you think?  What’s the best business model to adopt?

White Hats, Black Hats - Forbes.com

Red Hat earned $80 million on $278 million in revenue in its last fiscal year (ended Feb. 28), but the outlook for future profitability is not good. Shares have plunged 48% from earlier this year, to $17, wiping out $3 billion in market value. Even after the drop, Goldman Sachs rates Red Hat a sell. “I’m concerned about the sustainability of their business,” analyst Richard Sherlund says. Sands Capital Management, Red Hat’s third-largest shareholder, has reduced its stake from 10% to less than 5%.