I was thinking this morning what I’ve learnt from the Christmas break – so here goes.
- Fact – In Florida 24% of all mortgages are in default and 44% of mortgages are more than the homes are worth. What should I do with that stunning information?
- That the work we’ve been doing on almost every website has resulted in an improved Google Page Rank – some now as high as PR3.
- Tools – If you are operating in a niche then a very useful tool to monitor some of what’s going on around the world is a new tool by Google – It’s called Google Alerts - http://www.google.co.uk/alerts?
- Ponder – That Global warming doesn’t mean everyone will get warmer – at the moment it’s between – 8C and – 2C in the UK and yet again the cold weather is exceeding all records
So that brings me back to an eternal question – two actually.
- How can I play my part in being responsible on this planet so that everyone gets a fair crack at life?
- Where are the opportunities in life that these changes will bring – how can we spot them? By the way many of these opportunities are not commercial but that doesn’t mean they are not worth pursuing.
One of the most poorly understood terms in use on the Internet today is the term avatar. Let me begin by explaining where the term came from originally. Apparently the term is derived from the Sanskrit word which is to do with Eastern religions which means ‘a representation of one’s self’ in other words a picture, an image or a representation of the person concerned. The modern derivation or application of the term avatar is almost exclusively connected with the use of computers, the Internet, Internet gaming and blogs in particular. Many services like MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM and Skype actually encourage you to have an image of yourself. They seem to work better if the image is of the person concerned. A picture of you has been shown to encourage confidence.
Probably the most common outworking of the avatar format is by using on of a number of free services that link a particular e-mail to a particular image and that image is stored on the Internet at one such service and probably the one most commonly used in the blogging community is a service called Gravatar (www.Gravatar.com) allows you to go and register an e-mail address and then upload a small picture related to the e-mail address. Then whenever you go and post a comment or write an entry on the blog then provided you use that e-mail address then that image that you’ve linked to the e-mail address will pop up in the post or comment. There are many examples of that all over the internet.
Now why is it important to use Gravatars when you’re working on the Internet? We all know the search engines love back links to your site and search engines like Google view them as very important. So let’s say that you have a chosen area and niche area looking for example high performance sailing. If you go and search on the Internet for blogs containing the phrase high performance sailing. Once you find a good site you post a helpful comment and in doing so are asked to provide your e mail and are given the option of providing a web address. Provided your comment is accepted by the owner of the blog then two things happened one is you get a back link to your site which is all cute importance of the just mentioned and secondly your image gets placed adjacent in the comments (if your image is good then people may well click on it. The more you place relevant comments on other peoples blogs the more likely your website is to gain that elusive goal – an elevated Google PR rank. There are no hard and fast rules regarding the number of back links that you need in order to step up from say a Google rank of 0 to 1 to 2, then 2 to 3 and so on but every back link that you have brings you closer to that elusive goal.
Wherever you see an invitation to post a comment on a blog where they require you to put an e mail address to validate the poster then there is a probability that the site is enabled to use Avatars/Gravatars. Each comment that you post acts as a valuable back link. It is for just this reason that spammers try to post comments by the hundred in blogs and on forums.
This weeks recommendation is in two parts:
- go to www.gravatar.com and register – it is free. For each email address you want to use just have a small image – preferably different to upload.
- then make a decision to visit one blog (search on Google for ones similar to your niche) and post a helpful comment. The box on “start something today” looks like this but you may only see a ‘Comments’ link on some sites.
It is essential that we keep our eyes and is open. The reason people and the businesses they run fall behind is that we as individuals are not paying attention to the changes taking place.
Some dramatic and well known examples of disruptive change are:
- Who ever uses a cassette tape or a vinyl record today?
- Where are the typewriters of yesterday?
- Toyota and the Hybrid car
- the electric light displaced the gas or oil lamp
With regard to the changes around us – are we looking for them but not seeing them, are we reading about them but not understanding them, are we noticing them but refusing to listen to the lessons they give? Sure, you can trundle out hundreds of excuses about being too busy, under resourced or restricted by the management but in reality these all just excuses.
If you take repeated action that is not pushing you in the right direction and you are not using this feedback to infer how you may need to change, then this is not intelligent behavior. It has been referred to colloquially as the definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Not all feedback is good in the first instance. The faster you move through denial, to believing that all is rosy when it is actually not, and making some changes for the better. First you have to notice that all was not rosy.
The beauty of being a flip star is that you can always do the opposite of the what the world suggests – Google’s founders did this beautifully well – in truth they created an environment where change was seen as good. People say knowledge is power. Perhaps knowledge is not power. Maybe ignorance is David Grable, an author, speaks of the loss of ignorance with sadness:
“Unlike knowledge, which is infinitely reusable, ignorance is a one-shot deal; once it has been displaced by knowledge,
it can be hard to get back. After it’s gone, we are more apt to follow a well-worn path to find answers
than to exert our sense of what we didn’t know in order to present new options.
Knowledge can stand in the way of innovation. Solved problems tend to stay solved sometimes disastrously so.”
2000 years ago people “knew” the universe was created in the week. 1000 years ago humans “knew” the sun moved around earth. 500 years ago people “knew” the earth was flat. Imagine what you will know tomorrow? What knowledge or practices do you hold on to that are no longer empowering? What behavior that once drove your success do you and your team now need to unlearn?
Great leaders and managers must be prepared to make decisions about their business, and for that matter their lives. Often these decisions will be based as much on intuition and educated guesswork as on predictable data and knowledge. The flipstar makes the decision anyway. Why:
- decisions lead to actions. When you finally make up your mind about something, it usually leads to action. There is no need at this point to say why this is a good thing.
- Decisions creates momentum. The action that follows your decisions will give you the clarity that was preventing you from making a decision in the first place, and now you’re off on a positive upward spiral. Action leads to clarity, clarity leads to confidence, confidence leads to another decision and now the decision warrants action and so on.
- Decisions create confidence. The decision gives you not just a sense of confidence but also those around you. If you get your team or, if you’re a CEO your whole company moving in the right direction of your stated trajectory, you had better instil some confidence.
Decisions create that confidence.
Let me give you a simple but profound question. When will Apple cease to be a computer company that has an interest in music downloads to being exclusively a music and media company?
I saw this article on the New Economics Foundation Website and thought it made some real sense. The banks seem to think they are not only above the law but also above control. The idea that their function should be split 3 ways , personal customers, business banking and securities dealing, makes such common sense and give control back to the people that use their services. That a bank should be for profit for me runs against the grain – there is something just not quite right. That brings me onto the whole subject on money – is it real or is it a myth.
If we all went to the Bank of England and asked to exchange a £10 note for £10 in cash – we’d get a big surprise. The statement on bank notes ” I promise to pay the bearer on demand…” – has gone. So what is the currency of money – does it even exist? If you like philosophy just google the phrase ‘does money exist’ and see what comes up.
I’m very interested in the concept of micro finance as practised by several organisations in Africa – I wonder if that could be a model for the western countries so devastated by the banking system collapse.
Break up the banks to restore lending and revive the economy from the bottom up, says think tank
Economic rescue efforts – including quantitative easing – will not work until the fundamental problem that Britain’s banks have become “unfit for purpose” is addressed, says nef (the new economics foundation).
In a report published today, Tuesday 10 March 2009, – the day the British Bankers Association chief is to answer to a parliamentary investigation of banking supervision and regulation1 – nef argues that the shift in the shape and business model of banks over the last generation helped both cause and perpetuate the present financial crisis. Continue Reading…
