Gauravonomics Blog

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I have written about Seth Godin’s soon-to-be-released book ‘The Dip’ before and I have also been following The Dip Blog with utmost fascination. Here are some of my favorite pieces from The Dip Blog -

Seven reasons you might fail to become the best in the world -

- You run out of time (and quit).
- You run out of money (and quit).
- You get scared (and quit).
- You’re not serious about it (and quit).
- You lose interest or enthusiasm or settle for being mediocre (and quit).
- You focus on the short term instead of the long (and quit when the short term gets too hard).
- You pick the wrong thing at which to be the best in the world (because you don’t have the talent).

Even worse than quitting in the first six cases: not quitting. Settling. Sticking with it but not succeeding.

On hyper-competition -

David Weinberger, author of ‘Everything Is Miscellaneous’, interviews BoingBoing co-editor and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow on why metadata is often just metacrap and why ‘decay’ is such a popular Flickr tag -

David: Even just elevating something as being worthy of being categorized, at least at the same level, is itself often a political act.

Cory: Yes, absolutely. What we call things is pretty important.

Cory: And then, the social incentive to tag out like others do also seems to drive people to convergence, then you have effective tag-based collaboration–I’m thinking, for example, of Flickr tags. My favorite one is the “decay” tag, where you have pictures of things that are decaying, whether it’s old, beautiful, sagging barns, or the rich texture of rust, or at leaf that’s gone to crumble, or even that stuff that’s become a science experiment in the back of the fridge.

David: Which has become, completely unpredictably, one of the most popular tags at Flickr. I mean who would have guessed that decay…?

Cory: Yes, it’s really shocking. And of course, there is a certain amount of social capital that accrues to people who now explicitly tag with “decay” in order to show up in that stream.

Google’s Personalized Homepage is now iGoogle!

Looks like Eric Schmidt is spending too much time with Steve Jobs as a director on the Apple Board.

iPod > iTune > iPhone > iGoogle! Heh!

As you would have figured out by now, I’m never quite satisfied with my blog. As I learn more about the art and science of blogging, I find more and more things on the blog that need to be fixed. Yesterday was my day off from work and I spent most of it working on the biggest tweak on my blog ever since I shifted from Wordpress.com.

The thing is, Gauravonomics is not one blog anymore, I have split it into two separate blogs -

- At Gauravonomics Blog, I’ll write about blogging, marketing and personal development. If you want to read about what I’m thinking about, head over here.
- At Gauravonomics Diary, I’ll write about love, life and pop culture. If you want to read about what I’m doing/ feeling/ reading/ watching/ listening to, this is the blog to read.

I split the blog into two because I found myself writing for two separate sets of readers on the same blog. My older readers wanted more personal posts about what was happening in my life, but the focus of the blog had moved to what was happening in my head, resulting in a new set of readers looking for posts on marketing, technology and blogging tips. With the split, I’ll find it easier to have meaningful conversations with both sets of readers.