Our impulses are often contradictory – the shopaholic versus the wise spender, the exercise fiend versus the couch potato – but we can control which one prevails! The things you want now might not be so desirable in a month’s time.

What I did not realise was how sharply it would bring into focus the multiple personalities I seem to possess.

The me who signed up was full of happy resolve; the me who went to bed early the night before was slightly downcast. But the me who stumbled into the morning dark was entirely different: he wasn’t just groggy and annoyed, he was utterly baffled that someone occupying the same body could ever have thought this a good idea.

“Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours’ sleep?’ Oh, that’s Morning Guy’s problem!… I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want.” Yet hiding inside this frustrating Jekyll-and-Hydeness is an encouraging truth about personal change.

Read the whole article @ The Guardian/Multiple choice

It’s a largely unquestioned plank of what passes for self-help wisdom that you should cut “toxic people” out of your life. Get rid of losers and Energy Vampires; surround yourself, instead, with upbeat high-achievers who’ll motivate you to match their success. Know someone crippled by low self-esteem, convinced nobody likes her? Stop being her friend. Got an acquaintance who won’t shut up about his debilitating fear of doors? Show him the door. There’s a grain of real wisdom here, of course, but an alarming study at Yale University suggests that those superachievers may not be good for you, either.

What’s going on here, it seems, is one of the downsides of empathy. We tend to think of empathy as an unmitigated good…

…as you’ll know if you have ever become confused between whether an event happened to you, or to a friend, or to a movie character. (Don’t fret: studies suggest you’re normal.)

Memory is designed to help us act in the future. Seeing an action performed gives you some confidence that you understand how to perform the action yourself

Read the whole article @ The Guardian/This column will change your life: Watch out for superachievers

Opinion on the matter?

Great presentation and overview about Memory & Swap space management, Synchronous I/O, Filesystem and I/O Scheduler and some userfull commands and tools (iostat, mpstat, oprofile, System Tap, gdb)

Yoshinori has done great job here! I was looking for some articles that would tell me how far can I push MySql on commodity server when stumbled onto this article. It’s a must read for all you sql guys(chicks for that matter) out there

Most of high scale web applications use MySQL + memcached. Many of them use also NoSQL like TokyoCabinet/Tyrant. In some cases people have dropped MySQL and have shifted to NoSQL. One of the biggest reasons for such a movement is that it is said that NoSQL performs better than MySQL for simple access patterns such as primary key lookups. Most of queries from web applications are simple so this seems like a reasonable decision.

Like many other high scale web site… read the whole article @ Using MySQL as a NoSQL – A story for exceeding 750,000 qps on a commodity server

For me, the ability to see news-related links and commentary shared by people I follow, and whose opinions I respect, is infinitely more desirable than a service that picks things it thinks I will like via some algorithm, or even the RSS reader that I have fine-tuned but now spend very little time reading (or a lot less than I used to).

Read the whole article @ Gigaom/The Daily Me is Here Already — It’s Called Twitter

These are my notes from this podcast. It’s great interview.

Why he selected and continues to use WordPress

As of June 2010 when the podcast was made, Mashable still wasn’t using Wordpress 3.0. They used some customizations on their install (like custom post types) that in new version od WP3.0 comes nativly supported. It takes them some more work to switch them (customizations) to native support without breaking anything. They’ve got channels of content that operate like separate blogs – which as mentioned they had to customize in their current WP installation.

They have WP from the beggining. One argument was that on that time it allowed them more freedom since they could have it installed on their own server. Other solutions were hosted. Second argument was scaling. The biggest advantage when scaling was chaching – with milion uniques they didn’t have problems.

The secret formula of success for blogs

Advice; The key thing for starting out any blog is figuring out content niches. Who else is writing about that niche, if it’s defensible, if it’s small enough that there are no major brads already. Start a blog where you can build an audience and where you have a lot of passion becouse it takes a massive amounts of energy to get this stuff off the fround! Be super interested in the topic and get a lot of content on that matter.

Advice; Tag a lot – it makes easier to find and link older content later in the process. Be organized as much as you can.

Advice; One of the key things for readers is content discovery. Build a continuig story line – especially when you have a lot of nontechnical readers so readers can follow the stories, by crossreferencing articles. Don’t forget linking externally on the web. Once the other blogs start picking your content up you have a success. Also reference other bloggs in your space – so other way around.

How to work with and develop teams

They are also tracking authors posts success trough Google Analytics custom reports. They are holistic in that. They are not firing authors or anything but rather looking the whole picture. Everyone gets internal daily report of the work they done for like three days back automatically. Which is great becouse everyone sees everyones success and can learn what works what not and makes everything more of a team effort – great stuff!

They are letting the authors writing stuff that they are passionate about and what the audience likes. Dream job, no ?

Great question was how he made transition from single author model to multi author model; Well the blog was more of topic oriented rather than personal mix of topics. And once he saw that he can’t cover more than 3-10 posts a day with all that happening in social media (whitch Mashable is covering) the move was logicall next step. He just get out volumed and wasn’t serving the reader well becouse of that. So the resources were the problem. So he decided for second author. He had expenses covered with addds on the blog, so he could afford one more author. Bottom line is that when you have enough money you can hire someone else to write along – but you must claimb to that point yourself. Next step after that is hiring someone managing all the stuff that isn’t writing. Stuff like adds sells, business development, partnerships etc.  - that’s how you bootstrap a blog.

Mashable is now around 30 people (biggest blog but small to middle sized business).

How to develop communities

The traffic sources evolved from when it started blogging. At the beginning it was Google heavy (like 80% google traffic). Now it’s social media that’s playing the big role as referrerer. On Twitter, Facebook etc. people are sharing their stories and they don’t have control of what’s going to get shared.

They don’t have one traffic source that really stands out (and no it’s not Twitter).

Advice; Have these social media chearleaders sharing your stuff around (chearliader is thought as positive vibe, don’t get it wrong!). What works for them is; social media, searches (google), other blogs (direct links), partnes (direct links). Another thing that works for them is mobile.

How to  measure growth and monetize

The main thing Mashable uses is Google Analytics. They also measure social media mentions with various tools like SocialTalk. They also have people checking Twitter replies, monitoring numbers on Facebook for Fans/Likers(call them however you want). Don’t forget comment counts, social media mentions, uniques, page views etc.

The fortunate thing was that sponsors come to them. They have internall people seeking for sponsors as well partnersips whitch do that. It’s easies for them now, becouse that have both blog(website) platform and events platform(few events a year) that can be mixed into the sponsors offer and price.

How to build a brand

So Pete picked up a name that covered everything becouse he didn’t know what was going to pick up his interests. Adivce; Don’t name your blog something very narrow! Leave the options open for new verticals.

Their events are great for Mashable branding.

So what’s the secret souce?

Advice; Find a group of people that are passionate about core idea and making it idea centric rather than person centric. Identify a niche, identify a demographic, find the group of people that have the same passions, hire within that group, market to that group and build something that’s greater that yourself something that ties together the community of people that have the same passion, the same interes.

Any comments, suggestions on topic? Did you listen to podcast, what do you think?

Great video and for the ears! Watch and listen – take 3 minutes break It’s funny I didn’t liked it first time I heard it…interesting. Anyway I’m enjoying this retro-life style videos. Enjoy.

It came to my ears yesterday that Facebook and partners announced new investment fund for “Social Innovation” worth $250 Million. Althought the news isn’t new (it happend somewhere last month) it got my attention becose of the participants.

While the money is nice, the biggest benefit to being part of sFund is the direct access to some of technology’s most important companies. Priority access to Facebook, Amazon and Kleiner Perkins could be what helps a startup launch quicker, secure big partnerships or get substantial press.

So who are they and what will they offer?

Kleiner Perkins, Facebook, Zynga, Amazon, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Company. All are investment partners in the fund. Together the partners will provide financing, advice and “relationship capital.” They have committed to providing assistance in their areas of expertise to startups funded by sFund.

Interesting is that sFund is allowed to make investments as small as $100,000 and as large as $100 million.

“If you can’t invent the future, the second best thing to do is to fund it,” says Doerr (Kleiner Perkins).

So what is the offering (for example)?

• Amazon will offer up one year of Amazon Web Services to the entrepreneurs
• Facebook will provide early access to its platform and APIs
• Zynga plans to host sessions for sFund companies for advice on technology and business management
• Comcast will make available its resources and relationships

What is the story behind?

Facebook has already shown interest in social innovation. The world’s largest social network recently partnered with Y Combinator to inspire the next wave of social innovation around Facebook.

Kleiner Perkins is the same firm that started the $100 million iFund to finance iPhone application development, which was later doubled to $200 million to spur app development and innovation on the iPad.

Anyone funded already?

Yep. Cafebots is the first and only company to receive funding from sFund so far. It raised a $5 million Series A.

Related articles from the web

• Kleiner Perkins, Amazon, Facebook, and Zynga Launch $250 million ‘social’ fund [TNW United States] (thenextweb.com)
• Kleiner Perkins: $250M for Social Startups (and Its Own Relevance) (gigaom.com)
• Kleiner Perkins: Get Social, or Get Left Behind (fastcompany.com)
• Kleiner Perkins launches social-app fund (zdnet.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Every argument has at least two sides, even if sometimes, we’re not prepared to admit it. But in the heat of battle many people present their own side of the argument as though there’s no alternative.

You don’t have to go far to find numerous examples of just that; take your pick of the issues from politics (on tv, radio). The instinct is to avoid drawing attention to weaknesses for fear of undermining our own point of view.

Over the years psychologists have compared one-sided and two-sided arguments to see which are the most persuasive in different contexts. So what did they found out? They found that across different types of persuasive messages and with varied audiences, was that two-sided arguments are more persuasive than their one-sided equivalents. Remember that people aren’t idiots, they know there are two sides to every story and they’ll discount your message unless you acknowledge and counter the other side.

There’s one big proviso to this: when presenting the opposing view it’s vital to raise counter-arguments. Two-sided arguments which don’t refute the opposing view can be significantly less persuasive than a comparable one-sided argument. We instinctively understand that the safest course is to present only our own side, otherwise we risk losing traction with the audience. This is probably where the common fear of raising opposing arguments comes from.

When we bring up opposing arguments, then shoot them down, not only is the audience more likely to be swayed, we also see a boost in our credibility.

Conclusion? Balanced argument are more appealing morally, they are also more persuasive. And it doesn’t matter whether counter-arguments are introduced at the start, the end, or mixed in; as long as they are refuted, we are more likely to persuade the audience.

So what do you think?