chapter four – my 30s
Let me preface what I’m about to write with the fact that I admire Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell a lot. I think their books are great and their thinking is fantastic. I enjoy the examples the bring about the way the world around us works and how to be extraordinary. That said both of [...]
I don’t blog to make money, at least not directly. I blog for several other reasons, to improve my writing, to give people who may want to hire me or work with me an insight into my thought-process, to own the international Farhan Lalji google juice, but not to make money. I’m not saying you [...]
I’m not a huge apple fan boy, but I’m on my way. I’ve got an iPod Touch, a Macbook and I’ll probably get an iPad at some point in the future. I’ve stayed away from the iPhone as I think the iPod browsing and apps meets my needs. Then I saw the Apple keynote (if [...]
One of my least favourite sayings is that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. I really hate the idea that someone at any time stops learning. Or that someone can’t possibly learn the skills they need to be able to do something big. At the same time I really hate it when people [...]
So Twitter’s announced their monetisation model, “promoted tweets” will be seen from search queries around brands. To a lot of journos this looks a lot like ad sense / search engine monetisation that the likes of Overture / Google introduced years ago. But there’s more to this with Twitter. People forget that social media allows [...]
I’m sorry it’s been a while. Not sure you missed me like I missed you, but being ill, travelling loads and doing my first speaking engagement in years (at Ecole Hotelier Lausanne, which went really well), not to mention continuing to try and be a better dad and husband have meant that you’ve had to [...]
I love Disqus. It’s made managing comments on my blog pretty easy, between that and Facebook, I feel like I can engage with the people who read my posts pretty well. I own the conversation. I can’t always control where the discussion goes, and nor do I want to, I’m not a dictator but it’s [...]
Earlier this year, I set myself some objectives and gave my year a theme. 2009 was to be the year of “Learning to do”. I spent previous years, thinking, pontificating, learning but not really doing much. So, I told myself that by LeWeb in 2009 I wanted to have done some stuff and go to [...]
Duane over at Kashflow wrote a great blog post about SEO as a marketing strategy over at the Kashflow blog. I couldn’t agree more. His main point is summed up nicely in this bit: “Whilst free traffic (as opposed to paid-for Adwords) is highly desirable – and we certainly do well from it ourselves – [...]
There’s lots of news around Newscorp and getting Google to pay for the content on Newscorp newspapers. I don’t like is companies using Google as a scapegoat. Newscorp feels that Google should be paying for access. MSFT is talking about paying Newscorp for their content. The rationale being that perhaps this will make Google follow [...]