Text Links Ads + College Newspapers = BAD

Through my capacity at Personforce, I've gotten to know the college newspaper industry reasonably well. It's a delight to work with the students and faculty at these fantastic training grounds for journalism and media management. I can't say enough good things about the caliber of the people at these institutions and the journalism they produce.

Working with college newspapers , I'm struck that perhaps a pernicious force has infiltrated these otherwise sterling institutions - inadvertent influence-selling through text link ads.

In today's media landscape, it's very important to understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and make sure you abide by ethical online practices so that Google will find you. Google is the starting place for where most people find content. Jeff Atwood discusses that after launching his startup StackOverflow, he now gets 83% of his traffic (over 3 millions visitors!) from Google. So in today's media landscape, it's important to play by the rules or you'll get black listed and shut out of most of your traffic.

Almost all search engines use links as a currency to measure a website's authority. If you get lots of good inbound links from high profile websites to your website, Google rewards this by giving your site a high Page Rank. A high Page Rank means that people are more likely to find your content through Google. The more people can find your content, the more traffic, the more revenue for your newspaper.

One thing that struck me though is that most college newspapers have very low page ranks in Google. Even more startling - their page rank keeps falling. This was extremely surprising to me for a variety of reasons. First, all of these institutions publish first rate, original, sophisticated content. Yet somehow they have page rank of 4, the same as a mid-level blogger. Second, almost every college newspaper has been publishing online for over 10 years, but from Google's perspective they look like a brand new publication of questionable authenticity. Heck some of these newspapers have been around for over 200 years!

So why is this going on? Digging around the answer is clear - text link advertising. For some bizarre reason many college newspaper have insidious text link ads all over their websites. Text links ads are when an advertiser pays to have a link on your site so they can get some of your "google authority" and look like they have authority because your newspaper is linking to them. In essence, the advertiser wants the newspaper to link to them so their company shows up higher in search results and they willing to pay for it.

Virtually no reputable newspaper, blog, or publisher accepts text link advertising today for a big reason - when you sell a text link you are selling your influence. It is the technical and ethical equivalent of publishing a favorable article about a company in your newspaper because they paid you to do so. Ethical issues aside, Google thinks less of newspapers that do this and punishes them tremendously.

Matt Cutts, a Google search engineer and evangelist for the company writes:

Google (and pretty much every other major search engine) uses hyperlinks to help determine reputation. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and link-based analysis has greatly improved the quality of web search. Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results.

Remarkably, Matt Cutts specifically calls out college newspapers for selling text link ads:

When the Berkeley college newspaper has six online gambling links (three casinos, two for poker, and one bingo) on its front page, it’s harder for search engines to know which links can be trusted.

When text links ads are sold without using the "no follow" attribute, Google knows you are doing this and penalizes the newspaper as a less reputable source:

If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

So if any college newspaper is wondering why it has a 4 or a 5 page rank instead of a 6 or a 7, this is probably the answer. Most likely some company is taking advantage of students who think text link advertisements are a conventional form of advertising. In reality they are the purest form of payola and taint a site's reputation. The New York Times, Washington Post, or any newspaper wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole.

Given the prevalence of all these text link ads for college newspapers, my next question is where are they coming from? Who is taking advantage of the students at these colleges?

An experiment in audience building

As an experiment in audience building, I started a blog call The Police Jobs Review. I'm trying to see if I blog regularly about a fairly narrow subject, what exactly happens. A few things to note:

1. I don't know much about Police employment and issues
2. I'm trying to write most days
3. I try to scan the current events about police and work and see if i can comment on it
4. I don't plan on marketing the blog, participating in social media interactions or anything

It's a pure experiment. Let's hope I can blog enough to keep it going!

FanBridge, stop spamming the crap out of me

Every day I get about 3 or 4 pieces of spam from FanBridge, the email delivery service for bands.

Normally email delivery services like Constant Contact, iContact etc make sure that you opt in to the list before they deliver email from their customers to you. They provide the valuable service of mail deliverability by ensuring that users want to receive these emails.

FanBridge claims on on it's website that users must opt in to receive messages, but this is a bold faced lie. So FanBridge, how about it? Will you stop spamming the crap out of everybody?

Tax cuts and police employment

Covering how tax cuts for business affect police employment over at the police jobs review. Obviously, we don't solve anything, but its an interesting example of the prisoner's dilemma.

College Rankings for Law, Politics & Government

Personforce produced a new way to look at College Rankings. Basically it creates way to measure what schools are ranked best for a career in politics or law.

Hope it produces some interesting insight! Republished below with permission.
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At Personforce we help connect employers with students at the top universities in the country through our network of college job boards. In that capacity, we're interested in the question - what are the top universities and how do you rank them?

Rather than measuring an arbitrary set of metrics, why not look at what schools best prepare their students for the careers they want to pursue? This post examines the question: if you are interested in politics and law, what schools produce alumni that seem to excel in that area.

As a proxy for success in the field of politics and law, we use acceptance to Yale Law School. We are using this because Yale Law seems to produce a disproportionate number of Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, legislators, and partners at white shoe firms and is very difficult to get in to. Oh, and most importantly, Yale publishes a list of what undergraduate institutions each of its graduates attended.

First, here is a dump of the number of students each undergraduate school has contributed to the current Yale Law student body:

Yale University - 82 students

Harvard University - 66

Stanford University - 33

Columbia University - 30

Princeton University - 24

Brown University - 17

Dartmouth College - 15

University of California at Berkeley - 15

Duke University - 11

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - 11

University of Pennsylvania - 11

Williams College - 11

Amherst University - 9

Northwestern University - 9

University of Notre Dame [Indiana] - 9

Cornell University - 8

University of California at Los Angeles - 8

University of Chicago - 8

University of Virginia - 8

Georgetown University - 7

Swarthmore College - 7

University of Texas at Austin - 7

Wesleyan University - 7

Brigham Young University - 6

Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 5

New York University - 5

University of Toronto [Canada] - 5

Washington University [Missouri] - 5

Wellesley College - 5

Emory University - 4

Howard University - 4

Johns Hopkins University - 4

Middlebury College - 4

University of Georgia - 4

Arizona State University - 3

Boston College - 3

Fordham University - 3

National Taiwan University [Taiwan] - 3

Oberlin College - 3

United States Naval Academy - 3

University of Maryland - 3

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - 3

University of Southern California - 3

University of Washington - 3

University of Wisconsin at Madison - 3

American University - 3

Bard College - 2

Columbia University [Barnard College] - 2

Hebrew University of Jerusalem [Israel] - 2

McGill University [Canada] - 2

Morehouse College - 2

Ohio State University - 2

Peking University [People’s Republic of China] - 2

Rice University - 2

Université Panthéon-Assas Paris II [France] - 2

University of California at San Diego - 2

University of Delaware - 2

University of Iowa - 2

University of Mary Washington - 2

University of Missouri - 2

University of South Carolina - 2

University of the South - 2

Univerzitet U Pritini [Yugoslavia] - 2

Vanderbilt University - 2

Wake Forest University - 2

Washington and Lee University - 2

Whitman College - 2

Albertson College of Idaho - 1

Alma College - 1

American University in Bulgaria [Bulgaria] - 1

Aristoteleio Panepistimio Thessalonikis [Greece] - 1

Austin College - 1

Bar-Ilan University [Israel] - 1

Bates College - 1

Baylor University - 1

Benedictine College - 1

Biola University - 1

Bowdoin College - 1

Brandeis University - 1

Bryn Mawr College - 1

California State University - 1

Calvin College - 1

Chulalongkorn University [Thailand] - 1

Claremont McKenna College - 1

Colgate University - 1

College of William and Mary - 1

Concordia University [Canada] - 1

Denison University - 1

Depauw University - 1

East China University of Politics and Law [People’s Republic of China] - 1

Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen [Germany] - 1

Ewha Woman’s University [Republic of Korea] - 1

Fairfield University - 1

Gettysburg College - 1

Gonzaga University - 1

Gordon College - 1

Grinnell College - 1

Hamilton College - 1

Hampton University - 1

Harding University - 1

Haverford College - 1

Indiana University - 1

Ithaca College - 1

Kansai University [Japan] - 1

Lahore University of Management Sciences [Pakistan] - 1

Lewis and Clark College - 1

Louisiana State University - 1

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München [Germany] - 1

Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg [Germany] - 1

Masarykova Universita V Brnó [Czech Republic] - 1

Minnesota State University - 1

Mount Holyoke College - 1

National Law School of India University [India] - 1

National University of Singapore [Singapore] - 1

North Carolina State University - 1

Ohio Wesleyan University - 1

Pennsylvania State University - 1

Pomona College - 1

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile [Chile] - 1

Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo [Brazil] - 1

Rutgers, State University of New Jersey - 1

Saint Olaf College - 1

Santa Clara University - 1

Sarah Lawrence College - 1

Sookmyung Women’s University [Republic of Korea] - 1

State University of New York at Buffalo - 1

State University of New York at Stony Brook - 1

Sveuilite U Zagrebu [Croatia] - 1

Tel Aviv University [Israel] - 1

Texas A & M University - 1

Thammasat University [Thailand] - 1

Touro College - 1

Tsinghua University [People’s Republic of China] - 1

Tufts University - 1

Tulane University - 1

Universidad de Buenos Aires [Argentina] - 1

Universidad de Mendoza Law School [Argentina] - 1

Universidad de Palermo [Argentina] - 1

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [Brazil] - 1

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul [Brazil] - 1

Università degli Studi di Sassari [Italy] - 1

Università degli Studi, Pisa [Italy] - 1

Universität Zürich [Switzerland] - 1

University of Alberta [Canada] - 1

University of Arizona - 1

University of Auckland [New Zealand] - 1

University of California at Irvine - 1

University of California at Santa Barbara - 1

University of California, Santa Cruz - 1

University of Central Arkansas - 1

University of Colorado - 1

University of Denver - 1

University of Florida - 1

University of Haifa [Israel] - 1

University of Illinois - 1

University of Massachusetts - 1

University of Minnesota - 1

University of North Carolina at Asheville - 1

University of North Texas - 1

University of Northumbria at Newcastle [United Kingdom] - 1

University of Oklahoma - 1

University of Oxford [United Kingdom] - 1

University of Pittsburgh - 1

University of Pugent Sound - 1

University of Saint Andrews [United Kingdom] - 1

University of Texas at Dallas - 1

University of Western Australia [Australia] - 1

Vassar College - 1

Wuhan University [People’s Republic of China] - 1

Yeshiva University - 1

It's a interesting list. As you would expect, schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford top the list. However, schools like Michigan out-perform schools like Amherst, mostly likely because they are about a gazillion times bigger.

So, as a final step we need to control for the size of the undergraduate institutions. Pulling the undergraduate data from Freebase and Wikipedia and dividing through, we create a ranking of undergraduate schools where students have the best chance of attending Yale Law School. We index these results to 100 (since the % on their own are meaningless) to present:

College Rankings for a Career in Law or Politics

1. Yale University - 100

2. Harvard University - 64

3. Columbia University - 49

4. Williams College - 36

5. Amherst University - 35

6. Stanford University - 32

7. Princeton University - 32

8. Swarthmore College - 30

9. Dartmouth College - 23

10. Brown University - 19

11. Wesleyan University - 16

12. Wellesley College - 14

13. Duke University - 12

14. Middlebury College - 11

15. University of Chicago - 10

16. University of the South - 9

17. Whitman College - 9

18. Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 8

19. Washington and Lee University - 7

20. Bard College - 7

21. Northwestern University - 7

22. University of Pennsylvania - 7

23. University of Notre Dame [Indiana] - 7

24. Oberlin College - 7

25. Georgetown University - 7

26. Johns Hopkins University - 6

27. Columbia University [Barnard College] - 6

28. Washington University [Missouri] - 5

29. Morehouse College - 4

30. United States Naval Academy - 4

31. Rice University - 4

32. University of California at Berkeley - 4

33. Emory University - 4

34. Cornell University - 4

35. University of Virginia - 4

36. Howard University - 4

37. American University - 3

38. University of Mary Washington - 3

39. Wake Forest University - 3

40. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - 3

41. Fordham University - 2

42. Boston College - 2

43. University of California at Los Angeles - 2

44. Vanderbilt University - 2

45. New York University - 2

46. Brigham Young University - 1

47. University of Texas at Austin - 1

48. University of Southern California - 1

49. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - 1

50. National Taiwan University [Taiwan] - 1

51. Hebrew University of Jerusalem [Israel] - 1

52. University of Georgia - 1

53. University of Toronto [Canada] - 1

54. Peking University [People’s Republic of China] - 1

55. University of Delaware - 1

56. University of Maryland - 1

57. University of South Carolina - 1

58. University of Wisconsin at Madison - 1

59. University of Washington - 1

60. University of Iowa - 1

61. University of California at San Diego - 1

62. University of Missouri - 1

63. McGill University [Canada] - 1

64. Arizona State University - 0

65. Ohio State University - 0

And so Yale University comes out first in our rankings of schools that prepare you for a career in law and politics. A few observations based on the data:

1. Attending a top 10 (or in particular a top 2) school in the ranking gives a huge advantage in terms of likelihood to get into Yale Law.

2. Yale Law seems to gives a disproportionate number of spots to its own undergrads. A student at Yale is 66% more likely to get into Yale Law than a student at Harvard?

3. Schools like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore do really well in this ranking! If you are interested in law and politics, it looks like they rank ahead of schools like MIT, Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Northwestern. It makes me wonder if US News is doing a disservice to liberal arts schools by ranking them separately from universities.

Anyhow, there is no need to put too much stock in the results. It was an interesting and quick exercise based on some assumptions (reasonable ones hopefully) that produced a dramatically different ranking than other methods. It would be fascinating to produce similar analyses for the business and medical professions. Thanks for reading and if you are looking for a job, you can of course find jobs in law and policy on Personforce.

Job search in a recession

Over at Personforce we just posted a guide to getting a job in bad economy. I'd encourage you to check it out our post about finding a job in a bad economy.

Also, we've enhanced our job search on Personforce. Please check it out:

Search jobs on Personforce

iPhone for Small Business

Over at the Personforce blog, i wrote a review on how well the iPhone worked for small business and startups. Check it out here: iPhone for Small Business. Reprinted below with permission.
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At Personforce a lot of us are using the new Apple iPhone 3G for work and for fun. We thought it might be useful to give a short review on using the iPhone if you are a small business. After all, in a small company or startup your phone is your lifeline and you don't have a lot of resources, staff, or time to waste fiddling around with a new device.

Overall, we think the iPhone is awesome for small business. There certainly are huge negatives, but the pros really stand out. Most notably:

1. Your computer in your pocket. Unlike any prior PDA, the iPhone gives you true mobility by giving you remote access to all the functions of a computer. Because of the fully functioning web browser (combined with Google Apps) you can view any document, look up anything on the web, log in to your company's accounting systems, and of course make make a phone call from anywhere. You can basically set up your office environment so that there is nothing you can't do when you're on the road. This is a great leap forward in productivity!

2. Web Browsing. You can look up anything anywhere anytime. On the whole internet. Enough said.

3. IMAP & POP3 connections. While a Push email service for the SMB space would be a welcome addition, the iphone's IMAP connection is actually pretty good. As a result you can very confidently use your google apps email account from the iPhone. On the otherhand, the Samsung Blackjack routinely failed to work with google apps and was a constant source of frustration.

4. Apps make commuting better. You can listen to Pandora radio on the bus, play some iPhone games on a plane, and surf the web while you're in line at Starbucks. My favorite app so far is built by Muse. It won't be publicly available for a couple of weeks but we managed a sneak peek and wow! We'd have to say the one downside of apps in general is you can't do anything else while using them, so surfing the web or checking your email is out of the question.

So, the iphone is great, but there are some huge cons that a small business should consider:

1. Calendaring. Seriously, the calendar solution is not good for the iPhone. Your appoints are buried several clicks away and you have to actively be checking to see what's on your plate for the day. We really need a solution that somehow shows you the upcoming (or at least number of) appointments you have that day on your home screen. Moreover, there is no good way (on a PC at least) to sync you Google apps calendar with your iPhone.

2. Checking your email on the sly. Say you're in the middle of a dinner party or driving down 280, and you just need to take a quick peek to see if you have an email (don't email while driving!); it's really hard to check for a message quickly. You have to pull out the phone, unlock it, open your email (and maybe wait for it to load). The phone is so slippery eventually you'll drop it while doing this some time. I'd compare with with traditional devices where you just pull out the phone and take a peek.

3. Battery life. If you mess around with the phone and use its features throughout the day, the battery will die around dinnertime. This could lead to an absolutely cataclysmic event - no phone or email access. Yikes.

So, that's our perspective on the using the iPhone if you're a small business. Overall, we think it's a huge leap forward for making small business more productive from the road. Not only that, but it's very fun and enjoyable to use.

Personforce Re-design

Hello there Silicon MBA readers! Apologies that this blog has fallen by the way side. Now that I'm no longer in business school and have moved out of Silicon Valley, the blog name no longer seems apropos.

Any how, wanted to share with you our new redesign of the Personforce website. Please check it out at Personforce.com.

Please feel free to send me any feedback!

Rohin

Another Job Board Test

Job Board Listings

Interesting site for a jobs

He're a little thingy we put together with The Stanford Daily. Check out our featured employer, "HOT or NOT".

http://stanforddaily.personforce.com

Excellent Quote from Goethe

Graham Weaver, who founded a very successful fund (Alpine Investments) when he was in business school, came to speak to a class of mine the other day. He related a remarkable quote from Goethe as he urged us to take the plunge and commit to a road less travelled. The quote really reasonated with me so enjoy!


"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back-- Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

Loan Consolidation & Insurance is a Yummy Business

Dudes, below is a listing of the most expensive google keywords. If you click on google ads related to these things, the companies pay around $50 to google. Crazy! I'm going to run an experiment where I start putting google ads on this site to verify if this is true. Shocking, no?

school loan consolidation - $69.16
college loan consolidation - $68.35
car insurance quotes - $66.88
school consolidation - $66.29
auto insurance quotes - $65.90 c
ollege consolidation - $64.04
student loan consolidation rates - $60.14
sell structured settlement - $59.82
sell annuity - $58.92
federal student loan consolidation - $58.58
auto quotes - $58.09
auto insurance quote - $57.99
student consolidation - $56.96
student loan consolidation - $56.91
student loan consolidation interest rate - $56.52
consolidate student loan - $54.61
san diego dui attorney - $54.56
car insurance - $53.16
structured settlement - $52.96
consolidate school loans - $52.88
student loan refinance - $52.44
consolidation of student loans - $52.43
consolidation loan rate - $52.04
citibank student loan consolidation - $51.85
car insurance quote - $51.80
consolidate student loans - $51.23
private student loan consolidation - $51.05
lasik new york - $49.86
student loans consolidation - $49.82
private loan consolidation - $48.95
insurance quotes - $48.78
teleconference services - $48.72
the art institute of seattle - $48.68
federal loan consolidation - $48.61
plus loan consolidation - $47.74
student loan consolidation programs - $47.58
bad credit equity loan - $47.46
houston criminal attorney - $47.44
student loan consolidation calculator - $47.19
cash settlement - $47.12
consolidating student loans - $47.09
orlando culinary institute - $46.84
student loan consolidation program - $46.77
orlando culinary institute - $46.69
consolidation loan - $46.54
loan consolidation - $46.54
ditech - $46.32
auto quote - $45.77
sallie mae student loan consolidation - $45.69

Dear Readers

Hello! Long time no posting!

My apologies for my deliquency, but very few of you noticed my absence so I guess we're cool...

In the next few days, I'm going to use this blog as a bit of a "sandbox" to test things out of so watch out!

Also, maybe pretty soon I'll put some info here on the business I'm starting. In the meantime a few of my classmates launched these companies in the last few weeks:

www.url.com
www.ugenie.com
www.agloco.com

Smell ya later,

rohin

Hamish's Latest Column

My friend Hamish has a regular column in the Financial Times that chronicles his time at Stanford Business School. In his latest column, he has an excellent discussion of why he wants to be a truck driver instead of a hedge fund manager.

Check it out, booyah!

Stanford GSB Diary

Deep Thoughts from Andy Rachleff

My classmates Julio and Matt kicked off their excellent podcast, iinnovate, with an interview featuring Andy Rachleff, co-founder of Benchmark Capital and GSB professor. Benchmark is perhaps best known as the sole VC investor in eBay as well as a major investor in Webvan.

During the school year, I had an opportunity to attend a “meet the professor” dinner with Andy and a half dozen or so classmates. The dinner really stood out as one of the best learning experiences I’ve had at the GSB. Andy has a way of capturing complex business ideas and translating them in pithy, well-crystallized statements. After the dinner, there were about four of these concepts that I mulled over for weeks; the more I thought about them, the more sense they made. He covers some of them in his interview with Matt and Julio, but I thought I’d share.

Product-market fit is everything
According to Andy, the sole driver of a start-up company’s success is how well the product fits with the market need. Put in a different way, are you making the dog food that the dogs want to eat? If you get this right, you can afford to mess up everything else. The logical extension of this, according to Andy, is that execution doesn’t matter if you have the market fit in place. I’m not sure if I agree with that last statement though. It requires quite a bit of execution to develop the product, understand the customer need, re-engineer the product, communicate the value proposition, figure out the pricing, develop a distribution channel, and bring the product to market. When I prodded him on this, I think he classified all these activities as part of establishing the “product-market fit” and not as execution.

The Groucho Marx Principle
Groucho Marx famously said “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member”. Ain’t that the truth! I think I’ve spent my whole life seeking entrance into clubs of all sorts only to find out they weren’t so hot once I got in. But I digress. Andy’s point was that VCs never want to invest in companies that actually want their money. If the company is truly great, most likely it doesn’t want or need the capital. Though we didn’t really get into it, I think he implied that the flip-side is true as well—beware of any venture capitalist that wants to give you money.

It’s great when a major company enters your market
This was a real eye-opener for me. Most companies live in fear that Microsoft and Google will enter their market and blow them out of the water a la Netscape. Andy’s insight, however, is that more often than not, the presence of the competitor validates the product-market and as a result, actually grows the total market size significantly. So, the start-up may have a smaller share of the market, but now the market is sizable and legitimate. Not only that, but the start-up company gets fantastic free publicity vis-a-vis the entrance of a Goliath company.

80/20 is the mark of a great entrepreneur
Finally, during the dinner conversation, someone asked Andy what was it about the great entrepreneurs that he backed that made them successful. Andy’s response was that they had great vision to see what are the hand full of things that will make or break the business. After they seized on those things, they spent all their time making sure they got them right. It could be something like the pricing model, the “last mile” distribution expense, or building the direct sales force. What’s equally important is realizing, “this other 80% of stuff is crap and I’m not going to spend anytime with this crap because it’s crap” (my own words, not Andy’s).

The dinner ended with me spilling an enchilda all over my pants--but that is a story for another post.

Notes from Australia

Greetings from down-under! After a 15 hour plane ride and a 3 hour trek in a kangaroo’s pouch (which was rather unpleasant and sticky as it turns out), I am in Australia. My trip to Australia is part business and part anthropologic study. On the latter’s account, I’ve been taking detailed notes on my observations from Australia and I thought I’d share them with you:

The Flight
This damn neck pillow is extremely uncomfortable. Perhaps this is the worst $12 I’ve ever spent. I don’t understand how people can sleep with this thing on. I fear this is going to a very long flight.

Arriving in Sydney
Well, here I am! My neck feels as if it’s been jabbed by a thousand daggers, but my spirit feels as if it’s been hugged by a thousand loving teddy bears! What a marvellous country—McDonalds and Starbucks as far as the eye can see. It’s somewhat disturbing though to see miles of uninterrupted beaches and undeveloped waterfront property. What has this crazy world come to?!

Settling In
Hum dee dum. After a few days in Sydney, I feel like a regular ole Australian. I’ve taken a new nickname (“Thorpedo”), bought some surfing-related t-shirts, and am currently practicing for an upcoming long-bow tournament. Put another shrimp on the barby, eh!

Anyhow, most of these observations will later be published in the Annals of Dingo Affairs, but I thought you might want a sneak peek!

A Tricky Way to Get Web Traffic

Here's a zany idea for folks who want to attract some traffic to their websites.

As many of you know, there is a very popular news site called Digg.com where users flag (they "digg" them) interesting news stories. The ones that get flagged/digged the most end up going to the front page where millions of visitors read the stories. While it is aimed at sort of a "democratization" of the news, the end result is that some interesting odd-ball articles and websites bubble to the top.

If you wanted web traffic, in theory, you could try to get your friends to "digg" your website so it would be seen by millions of people. The problem with this, however, is Digg has a very efficient and large community of users who digg articles. You would literally need 1000's of people to digg your site to make a blip on the website.

However, a few weeks ago, Netscape.com converted its format to be a copycat of Digg. Netscape is a huge but declining portal (I guess from the days when people used netscape browsers) with millions of visitors per day. However, they have very few "diggers" who flag articles. In fact, all you need is a couple of dozen people to flag your site/blog to make it on the main page and get exposed to millions. It's a temporary anomaly that their readership is disproporationately large compared to the number of people who influence what makes the main page. My guess is you could pretty easily influence what shows up on netscape.com

So, if you're doing something interesting, why start a compaign to get it posted on Netscape.com?

Remember That You Like Pants

Dear Readers,

Tomorrow I shall ride my kangaroo off into the glorious sunset. That is to say, I'll be going to Australia for the next 5-weeks on a secret mission to preserve the global economic order. If all goes to plan, by the time I return, the SP 500 will have risen from 1300 to 1400. If I fail, however, we may plunge into a prolonged global recession. In retrospect, the downside risk of this mission hardly seemly commensurate with the potential upside.

Let me leave you with some tidbits of wisdom to abide by in my physical absence from the continent. First, beware of ner-do-wells who compel you to admit that you "hate pants". Second, remain neutral in the event of a war between England and France. Finally, tend to the children, for they are our future.

My next blog will be posted from the other side of the world, which is a miracle of technology that still blows my mind.

Your humble servant,

Rohin

Waking Up is Hard to Do

The fascinating thing about the capitalist system is it compels billions of people to wake up each day and go to a job that most likely they find unpleasant. Achieving this level of coordination is a feat no short of remarkable. I feel so sleepy and crummy every morning when I wake up, yet some how I’ll pitch up for work, even if I know I’ll spend the day valuing plain-vanilla coconut derivatives. Tom Wolfe, in Bonfire of the Vanities, captures perfectly how I feel when my alarm sounds in the morning:

The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.

There are a variety of reasons that motivate people to wake up and go to work, but the end result is stunning—people make things and people stay out of a trouble. On the first point, the entirety of human progress over the last 300 years [or at least improvements in standards of living] can be attributed to productivity gains that have compounded over time. People show up in the morning, maybe a bit disheveled and sleepy, but eventually, after a few cups of coffee, they do something. They improve some code, find a new way to make a product, or if they’re extremely ambitious, write a blog. Over time, these modest improvements compound upon each other in a staggering way. If 300 years ago, you started with $100 in capital and every year just improved it somehow by about 5%, you’d have $225 MM today. If interspersed every 50 years was some sort of productivity revolution (like computers, factories, transportation), before then settling into steady 5% growth, you’d have $1.9 BN today. So if over the course of they year, you just make thing 5% better than last, you’re doing sweet!

The other notable feat of capitalism is that it keeps people occupied. If you’re working 95 hours a week as an investment banker, frankly, you don’t have time to throw Molotov cocktails at your foes. Imagine how pissed your boss would be if you didn’t have the document ready for a client meeting because you had gotten in a fracas with some ethnic rivals. He’d have a frickin’ aneurism!

Boss: Rohin, we’re meeting with Procter & Gamble in 30 minutes to discuss the Gillette acquisition. Is the document ready?

Rohin: Well, no, not so much really. I was hoping maybe you could just “talk to” the main points instead of presenting the slides.

Boss: [face reddening] What do you mean?

Rohin: Well there are no slides really. I was working on the pitch last night and I went out to pick up some sushi for dinner that I planned to eat back at my desk. As I was walking back to the office, I saw [insert rival ethnic group here] folks milling about in front of a Starbucks. I was filled with an uncontrollable rage and started throwing sushi at them. Piece by piece, I flung sushi at them for hours. I even hit one of them in the eye with wasabi! This fellow may have had the last laugh though as he poured a non-fat latte on my Thomas Pink shirt—the dry cleaning bill will not be pretty.

As much as the boss may have sympathized with my cause, I just cost him $7 MM in income this year if we had won the business. That's a house in Westchester with a pool!

So my solution to solving all ethnic and political conflicts – give them jobs as investment bankers or possibly as management consultants or coconut arbitrageurs.