Author: navin

Don’t spend too much effort on incoming links

Problogger has an interesting article on the dangers of spending too much time on trying to build incoming links to your website. He points out:

Give it some attention by all means – but keep things in balance and realize that of all the factors that make up a successful blog – incoming links is at best midway through the list.

In general, the danger is that if you spend too much time and effort on incoming links you might end up neglecting your content.

I managed to increase the numbers of links to my blogs over time. In the process here’s what else happened:

  • My posting frequency dropped
  • Readers became frustrated with my content (which was obviously linkbait)
  • I lost some of my passion for blogging and my topic
  • I sold out content wise (started picking topics to write about that didn’t really add value to my blog)
  • I started watching my metrics more than the news in my industry
  • Frustration crept into my blogging when the links didn’t come
  • My Page Rank increased – but my actual SERPs (the position of my blog in search engines) dropped

See full article.

The Indian Economy Blog » A Brand New Model?

The Indian Economy Blog is reporting on very interesting observation:

not once in world history has a large-sized country gone into rapid industrialization mode, while also guaranteeing universal franchise or a vote for all of its citizens. When you think about it, this claim is probably true. Forget China, think about the U.S., Soviet Union, the U.K., France, Germany etc. Not one of those countries actually industrialized while everyone had the vote.

To me, this appears more to be coincidence than anything else. But there’s no denying the fact that India is one of the largest, growing economy in the developing world that has a working democracy.

All numbers are interesting

This is a great site which lists the “interesting” properties of a whole bunch of number from 0 to 9999. Here are the first few entries:
0 is the additive identity.
1 is the multiplicative identity.
2 is the only even prime.
3 is the number of spatial dimensions we live in.
4 is the smallest number of colors sufficient to color all planar maps.
5 is the number of Platonic solids.
6 is the smallest perfect number.
7 is the smallest number of faces of a regular polygon that is not constructible by straightedge and compass.
8 is the largest cube in the Fibonacci sequence.
9 is the maximum number of cubes that are needed to sum to any positive integer.
10 is the base of our number system.
11 is the largest known multiplicative persistence.