A few of the blogs I read have been posting recently about the power of positive thinking & action as well as how we can be entrepreneurs and still have work/life balance. I hope to be part of that group who can prove this is the case.
Shane & Peter did a post called 2008 goals: scare yourself where they state “In 2008, we are going to gross a million dollars and still have a life.” They make a compelling argument and I believe they have a really great shot at getting $1 million in revenue in 2008 given their attitude. In the comment thread, I asked them what they mean by ‘have a life?’ and Shane said they will be doing a post on that soon as they figure that out as well. Personally, I think I’m still a bit too nervous to scare myself by stating my 2008 business goals out loud and on this blog just yet!
The next post on their blog was written by a guest author, Jarkko Laine, called bring people with you – a recipe for small business revolution. He says: “I challenge you to count the successful entrepreneurs who have been able to maintain a healthy work-life balance.” Jarkko proclaims that in order to stay balanced you must bring your family, your friends, your world, and yourself with you.
Pearl at Interesting Observations also set a goal to make it to the front page of Digg with her Best 101 Lists post. She made it (yay!), her server crashed for a bit, but now she’s back up and running! I am working on making many more friends like those mentioned here in the blogosphere to achieve my front page of Digg goal one day next year.
To sum this post up, Liz Strauss has started a series of posts about thinking and how we can and should change our thinking and free ourselves of the limits of old thoughts. I joined the conversation at Change Our World: Think Our Way Out of the Box, came back for Personal Identity: Who Are You Really?, and followed on at Positively Me. Since she said it so well, I will leave you with an excerpt from her last post:
“I’ve been thinking about those sentences in our heads.
They were useful once I’m sure – those sentences in our heads that tell us how to act and who we are. But some of them are woefully past their “sell by” date and still they play over and over. It’s time to stop paying attention.
…
I see folks who let one sentence, one event, define their entire life while they sit with the power to set it aside and chose a new path.
…
It’s my life. They’re my thoughts. I’m tossing out the ones I don’t want. I don’t need negatives anymore. It’s the positives that move me forward.
How else will I become positively me?”
On her post, I said I would make a list of positive thoughts and negative ones and burn the negative ones…to delight the pyromaniac in me! 🙂
After doing my post on The Google Trap, I happened upon Pearl’s post at Interesting Observations on Find Page Rank of Every Page of Your Site. She found a link to a site called Live PR where you can enter your URL and it tells you the page rank of your landing page and all other pages associated with your blog.
As I mentioned in my Google Trap post, I honestly had no idea what the page rank of my blog was. Well after entering it at the PR Live site, it turns out it’s a PR 5 which apparently is a pretty good thing! Many of my individual posts range from 0 to 3 rank, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the http://entrepremusing.wpengine.com/ was a PR 5.
Oddly, it says a post of mine called New Web Template Site is PR 5, but I don’t have a post that has that name. Also, the number one viewed post on my blog on planning my son’s transformer themed birthday party has a PR 0.
I then asked Pearl in the comment section of her blog what PageRank really meant, and she sent me the following links:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
Thanks Pearl! Because of you I know more today than I did yesterday about PageRank. 🙂
Since the primary goal of this blog is not monetization, I was intrigued by many other bloggers outcries at the recent changes made by Google that drastically affected their Google page ranks. Since many bloggers are trying to make a decent income from their blog, this action by Google apparently really hurts them with regards to interest by other advertisers, impressions, visits to their sites, search optimization, etc.
Honestly, I don’t even know what the page rank of my blog is. (UPDATE: I now know my blog has a PageRank of 5) Someone once told me that you can get a tool bar add on from Google that tells you the page rank of every page you are on, but since I’m not really into page rank yet, I haven’t devoted the time to finding that little toolbar. I’m sure I’ll get around to it some day and may be the relevant thoughts on the subject that I found below will engender a new thought about the plight in the future. I do use Google Analytics so maybe I’ll find my rank noted in my account.
One thing I did notice was that when I removed the widget for Text Link Ads from my side bar, traffic to my blog almost doubled. Now I don’t know if there is any direct correlation or not because there are so many variables that affect the amount of visitors, but it may be a part of it. I wasn’t getting any revenue from them anyway so it was not a hard decision to make. I wonder if I reactivate my Google AdSense account if I’ll get even more visitors…
Here are some great articles on the Google Monopoly Trap topic:
Now for some long overdue link love…. Because of many of these bloggers, I am now back to where I started (even a little higher) with regards to my Technorati ranking before changing the name and URL of this blog to entrepreMusings back in late September 2007. Thank you for sharing the love and the links. 🙂
Successful Blog (for so many wonderful links! That’s why Liz is at the top of this otherwise random list)
Liz Strauss at Successful Blog held her 2nd year SOB birthday party on October 24, 2007. The candles were lit, wine was uncorked, the people dropped in and out, the conversation was interesting, and the links were valuable. Close to 700 comments were left. I felt so honored to be invited to the party. I barely made the invitation list since I was on the SOB 102 list and she held the party after week 104 (i.e., 52 weeks in a year makes 2 years of SOBs). It was tough doing the math, but I eventually figured it out! 🙂
Thanks for the invitation Liz! It was great fun. My mother was in town, otherwise I would have written this post a bit sooner.
Author:Aruni | Filed under:blogging | Comments Off on The SOB Party’s Over But The Fun Is Just Beginning!
and emailed me to see if I would be willing to be interviewd for an article she was writing on fortune cookies. She promised me fortune and fame that I would be mentioned because she was writing for BBCBrasil.com. So, I said sure I’ll talk with you. So the article called ‘Biscoitos da sorte’ ganham versão pessimista nos EUA was posted yesterday, October 16, 2007, and pretty much the only thing I recognize is my name. 🙂 I’m sure it is a great story. If any of my readers or visitors happen to know how to read and translate Portuguese, please let me know what it says.
I happened to be eating at FireBowl Cafe again earlier this week and we grabbed some more fortune cookies that said:
Right now there’s an energy pushing you in a new direction.
It’s one of those low-key days that you’d rather spend just chilling.
Today is the day you let it go. Your chance will come.
When the moment comes, take the last one. (I’m kind of wishing I didn’t take the last one of something I ate last night because my tummy hurts right now!)
Right now I’m thinking (in addition to the fact that my tummy hurts) that FireBowl Cafe should be paying me good money (or at least send me a bag of fortune cookies) because I’ve mentioned their name on all of these fortune cookie posts!
In case anyone is wondering, I do actually eat lunch at other places. Today I met with some of my Advisors at a local Austin fave, Chez Zee.
I, along with thousands of bloggers around the world, will be writing a post related to the environment on October 15, 2007. Check out the Blog Action Day site and see how you can get involved. They have even created a nice video about it on YouTube:
There are in mine! My husband and I watch the NBC Heroes TV show every week (thank goodness for DVRs). We got hooked in the first season and are hooked again. This season has started off a bit slower than I expected, but I am hopeful that some really cool stuff is up the writers’ sleeves.
The characters are great. The drama is intense. The science fiction is way cool. Wikipedia has a list of all the characters if you are interested in knowing their names and backgrounds. I know that several critics say the show reminds them too much of X-Men but to them I say ‘pfftph’ because who actually gets enough of the X-Men (and Women)?!? Plus since this is a TV show, there is more time to develop the lives and characters of each of the actors and actresses.
The one major criticism/comment I have is: How is it possible that the genetics genius Dr. Mohinder Suresh did not have a clue for such a long time that he was hanging out with the infamous Sylar? How could that smart and extremely handsome Dr. Suresh not realize he was leading the EVIL dude Sylar to all of the other genetically gifted individuals so Sylar could cut their heads off and steal their gifts? That did not make sense to me. Oh well…he better make up for that lapse in judgment in the current season!
NOTE: I was motivated to do this review for Problogger’s Last 24 Hour Giveaway competition. I really, really need want to win that $2,000 Internet marketing package being donated by IttyBiz. Since one kid is taking a nap and the other is at soccer with hubby, I said to myself “what better thing do I have to do on a Sunday afternoon than enter (by writing a review) for a great prize that if I won would really help me with my business.” It’s strange how us entrepreneurs think, isn’t it. 🙂
UPDATE October 9, 2007: As Pearl at Interesting Observations mentioned in the comments below, I wrote a little poem for my entry. Since she mentioned it, I thought I’d share it here:
IttyBitty spider crawled up and about the web
Down came the spam upon the spider’s head
Up came the Google juice (should have written Akismet) and dried up all the spam
And IttyBitty spider crawled through the web again. 🙂
Much to my shock and amazement I was named an SOB (Successful and Outstanding Blogger) by none other than Liz Strauss, the goddess of bloggers. I have seen her name mentioned on several of my favorite blogs, and I have to tell you I was stunned at being selected since I am a fairly new blogger. I figured it would take me a very long time to make it on the radar screen of someone like Liz. My eyes literally welled up when I went to her post and saw my little ‘ole entrepreMusings logo there. There’s nothing like the feeling of having someone who is respected and admired in a field taking their precious time to shine their light on you. It’s like a pat on the back…an ‘atta girl’ as they say here in Texas. Thank you Liz!
But most importantly a BIG thank you goes to Connie Reece at Every Dot Connects who got me started on this wild and crazy blogging ride back in May 2007! She is an SOB too. 🙂
Darren Rowse of Problogger fame is running a competition for his 3 year birthday blogiversary. He solicited prizes from his readers to give away in a series of competitions. Fortunately, I found his blog a few weeks ago and donated gift subscriptions to Babble Soft Web and Mobile applications. In exchange, he will post links to contributors sites and/or blogs. It seems that he will be running a series of competitions and the participants will have to do a variety of things from writing posts to ??? to win the prizes! So far he has amassed $54,000 worth of prizes!
If you ever wanted to win a gift subscription to Babble Soft products for yourself or to give to a friend, check out his blog!
Wendy Piersall at eMoms at Home is at it again. She just created a Home Business & Entreprenuer Feedburner Ad Network and invited little ‘ole me and my entrepreMusings blog to join! It looks like it will be really cool. So now people who subscribe to my RSS feed will see links to relevant information about home business and entrepreneurship at the bottom of some of my posts and hopefully I’ll make a little extra cash to help fund R&D for Babble Soft along the way. Wendy is just so innovative and most importantly inclusive.
Thanks Wendy for letting me ride on your coattails. 🙂
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet
But the same doesn’t go for blog names!(Sorry Shakespeare) My new blog design is finally ready to announce to the world.It was tough picking a new name and design.I wanted to capture who I am (a South Asian, high-tech woman entrepreneur) and what I’m trying to do (i.e., shift the definition of entrepreneurship to one that I outline on my About page) while at the same time including the biggest parts of my life as mother, wife, daughter, sister, cousin, neice, aunt, and friend.So I set out to come up with a name and design that I thought would allow me write about all of these things.
Last week I attended a meeting where Gail Evans, former VP at CNN and author of Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman, spoke (more about that later), and she said she can’t understand why people always talk about work/life balance.She said we have one life and our work and our personal stuff are all part of that life so why make it sound as if work and life are opposing factors?My work is part of my life and my family/kids/friends are part of my life.So when the name entrepreMusings was quietly said during a discussion on the topic by our brilliant volunteer, college student Marketing Intern who we pay with the un-spendable but highly leveragable currency of experience, it just seemed to fit. 🙂
Prior to that eureka moment, we threw around:
entrepreMuse – which I refer to myself on this blog, but we didn’t feel it was the right name for the blog
entrepreMusing – didn’t sound quite right until the s was added to the end.
Entrepreneuse (a female entrepreneur)– I almost went with that one but several friends said it sounded like entrepre ‘noose’ to which I replied well being an entrepreneur does sometimes feel like you have a noose around your neck! Plus there were some others around using the term (e.g., Entrepreneuse Live)
A bunch of others that were in jest and not appropriate to note on the blog.Name creation is a crazy, unscientific process…at least in this house.
As I mentioned in my How to Create a New Website post, I found Swank Web Style and Karen (who blogs at Vodkarella) from a link on Mocha Momma’s site.I picked the image at iStockphoto of the woman babbling on the phone, and Karen modified it to something that I liked.The woman had some blush on that made her look like she had a skin disease and some other features that I requested to be changed.After some back and forth (and my design fits, last second changes, and design seizures), late nights and both of us having to deal with sick kids and her having to deal not only with sick kids but also a sick dog, a broken toe, and moving houses it was finished and it was COOL!
She then turned the original design over to Vicki (who did our new corporate site) and Vicki did everything in her power to make it work!After this new theme design process, I have a huge amount of appreciation and respect for those designers who create free WordPress themes.(Check out Randa’s cool new Pink for October Free WordPress Theme.) The browser compatibility issues, the widget alignment issues, the blog stats integration issues all surfaced when you least expected them, but Vicki patiently, meticulously, and kindly addressed them all!
Now I can (hopefully) blog all of the post ideas that have been swimming around in my head, and oh yeah actually get some other work done such as selling, marketing, public relations, calling people, setting up partnerships, etc. 🙂
I hope all of you all like the new direction.Please help me change the world view of entrepreneurship and parenthood by entrepreMusing with me one blog post and one comment at a time!
We just updated to WordPress 2.3. So far so good. We’ve only noticed some image storage issues but for the most part the images are displaying correctly on the blog. I’ve updated Feedburner, Technorati, and MyBlogLog. Now we are off to watch the season premiere of Heroes! Thank goodness for DVR technology!!!
Author:Aruni | Filed under:blogging | Comments Off on WordPress 2.3 Upgrade complete
Bloggers everywhere seem to be writing about the much anticipated WordPress 2.3.We will be upgrading as soon as possible as well as making several other blog related changes such as:migrating our URL from www.babblesoft.com/blog to www.entrepremusings.com, finalizing the new blog theme (it’s pretty much ready), updating all of our feed information on FeedBurner, Technorati, MyBlogLog, etc., etc.
Based on the following nice note from Technorati, my blog will unfortunately lose its ranking and authority when we change the URL, but I figured it was better to bite the bullet now rather than later…mostly because I don’t like bullets.
Hello Aruni,
Please accept my apologies for the delay in getting back to you.We’ve been experiencing a backlog in support and are working hard to address everyone.I’m afraid that since the URL of your blog is changing, we currently are unable to combine or transfer links or authority from one to another.This is because authority and links in our system are URL based.Once the URL does change, it is suggested to contact bloggers who have linked to you and inform them of the URL change.If they update the URL in their blogrolls these changes should be picked up and applied to your new URL as new links.Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions. Thank you for using Technorati!
Best Regards, Janice Myint Customer Support Specialist Technorati
As of 9:00 p.m. on September 23, 2007, our ranking is 210,401 with an Authority of 30.Soon we will be kissing those stats good-bye and starting over from scratch, which I guess would put me at a bazillion (not a Brazilian) or something.If you link to our site, I’d really appreciate it if you could update your link when you have a chance to www.entrepremusings.com. Thank you in advance.
If you are looking for some great info on WordPress 2.3, check out these posts:
Earlier today, I read a post on Wendy Piersall’s eMoms at Home blog about the Technorati A-List. As of September 19, 2007 Wendy has a Technorati rank of 2,115. Yes, her blog is in the top 5K at Technorati. Awesome Wendy! Interestingly, Technorati is not reflecting her last several posts yet so her rank is probably even better than that.
One of her goals is to make it into the top 100 blogs list. She ponders that goal and highlights some interesting facts in her post (see below)…
“Before I begin, here are some fast facts:
11% of blogs on the current Technorati Top 100 blogs are led by or singly authored by women (maybe 12%, because I am unsure of the gender of the author of ICanHasCheesburger). They are:
Her post was prompted by a post made by Pearl at Interesting Observations called Male-Female Ratios of 50 Influential Blogs and more. Fascinating information! I wonder how they determine the gender of their readers. I don’t know how many of my readers are men and how many are women. Is that a new Feedburner Flare that I’m unaware of? 🙂
BTW, I love Pearl’s avatar. I’m guessing it’s an elf but it also brings to mind a Vulcan. (I’m a sci-fi gal)!
I am not trying to get entrepreMusings in the top 100 because I know I don’t have the time to invest in making that happen right now, but I do want to support these women (and men whose blogs I read often) who do want to achieve that goal…just let me know how!
A few of the blogs I read have been posting recently about the power of positive thinking & action as well as how we can be entrepreneurs and still have work/life balance. I hope to be part of that group who can prove this is the case.
So the fortune cookie saga continues and it continues in Portuguese! A reporter for BBC – Brazil saw my following posts on fortune cookies:
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