Social media is now very much a part of our daily life. And people seem to spend substantial time on social networking sites like FaceBook & Twitter.

Here is a link to James Surowiecki‘s presentation (in case the embedded video does not load). You can check on TED from time to time to listen to these inspiring & innovative presentations from the best speakers in the world.

In another fascinating post on Wired, they published a chart on the time average people seem to spend on social networking sites now a days.

This is a symbolic representation & even if this chart is near reality, people spend an average of about 60% of their time on social networks. In another study across various segments of the US population, it was shown that people on average use at least 4 social networking sites. The popular amongst them are FaceBook & Twitter.

Here are a few of the videos on YouTube on Christian the Lion:

• Christian the Lion 1 minute 16 secs
• A Lion Called Christian – Their Story from Animal Planet TV 2 minute 8 secs
• Interview with John Rendall (2008) 7 minutes 44 secs

There are tons of similar videos on this amazing story of a lion cub, called Christian, who transformed from a house pet in London to a survivor in the wild African jungles.

The story is about John Rendall & Anthony Ace Bourke rehabilitating a pet lion & set him free. The story ends with Jon & Anthony re-uniting with Christian a year later & the emotions in the few seconds when Christian recognizes his trusted friends & rushes to greet them!

The book is an excellent read with over 50 images of Christian from a cuddly cub in London to a magnificent lion in the wild in Africa. Here is a link to the book on Amazon: A Lion Called Christian: The True Story of the Remarkable Bond between Two Friends and a Lion

The videos of Christian went viral on the internet starting off with YouTube, collecting over 44 million hits very soon it was uploaded. The total hit count exceeded hundreds of millions with the amazing story of struggle & perseverance of Christian along with the determination of Anthony & John to give him a free life to live.

A good read, both entertaining & highly emotional!

While most of us are eager to hear experts give us a date when the economy will again spring back, Shiller observes that we need to be cautious in the days to come.

You can see Robert Shiller’s interview video here.

This graph, picked from Shiller’s book, Irrational Exuberance (2006), summarizes some of the key facts of the past & the current US economy.

4 key points from this interview on aspects of the crisis in the US economy 2009 – 2010:

• regulating for financial innovation
• reducing trust in models
• redesigning institutions
• and the time line for turnaround

Here is a list of other books by Robert Shiller worth reading for a better understanding of this crisis as well as understanding particularly an understanding human irrationality that played a key role in explaining economic breakdowns and exploring effective solutions:

• Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
• The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It
• The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century
• Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society’s Largest Economic Risks (Clarendon Lectures in Economics)

Biz Stone explains “Twitter provides a new way of messaging”. Stephen points to that fact that neither the concept was new, nor the services were essential. In spite of that, Twitter is an immense success.

The reason probably lies in the fact that people always find newer ways to use a service to their advantages. While some have used Twitter just as another web based instant messenger without the burden of running an application like Yahoo! or AIM, others, like politicians & celebrities have used Twitter to communicate with their fans & supporters.

Biz mentions a very significant trend – people, especially those who are the focus of the media, have used Twitter to replace the tabloids. Much like how the internet in general have caused the decline of newspaper print media, Twitter may cause to replace the tabloids.

True, if the high profile media personalities could express themselves directly to their fans, & respond to them instantly, there would be no extras for the tabloids to report! Unless, of course, if tabloids too get onto Twitter.

Biz also gives a very high level plan of Twitter’s upcoming development – to expand thoroughly into the mobile market, to have Twitter services expand into the lifestyle of mobile users. If advertisers piggy back on Twitter, the possibilities of sales marketing & promotions could be enormous.

The point that Biz Stone mentioned regarding the reason behind their success, which has been repeated in various other forums before, is the fact that Twitter has “patient investors”.

The investment could just be in the tune of a couple of million dollars a year, but the “patience” is allowing Twitter architects to focus on creating a value in the market rather than plugging all the money making opportunities.

In my early days with WordPress, I had taken a lot of help from some of the experts on WordPress. I am fairly experienced now, although my focus has always been to use a powerful system like WordPress to further online business & money making opportunities.

My core area of expertize is to help internet MLM business owners. And even though I have become very familiar with how WordPress works, I still use a lot of help from some of the WordPress Gurus.

Lately they launched WordPress TV – a fantastic & innovative way to train people on WordPress!

Here is a small list of 10 people who I regard to be the best of the best in what they have to offer on WordPress. Their statements are clear, explanations simple & offerings extremely useful.

Many of them have written various plugins & WordPress themes that can be very easily adapted to help you in your internet money making efforts.

• Matt – the owner founder of Automattic, the brainchild behind WordPress. You will get some of the best information on the fundamentals of WordPress, the power of open-source & heads up an all WordPress developments. The bog apart, one of the key plugins that Matt provides is Akismet – the intelligent spam catcher.

• Ryan Boren – a constant blogger on WordPress, and one of the key team members of Automattic, he keeps providing all the important wordpress developments in WordPress.

• Alex King – Alex is an icon in the WordPress community. He has continued to provide extremely important hacks on WordPress & some of the best plugins that are absolutely essential to anyone wishing to do well with WordPress blogs.

• Michael Torbert – A prolific WordPress developer & an SEO expert, Michael has a lot of WordPress related information to offer. He is also the publisher of the SEO plugin that is so essential in the internet business community.

• Arne Brachhold – Arne is also a WordPress expert with a focus on Search Engineering & Social media tools. Arne constantly publishes critical WordPress hacks & has released some of the best documentation on optimizing WordPress for search engines & social networks.

• Aodhan Cullen – Aodhan is an online entrepreneur & one of his greatest creations is the Stat Counter, a free service to track website visitors. Aodhan was also awarded the Internet Hero in the eircom Golden Spider Awards. A lot of important information is published on his blog on visitor statistics & internet click frauds.

• Lester Gamerz Chan – Lester is a fantastic programmer & publishes some very popular wordpress plugins. Very well respected in the WordPress community, Lester is the creator of essential plugins like DBManager, DownloadManager, PostViews & Polls.

• Lorelle VanFossen – Lorelle is one of the first people I started following when I began blogging. She provides tips on blogging & brings out the ethical & professional aspect of blogging.

If you read their profile, you will notice that apart from WordPress Gurus, they are all enthusiastic photographers. You will see some great pictures on their personal blogs too.

It also helps small business & home office professionals gather ideas on new ways to tap the internet’s potential to make a significant earning without having to spend a lot of money.

In fact, we have partnered with Media Cubs to encourage new bloggers to set up free websites & earn money from advertisements.

While advertising helps you to make money, its your content that brings in visitors. Niche content, over a long period of time, gets to earn significantly more money. Even if not a niche, Out-of-the-ordinary content will always be a great success.

Extraordinary content needs a lot of creativity. In an earlier post on imposed ignorance, I wrote about how wrong spelled website names draw a large search engine traffic simply because we all make mistakes in typing. Even though I personally do not encourage that, I think its a terrific creative idea.

Here is a short video on creativity from the well known fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi. He talks of ways that inspire him. He weaves through a dizzying array of inspirations – from ’50s pinups to a fleeting glimpse of a hole in a shirt that makes him shout “Stop the cab!”

I agree with most of what Isaac says. I can relate very closely to his talk because I often find that unintentional acts often turn out to be very creative in retrospect. Getting a “little bored” – in other words, it means continuous improvement in style, presentation & content is what makes one blogger successful over the others.

His comment on “mistake clothing” is very relevant to new bloggers. What has worked for several other bloggers may not work for you. So you have to keep on trying. Not to say that you should reinvent the wheel, but think of different innovative ways to present your content.

When he announced his step-down in 2000, handing over the decision making responsibilities of Microsoft to Steve Ballmer, it was clear he was heading for a life of a different kind.

In 2006 he formally announced his retirement from Microsoft.

WIRED presented a nice tribute to Bill Gates, What We’ll Miss About Bill Gates — a Very Long Good-Bye , chronologically listing the happenings in his life & the growth of Microsoft Corporation. On a lighter note, here is a Coke commercial that Bill Gates did!

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Websites are now directly competing with many of the print media. Be it in terms of reaching out to the customers or building a trustworthy relationship with your users, websites could do a lot good to your organization. If badly planned & executed, the websites, on the other hand, could do everlasting harm.

Here are a few Simple Rules that could help small business owners set up & help succeed on the web:

1. Content, content & content – even though the internet is filled with data & information, quality information is either rare or absent. Offer solid content on your website. More than just the volume of information, it is the one that is true, consistent & relatable that make your content worthwhile. While tons of pages & dozens of keywords would help people find the way to your website, it is the content that will make them come back for more.

2. Straight & Simple Design – address the purpose of your website straight away. If you are offering resource materials to your users, lead them straight to that. If you are offering reference materials on your website, lead your users straight to that. Many website owners sell internet advertising. In that case you would be tempted to take your readers through twists & turns, since each time they either click or move to another web page, you could be earning internet revenue. Most users do not mind that as long as they don’t feel that you are making them go in circles mainly because you want the advertising money. Keep ads to a level where they do not clutter your pages or distract your readers’ attention.

3. Build & align to your Identity – your website should reflect your brand. In the case of small business owners, the identity (& brand) is strongly driven by the person himself/herself.

4. Make it interactive – this is also known as "engaging the reader". Your content should temp readers to start a dialog with you. This is easier said than done. Some of the simple ways in which you can start interactive dialog are (a) ask for opinions from your readers (b) throw a genuine question & request for help (c) participate in communities (d) share your ideas & ask for suggestions

5. Have a non threatening approach – do not force your users to take an action on your favor. Having a log-in screen for all users is one way of saying that unless you share the email address, you wont get to read! Note that the information that you are about to share could already be existing somewhere on the internet! Another action that drives users crazy is pop-up windows. You must have seen websites where the moment you attempt to close the site pop-ups start opening asking you to confirm if you really want to leave & then one more asking if you want to see something else that the site has to offer! Very soon the visitor will ban your website from his/her computer never to be opened again.

6. Provide accurate & true information – data is everywhere, information is not. Helping users know the data source & then making sense of the data by creating information makes it useful for them. You have the ability of sharing your interpretation of the data. You could be right or wrong, that doesn’t matter now since you have already given the right data for your readers to draw their opinions independently. In fact, this is a nice way to start an interaction or a dialog. If your readers are "engaged" you would see comments with their feedback.

7. Don’t change your website too frequently – change is good, but any change involves a lot of work on your end. As for users, they do not care too much as long as they find the content useful & have the trust on your website. If you have to change, do ask for suggestions from your users & evaluate if you can offer any of them through a change.

In a recent interview, Jon Friedman from Marketwatch, shared his thoughts on how e-zine & print media owners could benefit from internet & websites. Many are relevant to the context we are discussing here too. Here is a small video presentation from Jon.

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The second place winner is Innova Materials . The team comprised of Alex Mittal, Priyanka Agarwal & Arjun Srinivas who made it possible to embed different materials in plastic in a very easy cost effective way. Their technology, which is names Innlay, would help impregnate plastic water pipes with a wide variety of materials like fragrance particles, anti-microbial medicines or even bio-sensors. The implementation could lead to better & cleaner water distribution over wide areas in a very cost effective way.

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Along with winning the second place & US $ 10,000 in cash & services, the Innova Materials team also won the Frederick H. Gloeckner Award for the best undergraduate-led team, which came with $5,000, and the People’s Choice Award, which came with $3,000.

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The focus in the teams clearly lay in evolving cost effective technologies to help mass population with better health & living conditions. While most of the teams attempted to bring in a Green aspect, the Creative Film worked on making a cheap way of making light sensitive films. The film could change it’s opacity with electrical pulses. The same technology is extremely expensive today & is used on sophisticated constructions like the Boeing’s Dreamliner jets and Maybach’s luxury cars. The Creative Film team will develop & market a cost effective technology to the mass population.

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The other teams that also participated in the Final Event of the presentation were Gelomatrix , iTherapeutics , Proteza , Sextant IP & Ultrasonic .

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