Ravi's Rants

Rndaom, Yet <Well Formed/>

Archives for August 2008

Hey You, Come Stalk Me

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“Twit” is no longer just a mean word 🙂

I signed up for Twitter a while ago. But I never “got it” – until recently – when I figured out the awesomeness of microblogging.

Seth Godin wrote this on his blog:

“My goal in creating this blog is to spread my ideas and keep me from having to write a book about every single thing that pops into my head. I’m an amateur, not a professional.”

“Micro” blogging takes this and turns it on its head – and completely frees me from even the “gotta write a meaningful post” world of “macro” (a.k.a “the usual style of”) blogging.

Microblogging lets me put out stuff that is interesting, stuff that I want to share with my followers, but is too trivial to take up space on my blog.

Though many folks use it in a more social and personal context (“watching Spiderman now”, “woke up late”, “eating lunch” types), it has a much more powerful and serious side to it that is just begging to be taken advantage of.

Now I’ve started leaving behind a trail of my online activities on twitter – for my tribe: Web sites I’m visiting, articles I’m reading, videos I’m watching, books I’m reading…

Whether you twitter or tumble or spoink, do it so that you can make meaning for your followers.

I invite you to come stalk me 🙂

Seth Godin’s Scalp Is On Fire

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I’ve always talked to folks about having a sense of urgency in life. Because that’s how I operate.

I look at the young & successful, and I feel like I’m 10 years behind. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing either.

If you don’t have nowhere to go and nothing to achieve, then you just take life as it comes: do your “job”, go home, have a beer, watch TV, hit the sack. Rinse, repeat.

But if you did have greatness to be achieved, that feeling that you are not yet where you ought to be, then you do things differently.

Having this sense of urgency is not the same as “being in a hurry”. Because when you’re in a hurry, you forget the basics, you overlook the fundamentals, you skip over the essentials, and you could end up going nowhere in a hurry.

But when you feel that you don’t have the luxury of time, the luxury that other “mere mortals” have, that’s when you transcend to a different level of your game.

I keep saying “sense of urgency”, but a much more beautiful way to say it is, “like your hair is on fire”.

Obviously, Seth doesn’t have much hair, so I’m pretty sure his scalp is on fire :-).

– Ravi Jayagopal
RavisRants.com

Are You Keeping A Tab On Your Competitors – and Yourself?

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Quite frequently, I am reminded of how we take certain things for granted, while it could be something completely new/interesting/educating/shocking for someone else.

Using Google Alerts for competitive research is one such “thing”. During a chat with a friend the other day, I casually mentioned how I use Google Alerts to keep an eye on my industry, and it completely blew him away, while I’d actually been doing this for as long as Google Alerts have existed (and before that News.com alerts).

So, for what it’s worth, here goes:

I use Google Alerts to set up specific alerts for specific keywords.

When Google first finds any new or existing content (blog posts, web pages, forum discussions, etc) anywhere on the web that it hasn’t indexed before, that contains these keywords, Google sends me an email with a link to this newly-found content.

And if a publisher has password-protected their content, but still allowed Google to index it (using the “password-protected content” sitemaps feature), then Google emails me a little blurb of that password-protected content!

So, basically I have set up tens of alerts, the first one (vanity “alert” ahead – quite literally! 🙂 being my own name (“Ravi Jayagopal”). That way, I always know the instant (or within a few days at worst), if anyone is blogging/writing about me or my products.

Google Alert

Here are some of the alerts you could create:
1. Your full name
2. For all your product names
3. All your web site urls
4. Each and every one of your competitors’ names
5. All of your partners’ names
6. Name of any industry expert (or their web site url) whose blog/site you follow (like I have one for “Seth Godin” 🙂
7. The name or category of your industry: For eg., right now I’m a month away from launching a very powerful “Access Management” software to manage subscription-based web sites. So, some of my alerts include the keywords “subscription”, “content”, “download”, “security”, etc. Yes, I do get some false positives, but who cares!

The kind of stuff Google finds on a daily basis thanks to these alerts, not only help me keep a tab on myself, my customers, my competitors, and my idols, but it also gives me a lot of new ideas, new features for my products, and great new ways in which I can make my product remarkable!

So go create your alerts today.