David Chan’s Blog

I was digging through my iPhone notes and found this quote that I had scribbled in there in May 2008:

“Weak bonds give you novelty”

Andrew McAfee said this at an Oracle/BEA conference I attended in Chicago.  Strong bonds are people who you have a deep connection with and are usually like-minded and have similar experiences.  People you don’t have have a close link with - weak bonds - are likely to provide new perspectives, opinions, and ideas.

I think that Twitter allows us to discover and build weak bonds extremely well, better than other social networking tools.

Download now or watch on posterous

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Sent from my iPhone

I just installed the latest version of Firefox 3 on a fresh Leopard partition. The copy of Firefox on my Windows desktop has all my bookmarks and saved passwords. I originally thought of only transferring the bookmarks to the Firefox on Mac, but I experimented with copying the entire profile folder over.  Nothing to lose!

I copied only the contents of the original profile .default folder, emptying and replacing the Firefox profile folder on my Mac. Opening Firefox on my Mac immediately gave me the familiar state of the Firefox on my Windows, exactly as I had it (before I transferred).  All my saved passwords, searches, and history are also there as well!

Will report any issues but everything works great so far.

If you’ve ever worked with large clients, you may have heard a few of these in your day:



As a consultant I love the little bit at the end: “I want to know how you did that so we can do it in-house”

I first read the story of “Three in the Morning” as a kid in a Chinese fables book, and it’s a story that has always stuck with me. There is a big lesson in perspective and persuasion, but also one of end results.

Tzu Ch’i says,
“…to wear out your brain
trying to make things into one
without realizing that they are all the same
this is called “Three in the Morning.”

“What is Three in the Morning?” asked Tzu Yu.

Tzu Ch’i replied,
“A keeper of monkeys
said that each monkey was to have
three chestnuts in the morning
and four at night,
but the monkeys were very angry at this.

So the keeper said
they might have four in the morning
and three at night,
with which arrangement they were all well pleased.

The actual number of the chestnuts remained the same,
but there was an adjustment
to meet to the likes and dislikes of those concerned.
Such is the principle of putting oneself into subjective relation with externals.

Therefore a wise man,
while regarding contraries as identical,
adapts himself to the laws of nature.
This is called following two courses at once.”
- From Chuang Tzu, Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer

It was easy to see that in both feeding scenarios the result was the same. Most of the time it won’t be so easy to predict the end result of choices. It might be stretching it, but maybe this is a story about the importance of prediction and business intelligence.

I know too many people who struggle to stay up late at night, with the only reason being that it is “not time to sleep yet”. Flipping through re-runs on tv, surfing aimlessly on the web, or playing Flash games.

Sleeping late means waking up late. Or a nap or two during the day.

Why not sleep early, and wake up early? You can watch your re-runs and surf the internet in the morning. Or you can do anything you want. Chances are you will have more options at 8 am than at 1 am.

“The expert card frequently trumps any other card in the room. The example here is that the scientists who discovered the double-helix of the DNA were never prime DNA experts, which made them “hungrier” for new discoveries, and made them question established rules.”

http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/yes-50-scientifically-proven-ways-to-be-persuasive/1624

Posted via email from Checkers is the name of David Chan’s iPhone

Do we still have this attitude today?

Posted via email from Checkers is the name of David Chan’s iPhone

By bounce, I am referring to bounce rate. A bounce is recorded when a visitor views only one page of your site during the visit. As someone who runs a blog, I strive to make my content coherent (ie. my blog contains a lot of programming and technology content) so that it appeals to a certain audience. A good indicator of whether my blog is coherent is if people view more than one page per visit on average, or if I have a low bounce rate.

People usually find my blog through search, and so they land directly on a post (instead of the front page). Likewise, when my blog get Stumbled, the landing page is always a post. When visitors finish reading that post, ideally they’d take a look around to find more of the same content. With that in mind, would the bounce rate of visitors from Google and StumbleUpon be the same? Here is my referral data from the last two months (July 1st - Sept 11th):

As you can see, the bounce rate from StumbleUpon visitors is very low compared to visitors from my other top referrals.

My conclusion (well, it’s more or less an assumption, but an educated one) is that the StumbleUpon Interests selection works very well to channel interested readers to your content. It’s not a bad bet that users who go through the entire process of signing up to StumbleUpon, installing the tool bar, and setting up their interests must really be passionate about the selected topics.

That or they have a lot of time to kill, which, admittedly, is something that StumbleUpon also does very well.

The moral of the story? Tag your Stumbles wisely!

P.S. If you have a blog which gets Stumbled often, post some of your findings on your bounce rate!