“If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me. He explained that he had a conversation once with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos about this, and the average time someone stays in job at Seattle is twice as long than it is in Silicon Valley. There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term, he explains. You don’t have to move out here to do this. There’s this culture in the Valley of starting a company before they know what they want to do. You decided you want to start a company, but you don’t know what you are passionate about yet…you need to do stuff you are passionate about. The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.” – Mark Zuckerberg

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17521806

Businessinsider.com paged through his titles and pulled out 12 of his most mind-blowing theories…

The business of spreading the epidemic of an idea, product or preference — including your own — is why Gladwell lands on so many business must-read lists.

Understanding who changes minds and influences people, and the small but critical ways the change takes place, is the first step to sweeping your audience up in your epidemic. This theory also explores how you can convert minds from hostility to acceptance.

What you need is one of those special people who have the power to connect with others and bring them over to their way of thinking.

These connectors

• Have social networks of 100 people or more
• Have something intrinsic in their personalities that allows them to span many different worlds
• Combine confidence, interest in and curiosity about the world in the broadest sense, social energy, and a high level of enthusiasm
• Translate and make accessible to all with whom they come into contact what they care about

Mavens

• Are “information specialists”
• Are the ones others rely on for the newest and the best
• Accumulate the latest and best information on what is out there
• Are “almost pathologically helpful” – they can’t help but know, they can’t help but share
• Are the source of word-of-mouth epidemics: they know and they know how to communicate what makes things worth knowing about

Tipping Point #4: Salesmen — You want what they are selling, whatever it is

Salesmen:

• Are the persuaders
• Through charisma, a level of engagement with what they know, and the skill to speak to a particular audience
• Are the ones people want to agree with

The Tipping Point #5: The Stickiness Factor – Why some ideas stick

The Tipping Point #6: The Power of Context — We are exquisitely and unknowingly sensitive to ambient influences

Image: Wikimedia Commons

• The Broken Window Theory is all about context
• Environment directs a person in one direction over another in tacit and therefore powerful ways
• Marketers, policemen, or any agency looking to direct human behavior is aware of this

Blink #1: Thin Slicing — How a little bit of knowledge goes a long way

Image: Business Insider

Our ability to gauge what is important, relevant, or meaningful from a very narrow slice of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully considered ones. We live in a world so information-saturated, the idea is radical.

In one example, a psychologist observed married couples:

• For each he knows a core set of facts
• The couples interact in response to a set number of questions posed
• He predicts whether or not they will be married in fifteen years.
• Observed for one hour, his accuracy is 95%
• Observed for fifteen minutes, his accuracy rate dropped to only 90%

Blink #2: Analysis Paralysis — Information overload is worse than too little information

Image: Flickr

• It can be difficult to focus on only the most critical information to make a decision
• Examining a large amount of data makes it hard to weed out the irrelevant and confusing
• The act of collecting more and more information is too often just a search for facts that reinforce assumptions made

Gladwell suggests decision making performed with a “frugality” of information — learn to recognize when enough information has been gathered.

Blink #3: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions — What they say about us can make us squirm

Image: AP

What we say or think before we’ve had time to remember what we want to say or think comes from the unconscious; they take place behind what Gladwell calls a “locked door.”

The problem? The snap decision doesn’t always reflect the best we want to be: we may be more racist, sexist, anti-short people than we would hope to be.

The solution? “Priming.”

• First impressions are based on experiences and environment.
• This means they can be changed by the simple act of changing, mixing up, the experiences we have which result in the impressions we walk around with.
• Exposure, positive experiences, and familiarity with more and different kinds of people result in first impressions of others that are different than those with a more narrow sense of the world.

Blink #4: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading — And why a face can say more than words ever could

Image: Wikimedia TA230773651

Or, rapid cognition.

• When we are around other people, we are in a constant state of predicting and inferring what that person is thinking and feeling.
• First impressions of a job candidate and an officer faced with a person who may or may not pose a threat are both cases where rapid cognition come into play.

The Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, offers up ideas on lip movement, brow furrowing, and every other facial movement (or lack thereof).

• We can understand why we interpret faces the way we do
• We can teach those for whom this kind of cognition does not come naturally
• We can challenge assumptions in order to change responses when they are based on prejudices or stereotypes

Outliers #1: The Matthew Effect — Talent is one thing, luck is another

Image: wstera/Flickr

“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” Matthew 25:29

“The biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work.^“

There are so many more variables involved in a person’s ability to succeed than any of us care to admit, we want to believe the chance to succeed is available to anyone who puts their mind to it.

Gladwell found the top of the field, whatever the field, to be dominated by those born in the first part of the year. Their advantage: they are bigger, been around longer, have developed just a bit more than those poor souls born in the later months.

The Outliers #2: The 10,000-Hour Rule — It’s less about natural talent and more about how much time you put into developing a talent

Apolo Anton Ohno, 2010 Winter Olympics

Image: AP

One of the most oft-quoted Gladwell-isms, it takes 10,000 hours, plain and simple, to be the best.

This involves a level of dedication that far exceeds even a significant interest. So much for the idea that talent is enough.

The Outliers #3: The Trouble With Geniuses — IQ is not enough to succeed

Image: AP

The correlation between high IQ and success is wobbly at best. Rather, one who has a supportive family and community that fosters, encourages, and values success — and subscribes to some form of the 10,000 hours theory — is much more likely to be successful.

Jonathan Abrams
Founder of Socializr and Friendster; San Francisco, CA

“In five to ten years, we will all have chips in our brains. When you look at someone’s face on the street, your Google Brain software will automatically call up every embarrassing photo of them from ancient websites such as Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace; list all mutual friends; and remind you of the person’s annotated bio. As a response to the perceived slowness and verbosity of antiquated services like Twitter, people will send everyone they know nanobursts of information about anything they might do or think before they actually do or think it. Every website, blog, and social-networking profile will include an aggregated feed from every other website, blog, and social-networking service, resulting in an exponential and infinite length of repeated content on every possible site, overloading our brain chips and causing frequent nosebleeds and occasional cerebral hemorrhage.”

Source: The Future of The Web, Technology Review 7/2008

• Now you can track spending online and compare your spending on all the categories you spend on, such as Coffee Shops, Movies, Clothes, Groceries, to the average spending of people in over 30 US cities, all 50 states, or the entire US national average.

Here’s an example:

Pretty cool stuff… and it’s still a work in progress…

The Violinist…
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

The Trumpeter…
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Dancing Robots…
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

A Real Live Transformer…
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

The Cyclist…
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Terminator…
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

The Humanoid…
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Related: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/robots.html

1. Presidential Candidates
If Google searches are effective at projecting the next president it looks like we are headed towards another texan Commander in Chief… although this one was actually born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

2. Newspapers, Blogs, Magazines
Blogs are taking over the world. It looks as though searches for blogs have surpassed newspaper searches (in volume) for the first time in history. Good bye traditional media.

3. Food and Exercise
Wow. We love food.

4. Fishing and Hunting
Apparently the Ice Fishermen aren’t pulling their weight. And people are less likely to shoot animals in the summer time (which can be attributed to regulated hunting seasons).

5. Turkey and Diet
Lots of Turkey for Thanksgiving, a little less for Christmas, and a whole bunch of New Year’s Resolutions to lose those extra holiday pounds (that typically last about 1.5 months)

6. Girl Scout Cookies
Girl Scouts of America must have some severe cash flow issues during Q2, Q3 and Q4. Maybe they need to start distributing to grocery stores to supplement their door to door sales?

7. Rain and Depression
Rain rain go away come again another day… seriously… you are driving people crazy!

This plugin will create a google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Currently homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported.

To calculate the number of pages indexed by Google a simple site:danielpeterjackson.com search was conducted on 5 different occasions during the last 15 days.

Example Search:

Here are the results…

Day 0: (Baseline = 69 pages indexed)

Day 2: (73 pages indexed)

Day 3: (84 pages indexed)

Day 15: (119 pages indexed and some new blue formatting)

With exactly 50 more pages indexed and only 12 new pages created during the 15 days… it appears we are moving in the right direction although counting the total number of pages indexed is a fairly basic metric to measure the effectiveness of this plugin.

You can view the actual Google Sitemap XML here: http://www.danielpeterjackson.com/sitemap.xml