Honest! Have a look at his profile. I especially love Bush’s comment. 😉

“Many years ago, when I worked as a volunteer at a hospital, I got to know a little girl named Liz who was suffering from a rare and serious disease. Her only chance of recovery appeared to be a blood transfusion from her 5-year-old brother, who had miraculously survived the same disease and had developed the antibodies needed to combat the illness. The doctor explained the situation to her little brother, and asked the little boy if he would be willing to give his blood to his sister. I saw him hesitate for only a moment before taking a deep breath and saying, “Yes, I’ll do it if it will save her.” As the transfusion progressed, he lay in bed next to his sister and smiled, as we all did, seeing the color returning to her cheeks. Then his face grew pale and his smile faded. He looked up at the doctor and asked with a trembling voice, “Will I start to die right away?”. Being young, the little boy had misunderstood the doctor; he thought he was going to have to give his sister all of his blood in order to save her.”

Go over here and read the rest of these nice little, thought provoking, stories: Five Lessons about how to treat people.

And remember,”…, just enjoy them. Who cares if they are completely true. Even inspiring fiction is ok isn’t it? I found it to be a nice 3 minute break from an overly cynical world.” Duke.

Fear is a terrible thing. It can stop you from doings things you want to do, and generally ruin your life. Fear, of course, is a basic human emotion and we’re all bound to experience it at some point or other. The trick, however, is not to let it get too you too much. Kirima‘s latest post got me thinking about fear. I was re-reading ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ recently and got intrigued by the statement: “Being poor is a choice.” I think that being afraid, to some extent, is also a choice albeit one that is probably compounded by one’s psychological make-up. That said, you can always choose not to be afraid. Think about it.

This short post was inspired by this week’s Comments For Beer winners. Here’s the link love:

Kirima starts us off with a nice post about fear, including definitions of the different types of fear and also includes helpful and interesting links. Great stuff.

Majonzi talks about babies and asks whether one can be too old to have some, and whether it is fair on the babies..

Gala explains how to be genuine with people you dislike. You know, those people you are nice to but really don’t care a bit about.

How to deal with stupid cops. Cops, especially in this part of the world can be really stupid. Archer gives a personal account of how he dealt with sheer stupidity. Didn’t someone once say that the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits?

Finally, Egm takes a break from his breathtaking photography and points out what is quite possibly the secret to life.

It’s been a while since I’ve given some link love – I’ve been real busy lately – so if you’ve commented here lately, hold on, you’ll get some link love soon. By the way, anyone can get some Link Love from me. Just leave a relevant comment anywhere on this blog. Read the Rules.

I thought I’d never see the day when I’d see people fear and/or distrust Google, the company everyone loves to love. Fear of Google (FOG) and Distrust/Disdain of Google(DOG) has been all over the web lately.

Click here to read no less than 11 high profile bloggers write on this issue.

What do you think of this? I think its just a case of power corrupting Google’s original values. When you get that big, you also get a little bit stupid, right?

As I’ve already stated a number of times on this blog, the best business strategy on the internet is to find a way to give out your product free of charge. It seems the folks over at sasanet finally appreciate this fact. Their website now bears a flashing image: Sasanet Free SMS Coming Soon Due to Public Demand.

This isn’t a surprise. A while back, sms.ac did the same thing: they discontinued free sms service only to resume later. When sasanet say ‘public demand’, they mean just that. I have written just two posts that mention sasanet yet these two posts bring in about 30 visitors daily who come via google, after searching for sasanet free sms. I keep on thinking: if I get that much, how many more head over to sasanet’s site and get utterly disappointed to learn that there is no more free sms? Clearly, too many – that’s why sasanet is re-introducing free sms services.
The good news is that it seems now the sasanet hack will work again.

What can we learn from this?

1. Your website’s visitors are your master and commander. Do not mistreat them; this is the Golden Rule.
2. Never come to do business on the internet with a goal of ‘tricking’ users(your customers) to love you then change your whole business model in total disregard of them. I call this the jerky jock approach. Don’t do it!
3. Giving something away for free is the most powerful business model online or, indeed, offline.

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It’s yet another lazy Sunday and I know most of you don’t really want to get out of the house. Here are some great links taken from ProBlogger’s Top 5 Group Writing Project. My Top 5 picks:

1. Top 5 Challenges N00bs (newbies) Face Online.
2. Top 5 Easiest Ways to Solve any problems.
3. Top 5 Blogging Myths.
4. Five Strangely Named Websites that made it big.
5. Five Questions You Never thought you wanted answers to.

Of course, I made my own entry: Do You Know these 5 Easy Ways of Making Online Friends?

Now, grab a cup of coffee and head over here to read more Top 5’s than you ever thought possible.

I bet that, by now, you’ve all heard about Barrack Obama’s recent incident on Myspace. If you haven’t, here’s the summary: Way before Barrack Obama declared his candidature for US president, someone else, Joe Anthony, created a myspace account to promote Barrack Obama at www.myspace.com/barrackobama. When Obama got into the race for the presidency, he naturally wanted a myspace account and his people contacted Joe Anthony and they started working together to optimize the profile – which grew to have 160,000 friends. Later, the two groups fell out of sorts and Barrack’s camp offered to buy rights to the profile. Joe Anthony asked for $39000. Obama’s team didn’t like that and asked myspace to hand over the account, claiming that they should have rights to Obama’s name. Myspace complied and handed over the account to Obama. This created quite a storm and bad press for Obama. Obama and Myspace are working hard to find a solution. As it stands now, Joe Anthony will get back his account (with all the 160,000) friends but under a different name. Click here to read the full story.

I find this incident quite funny and very unnecessary. In my humble opinion, Barrack should have paid the $39000 – I think that’s pocket change for a US presidential candidate. SMO Blog puts it best: “When your running for president, isn’t it worth the $39,000 to secure your MySpace profile without the flurry of bad press? Plus you risked alienating a talented and devoted new media savvy supporter along the way… $39,000 strikes me as cheap and probably more than that has been spent in crisis management already.”

Some lessons we should take to heart from this incident:

• New media matters. Treat people online with as much respect as you would offline. Do not underestimate the value of the internet.
• Secure your brand online NOW!! Yes that means going out there and getting your myspace and/or Hi5 profile, youtube account, url, and whatever else before a cyber squatter does.
• You don’t really own anything you put up on sites like myspace, blogger, Hi5, tumblr etc.