Lipdub - I gotta feeling by the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST)
Very well directed!
proud of my former student association! Wish we had done something like this in my days!! Well done guys!
Why does my mom’s blog get more visitors than mine?
Ok, there’s a part of me that gets upset every time I log in to my analytics account and see that my mother’s blog outperforms mine by a factor of 8x.
She has a blog about her recipes. http://www.receitasdaelisa.com
But mostly, I’m just amazed at the fact that my mother (who is close to 60) is actively (well, the last blog post was from last Christmas… but still…) blogging and her blog gets around 60-80 visitors a day! 
How many people (of around my age) can say that their mother’s are blogging?
A bit of background. My mother is an excellent cook (I’m sure yours is too, but mine is exceptionally good)
So, how did I get my mother blogging?
It all started two years ago. I had been living in Estonia for about a year, and my mother’s birthday was approaching fast. I needed to give her a present, but was lacking ideas. This was about the same time that I had just registered two domains for myself. www.joaorei.eu and www.joaorei.net I still wasn’t sure what I would do with either (still not sure) but I wanted to control my online presence, and another Joao Rei had taken joaorei.com (he’s not doing anything with it really, still under construction since 2007).
So, I decided to buy my mother a domain name and set up a blogger.com account for her. That’s how it started it. That was my birthday gift to my mother that year.
I assume she liked it, she started posting avidly for a while. Mostly her favorite recipes, and mine too. Like this delicious pear tart recipe
Some comparisons
Her blog is in Portuguese, and so she gets 80% of her visitors from Portugal, but she also gets a considerable amount of visitors from other Portuguese speaking countries, like Brasil, Angola and Mozambique. There are also visitors from Portuguese communities living abroad, like in Switzerland, France, Germany and the U.S.
Her viewers spend almost 1 minute on average on her site, compared to my viewers who walk away after about 35 seconds. That’s almost double the time!
I get most of my visitors from referring sites (Twitter, facebook, and a mailing list I usually send my blog posts if they’re interesting). But I also get a lot of direct traffic.
My mother’s blog in comparison gets most of her traffic (95%) through search engines! 
And she does no SEO, has no active adwords campaigns, no paid advertising to get traffic. Nothing!
Just one thing makes our sites different
Content. Good content. Good, quality, relevant, unique content.
See, I usually just repost stuff I find interesting on the web, or I might occasionally comment on an issue I’ve been reading about. But the amount of original content is very small. I post more often than she does, but I repeat a lot of what is already there.
She, on the other hand, always posts unique versions of a recipe. The way she cooks it, and she adds personal touches to the end of most of her recipes. She talks about how to make them look nicer or how to present them or serve them.
Post with pictures are the most popular in terms of comments from views, and traditional sweets and cakes are the most searched for keywords on her blog.
Last year, for Christmas she broke the 300 visitors a day barrier, and got 311 visitors on December 23rd. I expect this Christmas will be even better.
There are ads on the site, google ads and amazon affiliate ads. They yield no return, so I might actually consider removing them. They clutter the site needlessly.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions for my mother’s recipe blog? Let me know!
[Google Fast Flip] Trickle Effect
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Trickle Effect
How to protect small communities, preserve wildlife, and mitigate climate change? For one leading researcher, it all starts in the forest. UN peace messenger and British primatologist Jane Goodall, the world’s most famous authority on chimpanzees, is taking questions about Copenhagen. By Daniel Stone | Newsweek Web Exclusive Please fill in the following Newsweek Trickle Effect…
Read full story[Google Fast Flip] It’s All About Selling for Survival
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It’s All About Selling for Survival
by Vivek Wadhwa on December 12, 2009 The one skill which entrepreneurs need is something they don’t teach in business school—selling. Yes, I know that “selling” conjures up negative images of used-car salesmen peddling clunkers. But the ability to persuade people to believe in you is a necessity. That’s because sales is not just about selling TechCrunch It’s All About Selling for Survival…
Read full storyCorporations, businesses, capitalism - wikipedia discussion pages
There is a statement which says that ‘Corporations exist to provide products and/or services that produce profits for their shareholders’ and the cite is from Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports. This statement lumps far too many things in the same box. Corporations, business in society, capitalism and why people go into business are all different things. Please consider the following:
-The purpose of using a corporation is to provide legal protection for owners (shareholders) who hire managers to run the daily operations of their business. (“Corporations” The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 11, No. 5 (Mar., 1902), pp. 223-245)(“Are Corporations Morally Defensible?” Gillian Brock Business Ethics Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 703-721)
-The purpose of businesses in a capitalist society is to provide efficient division of labor so that society can benefit from the innovativeness driven by competition. (The Natural Roots of Capitalism and Its Virtues and Values Sherwin Klein Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Jul., 2003), pp. 387-401)(Realizing the Spirit and Impact of Adam Smith’s Capitalism through Entrepreneurship Realizing the Spirit and Impact of Adam Smith’s Capitalism through Entrepreneurship Scott L. Newbert Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Sep., 2003), pp. 251-261)
-Why individuals do business is to maximize their own personal exchange in a market. (“The Why’s of Business Revisited” Ronald F. Duska Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 16, No. 12/13, From the Universities to the Marketplace: The Business Ethics Journey: The Second Annual International Vincentian Conference Promoting Business Ethics (Sep., 1997), pp. 1401-1409)
Consider the following quote about capitalism: “More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiment and The Wealth of Nations wherein he argued that capitalism was a system of economic organization whereby social welfare can be most efficiently created through the pursuit of economic and moral self-interest. However, due to the undue focus on the latter of these two works, modern economic thinking has become dominated by the belief that the pursuit of economic self-interests alone will engender the greatest social welfare. Unfortunately, such reasoning becomes problematic when the externalities that often spawn from economically driven capitalist endeavors are considered. It appears then that in order to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of a capitalist system, the interests of both the self and society must be considered, which of course was Adam Smith’s argument.” (Newbert 2003 from above).
I would take out that first statement and revise the second so that we avoid the debate in this section.
The Purpose and role of a business
Businesses in our society can influence every aspect of our lives. They have such power and can create trends so easily that they have an obligation to promote good. Their shear size, power, and monetary influence allows them to heavily sway public opinion.
From the Wikipedia discussion page for Corporate Social Responsibility
[Google Fast Flip] The Eurocrats Europe Needs
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The Eurocrats Europe Needs
Catherine Ashton and Herman Van Rompuy should suit the European Union – and that’s all that matters. BY JAMES JOYNER | DECEMBER 1, 2009 Today, two obscure figures will take to the highest posts in the new European Council: Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy as president and EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton as high representative for foreign Foreign Policy The Eurocrats Europe Needs…
Read full story[Google Fast Flip] Take the R Out of BRIC
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Take the R Out of BRIC
BY ANDERS ÅSLUND | DECEMBER 2, 2009 As Russia proudly boasts its prominence at G-20 summits, gatherings of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), and other global economic round tables, an embarrassing question arises. Does Russia really deserve to be a BRIC? The country’s economic performance has plummeted to such a dismal level that Foreign Policy Take the R Out of BRIC…
Read full story[Google Fast Flip] Ukraine’s Phantom Flu
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Ukraine’s Phantom Flu
BY JULIA IOFFE | NOVEMBER 25, 2009 The global swine flu outbreak has become something of a political football in every country where the pandemic has spread, but Ukraine’s response to the virus has achieved a new level of blatant politicization. According to a campaign advisor to Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian prime minister and presidential candidate Foreign Policy Ukraine’s Phantom Flu…
Read full storyA condemnation of sparkly vampires
DISPATCH NOVEMBER 19, 2009
After decades of girls’ fantasy novels featuring empowered,
adventurous heroines, it’s perplexing that the Twilight saga,
featuring insipid Bella Swann, has so thoroughly captivated a
generation of teenagers.
by Alyssa Rosenberg
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911u/new-moon A Condemnation of Sparkly Vampires
New Moon, the second movie based on Stephenie Meyer’s series about a
benevolent vampire and the human girl he falls obsessively in love
with. Meyer’s novels have been a boon to booksellers and movie
theaters, who have made hundreds of millions off the Twilight saga,
and to cultural and social critics who have feasted on the series’
melodramatic language and convoluted sexual politics. Much of that
attention has focused on the story’s vampire mythology, launching a
thousand trend pieces about screaming girls and their swooning
mothers, and debates about whether vampire mania means teenagers want
to have sex with gay men, or dangerous sex, or no sex at all. But
Twilight is essentially, and importantly, a fairytale. The four-book series traces the transformation of Bella Swann, a
competent, if clumsy and withdrawn girl, into a modern-day princess,
complete with sports car, credit card, designer wardrobe and country
cottage—though the route she takes from drudgery in her father’s
kitchen to quasi-royalty includes a transformation into the undead.
And Edward Cullen, the vampire who is first Bella’s boyfriend and then
her husband, initially believes that he is a soulless monster, but
comes to realize “that he belonged here. In a fairytale.” Indeed, Twilight’s wild popularity is a testament to the power of
fairytale stories—to the “true-loveism” that Salon’s Laura Miller has
called “the secular religion of America.” It’s more than a little
depressing that after decades of novels for girls in which authors
have used magic as a powerful tool to expand the scope of fairytale
heroines’ adventures beyond mere romance fantasies, it is Bella
Swann—a modified princess in a tower – that’s succeeded in thoroughly
captivating a generation of teenagers. Like many fairytales, Bella Swann’s adventure begins with the
unexpected discovery of a magical ability or fate: she learns that her
blood is unusually appealing to a handsome boy in her biology class at
her new school, a vampire who lives off animal instead of human blood.
“You are exactly my brand of heroin,” Edward Cullen tells her,
explaining both his attraction to her and his need to resist her. The
vampire authorities in Meyer’s world, the Volturi, “have a name for
someone who smells the way Bella does to me,” Edward says towards the
close of the second novel, New Moon. “They call her my singer—because
her blood sings for me.” Edward initially notices Bella and is
intensely—if chastely—attracted to her not because of her looks or her
(strangely sour) personality, but because of the scent of her blood.
She is not simply sexually delectable: she is literally delicious. But Bella cannot use her blood to charm anyone else—in fact, she
cannot use it at all. She simply is. And while its appeal is
extraordinarily powerful (Edward has waited a century to react to
someone as he’s reacted to Bella, and repeatedly insists that he
cannot continue to live if she dies), in terms of advancing the story,
Bella’s blood can only precipitate one event, Edward’s attraction to
her. Bella’s overriding passivity is in distinct contrast to other
fairytales for teen girls that have been popular in recent decades—in
which the protagonists’ encounters with magic open up much wider
fields of play. Take Cimorene, for example, the stubborn and independent princess who
is the heroine of Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest series, which
began publishing in 1990. She lives in a world where magic is a given:
her official lessons include how to scream properly when kidnapped by
a giant, while her unofficial ones include sessions with the court
magician. In the series’ first novel, Talking to Dragons, each small
act of magic Cimorene performs or participates in takes her further
from home, and from her duty to marry. A frog provides her with
suggestions on how to run away from a union with a deeply boring
prince, and towards an eventual career as cook and librarian for the
(female) King of the Dragons. She makes her escape by means of an
invisibility spell she casts herself, wins the right to bear a magic
sword by killing a giant bird with it, and discovers that it’s
possible to melt wizards with dish soap scented with lemon. As for the man she marries, she falls for him not because she is
magically attractive, but because of how well they work together on a
quest to track down her missing large and scaly employer. And while he
may be the love of her life, he’s far from the only purpose in it. Then there’s Monica Furlong’s children’s novels, Juniper and Wise
Child, about witches in medieval England. Juniper learns she has
extraordinary abilities when she discovers that she is magically able
to divine the water that her father’s Cornish fiefdom needs.
Meanwhile Wise Child learns of her capabilities as a potential witch
by playing with a deck of cards and arranging them into a meaningful
pattern, an act that suggests she has magical abilities. Another
book, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s retelling of the Arthurian legend, The
Mists of Avalon, presents a heroine, Morgaine, who experiences
prophetic visions and confesses them to a priest who tells her that
they are sinful. All three women become seers, healers, and
significant forces in the kingdoms where they live. Magic does not
simply change the ways Juniper, Wise Child, and Morgaine see the
world: it enhances their power to act in it. And while all three women
find love at various points along the way, it never becomes everything
to them, or eclipses their dedication to their unique vocations. In Twilight, magic is an inhibiting factor, rather than a catalyst.
Meyer’s vampires, in one of the series’ most pointless innovations
(and incentives to flagrant over-use of the world dazzle and its
variations), sparkle when exposed to direct sunlight, making it
difficult for them to spend much time outside the cloud-ridden
environs of Forks, Wash. Questing is difficult when you’re stuck in
the Pacific Northwest, but Bella does manage to get out of town a few
times. First, she flees to Arizona when a nasty vampire decides she’d
make a tasty snack. But she spends most of the time in her hotel room
or the hospital. Next, she dashes to Italy to save Edward from a
suicide attempt. And finally, she gets a honeymoon. But the vast
majority of the action takes place in Forks, a limited canvass for
Meyer’s limited plot. In so much as the novel can lay claim to anything approximating a
quest, Bella’s goals are narrow, and focused internally. She wants to
preserve Edward’s life and her relationship with him. When she
becomes pregnant in the final novel, she wants to protect her fetus,
even as it begins to kill her. And most of all, she wants to become a
vampire, to become as magical as her boyfriend. When that
transformation does take place, Bella is essentially uninterested in
the prospect of having a useful superpower, like Edward’s ability to
read minds, or the healing and prognosticating abilities other
vampires she knows possesses. “I would probably never be able to do anything interesting or special
like Edward, Alice, and Jasper could do,” she muses. “Maybe I would
just love Edward more than anyone in the history of the world had ever
loved anyone else.” Bella does eventually develop an unusual strength: the ability to
block vampires’ powers. But much as her blood only attracts Edward,
Bella uses that strength only to protect her family in a wanly
climactic confrontation with the vampire world’s authorities.
Cimorene, Juniper, Wise Child, and Morgaine have whole kingdoms to
protect and justice and freedom to uphold. It’s hard to imagine how even the most obsessive devotee of
all-consuming love stories could be thoroughly absorbed by this saga.
Meyer cuts even the romance buffs out of the equation in the end:
after Bella becomes a vampire “with the dimming shadows and limiting
weakness of humanity taken off my eyes, I saw [Edward’s] face,” truly
for the first time Bella says. Her infatuation with Edward’s
specialness may have given readers a sense of kinship with her in the
first three novels, but by the fourth, Meyer is telling them they are
literally incapable of seeing through Bella’s eyes. I don’t imagine that I was alone when I was young in wishing there was
something magical about me – or in reading Talking to Dragons until it
became dog-eared or keeping The Mists of Avalon perpetually on renewal
at the library. What girl doesn’t wish she could discover some
special attribute about herself that would smooth her way through the
demons of junior high school and beyond—particularly if that something
would get her noticed for the first time by a boy or girl with special
attributes of their own? But earlier this week, when I stumbled over
the Twilight finish line, reaching the final page of Breaking Dawn,
the series’ last book, it seemed clear to me that even in my younger
days, Bella Swann would never have captured my imagination in the same
way Cimorene, or Juniper, or Wise Child, or Morgaine had, and still
do. Those heroines understand the joy of being loved by someone else.
But their stories make the case that being a witch, or a warrior, or a
queen—even without a king—might be better than an eternity as a
metaphorical princess in a metaphorical tower, no matter how much the
vampire company sparkles. Via http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911u/new-moon
[Google Fast Flip] More Research To Back The Notion That Streaming Kills Piracy
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More Research To Back The Notion That Streaming Kills Piracy
by Robin Wauters on December 2, 2009 The findings are in line with other research and conclusions reached earlier this year by The Leading Question, MusicAlly’s consumer research division, which suggested that the number of teenagers who download copyrighted content from illegal sources has fallen dramatically over the past few years in favor of streaming. TechCrunch More Research To Back The Notion That Streaming Kills Piracy…
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