7 Killer Tips For Optimizing Your YouTube Videos

Download video script from here.

The 7 tips are:

1.   Create outstanding content
2.   Optimize your YouTube Channel
3.   Use keywords cleverly and in the right places
4.   Add URL's in the right places
5.   Link to your videos from where ever you can
6.   Provide plenty of social proof for your videos
7.   Ping your YouTube channel as soon as you add new content

More than a paradise, more than a small miracle... It's Home!

Sri Lanka Tourism officially launched its new logo and tagline Sri Lanka Small Miracle on the 23rd of June 2009, with the ushering of peace in a new era.

Trust the Art, Not the Artist

A thought provoking article for those of you who are fans of Steve Jobs. Not of his work, but of his leadership style. This article answered a lot of questions that went through my mind while studying "Trait Theories" last semester, especially "The Great Man Theory". Mr. Jobs was the first leader who came to my mind the moment I heard it. And then, as most would probably do, I wondered, "If this theory is a challenged as inaccurate, how did Steve Jobs become so successful?". This article answered that question too. Good read.



Decoding Steve Jobs: Trust the Art, Not the Artist - Bill Taylor - HarvardBusiness.org

"Leaders who want to both change the game and stay in the game for the long haul have come to appreciate the power of "humbition" over blind ambition. What's humbition? It's a term I first heard from Jane Harper, a nearly 30-year veteran of IBM. It is, she explains, the subtle blend of humility and ambition that drives the most successful leaders — an antidote to the know-it-all hubris that affects so many executives and entrepreneurs.

Humility is not part of the Steve Jobs leadership repertoire — and that's worked out fine for him. But humility has become a crucial part of the job description for leaders who aren't Steve Jobs. So marvel at his products, applaud his feel for design, wonder at his capacity to cast such a large shadow over so many industries — and, by all means, pray for his speedy recovery and long health.

But don't think you'll do better as a leader by acting more like Apple's leader. Trust the art, not the artist."

Mahindra Satyam; Re branded Satyam

Satyam Uses Mahindra Satyam Brand to Reflect New Owners - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

Tech Mahindra, an outsourcing company of India's Mahindra Group, has acquired a 31 percent stake in Satyam. Tech Mahindra made the acquisition through a wholly owned subsidiary called Venturbay Consultants.
Click here to find out more!

Tech Mahindra and Venturbay also made an open offer earlier this month to buy 20 percent more of the equity in Satyam from existing shareholders.

The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer

The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer - Bill Taylor - HarvardBusiness.org

It's time to do — and get — something different. Here, then, are ten questions that leaders must ask of themselves and their organizations — questions that speak to the challenges of change at a moment when change is the name of the game. The leaders with the best answers win.

My favourite ..

6. Can your customers live without you?
If they can, they probably will. The researchers at Gallup have identified a hierarchy of connections between companies and their customers — from confidence to integrity to pride to passion. To test for passion, Gallup asks a simple question: "Can you imagine a world without this product?" One of the make-or-break challenges for change is to become irreplaceable in the eyes of your customers.

Pidgin won't connect to Yahoo since June 17th? Here's a workaround

Pidgin and Yahoo

As of June 17, 2009, Pidgin users are having trouble connecting to Yahoo! IM accounts. Here is a summary of the problem:
Yahoo! appears to be upgrading their servers to a new version of their software. This new version requires a new authentication method. The latest version of Pidgin, 2.5.6, does not support this new authentication method. The next version, 2.6.0, will, but it has not yet been released.

The above link contains a set of alternate IPs (servers that are yet to be upgraded by Yahoo). Just go to Accounts -> Manage Accounts -> Modify -> Advanced -> Pager Server and try testing with those IPs. I can connect using cs101.msg.mud.yahoo.com ... for now.

UPDATE: Pidgin has released version 2.5.7, which solves this problem. Visit the Pidgin site for the update.

Southwest Airlines' Safety Message

Southwest Airlines... More than one Lecturer have raved about their innovative approaches. From Marketing Strategy to Human Resource Management, whenever a case study is discussed, the name seems to make an appearance. How they identified Taxi Cabs as a key competitor, then focused on short-haul destinations making "traditional competitors" of a new airline irrelevant, to creativity in their in-flight service. Even in this blog, one of the Top 5 visited posts is the one I wrote about a Southwest auto check-in Mashup. Don't take my word for it, look at the Live Traffic Feed Widget at the bottom right of the page. I'm sure you'll see a few people visiting that post.



Remember that? Most of us have read the little booklet at least once and heard the mandatory safety message mechanically recited by a Flight Attendant. Apparently some at Southwest are creative enough to make even that boring episode fun. "There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane.", is one example. Here's another I came across today.

"Point 'n' Click" SOA Governance with WSO2 Gadgets

“The processes that an enterprise puts in place to ensure that things are done ... in accordance with best practices, architectural principles, government regulations, laws, and other determining factors. SOA governance refers to the processes used to govern adoption and implementation of SOA.” - Anne Thomas Manes

"Ensuring and validating that assets and artifacts within the architecture are acting as expected and maintaining a certain level of quality" - Gartner

That concisely sums up what most would expect from SOA Governance. It's obvious that one of the most important parts (if not the most important) of any type of Governance, SOA or otherwise, is monitoring. Making sure that everything works according to plan. Raising alerts when things deviate from norms. Let's take a real world scenario.



Imagine driving your car. You expect the car to behave in a certain way. But not all of us are Mechanics. Some people I know don't want to look under the hood at all. Most of us like to leave mechanical meddling to a professional. This doesn't mean that we don't want to feel safe and rest assured that everything works perfectly. That's why there's a thing called a Dashboard in any vehicle. At a glance, this faithful tool tells me what the water temperature is in my Radiator, how much fuel I have in my tank and even alerts me when I'm not wearing the seat belt or when the engine needs to be checked by a Mechanic. If you are an enthusiast, you would probably extend the manufacturer's dashboard with your own gadgets, from gear shift point indicators to Speed Gun detectors (..ahem), the possibilities are endless.

We thought of adopting a similar presentation strategy for our Governance and BAM solutions. From the next release, the WSO2 Governance Registry will ship with a Dashboard along with a set of Gadgets (or Dials) showing you, at a glance, what's going on under the hood. Being an Open Source product, we also made sure that our Dashboard and Gadgets can be easily extended by users. That's why WSO2 Gadgets adhere to the Google Gadget Specification. Now you don't have to be limited by the bunch of Gadgets we ship with our Dashboard. If you know HTML you can write your own or you can add Gadgets from places such as iGoogle.

The Biz School Chronicles :: Diffusion of innovations

From the marketing lectures ...

Diffusion of innovations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Diffusion of Innovations is a theory of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. The concept has been first studied by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1890) and by German and Austrian anthropologists as Friedrich Ratzel or Leo Frobenius [1]. Its basic ‚epidemiological‘ or ‚internal-influence‘ form was described by H. Earl Pemberton[2], who provided examples of institutional diffusions as postage stamps or compulsary school laws. The publication of a study of Ryan and Gross on the diffusion of hybrid corn in Iowa[3] was the first sustainably visible contribution in a broader interest in innovations which was especially popularized by the textbook of Everett Rogers (1962), Diffusion of Innovations. He defines diffusion as "the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system."[1]

Aston Martin Cup - Sepang Malaysia Race 2

Two things I enjoy most in this clip?

1. Notes made by this Aston Martin at each shift (or as Jeremy Clarkson would say, "Gods of thunder.. Gargling!!")
   
2. The car leading being driven by Dilantha Malagamuwa of Sri Lanka
   

Photos from Dilantha's FB.