As a little kid, whenever anyone asks me what career I want to pursue when I grow-up, I tell them that I want to be a Managing Director. My cousin gets embarrassed whenever he hears this and scolds me that there is no such career! Well, that was what I wanted. At the back of my mind I wanted to occupy a big office and sit on a big executive swivel chair issuing instruction to subordinates! Funny enough, I never bother to think about what I was going to be managing (a hospital or a blog, lol). I was only focussed on, the big title, big office, big executive desk and swivel chair and subordinates standing at attention while I issue commands. Pretty childish, but I held unto it until I did a course in the University, Entrepreneurship Development. It was then I was forced to think about what service I will be rendering to the consumers!
Unfortunately, an average would-be Nigerian Entrepreneur is still having that faulty frame of mind. If you ask an average Nigerian, he will tell you “I want to do business” meaning I want to be my own boss, I want to be a “Chairman Managing Director”, an entrepreneur. The phrase Managing Director is regarded as a status symbol, not a job designation for an Entrepreneur (If you listen to some folktale-musicians in Nigeria, you will understand better what I mean). I get really bothered when I read posts in Nigerian Forums that shows that even some of the educated ones are still reasoning along that line. (more…)
Archive for April, 2008
Entrepreneurship Is Not For The Lazy
Monday, April 21st, 2008DADDY’S EMPTY CHAIR
Sunday, April 20th, 2008A man’s daughter had asked the local minister to come and pray with her father. When the minister arrived, he found the man lying in bed with his head propped up on two pillows.
An empty chair sat beside his bed. The minister assumed that the old fellow had been informed of his visit.
‘I guess you were expecting me’, he said.
‘No, who are you?’ said the father.
The minister told him his name and then remarked, ‘I saw the empty chair and I figured you knew I was going to show up,’
‘Oh yeah, the chair,’ said the bedridden man. ‘Would you mind closing the door?’
Puzzled, the minister shut the door. (more…)
Naija Professor vs Englishman
Saturday, April 19th, 2008I got this funny joke by email from my friend, Dot2Power . If you are not a Nigerian, it might not sound so funny. The joke is about a non-English professor trying to show-off his mastery of English language by using difficult words in place of simple ones. Enjoy!
Caution – Please Look for a Dictionary Before Reading 😉
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Blog Comments – To Follow Or Not To Follow?
Friday, April 18th, 2008I have been a bit confused on which side to be in the controversial “DoFollow” and “NoFollow” debate. Each proponents have cogent reasons why their idea is the best for a blogger.
The term “nofollow” is an instruction to search engines such as Google that a hyperlink should not influence the link owner’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to discourage spammers, thereby improving the quality of search engine results. Unfortunately, it makes nonsense of the potential benefit that bloggers who drop comments on a site would have had since the links to their site adds no value to the popularity of their sites.
I read convincing points in the post of Mehul, I encourage you to read the full post (I do not want to reproduce the whole article here).
However, today after reading Jeff and Hardley Jane’s arguments, I have decided to join the “DoFollow” group.
In order to still take advantage of some of the points listed by the “NoFollow” group, I installed a plugin NoFollow Free that gives me some control on who I will allow to have a “DoFollow” and those I will deny. I will be experimenting with this decision for a month. If the result is undesirable, I will change and make an update to this post.
I sure will love to learn from your experience via your comments 😉 . Thanks for visiting. Cheers.
New Alexa Rankings System
Thursday, April 17th, 2008I got online this morning and I was greeted with a drastic drop in my Alexa ranking. Yesterday it was reading 315,865 but this morning I saw 102,798 that was too drastic a drop and I was wondering what happened overnight. Is there a sudden surge in traffic to my site (I wish that was the case)? When I visited the Alexa site, I was greeted with a banner announcing that the Ranking System has been changed.
Yesterday, a blogger, A Nairobian’s Perspective!, blogged about my ranking being 88 for Nigeria. I was excited then, but when I checked my ranking for Nigeria today, I discovered that it has dropped from 88 down to 157. So I guess the new system has modify the old algorithm that was being used for calculating site rankings. The Alexa team explained that the new Ranking System is more reflective of the popularity of the sites being ranked. Also the ranking is not restricted to the Alexa Users Community. I believe this is a welcome idea. You can read more about the new system on their website here.