After several months of procrastination, I finally got off my ass and got a slick set of personal cards for myself. Check ‘em out:

The “The market for something to believe in is infinite” drawing is by Hugh Macleod. The card was purchased through the Hugh’s special store on StreetCards.

I can’t wait for them to arrive!

Happy 2007 everyone! This year, new years eve wasn’t very exciting for me. I’ve had a pretty bad case of the flu for the past 3 days and as a result have been stuck at home. Clearly 2007 hasn’t gotten off to a great start for me but I’m sure the rest of the year will be much better.

So let’s see, as one of you pointed out to me, it’s been almost six weeks since my last post. As I said in that last post, I was leaving for a family vacation to Germany and India. The trip was pretty cool. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring a camera with me so the only pictures I have are those off of my sister’s camera. I’ll post a link once my sister puts them online. Germany struck me as the most similar to the US compared to the all the other European cities I have been to. In terms of tourist destination, Germany is not really that great in my opinion. My sister and I agreed that Munich looked like it was one big Disneyland set. The reason is that while much of Munich is newish construction, the architecture is made to look very classical German. So what you get is a bunch of new, old-looking streets. As for Berlin, the (20th century) history in the city is pretty amazing. Our hotel was literally spitting distance from what one of the last remains of the Berlin Wall. All over the city you find points of recent historical signficance. After Germany, we spent time in India visiting family.

One thing from my time in India that really struck me was how the Internet is still just beginning to make an impact in the daily life of the average college-educated young Indian adult. In India, you’re basically looking at 100kbps DSL as the best broadband in the home - and from my experience it’s flaky even at this low speed. Few of my cousins - even those that are in the tech industry - blog or socialize much online. Sharing photos much less videos on the Web is not big at all there, I’m assuming because the Internet speeds at home are so poor.

From a mobile standpoint they are quite advanced though. It’s typical to see that every family member has a cell phone and in fact many households use a wireless local-loop service that replaces the land-line local loop provider (many buildings have really poor phone wiring which makes having a land-line phone pretty useless). Because most homes are built with steel+concrete walls, it seems like 802.11 is basically nonexistant. I didn’t see a single wi-fi hotspot the entire week. Instead, for the few business professionals who need it, tethering your laptop to your cell phone is more the norm. What’s intersting is that Airtel, one of the popular mobile carriers over there, has a wap portal called Airtel Live, which I noticed many of my relatives using via their cell to get news, stock market notifications, movie times, etc.

It’s almost like India is kind of leaping over terrestial datacom infrastructure and going directly to wireless/cellular infrastructure. Once wireless/cellular broadband shows up in India, I think we’re going to see a really massive explosion in Internet consumption amongst the typical middle-class Indian young adult population - which at xx% of 1+ billion people represents a group of people that likely approaches or even exceeds the entire population of the US. The opportunity over there is pretty mind-blowing.

Anyway, enough about India. Let’s talk 2007. One resolution of mine is to blog more frequently. In the past I’ve tried to put some real deep thought into most of my posts. Sometimes that has meant each post taking several hours to write. This has often discouraged me from blogging. While blogging is something I enjoy, I often am short on time. Instead, from now on I intend to post more of my daily observations and when I do feel like writing in-depth about a topic, I will break it up into a series of posts.

Actually, I have more updates for y’all but in accordance with the aforementioned resolution, I will save it for my next post. =)

As you’ve probably noticed, my post frequency has dropped off significantly for the past couple of months. The reason mostly has been because I’ve been working hard to finish Stuffist, the new “stuff”-oriented social site project of mine.

Stuffist is based on two basic premises.

The first is that when you buy something - say a new shirt or a new cell phone - part of the excitement is showing it off to your friends and colleagues. There’s nothing better than showing up to class or the office with your new shirt on and getting compliments. In the online world, driven by this same motivation, people post pictures and descriptions of their latest purchases on their MySpace page, blog, forums, etc. On Stuffist, you can post your latest purchases for everyone to see. Others rate and comment what you posted.

The second premise is that when shopping, an important consideration in your purchase is what others will think of your purchase. Few people go to the mall themselves. Instead we go with others in order to feed off one another’s opinions. Similarly, before buying something online, you’ll often send the product link to a few other people to get their validation. Many stores provide a “most popular items” in order to help guide you to a purchase when you are unsure. The bottom line is often times, we just wanna know what the hot new stuff is. The goal of Stuffist is that you can search for “women’s jeans” and see what jeans other women have bought recently and how each was rated by the community. Or in your spare time you just can browse around by categories and tags to see what other people are buying.

Anyways, I’ll write when I return from the trip. In addition to Stuffist, I have a long backlog of topics I want to blog about. I’ve been neglecting my blogging activities lately and I’m not happy about that. I’m also going to be reading some selections from the Personal MBA reading list during the almost 40 hours of flight time so I’ll have some book reviews & notes to share. Have a nice Thanksgiving!

In the past 24 hours, Its Rishi was visited by readers from over 18 countries:

• Australia
• Poland
• Germany
• China
• Sri Lanka
• Pakistan
• Finland
• Ireland
• France
• United Kingdom
• Brazil
• Netherlands
• Canada
• Indonesia
• Denmark
• Italy
• Viet Nam

..and of course the USA. How cool is that?! I’m honestly not sure why all of you international foks are coming (OK, that’s kind of a lie because I have analytic software that tells me) but it really is pretty amazing to me that you do. When I started this blog in November ‘05 I had 2 readers on a good day.

One of my more popular posts for the past couple of weeks has been MyTube = YouTube Ripper. Concrete evidence of the worldwide popularity of YouTube. I didn’t expect that this post would be that popular but I’m more than happy to get the attention. =)

“The era of the blockbuster is so over. The niche is now king, and the entertainment industry – from music to movies to TV – will never be the same.” says Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine.

Mr. Anderson has written an article that clearly articulates a trend in media that you and I have observed over the past few years but since it has been gradual, it may not have struck you as being as dramatic as it truly is.

Let’s look at some facts:

• Twenty-one of the all-time top 100 albums were released in the five-year period between 1996 and 2000. The next five years produced only two
• Time spent listening to the radio is now at a 12-year low, and rock music is among the formats suffering the most.
• The average top 25 blockbusters in any given year so far this decade have accounted for 5 percent less of the total box office gross than in the 1990s, even as they’ve cost 57 percent more to make.
• Today’s top-rated show, American Idol, is watched by just 18 percent of households. During the ’70s, American Idol wouldn’t even have made it to the top 10 with that kind of market share.
• the number of weeks the average best-selling novel remains at the top of the list has fallen by half over the past decade.

OK, enough with the facts. Read the article

Whether you realize it or not, the interactions you have with other people and businesses are a big part of your identity. Every interaction you have says something about who you are. If you kept a journal that summarized every interaction you’ve ever had, that journal would paint an accurate picture of yourself.

Of course, no one actually writes down summaries of interactions they have. However, while you may not actually write anything down, you are likely to record in your head a little memory of the experience i.e. “My barber John kicks ass. Another bitchin’ haircut!” or “WTF, the drive-thru guy seriously doesn’t understand a word of English. I’m never going back! “. Those memories of your experiences usually just remain in your own head. You might share your experiences with friends and family, but that’s about it. As a result, you, and maybe your friends, know that your barber John rocks, but at the same time there’s many more people in your community that are either in search of a good barber or are walking into John’s barber shop with no clue of what to expect.

So what’s a solution? The (now) obvious answer is to rely on members of the community to publicly share their experiences with one another. I can read about the experiences of others who have interacted with this person/business. Generally speaking, this additional information will help me determine whether I want to interact with this person/business.

Okay, so blah blah, what I just described is simply the concept of what we now know to be a community feedback system. Far and away the largest, most mainstream feedback system belongs to eBay. eBay’s feedback system works well because it is a very tight system. Each user on the system is required to validate their identity and each feedback entry is linked to an eBay transaction. Because of these two requirements, it’s relatively difficult to game their system.

People networking sites from social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace to career networking sites like LinkedIn are founded on this principle of exposing one’s identity and reputation for a possible gain. Users of LinkedIn are encouraged to thoroughly describe their backgrounds and solicit endorsements from past colleagues to bolster their professional reputations. The same thing happens on social networking sites. In both cases, your profile page is your reputation so users naturally want to pad it as much as they can. The problem with these sites is that they are much easier to game. There is no concept of identity verification and one can easily fabricate a profile. Nevertheless, networking sites continue to grow rapidly in popularity and will likely be a force to be reckoned with in the identity/reputation space.

For quite some time I’ve been thinking about the implications of reputation on both personal and business interactions in the Internet of the future. One of the most intriguing topics around reputation is privacy. Of course, I want to use my reputation when it can help me get what I want. For example, I’m generally protective of my credit history, but when applying for a loan, I’m more than happy to divulge this information to help me obtain better loan terms. Similarly, even as recently as a decade ago, one’s resume was considered to be a fairly private document. Nowdays, many people make their resumes publicly accessible on the Web in hopes of landing an even better career opportunity.

Right now, fragments of your reputation are spread all across the Internet on different sites. It’s all but impossible for anyone to assemble those fragments to get a complete view. Let’s say you have a a couple eBay transactions gone bad. What if a bank saw that and rejected your loan application because of it? Sounds kinda farfetched but is it really that crazy? After all, your eBay feedback represents real transactions that you were involved in. So, really, we want to utilize our good reputation when it will help us but mask any negative reputation when it might hurt us.

And that is precisely where things get complicated. First of all, how should reputation be applied? What are its boundaries? How can your reputation in one space be applied to another space? Does it make sense? Who gets to decide? As it is now, most reputation systems are closed systems so for now there is no cross referencing. I can have a horrible reputation on a dating site and no one outside of that dating site will ever know.

One site that’s trying to knock down those boundaries is RapLeaf. They’ve built an open community system. Any site in which the users exchange feedback can integrate with RapLeaf. Initially, they’re focusing their attention on the classifieds and bartering space. Basically every site but eBay. There certainly is value in bringing together reputations from many different communities into a single place. If your reputation is stellar across all the communities, then this is a big win for you. However, if you have some holes in your reputation, now they will be visible across many communities. RapLeaf’s mantra is “it’s more profitable to be ethical”. While this mantra makes sense in the context of transactions, the idea of being “ethical” does not always make sense in other contexts.

The bottom line is that within every community, no matter how small or large, that we belong to, we have a reputation. The Internet is slowly revolutionizing how that reputation can be used for and against us.

Hmm.. this post didn’t really come together as much as I wanted too. There’s still some more points that I wanted to cover like universal/portable identities but this post is already too long and disjointed so I’ll stop now…

While I do actively manage my personal investment portfolio, I still consider myself to be a fairly green investor. I own just a few individual stocks that I’ve held long positions in. Most of my money is invested in about 15 mutual funds. One aspect of trading that I’ve always been curious about, but never actually tried was options trading. I understand the mechanics of options but I never understood if, when and how I should be utilizing this form of trading.

A college buddy of mine, Kevin Chou, recently launched FinanceHuddle where he discusses his investment strategy and his own trading activities. I asked Kevin if he could summarize options trading and contrast it with buying/shorting stocks. He graciously did so in his latest post, Using Options - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I had to read it a couple times over to fully digest what he wrote, but having done so I feel like I have a much better understanding of options trading. Thanks Kevin!

In the past 24 hours, I’ve suddenly experienced a huge influx of spam comments on this blog. At first I was very annoyed. My e-mail inbox was flooded with new comment notifications from WordPress. I had to login and delete (and subsquently blacklist) them all. After about an hour of being annoyed, a thought occurred to me. “Why am I getting attention from spammers all of a sudden?” In a way, it was actually kind of flattering. In the past, I have gotten just a handful of spam comments presumably because the spammers were busy spamming other sites that were more worth their (bots’) time. Then, I realized that maybe…just maybe.. my Google PageRank had gone up and thus made my blog more appealing to spammers. I checked and, in fact, www.itsrishi.com, is now marked as PR5. Now, to be honest, I’m not sure why I have a PageRank as high as 5. My backlinks don’t really seem to merit it. I’ve had some big (PR7-ish) blogs and aggregators point to some of my posts but those sites also have a large number of outgoing links. PR5 really does seem high. Is it a glitch? Possibly.

I’ll check my PR again later and monitor my metrics to see if I have any boost in traffic referrals from Google search result pages. If, in fact, itsrishi.com is a PR5, I should notice a boost in search referrals especially for popular keywords for which in the past I would be shoved waaayyy to the bottom, even if my post had good relevance.