Tag: greenwhite

5 Reasons GreenWhite.org is a Success

Sohaib Athar11 Comments

A guru blogger once shared the following piece of wisdom with me:

Posts with lists are more ‘successful’.

Here is a list of reasons why I think GreenWhite is a successful blog. I have to write this post as a lot of people have approached me this week and asked what GreenWhite.org ( GnW) is all about and whether it actually is a successful blog or not. Among the people who have asked this question are:

GnW, for those who don’t know, is a technology blog focusing on the news, innovations and emerging trends in the Pakistani IT industry. I am no blog analyst, but I would call GreenWhite a big success because:

  1. GreenWhite has built a community – In the two years of its existence, GnW has managed to gather and engage a strong bunch of IT professionals around itself – people who are writing and participate in valuable discussions on the Pakistani IT industry. As a Pakistani IT professional who follows 400+ Pakistani blogs semi-regularly, I do not know of any other IT blog focused on the Pakistani IT industry that comes close in this regard. Do share the address in the URL if you know of one.
  2. GreenWhite serves a small niche successfully – This post is intended to be read by a dozen or so people – it does not matter if 50 or 5000 people read it, as long as the intended target audience gets the message. Similarly, if we stop fooling ourselves, the Pakistani IT industry is TINY – GnW aims to serve this small niche, and if you will go through any 10 random posts on GnW, you will agree that it does the job well, which is another measure of success.
  3. GreenWhite has original content – Since our tiny IT industry does not generate hundreds of news items every hour, so GnW authors have no option but to write original content. The posts on GnW are not ‘originalized’, which is my term for picking up a few dozen ‘blogworthy’ hot news items from a few hundred (preferably before the competition does it, so that your post gets listed for a few Google keywords) and quickly remixing and rewording the resultant body of text before pressing the publish button. To use a hackneyed expression, GnW usually has something to say, while most local blogs have to say something.
  4. GreenWhite has been a catalyst – My first introduction to GnW was through the Startup Insider sessions, which was a commendable series of informal sessions between the wannabe entrepreneurs and the veterans, held in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad in collaboration with P@SHA. Dozens of CEOs and IT professionals were speakers / panelists, and hundreds of people participated in the series, but apparently that endeavor did not get the projection that it deserved, as many IT bloggers say they have heard the GnW name for the first time only recently. Just as the Bloggers’ Meetups are attempting to bring the wannabe bloggers together, the Startup Insiders brought people interested in IT startups together and gave many of them the push needed to ‘do their own thing’. Not many other blogs can claim to ‘walk the walk’. GnW can.
  5. GreenWhite has decent statistics – I think many of the worlds’ best blogs are undiscovered, and usually have less than 100 regular visitors, and yet there are many people just want safety in numbers, so they go by analytics figures, don’t waste time on any blog that doesn’t get trackbacked by a million other blogs and dont read a book until it is a bestseller or a movie based on the book is in production. For people measure success in percentages and clickthroughs, GnW has around 1000 subscribers, is usually in the top 100K blogs on Alexa (and has #666 rank in – though I am not a stats freak, but achieving a sub-100K Alexa rank with 90% audience coming from Pakistan and a few hundred thousand visitors a month, all without explicit SEO might mean something to the statistician sort.

So there you have it, for what ever it is worth, GreenWhite is a successful blog IMHO.

Before I go, here is a bulleted list of pointers:

  • I was approached by strangers (now friends) during the LBM08 event, and then on Skype during the KBM08 event – they wanted to meet and congratulate GnW representatives, and I had to tell them that the blog was based in ISB. I wish GnW was represented in the meetup, but regardless of whether GnW attends any meetings or not, this is the only measure of success that I would aim for if I owned GnW – actually no further justification of success should be required.
  • Hot Chick - reallyI read some twitter friend LOLing and saying that people believe that the success of a blog is limited to those who aim to create a difference in their society. That would be wrong, though I don’t know any blogger who would generalize success like that. I believe that boobie blogs may have their need in the world, just like gadget blogs, social welfare blogs or porn. The measure of a blog’s success is whatever its owner and readers want it to be – sometimes it is thoughts and dreams, sometimes it is rants, sometimes it is monetization by prolific content generation, and sometimes it is pics of hot chicks – but that is just my simplistic view of things, and you are welcome to disagree.
  • To answer another (very enthusiastic, judging from the !!!s) friend who said “… success story? honestly, this is the FIRST time I read this blog or even heard about it!!!” – it is simply because you belong to a different segment. You are facing the west, GnW is facing the east. In the blaagosphere fruit market, you are an apple, GnW is an orange, and there are melons and mangos and hundreds of vegetables, fruits and nuts like me around. Sorry to burst your bubble, but your knowledge of a blog’s existance is not a measure of success – after all, ten years ago, you didn’t know where babies come from!!! (I kid).

Disclaimer/Disclosure:

I have written 3 odd posts on GreenWhite.org so far. They are:

http://greenwhite.org/2008/10/24/rentacoder-says-stay-away-from-pakistanis/

http://greenwhite.org/2008/10/29/rentacoder-removes-offensive-message-and-applogizes/

http://greenwhite.org/2008/09/23/the-evolution-of-begging/

Hope is a Pain-Killer

Sohaib Athar2 Comments

Osama of GreenWhite.org tagged me on FaceBook to describe a metaphor that I would use for ‘hope’. I would have shied away from such an invitation, but since Osama’s objective is to “get people talking” (and hopefully, thinking and doing as a consequence), so I’ll bite and dump my thoughts on ‘hope’ here, but first, the disclaimer.

Disclaimer: These are my own raw and twisted ideas – unresearched, unrefined and uninfluenced by anything Obama (or Osama). I know Obama’s campaign revolves around Hope, but I have deliberately missed his speeches, though his book is in my reading queue.

My personal metaphor for hope:

Hope is a Pain-Killer

At its most basic level, I think hope serves as a harmless ‘filler’ between an action and its consequence. A pool player shoots and hopes that he makes the shot and wins the game. A poker player bluffs and hopes his bluff is not called. A professor teaches and hopes that his students change the world for the better. People doing their thing and then hoping their efforts are fruitful. This is what I call ‘positive hope‘ – a positive force and a good thing in any shape and size. It is still present and available around us in small doses, though very rare.

The rest of this post is about a couple of other flavors, shades and variants that hope comes in, variants that we sometimes mistake for this ‘positive hope’.

Opposite to the ‘positive hope’ is the ‘fantastic hope‘, which is actually a wish in disguise. It is the hope of a negligent student to get an A in the final exam, or the hope of an obese person to look slimmer without exercise. This kind of hope is responsible for selling miracle cures and forms the basis of many marketing campaigns. It is still hope, but the important thing missing is ‘action’, and that lack is something to watch out for.

There are millions of people in the world who have not touched a cricket (or baseball) bat or kicked a football in years, and yet they sit hypnotized in front of their large screen plasma TVs for hours to watch a match, or even go abroad to watch a whole game series if they can afford it. They root for their favorite teams (or their home country), wear the merchandise, talk for hours about the permutations and combinations, and passionately argue, fight or kill to defend the honor of “their” team… and to let corporations sell them “stuff”. They do it every other day, and they do it most of their lives. This is the most abundant form of hope that I see all around me, every day. I call it ‘cotton-candy hope‘.

We read about about how Romans used theater, arenas and gladiators as an energy outlet for their warriors in times of peace – I think that somehow, over the centuries, arts, games and sports have all devolved from a useful tool to keep the “warriors” alert and healthy into factories for hope-generating scenarios, and even though the “war” has changed its form, we have degenerated into hope-addicts. We hope our team wins, we hope the hero of the movie breaks out of the prison, we hope team X beats team Y and changes the standings table so that our team gets to play in the finals. We hope, and we hope because it feels good and because it generates a warm and fuzzy feeling in primitive parts of our brain, especially when our hopes are fulfilled.

Painkillers

Sometimes we amplify the effect of our hopes by putting up personal bets on ‘our’ teams, and experience small hits of joy when we win those bets. Some of us get so addicted that they start hitting casinos in the pursuit of hope – hope that starts from the time we insert a coin into the slot machine and lasts until the time the symbols come to a stop. This is the kind of hope that conditions us until we become the experts of ‘fantastic hope‘ – whenever things go wrong, we start ‘hoping’ them to get fixed by a miracle or some divine intervention, without any action to back it up. As we sink deeper, we wonder about all that is wrong with the world that we live in, and that gives us a reason for further hope.

Just like heroine, a painkiller that has turned into an illegal drug due to abuse, we get addicted to hope to the point where we start hoping that our hopes will materialize into solutions. Instead of using it as a relief from a headache, we start taking the hope painkiller as a panacea to all our problems, and instead of thinking of hope as an after-effect of action, we start idolizing it as the action itself.

Some people may define ‘hope’ as the opposite of fear, despair or a defeatist attitude, which is true too, but just as fear is the mind-killer, hope for its own sake is usually a progress-killer, almost as counterproductive as these negative emotions.

If we really need to select an emotional response to our circumstances and situation, we should try a bit of rage – there is a higher probability of (controlled) rage breaking the inertia and inciting us into action. Once we gain enough momentum through our actions, perhaps we will be able to switch to autopilot and let hope guide us from the backseat.

Startup Insiders Lahore – Braindump

Sohaib Athar1 Comment

As it is almost bedtime (8AM), so I must dump a few very interesting points that were raised at the meet up before going to sleep. These ideas are sticking around in my brain after 3 days have passed, and deserve more discussion, perhaps in another similar session.

  • Its easier to do a startup near graduation – This was a suggestion given by the host, Zia Imran to the young kids there, and were almost the same words that I had used (while pointing towards Sharjeel) only a few minutes earlier. What I actually said to a 30something friend was something along the lines of "These kids are not married, they live with their parents and have the energy to do it". We live in a culture where we don't have to move out of our parents' house after graduation, so I see no reason why an aspiring entrepreneur should not spend a few months during/after graduation to give it a try. They don't even have to drop out of college (like Bill Gates, or more recently, Mark Zuckerberg), and can entice their parents with founders' equity in exchange for free meals. With no children demanding attention four hours a day (or as in my case, hogging the bandwidth) and no grocery shopping to distract their long coding sessions, they can focus on their startup idea like no 30+ person can.
  • Living in Pakistan helps us build our mental muscles – With the competitive education environment that we have (getting an A+ was not the goal in my days, it was getting that '1st position) and the third-world conditions that force us to schedule our lives around load-shedding, we get the exercise in patience and adaptability from an early age that an average American probably lacks. So while Fahd Bangash (with an American childhood + Stanford education, I think) clearly showed his frustration at the lack of infrastructure in Pakistan and his fascination with the quality of life in the Silicon Valley, we also had old salts like Kewan Khawaja and Hasan Rizvi looking at the positive side-effects of life in Pakistan. I think one of the major reasons the Indians and Chinese are so successful "out there" is that after their relatively tougher childhood/adolescent years, they find it really easy to succeed in the West when they suddenly get the infrastructure and the opportunities that they lacked in their homelands. It is also the one of the reasons that some of us stay in Pakistan – with all the handicaps, "making it" here deserves more merit than making it in the US, for example.
  • The quality of life / buying power is better in Pakistan in some ways – Another important fact mentioned in the meetup was that of people converting dollars into rupee while deciding to move out of Pakistan. I believe that there is a definite need for another session that focuses on this topic so that people can make informed decisions about the opportunity costs of going abroad to work seeking greener pastures, people who can see that 4000$ = 240,000Rs. but do not realize that a cab ride can cost 1,200Rs. and a studio apartment rent can be 100,000Rs., or more importantly, that you can't get back at a one day notice to attend that loved one's funeral. 

So I think these topics deserve more discussions, offline or online. I did see a lot of camera flashes but I am still waiting for the video/pics links to start appearing on youtube/flickr. Ideas dumped. Off to sleep now.