Dave Gorman, whose 15 minutes of fame include trying to track down all the Dave Gormans in the world and meet up with them, decides to take on a bet by his friend, also Dave Gorman, to start a chain. It would be a chain of Googlewhacking that would take him around the world a few times, spending his book publishers advances on a quest to get 2 Googlewhacks from every Googlewhacker.
All these mentions of Google whacking should either get me banned or put me in the first page of search results on Google.
Here's a link to his book that I will probably try and pick up soon.
Another book Amazon suggests customers ultimately buy after viewing this item is:
8% buy The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs $11.20
So instead of buying Dave's book, they picked up AJ Jacobs? I really enjoyed his book, it was another one of those quirky, hilarious, idiotic but strangely purposeful reads. AJ decides to go about reading the dictionary, turning it into an obsession and ultimately a book.
I think I have a similar obsessive personality trait to these two... at one point early this year I was asking everyone I knew 3 ways they thought they could get rich. This was most likely because of the books I was buying at the time: Pay Yourself First, Grow Rich Slowly, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Eat The Rich, and Homemade Money (not a book on counterfeiting) to name a few.
Most people suggested playing the lottery, marrying wealth, or selling real estate. Since I was married and didn't own any real estate, the answer was to buy lotto tickets. I didn't go crazy and spend all my money on quickpicks and scratch 'n wins, but I did use some of my pocket change to pick up tickets on a regular basis. How much did I win?
$3 I think.
I didn't measure how much I lost, which really didn't matter to me that much. It was the fact that so many people think the lotto was the way to gain wealth, and it isn't.
Another obsession of late has been the stock market, which is the king of all gambles. Like the casinos, banks and brokeragehouses all have the upper hand and whether you win or lose they will make money. It is only when you step away from the table that they really do lose.
According to Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, "Gambling offers the near-certainty of completely losing the original stake over the long term, even if it offers regular wins along the way."
The "get rich slowly" way, according to all the other books I have read that don't have "rich" in the title is this:
Start your own business
Work hard
Fail, sometimes many times
Get noticed
Become successful.
This seemed to play out well for those with the Youtube view of things. Youtube probably would have been sued into Napster oblivion if it hadn't been for Google coming by with a chunk of change. Google set the trend and opened the coiffers of many venture capitalists who were once-bitten twice-shy about the dot com craze.
Quoting from the story Google's Abject Failure
"In its 21-month life, YouTube has created value at the rate of $80 million dollars a month, sending every venture capitalist and smart kid searching for the "next big thing" in Web 2.0 "
November has seen a huge amount of Web 2.0 sites trying to capitalize on the craze. Remember the Million Dollar Homepage? There's a bunch of copycats. One red paperclip? There's Swapace. Web 2.0?
Well, what really is Web 2.0, but Web 1.0 with less clicks? Youtube's success was probably moving the play button from the toobar to the middle of the screen. The television's success was the remote. The computer's success was the mouse.
Simplification of great ideas and bringing them to life could be the way to success.
