Make Your Mark Blog

The Harvard Business Review included an article this month arguing that experts are made, not born. It presents evidence from a variety of studies looking at elite performers who have won international competitions in fields ranging from music and the arts to mathematics and neurolology. A couple of findings I thought were interesting:

• None of the studies were able to identify indicators in young people that predict success later in life
• There is no correlation between IQ and expert performance in fields such as chess, music, sports and medicine

Here is an article that was in FT Magazine over the weekend. It’s about a rather “enterprising” approach to apportioning out kidneys to those in need of transplants. Rather than just depending on the health system to search out available kidneys from the recently deceased, or having people selling their own kidneys on the open market… the idea here is to set up a system where friends agree to swap their friends kidneys to people in need.

An interesting article from Jakob Nielson on why you should write articles rather than blogs. He seems very dismissive of blogs (referring to them as “commodity content”), though he does admit that they have their place in selling cheap products.

Are blogs any more than that? Can businesses use them to generate a sense of community around their product or service?

I think there is a huge potential for small businesses to create communities around friendly blogs. Particularly with the rise of decent RSS aggregators and readers that help you to easily skip over content that you aren’t interested in.

Saul Klein who started Open Coffee Club is now involved in Seedcamp. It looks like some amazing people have got together to create Seedcamp - and they are now looking for “the brightest and the best young technology entrepreneurs across Europe, Middle East and Africa”.

Seedcamp will be like a hothouse - helping young entrepreneurs to secure seed capital, develop the right connections through a network of mentors and provide a catalyst for groundbreaking ‘game-changing’ business ideas.