BasBasBas.com

Happy new year to everyone! Today while reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying I ran into a good poem to remind you how to deal with new year’s resolutions and figured it would make a great post to start the year off with.

Autobiography in Five Chapters

1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost… I am hopeless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidealk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I’m in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

3) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I see it is there.
I still fall in… it’s a habit
My eyes are open
I know where I am
It is my fault
I get out immediately.

4) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I walk around it.

5) I walk down another street.

One of my own resolutions is to blow more life into this blog, since it has been gathering digital dust for quite a while due to personal circumstances. No more though, just subscribe to the feed (I recommend using Feedly) and stay in touch!

Happy 2010!

As if the amount of blogs and micro-blogs I have right now are not enough… I set up yet another blog. For my final thesis I’m studying the Future of Music Distribution. While I was studying I realized that instead of saving my notes in a document on my computer, it would be easier to post them to a place where I can access them from every computer. Then I thought “why not make them public?” So that’s what I did. I present to  you my new blog, The Future of Music Distribution.

Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging here, but instead of posting 5 updates per day regarding this topic on this blog, I’ve chosen to keep it separate. My ‘life’, travels, pictures and views go on here and all stuff related to my final thesis go on there. Visit The Future of Music Distribution now!

BasBasBas.com is about my life abroad. I regularly write about my adventures in Istanbul, Bulgaria and travels in the region, but like to ponder about the future also. If you’d like to stay up to date, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or get email updates in your inbox. You can also follow me on Twitter.

I am leaving Entrecard. For a while now, I’ve been thinking about it and recent events have made the decision all the more easier. I’ve turned off advertising on my blog. When my last ad finishes, on the 16th, the widget goes. Until that time I’m still returning drops.

Entrecard is a social network for bloggers who can drop by each others’ blogs and earn credits in return. With these credits, they can advertise on each others blogs. A nice system, but in the end it’s not worth it for me.

8 Reasons to Quit Entrecard

If you’re a blogger using Entrecard, don’t take any of the following points personal. If any of them insult you, please keep reading on until the end of this article.

1. Poorly invested time. Unless you’re on a very fast connection, it’s going to take you a considerable amount of time per day to get the best out of Entrecard. To get the best out of it, 300 drops per day is a must and its results are spectacular then. However, your time is better invested in discovering and commenting on relevant blogs, using Twitter and more actively engaging the blogosphere, because…
2. Entrecard traffic has low value. Much of the traffic generated through Entrecard just inflates your statistics and increases your bounce rate. Many people just “drop and run”, as it’s dubbed in the Entrecard community. In the end, the traffic has more value than that of most social bookmarking services, but is for the most part still of low value.
3. Bad quality blogs. I’ve had it with low quality blogs. There are too many of them. Poorly written content, grammar and spelling mistakes all over the place, lots of sponsored posts, bad designs. Stay away from me.
4. Non-interesting blogs. I suppose making a blog about your cats is fun, and I’m sure it’s fun for many others to read it, but I’m simply not your target group. You don’t need me on your blog and I don’t want to be there to be honest. There are many other types of blogs I am not interested in that I had to visit because of returning ‘drops’.
5. I don’t care about your ‘hubby‘. Dear Stay/Work At Home Mom (SAHM/WAHM) bloggers, please erase this word out of your vocabulary. If I see it one more time I will puke. Never thought this word would end up on my own blog. Refering to your spouse like this in every one of your blog posts is like two ugly people making out right in front of me. My stomach cannot help but revolt. Sorry. I guess Entrecard has brought me to your blog, but I doubt you really want someone like me there.
6. Linkback building obsession. My God, is there an immense obsession with getting linked back on Entrecard. It’s good to get links back to your blog, because it helps to build your status in search engines. Google Bombs are proof of this. Entrecard is a BAD place to build your linkback. Firstly, you want to get linked back from blogs and sites that are relevant to your site. I don’t need topdropper links back to my page from blogs about cars.
   Secondly, I don’t want to give “link juice” out to unrelated blogs. It’s unfair to the related, relevant or highly interesting blogs that I link to. More about this on SeoBlogr. I read a better article about it recently, found it via Entrecard, but forgot to bookmark it. Doh! So stop caring about your Google PageRank (PR) people, I have zero PR and I get a LOT of search engine traffic. Start worrying about writing good content, writing some linkbait and having high keyword density (but not too high or you’ll get flagged as spam ).
7. The captain is drunk. I’ve put a lot of energy into the community on the Entrecard ship and we’ve sailed far and become friends, but the captain has been making poor choices and I suspect he’s incapable of taking this censorship much further. I love the community on board, but I’m getting off before we hit an iceberg. Graham, the owner of Entrecard, is childish and yesterday banned one of Entrecard’s top users. As you can see in the comments, many people are outraged. I think this was the final proof of Graham’s immaturity and incapacity to make the right decisions at the right time. Although Turnip‘s tweet wasn’t a great show of maturity either. While Graham is saying the negative publicity is only good for Entrecard, his poor leadership is not and new and current members will soon realize that.

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Just started a new blog. You should check it out.

It’s basically a trendwatching project into what’s hip and cool on the web. The must-sees and must-knows!

Go to webfads.basbasbas.com now!

Hello everybody!
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Today I more or less spontaneously decided to haul over my site. The main reasons for this being:

• Wanting to update to WordPress 2.5;
• Wanting to switch from Fantastico, to SimpleScripts for maintaining the installations of my blog;
• Not being completely happy with the previous layout of the blog;
• There being some bugs that needed to be removed with sledgehammers.

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So, I pulled out my sledgehammer and smashed my blog! The main challenge I was facing initially was that I had to figure out how to export the old blog and import it into the new one without having to move to a different URL. I made a new installation of WordPress alongside the old one and tried renaming the installation folder, which didn’t work out so well, as I had expected.
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In the end I basically just took all the uploaded files from the old blog, exported all posts and comments, uninstalled it, installed a new blog in the same location, put the uploaded files into its directories and imported all posts and comments. Although it was displaying some errors during importing, everything seems to be working fine.
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Okay, so what’s new:

• Probably most obvious is the layout – hope you like it!
• I am working with WordPress 2.5 now, which is a delight and will make my blog a lot more dynamic!
• When you comment on a post,  you can now enable email notification so that you can keep your ear to the grapevine!
• On the page of each post, you will now be able to see a list of related posts!
• Clickable tags will start showing up in posts.
• A neat list of categories at the top of the page!
• A Twitter menu at the left, so you can stay up to date with what I’m doing!
• Only 5 posts displayed on the main page, instead of 10. I might change this though.

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There’s more! You’ll just have to find out about those yourself!
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Hope you like the new site!

Just had a conversation with my academic placement supervisor and it looks like I’ll be getting a very good evaluation for the work placement I did with the Bulgarian National Radio. These are the main things I discussed with him:

1. what did you learn that you didn’t expect to learn?

One of the things I really learned was to be flexible. First of all, this was because of working in an institution instead of doing my projects within an academic and theoretical environment. There were a lot of barriers between me and my goals and I had to figure out how to get around that. Another reason why I had to be flexible is because of the organisation being Bulgarian. Meaning that things were often rather rigid and bureaucratic and I had to constantly adapt to the situation and expect to have to adapt and be flexible.

2. what did you not learn that you had hoped to?

There was one particular research project I was doing amongst listeners which I would have loved to start sooner, so that I could have executed it on a larger scale and would have learned more about research in the process. I can not go into detail about that on this blog, but planning and looking ahead is the key here!

3. what would you change about your placement?

Not much, except I would secure it earlier and prepare more coordination. Have more people who can help me out and secure a part of their time so that they can help me out if it’s necessary. Besides that I would do the research project I mentioned juts now earlier and I would love to do an evaluation of the internal communication of the radio. That is, if there are influential people within the radio who are willing to listen to my findings and are ready to make some changes or do further research based on those results.

4. what advice would you give to a student going on placement in order to help him/her ave a better experience?

- Be flexible: expect the best and prepare for the worst!
- Be proactive: don’t sit around waiting to get tasks handed out to you. Create your own job! This will make things A LOT more interesting for you as well as for your employer.
- Be valuable: make yourself an asset to the company. Be of value to the company, so that when you leave, the company loses something valuable that they would like to keep or get back. No matter what your plans are, do this! Even if you don’t plan on coming back or are actually planning to never come back; do it!
- Be original: don’t go and don’t do what everyone else is doing. Pick an original company or organisation for your placement. Pick an original destination. This will make you learn so much more, will make you have so much more fun, will make life so much more interesting for you. Besides that, it will impress your host organisation, your professors, your social environment, as well as potential future employers when they see this on your CV! However, if you are not willing to be flexible and proactive then forget it. Go do what everyone else is doing or you will not make it. If you don’t feel like having to make the best out of situations, but prefer to be passive, then you are not fit for the exceptional.

I hope this helps you out, whether you’re a student looking for a placement or currently on a placement or just someone interested in career strategy. Make sure to come back for more!

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