She looked sideways as she became conscious of two boys on a faraway table staring at her. It wasn't surprising, considering she was the best looking girl in Dairy Den by a huge margin. Why are there so few pretty girls? Why hadn't evolution figured it out that men liked pretty women and turned them all out that way?
--
Unrelated images of the day my dad left us flashed in my head. Those images had not come for years. The look on his face as he shut the living room door on the way out. My mother's silent tears for the next few hours, which continued for the next few years. I don't know why that past scene came to me. I think the brain has a special box where it keeps crappy memories. It stays shut, but everytime a new entry has to be added, it opens and you can look at what is inside. I felt anger at my dad, totally misplaced as I should have felt anger at the
earthquake. Or at myself, for betting so much money. Anger for making the first big mistake of my life.

The 3 Mistakes of My Life: A Story about Business, Cricket and Religion
by Chetan Bhagat

“Goals are not only absolutely necessary to motivate us. They are essential to really keep us alive.”
Robert H. Schuller

Enjoying success is a very positive experience. It can weaken influence of other, bad experiences in our life. We often find it easier to act in one direction, when we expect success, while we avoid handling different, unpleasant problems in our life. What is important is that we are often unaware of this mechanism as it mostly works on unconscious level.
- Kacper Wrzesniewski

Source.

Could the whole decade-long explosion of blogging have been a mere fad — the transitory adolescence of a Web destined to grow up? Rebecca Mead's 2000 New Yorker piece about Blogger and Meg Hourihan and Kottke had referred to blogging as "the CB radio of the Dave Eggers generation." Nicholas Carr, meanwhile, compared the blogosphere to the flourishing of ham radio in the early days of broadcasting. It had taken roughly two decades for "social production" of radio to be absorbed into "corporate production," Carr observed. Now, he maintained, with only the slightest hint of regret, the same thing was happening somewhat more quickly to bloggers, as the amateurs got pushed to the periphery by the pros.

Historically, the succession of media forms and technologies follows a predictable pattern: every innovation arrives with a fanfare announcing that it will replace its predecessor. But when the dust settles, the newcomer almost always winds up having redefined that predecessor rather than eliminated it. Radio did not kill off the telegraph. (Although it is now, finally, dead — Western Union shut down telegram service in 2006 — it was the Internet that delivered the final blow.) Television killed off neither radio nor the newspaper. The cinema failed to kill live theater. Home video did not shutter the movie theaters. The Web may be wreaking havoc on the newspaper industry, but it is unlikely to wipe out all publishing on paper in the near future.

Similarly, as people have flocked to Facebook and MySpace and Twitter, they will not stop posting to or reading blogs — but their patterns of blogging will change. The social networks turn out to be an easier and more efficient channel for casual messages intended for a handful of friends. If what you want to tell the world requires only 140 characters, you may well choose to say it on Twitter instead of in a blog post. As a result, some unquantifiable portion of the world's blogging has already started to change, to become a little more deliberate, a little less telephonic in nature.

But there is scant sign of mass abandonment of the form. There's likely to be a long future in which a great number of people who wish to communicate online find the unique characteristics of a blog irresistible. Next to the traditions and constraints of older media on paper or the airwaves, blogging tends to look anarchic and ephemeral and superficial. But next to the crowd-driven networking on Facebook or the stream of Twitter snippets, blogs appear far more substantial and free-standing and powerful. A blog lets you define yourself, whereas on a social network you are more likely to be defined by others. Sure, blog readers can write comments — but the blogger can delete the comments, or disemvowel them, or turn them off entirely. Sure, a blog is dependent on the links you point outward and those that others point in; but it has its own independent existence in a way that no amount of messaging and chat and interaction on a social networking site can match. A blog is not necessarily better than a Facebook profile, nor is it worse; it is, simply, different.

So, while there is no question that the energy that has poured into Facebook and its ilk in the latter part of the 2000s has drawn some of the excitement and media attention that bloggers formerly took for granted, it is also true that the rise of the social networks clarifies exactly what characteristics made blogging last. They are the same traits that once excited its earliest pioneers. A blog lets you raise your voice without asking anyone's permission, and no one is in a position to tell you to shut up. It is, as the journalism scholar Jay Rosen puts it, "a little First Amendment machine," an engine of free speech operating powerfully at a fulcrum-point between individual autonomy and the pressures of the group. Blogging uniquely straddles the acts of writing and reading; it can be private and public, solitary and gregarious, in ratios that each practitioner sets for himself. It is hardly the only way to project yourself onto the Web, and today it is no longer the easiest way. But it remains the most interesting way. Nothing else so richly combines the invitation to speak your mind with the opportunity to mix it up with other minds.

Excerpted from "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters"

Source.

The other money quote from Damon is also misleading and was taken out of context:

That drive to compete with the so-called mainstream media is what’s behind his strategy. He doesn’t have the luxury of a large staff to confirm everything, so he competes where he has the advantage. “Getting it right is expensive,” he says. “Getting it first is cheap.”

Note the break between “Getting it right is expensive” and “Getting it first is cheap.” The break is there because there were paragraphs of dialog between them. Damon saw a way to slap them together to make us look bad. He did that because it fit his original thesis, which he had formed prior to talking to us.

The Real Story

The real story is what I said between those two sentence fragments, and it’s that stuff that makes all the difference. I talked to Damon about how stories evolve on our blog. How it can start with a rumor, which we may post if we find it credible and/or it’s being so widely circulated that the fact of the rumor’s existence is newsworthy in itself. But then we evolve a post to get to the truth.

Jeff Jarvis calls this Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture in a post today. His arguments deserve to be fleshed out into an entire book.

We don’t believe that readers need to be presented with a sausage all the time. Sometimes it’s both entertaining and informative to see that sausage being made, too. The key is to be transparent at all times. If we post something we think is rough, we say so. If we think it’s absolutely true, we signal that, too, while protecting our sources.

A good example of this is another Twitter story we wrote, this time about Google. in Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter (Updated) we wrote, based on a solid source, that Google was in late stage talks to acquire Twitter. The post itself brought out other sources who disputed that the talks were in late stage. Within minutes after posting we had updated the text, adding “Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine. But discussions between the companies are confirmed.”

That update is 100% correct. Google was in talks over a data deal, and there were discussions of an acquisition. Our original source got his information from a Google employee. We have subsequently confirmed that a Google employee did in fact tell him that they were in late stage acquisition discussions with Twitter, because he believed it to be true. There was some internal miscommunication about the discussions.

But anyway, media outlets like the NYTimes think that having to update a story is a sign of weakness. I believe the opposite, that it’s a sign of transparency and a promise to our readers to continue to give them the best information we have. Corrections and updates are made constantly to big news posts.

Some people ask why we don’t just wait until we have the whole story before posting. That’s where the cheap/expensive quote above comes in. The fact is that we sometimes can’t get to the end story without going through this process. CEOs don’t always take our calls when we’re asking about speculative rumors. But when a story is up and posted, it’s amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information.

It’s that iterative process, which Jarvis nails completely, that I was trying to guide Damon to. He can like it or hate it, but it works. And readers love it. The only people who don’t like it are competitors who like to point out that a story was partially wrong, and that they got it right later. But the fact is that they didn’t even know there was a story to begin with. Our original post kicked off the process, and they, like us, started digging for the absolute truth.