In Rich Dad Poor Dad Robert T Kiyosaki talks about the differences between those who are wealthy and those who are not, stating that society is sorely lacking in financial intelligence.

Many people in the middle class get stuck in debt because they buy liabilities which prevent them from saving for assets. Expensive mortgages from a bigger house, higher car costs from larger and more expensive cars, having kids, and other similar incremental expenses that come with age perpetually keep people fighting just to get by, even as they receive pay raise after pay raise. If people slow consumption to pay off debt and allow their income to help build assets compounding interest can help them.

Robert also talks about paying yourself first, a concept where you make yourself save money and stash it away before you pay off all your bills. The need to pay the bills can be a force to help you create additional income, although sometimes I think the added stress may not be a good thing for some.

Robert also suggests that money spent on learning / investing in your brain is the single best investment you can possibly make.

As a warning, some of his specific investing examples may require strapping on the wading boots, as noted by John T. Reed. Some statements, such as lose big when you lose, might not be too well in tune with reality for good investment advice for most people. Also Robert T Kiyosaki was not well known until he got together with a group of multi level marketers, which makes some people question whether or not he only got wealthy by / after telling others how to do so.

If you focus completely on the money some of his advice is exceptionally shallow, but some of the general ideas are good stuff.

Biggest, Baddest, ETC:

• Yahoo! says 20 billion items in their index

• At SES DaveN predicted heavy spam problems for them (read as Dave making bank from stuffing spam in their index).
• Interesting to see how little coverage Yahoo! has got compared to Google's similar size matters mentions in the past.
• While Jeremy defends the index size traditional media sources like the New York Times looks to Google co founder Sergey Brin as a credible source to discount the story, and Danny is sick of the size comparisons.
• Google also slightly increased their number (from 8,058,044,651 to 8,168,684,336), which may be an attempt to further refute / undermine Yahoo!'s claim. Gary says Google gave them the new number before Yahoo! did, which makes me wonder if Google has a few people who know the pulse on Yahoo!
• Google always used index size as free marketing it's whole way up, and now that someone is ahead they simply said the figure is useless and everyone agrees. Amazing PR.

Recently NickW started testing IntelliTXT. I dislike those ads. The perfect example of why I think they suck is when the people from Vibrant Media posted "feel free to email us directly" and the word email became one of their green ad links.

The problem with those little green ads is that they are more noise, which goes counter to the less noise more signal tagline on the site.

The audience of ThreadWatch has some serious cash, but what they are most interested in that which is shared freely amongst friends.
The people you make money off are not necissarily going to be the same people who help build up the network though, but you still can leverage that market position and those friendships to help sell a related idea.

I think if Nick created a guide to community building and blogging it would get far more support than my ebook does.

One of Nick's friends said that he wouldn't want to let a guide to cloning ThreadWatch to get out there, but:

• if they were smart enough to clone it they probably wouldn't need a guide

• few people are going to want to work as hard as Nick has building up that site
• few people have as many friends as Nick does
• eventually the fakeness or cloneness comes out in the writing if people try to clone it
• without a highly profitable business model few people will likely want to clone it
• adding more and a wider variety of advertisements to that site goes counter to why it became successful
• as you add noise you lose mindshare, and that is the only thing that will make it possible for others to duplicate ThreadWatch...if it becomes more noise less signal

The first version of my ebook was free and sucked, but over time it got better. If Nick threw something out there and was open to feedback then the people there would help make sure he was offering something they would want to recommend, plus they would be more invested into helping it become successful if they offered suggestions and feedback and his site saved them a bunch of time.

Even if Nick starts off as only a 10 or 20 page guide it can get reshaped and improved as time passes. The key is to just pick an idea and start writing about it. Some people who in the past sent me hate mail now point unrequested link into my sites in part because I accepted their feedback.

As search algorithms advance guides which help people do well with community interaction will have far more value than guides about algorithms and engines, because ultimately the algorithms and engines are just trying to emulate people. For many people it will be far easier to create something others want than to push something they don't.

Recently HitWise jumped into the keyword research market by offering their Keyword Intelligence tool starting at $89 a month. Trellian's Keyword Discovery just joined the competitive analysis market.

It is cool to see another competitive analysis tool available for those of us who can't afford to splash out the $20,000 or so for HitWise. Trellian's new tool costs $65 per month per URL.

A few things I do not like with Trellian's package are:

• limited data reach (most of these types of tools do not have much data when you compare them to the likes of Google or Yahoo!, but none of the big portals have decided to sell this type of data yet, probably for fear of a privacy backlash & bad press).

• they don't have a package deal. you have to keep ordering one domain at a time, which could probably lead to confusing credit card bills and the like.
• When they tell you the number of domains that they have tracked traffic from they don't group the subdomains with the main domains, so that can throw the numbers off.

Before you subscribe they tell you how many keywords and websites they have listed for that domain. They state that they have stats for the top 100,000 domains.

I bought one domain, and did not see any gems from it, but I suppose if you find one or two good spots to market from it then it would be a good buy and $65 is not much risk.

I will post some stuff on the conference soon. Off to the Google Dance.

There are always screwed up things going on in the world, but some of them are moreso than others. This story relates to search, because you really have to search hard to find any information about it...

Recently Andy Hagans mentioned to me that in northern Uganda there is a war where children are being abducted and trained to kill or abduct other children. For safety at night many children are forced to leave their homes and sleep in a pool of overlapping bodies hoping they are not abducted or killed, living in perpetual fear.

Invisible Children is a recent DVD which shows what is going on in Uganda. If you would like, I have a couple of them and I can send you one (just send me an email with address, etc).

The war has been going on for about 19 years and has got next to no legitimite media coverage here in the United States. Andy Hagans has been helping Uganda CAN do SEO, but the problem is nobody is going to be searching for it if nobody knows about it.

Recently some people from Uganda CAN got a bit of coverage on a few articles and on NPR. The online petition to stop the war was getting about 10 signatures an hour, but that number has started to drift back downward :( I think if blogs really got ahold of the story that number should be able to run well into the thousands / hour. With enough voices of concern the US government will hopefully be forced to help the Uganda government face and fix the problems.

Not too long ago, when Ian Turner was missing, search related bloggers helped spread his name to where it was the #1 search term on Technorati. Hopefully we can raise the war in Uganda to #1 as well.

If you do not like the idea of children being abuducted, murdered, and living in constant fear please help. A few options:

• Sign the petition

• Mention and link to the petition on your website. Also tell your friends to link up and sign it.
• donate
• volunteer
• speak out
• for background watch the video or read about the conflict in northern Uganda

Techorati Tags: Uganda War Uganda Children