Youthpad – Page 15

Pluggd.in is a blog covering developments in the Indian startup / entrepreneurship scene. Recently, I won an autographed copy of the book Cash The Crash by Yogesh Chabria (pluggd.in’s review of the book) in a Twitter contest organized by pluggd.in. Took some time to receive my prize because the author was off travelling (Iran, I heard) but it eventually arrived via courier. Disclaimer – This is NOT a sponsored post.

Happionaire’s Cash The Crash is published by TV18 (CNBC, CNN-IBN, in.com…ring a bell?) under its book publishing brand Bestsellers18. I’m sure that if this group ever went into the porn business they’ll name that particular venture Above18.

Yogesh Chabria is an author who, when not writing books or touring Iran, works for Indian stock market watch site Moneycontrol.com. He wrote a book earlier titled Invest the Happionaire Way explaining the basics of how the stock market, share trading et al works. Basically…he’s a Michael Douglas from Wall Street kind of advisor.

"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good"

Cash The Crash aims to explain why the global economy was on the brink of collapse last year, and why this opportunity is a good thing for people in general and for those looking to invest in stock markets in particular. Now, if you’re thinking there’s some of ‘GET RICH QUICK…EARN MILLENS OF DOLLAHS’ kind of thing going on here, perish the thought. The book quite sensibly states that that’s not what it’s objective is; the objective is to explain and make people a bit more financially literate and aware. This is quite specifically meant for a beginner.

I’d already read about why so many banks collapsed last year – in general news media and places like Chirag Jain’s blog. Even when discussing this period, the mood is upbeat throughout. At no point will the book make you feel depressed. Later chapters move on to explaining the importance of keep a good look on your finances and some basics about stock markets work. By basic I mean very basic. (Though, there’s an appendix at the end of the book explaining financial terms succinctly which is quite informative and concise.) This is not a textbook. It’s a book you could gift to your grandmother and expect even her to understand what’s written. This is all theoretical of course since I don’t have a grandmother whom I could test this on, but I expect she would.

What makes this book stand out that is that even a layman would be able to understand how it is explained. The book generously uses examples and explains events / terms using conversations instead of paragraphs of text. This is the book’s biggest strength and weakness. If you aren’t well clued in to the world of finance then it you will find this style of explanation easy to understand. On the other hand, adopting this style also results in the book becoming a bit lengthier, but I’m sure the targeted buyers of the book won’t mind. Also, the conversation are also quite obviously made up. Not saying the conversations didn’t happen, they probably did, but you can make out that the exact dialogue used is written specifically for the book preserving the essence of the conversation that the author would have had with the people mentioned.

What's the need to print this on glossy paper? — What's to show coins at the bottom of EACH page?

Purely talking about the technical aspect, there are a few things which could have made the book a more comfortable read. All pages are printed on glossy paper. Cash the Crash is one book which didn’t really need colour printing – or pictures of coins at the bottom. So, Bestsellers18, why torture your readers into squinting because of the all the glare caused by the glossy paper? This isn’t a coffee table book either – no major photos, diagrams, charts to illustrate. Printing on normal paper – and releasing a paperback instead of hardback – you have made the process of reading easier. I hope Network18 guys listen to feedback. Also would have made the book a lot cheaper (MRP for this edition is Rs 499).

The book also lists itself in the ‘Coming Soon’ section publishers attach at the end of the book. Did you mean…recursion?

Overall, I’d say that if you’re not a finance pro, then you should read this book. It’s optimistic, everything is easily in a conversational way, and doesn’t scare off a beginner with jargon. If only the publishers had made sensible decisions about the printing process and pricing it would be sweeter deal when buying the book.

Originally posted at Youthpad.

I recently did a post titled A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter : Part 1 in which I mentioned the basics of ‘tweeting’. Hopefully, you’ve had some time now to check out Twitter and give it a go. Or you were already on Twitter, and some terms confused you. This post is intended to go beyond the basics of tweeting and get you acquainted with a few other ‘advanced’ features of Twitter. There isn’t much ‘advanced’ you can go in service which allows you to enter 140 characters of plaintext, but each community has its own quirks.

RT (retweets): When you a tweet someone else made and want to share it with your own followers, you retweet it. The traditional way to do this is to add ‘RT @username’ and then repeat that tweet. So in case you liked this tweet of mine, you’d retweet this as RT @ankurb Let There Be Light. http://tr.im/upud #photog. In case you want to rephrase the words used, then you can use another style which goes – mention what you want to say, then add ‘(via @username)’ at the end. For example, This is a nice picture! http://tr.im/upud (via @ankurb).
#hashtags: You might have noticed when browsing your Twitter timeline that certain words are preceded by the ‘#’ (‘hash’) character. Why? Consider this – Twitter has no way of tagging ideas separately. Say you want to comment something about IPL or Formula 1. Now it’s not necessary that your tweet would contain those terms, so how do people searching for that topic on Twitter Search find out your tweet? To solve this the Twitter community came up with the concept of hashtags. Somebody or the other – sometimes the community collectively – settles on a short word / phrase to settle for tagging their tweets, add the # character before that tag, and include it in their tweets. You could tweet “Brilliant shot by Sachin. #ipl2” instead of “Brilliant shot by Sachin”. The former gives a semblance of context.
Twitter Search: On a similar note, Twitter Seach allows you to search certain topics or ideas on Twitter. Unlike normal search engines results are ranked not according to relevance but in reverse chronological order like a blog. You can search directly from your Twitter timeline by using the integrated search box in the sidebar, or use a slightly more advanced search option. Note that Twitter allows you to search tweets only seven days old at max. Beyond that time period, search results simply drop off the search radar. (If you have the direct link to a tweet you can still access that, but you won’t be able to find via search.) In case you don’t know what a particular hashtag which is trending means, look it up on What The Hashtag or TagDef.
Trending topics: This is related to Twitter search. You’ll see beneath the integrated search box that some terms are mentioned. These are the most-mentioned terms right at the moment that you’re viewing it. In a way this is the ‘pulse’ of Twitter. This will give you a good idea of breaking news or what topic is hot at the moment, but you might often find spurious results if you click on any of the trending topic links. What happens these days is that many spammers insert trending topic terms in their tweets; since Twitter doesn’t display results according to relevance your search results might often end up as garbage. You’ll just have to live with this. Twitter is working on a better search engine which also factors in relevance, which might be released in the future.
Follow Friday: I mentioned hashtags in this article earlier but Follow Friday deserves a special mention. Every Friday you might find some people that you’re following on Twitter mentioning some Twitter ‘handles’ with the tweet hashtagged as ‘#followfriday’. This ‘tradition’ started as an attempt to tell your followers about interesting people to follow. Say you find someone interesting on Twitter, and want to tell them about it. On a Friday you can mention that Twitter profile as tweet, optionally with a reason as to why you like the person’s tweets. You could also skip giving any reasons and just mention list of people. I’ll give two examples. One could be “My #followfriday recommendation is @youthpad for interesting articles for the youth”. The other type could be “My recommendations – @youthpad, @ankurb, @funnyoneliners #followfriday”. These are just examples. There’s no strict syntax or rule as such.
Short URLs: ‘Tweeple’ (as Twitter users sometimes call themselves) often use Twitter as a way to share interesting links with their friends / followers. With a 140 character limit on what you can enter, giving ‘full’ URLs to a page can be impossible or impractical. That’s why we use URL shorteners. What these do is that that it allows you to get a ‘short URL’ for a link you want to share that you can mention in your Twitter profile. When someone clicks on this, the reader is redirected to the original site. Some URL shorteners even provide extras such as statistics on who clicked on your links. My favourite URL shortener is tr.im; other popular ones are bit.ly, TinyURL, is.gd, etc.
Twitpic (and other variants): You might want to share pictures that you have taken via Twitter. These are mostly snaps taken on a cellphone which you post via GPRS, but that’s not necessary. What you need is an image hosting service that provides you quick and easy uploading along with a short URL you can share with others. Twitpic is the most popular option, though there are others such as yfrog, img.ly – and even Flickr which provides a flic.kr short URL for all images.
Tweetups: Tweetups are real-life meetings organized by Twitter users. This is done so that you can catch up with people you already know, meet new Twitter users, meet Twitter users you know online but not in real life, or if you’re interested in joining Twitter but want to know more about the service from existing users. Anyone can organize a tweetup – it’s not an ‘official’ gathering of any sort. There isn’t any schedule for tweetups as such either because anyone can organize a gathering anytime. The way you get to know about these is when one of your friends on Twitter tweets that s/he will be attending one. Popular services to organize and keep track of users who’re attending tweetups are twtvite and Upcoming.
Polls: Twitter is a great place to seek instant feedback on something you’re working on, or to ask a query on practically any topic. Once you have enough followers (a few hundred at least), chances are that you will get replies from someone or the other who knows something about what you’re asking. In case you want to conduct quick surveys, try out twtpoll or PollDaddy.
Bots: Aside from human beings, there are many Twitter accounts which are ‘authored’ by bots. These could be spambots on spam accounts pushing pr0n or some other website, or these could be more benign bots which retweet tweets in case they contain a particular term they’re looking out for (like hashgoogle). Then there’s swear_bot which admonishes you if you use ‘dirty words’ in your tweets. The list of bots is endless.

Those are the major terms you might not be aware of as a newbie to Twitter. I plan to do at least one more post in this series, on software and web apps for using Twitter. Do give your feedback on aspects of Twitter you want to know more about or terms you don’t understand; in case I’ve missed something significant I’ll do a fourth part in this series.