The 7 Links Challenge

Being a constant reader of Problogger.net (for a good 4 years now) I just couldn’t miss the opportunity to take this 7 links challenge Darren posted a few days ago. What is the challenge about? It’s a blogging exercise in which you try to identify 7 links, both in your blog and in other blogs, based on some simple semantics. If “simple semantics” sounds complicated, it’s on purpose, I wanted something intellectual in my first paragraph. My last post (huge and 98% purely technical) freaked out a good part of my readers. The message is simple: nobody stole that Dragos Roua you know, I’m here and I’m doing blogging as usual :-).

Let’s start the list:

1. Your First Post

That would be a blog post called Blog alive! Why? . It was published in December 2006. At that time I was still a very busy entrepreneur, running an online publishing business in Romania, an that took me all the available time. And then some extra. I mention in the post the Romanian blog I was keeping as part of my active involvement in the market. That blog is gone, but this one is still alive.

2. A Post You Enjoyed Writing The Most

The Sun Always Rises At Dawn – this describes my experience as a Romanian soldier during the Romanian Revolution in 1989. It’s a very personal blog post and every time I read it I’m actually reliving those days. The experience by itself was frightening, many times I was near physical death, but since I managed to survive, it transformed into an incredibly valuable lesson.

3. A Post Which Has A Great Discussion

Not your usual type of discussion, but a really great one, at least for me. Start Your Day In 33 Different Ways – the post describes, as you can easily realize from its title, 33 ways to start your day. Surprisingly though, the comments were about a so-called sexist approach I had in one of those points. I was baffled – and as I write this – I still am, by the effects of our educations on such a simple situation. All I was saying was that women and men are different. And that this is usually a good thing. Read the article and keep the discussion going. I’m not interested in creating a certain outcome for this discussion, I’m simply curious about your opinion.

4. A Post On Someone Else’s Blog That You Wish You’d Written

Undoubtedly How To Discover Your Life Purpose In 20 About Minutes, by Steve Pavlina.  I don’t know why this article stood up in front of me when I thought which one I wish I’d written, but it did. Maybe because 5 years ago, in 2005, very few bloggers had the courage to write such personal stuff. I read many more articles by Steve since then and I also attended his first workshop in Vegas, October 2009. In many aspects I went over and above Steve’s articles and although we do share some common views on life and success, I took quite a distance from his work in the last few years. In a way, his Twitter profile says a lot about his life mission: “I’m a human alarm clock, I wake up people from sleeping their life. Then I duck“. Once you get to the ducking part it’s not useful anymore, but the waking part is invaluable and I’m really grateful for it.

5. A Post With A Title You’re Proud Of

How To Defrag Your Mind In 5 Easy Steps. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to like this title (and the article in itself). Lifehacker.com featured it in a post and to be honest, that was the first time I realized that A LOT of traffic can fireback really bad. You can say I was “lifehacked” the same way they used to say that somebody was “slashdotted”. The amount of traffic I got from lifehacker.com that day put my server on its knees. That doesn’t make the title less interesting, of course.

6. A Post That You Wish More People Had Read

Definitely 6 Degrees Of Integration. I really wish more people would have read the article and participate in the discussion. The article propose a new model for value propagation, one that is different from the usual value propagation channels we’re used to. In a way, it propose a new economical model, one that will mimic the “web of opportunities” based on real needs and not on profit. I still re-read the article every few months and to be honest, I still agree with everything I wrote in it. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

7. Your Most Visited Post Ever

That would be, without any doubt, 100 Ways To Live A Better Life. The post was featured (just hours after it went live) on Delicious and Reddit and also took a very serious option for the first category pages in StumbleUpon. It still gets a few hundreds visits every day and to date, is the only post on my blog with more than 1000 retweets. In January 2010 I wrote an entire ebook based on this post (an ebook which still sells, by the way) and in February I created the printed version of that ebook. The printed version is available on Amazon.com. Interestingly enough, just before writing this article, I noticed that somebody was actually selling this very book on eBay, at double the price. I don’t have anything against people making money out of my products, if they know the market better than me. To be honest, I never thought eBay would be a place to sell a book like this, especially since you can find the exact same book on Amazon. Whatever. 🙂

Now, a 7 links challenge won’t be a challenge if you don’t challenge your blogging friends to take it (notice the sparse usage of the word “challenge” in this sentence 😉 ). So, without further ado, I’d be really interested to see what are the 7 links of my following 7 blogging friends:

1. Steven Aitchison from StevenAitchison.co.uk

2. Sid Savara from SidSavara.com

3. Farnoosh Brock from ProlifilLiving.com

4. Jonathan Wells from AdvancedLifeSkills.com

5. Robin Easton from NakedInEden.com

6. Mike King from LearnThis.ca

7. Bud Hennekes from PluginId.com

Extra requests (yeah, I’m that curious)

1 bis. Henri Junttila from WakeUpCloud.com

2 bis. Armen Shirvanian from TimelessInformation.com

3 bis. Colin Wright from ExileLifeStyle.com

4 bis. David Damron from TheMinimalistPath.com

5 bis. Adam Baker from ManVsDebt.com

6 bis. Tim Brownson from ADaringAdventure.com

7 bis. Dirk de Bruin (aka Diggy) from UpgradeReality.com

The extra-extra request

Kristi from Kikolani.com