Getting Through The Recession

Three of my colleagues were "let-go" last week. Doesn't seem like a big number, until you take into consideration the fact that the total strength of the work-force at my office, here in Bangalore, is 50-odd.
Needless to say, the news had most of us reeling in shock for a while.

Here's some advice on getting through these trying times.

1. Invest in yourself.

Brush up on your core skills. Learn, sketch, design, code, write, do whatever makes you better at your job.

2. Be frugal.

This one is more pertinent to those of us, living in the metropolitans, where not visiting the mall on the weekend, or watching a weekend movie show for 250 bucks, or dining at that expensive restaurant, or binging on Mr. Mallya's precious produce, has us feeling strangely guilty and cheap.

Presh Talwalkar explains what it means to be frugal here, along with loads of other excellent advice.

"The word frugal is widely misunderstood. Frugal does not mean being cheap or saving money. Frugal means avoiding waste and being efficient."

He goes on to quote Theodore Roosevelt on frugal living :

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

3. Take time to unwind and relax.

Its easy to let the pressures of the work-place get to your nerves, what with all your customers crying their throats hoarse all the time.
With the Christmas season closing in, it's a good time to take some time off, to spend with your family, and give yourself some time to collect your thoughts, and put things in perspective.

Enhancements on Flickr

A few enhancements that I'd like to see on Flickr:

1. Maintain a default set of recently uploaded pictures, with a refresh rate of say, 2 days.

2. A way to maintain a list of people whose work I'd like to follow on Flickr

Through the Flickr blog, or through "Explore", I often come across the profiles of some very gifted people whose work I'd like to keep track of. As of now, there seems to be no other way of doing this other than by adding them as a contact.

What I'd like to see is a feature by which I can mark a set of people whose work I'd like to "follow" on Flickr, and get updates from them, the way you get updates from your contacts, but without really having to add them as a contact.

3. A way to auto-publish content at specific points of time in the future

One of the inherent dynamics of User Generated Content is that, a profile attracts more attention when it is updated regularly, than if the same amount of content were to be posted at one shot.

To elaborate, let's consider the case of blogs. If you were following Seth Godin's blog, would you rather that he posted 30 blogs over a particular weekend, every month on a variety of topics, or that he posted one every day(, or for that matter one every few hours) ?

One of the secrets to having a successful blog or any community-based profile is to post regularly.

When you post content regularly, you not only give people who follow your work, time and space to digest what you are posting, and ruminate over the subject matter, but you also give them a reason to expect more.

Google gets this, which is why blogger seems to provide a feature of auto-publishing content at pre-defined points of time in the future.

It would be great if Flickr could follow suit and allow such a feature, allowing you to auto-publish your pictures at specific dates in the future.

4. Last of all, I'd like to see a wee bit more intelligence on Flickr, in that it doesn't scream out, "Please come back, We Miss you ! Renew Your Pro membership." , even for a first time Flickr user, who's never been Pro to begin with.

Also, I feel the line itself sounds very affected, and has scope for improvement.