How to Win Friends and Influence People: A list in 28 points

Frederick Giasson

I just finished reading this book: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I want to resume it, and to do so, I wrote this list of each important point Mr. Carnegie discuss in the book. The first time I ear about that book, I was skeptical. The title could seem selfish and pompous, but it is nothing like this. This book is about out to be more human and a good citizen; it is about being nice with people and how to work with them.

  1. Do not criticize. “Criticism is futile because it puts a man on the defensive, and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a man’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses his resentment.” – Dale Carnegies. Related quotes: Criticism
  2. Give honest, sincere appreciation. “Dr. Dewey says the deepest urge in human nature is ‘the desire to be important.’”. Related quotes: Compliments
  3. Get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle. The thing here is to give to your interlocutor what he wants, and not what you, you want. Related quotes: Desire and Others’ view point
  4. Become genuinely interested in other people. Related quotes: Interest
  5. Smile.
  6. Remember names. “Remember that a man’s name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in the English language.
  7. Be a good listener. “Encourage others to talk about themselves”. Related quotes: listen
  8. Make the other person feel important. “And do it sincerely”

This is the most important points he talk about in his book. However he added other sections that goes in that trend.

Twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking

  1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it
  2. Show respect for the other man’s opinions
  3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically
  4. Begin in a friendly way
  5. Get the other person sating “yes, yes” immediately
  6. Let the other man do a great deal of the talking
  7. Let the other man feed that the idea is his
  8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view
  9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires
  10. Appeal to the nobler motives
  11. Dramatize you ideas
  12. Throw down a challenge

Nine ways to change people without giving offense or arousing resentment

  1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation
  2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly
  3. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders
  4. Let the other man save his face
  5. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in you approbation and lavish in your praise.”
  6. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to
  7. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct
  8. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest

Are you interested in that book? Then I would suggest you to buy one of the first edition. I got a 1937 one on Alibris (make an advance search with edition books from 1935 to 1940). That book is near a century old, it smells the old and it was a real please to read.

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Search engines analysis after 6 days of Talk Digging

Frederick Giasson

Talk Digger is 6 days old. I do not know how many requests I send to know if everything works fine after all modifications I have made on the system. Performing all theses searches give me the possibility to learn some things about these 9 search engines. There are some results I had.

The first thing that I noticed is that Google seems to have some difficulties with the link-back feature. The problem is that young or unpopular blogs/websites seem to be omitted by it. I think that the problem is the slow indexing of unpopular web pages that could cause the “problem”; the crawler just does not crawl them before weeks. It is the exact reason why pinging systems of new search engines is so interesting: it give you the possibility to get indexed in minutes, being popular or not. It is why system like King Ping are so important, it give the possibility to bloggers to instantly ping many search engine ping services. But it could be understandable that Google has not such a service, because Technorati does not have the same traffic than Google, for example.

A thing that is not understandable is when we compare Google with a search engine of the same size: MSN Search. How could we explain the fact that there are 3,931 link-backs tracked by MSN Search and 0 by Google for talkdigger.com after 6 days of activity? A bug with the results of MSN Search? A bug with the link-back feature of Google? A bug in both search engines? Who know…

Then we have the new emerging search engines, mostly blogging oriented. That time, the results will vary from a search engine to another. This is why Talk Digger is useful, some posts will be visible on all search engines, but will be indexed faster by some and slower by others. What is interesting is that many results are only visible on one or two search engines. Why? Two possibilities:

  1. The blog/website owner just do not ping these search engines
  2. The search engine just lost or omit to index the page

My first surprise came from Ice Rocket. Recently, many bloggers talked about it and wrote good words about the service. I am using that search engine since a week, and I need to say that their recently hard work in developing a good blog search engine give results. It is really reliable; the indexing is fast and the results accurate. This emerging search engine became a real player in the search engine industry. How have they reached that state? By listening at their users. This is the key to success folks: do what users want to use, and not what you, you want.

My second came from Technorati. During the first bombing in London, Technorati had many problems with their servers. Many thought that it was the beginning of the end for them. However, I have been really surprised by it during the last week. Their results were the first to arrive, far faster than the ones of Bloglines (except for yesterday and today that they seems to have some traffic problems). In fact, Bloglines seem to have some problem with their “citations” (link-backs) when come the time to search for heavy linked blog like the one of Robert Scoble. Bloglines also seems to have more results than other search engines, but I found that there were many duplicated entries.

What about Feedster? Many people also talked about it recently. They were questioning themselves about the validity of their results. Scott answered to these claims with that blog post. It seems that Feedster always found more results on low linked blogs/websites (except for some search, Bloglines have mores). It is probably a direct impact of the statistical algorithm they are using to estimate the number of entries in their database. However I need to add that sometimes, some entries only appear on Feedster.

Finally, what about BlogDigger? It does not seem bad, but the numbers of results are surprisingly low. It could be explained by the fact that people just do not ping them. However, even if they ping them, the indexing speed seem really low. It explains probably many things about that search engine.

I would like to say a last work about PubSub to clarify how Talk Digger calculate the number of results it returns. The results that appear in Talk Digger are the addition of the InLinks tracked by PubSub in the last 31 days that appears on their “Site Stats” section. It is the way that PubSub works, and it is why you will normally not have as many results compared with other search engines.

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Talk Digger censored, banned, by Chinese authorities

Frederick Giasson

Talk Digger teaches me many things since I am working on it. I discovered many things: I found search engines bugs (I will come back on this in a later post), I learned many Ajax tricks, etc. However, today I learned a thing much more important: the situation of Chinese people and the state of the Internet in China.

I know that the Chinese government censors many, many websites. I also know that Chinese bloggers are even more censored. However, I never really question myself on that reality. This morning, all that ignorance slapped me into the face.

I opened Talk Digger to see who was talking about it and about my blog. Then I found that little post in German wrote by VanVan. I was astonished to see the name of Talk Digger beside the ones of Skype and Flickr. Then I immediately checked my logs: no one connection came from China during the night. She was right: the Chinese government censored Talk Digger. Awesome; I never thought it possible, but it is.

A few Chinese were able to access to Talk Digger via this address: fgiasson.com/td/. However, it seems that they also banned my domain name fgiasson.com today. Unbelievable and how sad. Many, many Chinese had tried Talk Digger in the first hours of online life. Around 24 hours after, the domain name has been put into the censored sites list.

So, could I do something to make Talk Digger available to them? Anyone have an idea?

I could probably build something like an email diffusion list of Talk Digger’s result once a day. Could it work? Probably, I would need to check the possibility. Then, if it is possible, how could I reach them if they can’t even read my blog? I do not have any idea yet. I will need a good night of sleep and hope to get a good idea.

So, many brains are always better than only one; so, you, do you have an idea? Leave it there and I will consider every of them.

Update: 4 august 2005: It seems that the Chinese government did not ban the domain name fgiasson.com… yet. So, if you look to use Talk Digger in Chine, use that URL to access it: http://fgiasson.com/td/

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New Talk Digger update: see the first 3 results returned by each search engine

Frederick Giasson

I just put online an update for Talk Digger. What it does? Now you have the possibility to see the 3 first results returned by each search engine.

How it works?

Now, when you do a search, 3 new icons will appear under the returning result of each search engine. It will looks like this:

What these icons do?

  1. The first one at the left will redirect you to the search engine to see all the returning results. It will redirect you in the current window.
  2. The one at the middle will also redirect you to the search engine to see all the returning results. But that time it will be in a new window.
  3. The last at the right is the more interesting one. If you click on it, a gray box will appear bellow these icons and you will then be able to see the first 3 results returned by the search engine.

Then, if you click on the last icon (the rightmost one), you will see the 3 first results returned by each search engine. When you click on it, the icon will change for a “minus” instead of a “plus”. If you click on that new “minus” icon, the box will collapse.

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The first bookmarklet developed for Talk Digger

Frederick Giasson

This morning, while checking the evolution of Talk Digger over the night, I discovered the first bookmarklet designed for Talk Digger. Thank to Google Translate, I have been able to discover it.

Yasuhisa Hasegawa developed it some hours after Talk Digger started.

How to use it?

First you have to create a new bookmark and to put that code into his URL (more information here):

javascript:q=location.href;if(q) location.href=’http://www.talkdigger.com/index.php?surl=’+q;

Then, when you are surfing the Internet and that you want to know who is linking to the current web page, you only have to click on that bookmark and you will instantly start a search on Talk Digger with that URL; is that not powerful?

So, if you have a bookmarklet idea and want to share it with other Talk Digger users, then feel free to leave it there.