Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

I say good bye to 2008 with a special edition of the Bilinkis Top 20 for the full year. Tomorrow my top 10 bands… But today, here they are, the Top 20 songs I listened to the most in ‘08.

I invite the readers to share what THE song of 2008 was for each of you…

At the top of the chart, the same band that was number 1 in 2006 with “Truth”, although at that time I did not have a blog so no one know what that it. Great song!

The rest of the Top 5 with a lot of slow music to my own surprise (my ranking is based on what I listen and sometimes I am myself surprised with what I listen!)… It seems my soft side emerged this year. I included links so you can listen to the best songs. Enjoy!

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In this new 2.0 World there are countless sources of information on almost everything. If, for example, you want to decide which movie to see this weekend, Google offers thousands of different sites where you can gather info to make up your mind: newspapers, specialized sites, social networks on cinema, blogs, etc. Which ones are you going to read? Whose opinion will you trust to make your decision?

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The use of the Web 2.0 opens new doors as it gives us the chance to meet a lot of unknown people. For a phobic like me, this is enough to crisp my hair.

Getting acquainted with strangers is not an easy task for me. For instance, I would never chat with someone I don’t know. But, you know what? In my 2.0 life I was twice surprised by this subject.

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How private is your privacy today?

The fact that there is no danger in adopting 2.0 tools does not mean they are free from generating some serious challenges for our privacy. But, let me tell all those who wouldn’t show their photos or share their stuff, the following: our World today is such that it doesn’t matter whether we want to have our stuff online or not, it will be there anyway! More so, unless you live in a nutshell, mostly sure they are already in it. If you didn’t put your data there, a friend of yours did. Or, even worse, an enemy!

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Recently, I gave two conferences at Wordcamp and Buenos Aires 2.0 offering some of my ideas concerning social networks and the Web 2.0. In this post and in a few more to come I will try to share with you the main points I made there. First, a question: Is the use of social networks dangerous?

We frequently hear from those who are reluctant to the use of web 2.0 tools that they do not do so because they find them dangerous. Don’t upload your pictures to Flickr!, they say. Don’t publicize your activities on Facebook, Twitter or Friendfeed! -they add- as someone might use that information to harm you or even kidnap you!

In my opinion, this argument is senseless. At least in Argentina, where the probability of dying in a car crash is MUCH HIGHER than the chance to be kidnapped, let alone die as a result of a kidnapping. We all know that, yet nobody gives up using cars.

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Last week at Harvard University they announced the 2008 Ig Nobel Awards, an interesting version of the Nobel Prizes to recognize research where the funny subject “first makes you laugh, then makes you think”, organized by the journal ‘Annals of Improbable Research’.

The name comes from a pun with the word “ignoble” but there is nothing ignoble about the winners! I would say they are shameless geniuses.

As an example, two of last year’s winners: in Medicine it was won by two scientists who wrote a paper on: “Sword swallowing and its side effects”. You can see above the pic of the moment when they accepted the award.

The Peace award was given to a US Air Force Lab that researched to develop a chemical weapon nicknamed  “the gay bomb” because it makes the enemy soldiers feel sexually irresistible to each other.

Let’s see some of this year’s winners, and then I will propose a contest:

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This is the fourth and last post on the series about paragliding and Entrepreneurship. On the three previous ones we covered the topics of preparing to startup, the startup phase itself and the growth period. Now it is time to discuss about how to deal with adversity.

A while after the pleasant flight of the previous post, large clouds started covering the horizon. As if Nature wanted to help me write this blog, it was a perfect metaphor of how in countries like Argentina, right when things start going well you get a storm threatening to cut your wings.

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The Bilinkis Top 20 is back with the 20 most popular songs for October. There is a new song at the top. And it made me remember that many times I thought if I had to choose only one artist to be the soundtrack of my life, it would be The Smiths/Morrissey.

What artist would be the soundtrack of yours?

Now, on to the rankings!

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The sensation of flying, even at low altitude, is like anything else. But the true challenge (and pleasure) is to be able to fly high.

The next morning after my first take-off, we went to a much higher mountain. It was no longer time for preparation or test take-offs: the time had come to really fly.

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Along the lines of comparing the learnings from paragliding with becoming an Entrepreneur, the first post covered the stage of preparation. Now is the time to focus on the start-up phase. And as Wes Harman, the author of this photo, graciously reminds us, no start-up is ever the first or last to die!

So back to Tucuman and my paragliding course. After two hours of suffering and being blown by the wind on the flat, the instructor said it was time to move on to the next stage: the first take off. We moved to a different location, where we could walk up a hill about 100 feet high. Naive, I asked: “We are going to fly in tandem, right?”. The professor laughed. With only two hours of practice, it was time for my first flight alone.

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