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We tend to think that if people are good at something, it’s because they just have a god-given talent. In a very interesting article by the guys behind “Freakonomics”, there is a body of evidence that suggests that isn’t true at all.

They set out to answer a question, why is it that most elite soccer players are born in the first three months of the year? It turns out that practice, and a very specific kind of practice, holds the key to success in any endevour. If we want to get good at something, we should set specific goals, obtain immediate feedback of how we’re doing, and concentrate on technique more than outcome as we practice.

Read the article here.

Every once in awhile I like to read a little bit of a pep-talk about being an entrepreneur. He’s correct in saying that not every business has to start as a capital-intensive full-time operation. With modern technology and the current trends in the working world of contracting and freelancing, I think there’s never been a better time for starting a small enterprise.

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So, you’ve got a blog, you want a quick and painless way to upload video and have people watch it without having to download a player or do anything special. I still haven’t figured out how to make that happen painlessly. Strocel.com is getting the WordPress 2.0 upgrade tonight, we’ll see if that helps. But here is a good rundown of the top video-sharing websites.

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Techcrunch, an excellent blog that tracks all kinds of new and wonderful web applications, has recently talked about the booming world of online video hosting solutions. Some of these services have gone beyond the usual video hosting, and allow you to actually edit clips online. The idea is that you can collaborate on an edit with other people, sort of an “edit that party video by committee” system.

Check out the article

An interesting article from the New York Times about how television networks are being formed online, bypassing cable altogether. One network in particular, Trio TV used to be carried on DirecTV but lost their spot. So they relanuched the channel on the Internet.

An Excerpt…

“In 2004, Wired magazine popularized the phrase “the long tail” to refer to the large number of specialized offerings that in themselves appeal to a small number of people, but cumulatively represent a large market that can be easily aggregated on the Internet. Plotted on a graph along with best sellers, these specialized products trail off like a long tail that never reaches zero.

Indeed, the Internet’s ability to offer an almost infinite selection is part of what makes it so appealing: people can find things that don’t sell well enough to warrant shelf space in a neighborhood music store or video rental shop — think of the obscure books on Amazon.com. The ease of digital video production and the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections are sending the long tail of video into the living rooms of the world, live and in color.”

Here’s the Slashdot post with links to the article.