To those of you that have been leaving comments… Thank you and I’m sorry that they hadn’t appeared. I wasn’t receiving emails when there were comments to approve. Once you have left a comment once (and been authorized) it does let you leave comments later.

Some Bay Area Baha’is and I have been working on this project called Bahai Top 9 (with precursor site bahainine.com). It’s basically going to be a popurls-look-and-feel, newsvine-styled-organization web portal with digg-like-capabilities in order to showcase user-generated content about the Baha’i Faith.

Our first phase in the project consisted of finding either personal blogs written by Baha’is or Baha’i-inspired blogs that are out there today. We also collected photos from flickr and videos from youtube which are tagged bahai (or baha’i). The design and backend of the site has been keeping us very occupied. :)

At this point, bahainine.com has a registration form for your blog and a map of the world with markers for the locations of the Baha’i blogs out there:

Thanks to those of you that have linked to us and encouraged your friends to register. Also, the Official United States Baha’i website has written a nice article about Baha’i Blogs.

For all the faithful “Kevin’s Blog” readers out there, I’ll include a screenshot of the design we are currently working on:

Keep in mind that it’s in a very early stage of development (alpha). Feel free to include your feedback as comments to this post. I will be sure to pass it on to the team.

This YouTube video (thanks Sara!) has some very interesting statistics. As anyone who has taken a statistis course can tell you, take them with a grain of salt but that’s not to say you can’t clearly see how many of them could be true.

Without taking away too much of the effect of the video, here are some of the facts:

-The 25% of the population of China with the highest IQs… is greater than the total population of North America. In India, it’s the top 28%. Translation for teachers: they have more honors kids than we have kids

-China will soon become the number one English-speaking country in the world.

This I find very interesting:

… the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet… using technologies that haven’t been invented… in order to solve problems we don’t know are problems yet.

I can see how fast the world is changing in terms of technology and keeping up is a mighty task. Technology should be used to improve the lives of people even though at first, it may be unclear how a particular technology will do this.

I also found a report that very cleverly uses maps with distorted countries to display statistics about the world. I found the two maps about toys very interesting: the one about toy imports shows the US as the biggest and the one about toy exports shows China as the biggest.

A recent Lifehacker post linked to a great blog post over at YourCreditAdvisor.com’s Blog.

Here are some excepts from their Top 25 Personal Finance Myths:

I don’t deserve to be rich.
Why not? Intuition suggests that no matter which religion you follow, there are people who are successful and got there by honest means.

As Baha’is, we believe that a spiritual person should be rich. Abdu’l-Baha, the son of Baha’u'llah, the prophet-founder of the Baha’i Faith wrote:

Wealth is praiseworthy in the highest degree, if it is acquired by an individual’s own efforts and the grace of God, in commerce, agriculture, art and industry, and if it be expended for philanthropic purposes.

Another myth:

You have to have X dollars to be wealthy.
Wealthy is what you think it is for you. Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses. Keep things simple.

Which brings to mind one of the Hidden Words:

O SON OF BEING!
Thou art My lamp and My light is in thee. Get thou from it thy radiance and seek none other than Me. For I have created thee rich and have bountifully shed My favor upon thee.

A few more:

Becoming rich is hard work.
It can be easier than you’ve been told. Dr. Marsha Sinetar’s book Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow is one of the best guides for an organic approach to wealth.

Buying on-sale items saves money.
It’s that “use your coupons” myth in another form. What really happens is that the items you buy on sale are items you want, not need. It’s even worse if you drive out of your way to buy it.

Debt is bad.
Managed debt is actually good, and builds up your credit rating. On the other hand, credit card debt tends to be amongst the worst, so eliminate that first.

You need to earn more to save.
Try this. What happens if you suddenly start earning less money in your job? You adjust, right? So save a percentage of what you make and set it aside somewhere.

Lifehacker has computer tips as well as life tips and is an excellent blog to read daily for both the tech-savvy and the technically challenged :).