D-Blogarian

Google Drive:Moving work to cloud

2012-05-09T18:44:00.001-07:00

Google Drive isn’t really just about storage,it’s about moving everyone’s work to the cloud.

Finally the much awaited 'Google Drive' was unveiled, ending months of speculation about Google launching an online drive.
"Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard rumours about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually exists," Sundar Pichai, senior vice-president, Chrome & Apps, posted on an official Google blog recently.
For starters,user will get 5GB of storage for free.Further Google Drives can be upgraded to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When upgrading to a paid account, Gmail account storage of the user will also expand to 25GB.
Google supports the Drive on both PC and Mac as well as on Android devices(Android 2.1 or higher), and an app for the iOS is promised, and Google Docs is built right into Google Drive so that the user can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

By default, all your Google Docs–Documents, Spreadsheets, Forms, Drawings, Presentations, and Fusion Tables–will sync to your Google Drive folder, unless you disable this preference. Any files and directories you place on your local Google Drive will also automatically sync with your cloud-based Google Drive. Again, you can choose not to let them all sync over.
Using the Web interface, Google Drive’s online interface defaults to showing you all your files in alphabetical order.
In addition, Google includes a unique feature. You can upload PDFs and scanned documents and it will try to translate them via optical character recognition (OCR) into Google Docs,supports keyword searching and has OCR(Optical Character Recognition) software built in.
But how does OCR help?
Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up.

It also has centralised management tools for administrators, encryption on emails exchanged between Drive and the desktop and replication of data "so that in the unlikely event that one data centre is unavailable, your files will still be safe and accessible" Google says, guaranteeing a 99.9 per cent uptime and 24/ 7 support.

Incidentally, the Drive has an Indian connect.'Google Drive' is built by Google's engineering teams in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Facebook Introducing its own app store

2012-05-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

Facebook today announced that it intends to offer what it calls an "App Center" in coming weeks.
For the over 900 million people that use Facebook, the App Center will become the new, central place to find great apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify, Battle Pirates, Viddy, and Bubble Witch Saga," Facebook's Aron Brady said in a blog post.
"Everything has an app detail page, which helps people see what makes an app unique and lets them install it before going to an app."
The site is not yet live and the URL, which will be facebook.com/appcenter, now takes you to a "The page you requested was not found" error page.
The takeaway here is that Facebook will let developers offer paid apps (users will pay a flat fee to use an app on facebook.com). However, one can assume that with over 900 million users on the social network, there will be no shortage of developers attempting to create apps. Facebook's decision whether to list an app on the site will depend on several benchmarks governing design, user ratings and engagement. According to Brady, developers will be able to monitor how their products fare on the App Center with a new app ratings metric in Insights to report how users rate your app over time.
Facebook has created an App Center guidelines page which spells out submission and eligibility criteria.

The following apps will be considered:

An app on Facebook.com in a canvas page.
A mobile app built for the web, iOS or Android that uses Facebook Login
A website that uses Facebook Login and has an immediately logged-in, personalized experience (see App Quality for more info)
An App for Pages built to manage or enhance other companies' Facebook Pages
After creating an application, developers will need to follow these guidelines when creating their app detail pages.
Display Name - Use the exact name of your app, with no extra words or characters.
Short & Detailed Descriptions - Describe how your app works and what makes it unique. Be accurate, so people aren't surprised when they start using it. Use standard spelling, grammar and capitalization. Don't include URLs, excessive punctuation, price information, keyword lists or non-standard symbols.
Category & Subcategory - Select a category that most people would expect. See the category descriptions for more information.
Icons - Upload attractive, relevant, original icons. Icons should be simple and free of visual clutter (ex: buttons or additional info). Different-sized icons should be similar, with no distortion and pixilation.
Cover Image - Choose an image that conveys what your app is all about. Use simple imagery that people will easily recognize, with limited text, shadows, and distracting patterns. Don't use arrows or other references to the buttons below your cover image to encourage people to install your app.
Small and Large Banners - Drive people to your app detail page with visually compelling images that clearly show the name of your app. Don't include buttons, URLs, excess text, promotions, or price information.
Screenshots - Show off unique and engaging parts of your app, and demonstrate how the app is social. Don't use images that are unrelated, misleading, or dramatically different from what most users experience.

Microsoft To provide its Live@edu services to AICTE

2012-04-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has cracked its biggest could computing deal with AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) of providing its Live@edu communication and collaboration software to more than 7 million students and half a million teachers. The project will afford IT access to 11,000 AICTE affiliated institutions across India over the next three months. The cloud deployment will expand student’s access to high-quality technical education and collaboration.

Live@edu is a free suite of hosted Microsoft services and applications that is intended for educational needs. Live@edu service offers email, Microsoft Office Web Apps, instant messaging and storage (10 GB each) to over seven million students and nearly 500,000 faculty members under the AICTE, with a total reach of 7.5 million users - roughly double the size of the Los Angeles population. AICTE is Microsoft's largest cloud customer.

Live@edu platform will include three main offerings - a project factory, a placement portal and an academic networking site. This will be offered free of cost, as it is part of Microsoft’s CSR initiatives, and will allow 7.5 million students and 5 lakh teachers to interact with each other, by drawing resources from the cloud.

While the Project Factory allows students to upload their projects online, enabling viewership by a much larger audience of academicians, students as well as the industry who are part of the AICTE cloud platform, the Placement Portal allows students to send their CVs directly to the HR of a company of his choice, without having to log into paid job sites.

Additionally, companies will also be able to post their exact requirements on the Live@edu platform, allowing for more streamlined placements. The Academic Networking site will be similar to other social networking sites like Facebook, allowing students and teachers to exchange ideas and information. These three cloud apps are expected to be launched by June 1, before the start of the new academic year.

AICTE also plans to deploy Microsoft Office 365 for education when it becomes available later this year, providing access to Microsoft Exchange Online email and calendar, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Lync Online and Microsoft Office Professional as the technical infrastructure to support member colleges and institutes.

“India is seeing rapid economic activity and growth. Developing India’s youth and their skills is going to play an important role in the country’s inclusive growth. The union budget also laid emphasis on skill development and so does the proposed 12th Five Year Plan with a National Policy on Skill development. The PPP model (public-private partnership) is most essential in running and managing training institutions to address the skill gap most efficiently. Microsoft’s commitment to empower students by deploying Microsoft Live@edu for 7.5 million users across the country with AICTE is commendable and a step towards an informed and developing India. I congratulate both AICTE and Microsoft on this significant milestone,” said Mr. Kapil Sibbal, Union Minister for HRD.

The Evolution of Social Networking Sites

2012-03-18T13:23:00.003-07:00

Being connected to the world has never been so easy before, thanks to social media, they made it possible to connect to people far away with just a click of button.From sending an “QWERTYUIOP” e-mail to the adjacent computer to a powerful marketing tool, what we see today is the result of many evolutions in Social network sites (SNSs).

Here are a few notable events in history which has changed the way how people use internet:

The web’s first social networking site GEOCITIES was founded in 1994.The concept was for user to create their own website categorized by one of ‘SIX CITIES’ known for certain characteristics.
In the year 1995 THEGLOBE.COM gave users the freedom to personalize their online experiences by publishing their own content and interacting with others with similar interests.
In the year 1997 AOL’s Instant Messenger was launched, popularizing instant messaging. In the same year SIXDEGREES.COM was launched allowing profile creation and listing friends.
In the year 2002 FRIENDSTER was launched, pioneering the online connections of real-world friends. Its user base tuned up to 3 Million users in the first three months, about 1in every 126 internet users at that time, and was the most successful of any to the social networking platforms made before.

As Friendster’s popularity surged, the site encountered technical and social difficulties. Friendster’s servers and databases were ill-equipped to handle its rapid growth, and the site faltered regularly, frustrating users who replaced email with Friendster. Because organic growth had been critical to creating a coherent community, the onslaught of new users who learned about the site from media coverage upset the cultural balance. Furthermore, exponential growth meant a collapse in social contexts: Users had to face their bosses and former classmates alongside their close friends. To complicate matters, Friendster began restricting the activities of its most passionate users.
The initial design of Friendster restricted users from viewing profiles of people who were more than four degrees away (friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends). In order to view additional profiles, users began adding acquaintances and interesting-looking strangers to expand their reach. Some began massively collecting Friends, an activity that was implicitly encouraged through a “most popular” feature. The ultimate collectors were fake profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts, and other such entities. These “Fakesters” outraged the company, who banished fake profiles and eliminated the “most popular” feature. While few people actually created Fakesters, many more enjoyed surfing Fakesters for entertainment or using functional Fakesters to find people they knew.

The next wave of Social networking sites began when RYZE.COM was launched, to help people leverage their business networks. In particular, the people behind Ryze, LinkedIn, and Friendster were tightly entwined personally and professionally. They believed that they could support each other without competing. In the end, Ryze never acquired mass popularity, LinkedIn became a powerful business service, and Friendster became the most significant, if only as “one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history”
The following year saw the launch of MYSPACE and it was conceived as a FRIENDSTER CLONE, the first version of MYSPACE was hastily coded in 10 days.
In the year 2004 FACEBOOK was launched, originally as a way of connecting US college students, first launched at Harvard College, and more than half of the 19,500 students signed up within the first month. To join, a user had to have a harvard.edu email address.

A few months later Facebook began supporting other schools, those users were also required to have university email addresses associated with those institutions, a requirement that kept the site relatively closed and contributed to users’ perceptions of the site as an intimate, private community.
Beginning in September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students, professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. The change to open signup did not mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks—gaining access to corporate networks still required the appropriate .com address, while gaining access to high school networks required administrator approval. (As of this writing, only membership in regional networks requires no permission.) Unlike other networking sites, Facebook users were unable to make their full profiles public to all users. Another feature that differentiated Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build “Applications” which allowed users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare movie preferences and chart travel histories.

Twitter was launched in the year 2006, as a micro blogging platform that enabled its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was said to be "the SMS of the Internet."

2008 saw the rise of FACEBOOK and it overtook MYSPCAE as leading social networking site in monthly unique visitors. In today’s market FACEBOOK is the leader of Social Netwoking with more than 850 Million users.

There are many new networking sites coming up and the most talked about nowadays in PINTEREST.COM, though it was launched it 2010 it recently came into limelight, now it is being widely used for Content Marketing.

Google to introduce ‘Semantic Search’

2012-03-16T07:08:00.002-07:00

Google is facing a tough competition from Microsoft’s Bing and Apple’s Voice search (Siri) . In an attempt to fix its shortcomings and to maintain dominance in search market, Google is tapping into the virtual brain of a Freebase database of knowledge regarding what things are and how they relate to one another and is soon going to include the concept of ‘Semantic Search’ in their search algorithm.
This change to search is among the biggest in the company's history and could affect millions of websites that rely on Google's current page-ranking results. At the same time, they could give Google more ways to serve up advertisements.

Semantic search refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words that people type into a Web-search box. That would enable the search engine to differentiate between the car brand "Jaguar" and the animal "jaguar" on a Web page that it may want to provide a link to in search results.

In an interview, Google search executive Amit Singhal implied the semantic-search effort will help Google compete with Siri. "When we can deliver small nuggets of information, that system is far more suited to mobile phones and searching with voice," he said. Google search will look more like "how humans understand the world".

Google also hopes the change to semantic search will entice some people to stay longer on the search site, said people briefed on the plans, amid competition with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter Inc. that are claiming more Internet users' time.

For instance, people who search for a particular novelist like Ernest Hemingway could, under the new system, find a list of the author's books they could browse through and information pages about other related authors or books, according to people familiar with the company's plans. Presumably Google could suggest books to buy, too.

Google also currently has some other semantic-search elements, such as the ability to assess what the web collectively thinks are the most significant items associated with certain keywords. For example, a search for "30 Rock," the name of a popular TV series, will bring up a section called "Actor searches for 30 Rock" at the bottom of the search-results page. There, people can find a photo of each actor and a link to execute a new Google search for that name.

But the newest change is expected to go much further, coming as a result of Google's acquisition in 2010 start-up Metaweb Technologies, which had an index of 12 million entities, such as movies, books, companies and celebrities. By comparison, online encyclopedia Wikipedia has 3.5 million English entries, though they include more detailed information.

Some semantic-search experts said Google also may be eyeing rival Facebook, which has created a database of information about hundreds of millions of entities, including people, places, countless articles, music and things that its users share with each other.

"Google is probably more concerned about Facebook than other search engines," said Danny Hillis, who co-founded semantic-search Company Metaweb Technologies. Facebook has created a database of information about hundreds of millions of entities, including people, places, countless articles, music and things that its users share with each other. Mr. Hillis said Facebook knows the difference between many people who have the same name, like "John Smith," while Google historically has not.

Facebook in the future could become a powerful tool for people searching for all types of information, he said.

Image Credit:Techspot

Profile Pruning on Rise in Social Media.

2012-02-29T12:43:00.002-08:00

Nowadays a new trend has been seen in the Social Networking Arena,that is of "Profile Pruning".People are getting much aware of their Online Reputation and they are noticed acting accordingly to maintain their Online reputation .

People want to control how and what they share on social network sites, and the number of users pruning information from profiles has increased, a new study by the Pew Research Center shows:

Some two-thirds of U.S. adults have a social networking profile, and 58 percent of them say only friends can view their profile.

Key Findings:

‘Unfriend’

63% have deleted ‘friends’ (up from 56% in 2009).
Women (67%) are much more likely to do this than men (58%).
Younger people more likely to do this than older users

'Editing'

44% have deleted comments made by others on their profile
37% have removed their names from photos

'Privacy settings'

67% of women restrict access to friends only compared with 48% of men
Men (26%) more likely to choose fully public profiles than women (14%)
48% reported some level of difficulties in managing privacy controls; 30% say they have no difficulty.

'Did I really post that?!'

11% have posted content they regret. Men and young people profess the most regret!

When it comes to our online lives, however, privacy issues go well beyond what we control via our personal social-network settings. Advertisers, search engines, mobile apps, and others are perpetually collecting information from our online travels.

'Ilegal internet Pharmacy' -new trend in Social Media

2012-02-29T12:25:00.001-08:00

Illegal Internet pharmacies are thriving in India and they are increasingly becoming a source of pharmaceutical drug abuse across the globe.India has emerged as one of the main sources of drugs sold through illegal Internet pharmacies, where orders placed abroad are dispatched to buyers using couriers and postal services, which have become a common means of smuggling drugs abroad.
Till date more than 150 consignments of banned drugs are caught out of which some were also found to contain heroin.With the arrest of some doctors and pharmacists across the country a number of clandestine methamphetamine laboratories were discovered too.

Your articles should be the assets of your blog not fillers

2012-01-28T00:17:00.000-08:00

People say that articles are the assets of your blog but have you ever wondered what will happen if you end up creating a mess of the information you want to convey through your article? Your readers are not concerned about the motive of your blog, whether you are creating the blog to generate revenue or anything else, what matters to them is the piece of information they get by reading your blog posts. If you write good enough they will be happy to get associated with you and if not, they wouldn't even bother to turn back to visit your blog again. It’s not about how much you write, it’s all about how well you write.

Unique content does not mean that you put someone else’s work in your words; more precisely it means unique information. Consider yourself to be a reader and think, would you like to read the same piece of information again and again at different places in different accents?
Without even giving a second thought, the answer would be ‘no’. So why to waste your and your reader’s time iterating the same thing again and again?
But it’s not unlawful to refer other’s articles on the topic you want to write on. By referring, you can get to know what stuffs are already there and match them with what you want to write. Slash off the things which are already there and then proceed.

Here are a few things you can implement while writing articles:

Length Matters, Always: It’s not like lengthier the better, average word count can be somewhere around 400-500. Lengthy articles are not accepted by many readers. And try to maintain the average length for all the articles.
Don’t pool out all the information: Don’t try to put all your thoughts at a single place; rather you can break it up into many articles. If you try making up a single information rich article you may end up creating a mess of all your ideas.
Break-up: Fragment your articles into paragraphs and the things which you want to emphasise upon make it in bolds, you can also put them point wise.
Accent: The accent of your articles should be more interactive and write it like you are talking to them in reality.
Format: You should not ignore the formatting part, make the alignment of articles on Align text left, as it makes it more cosy for reader’s eye.

Further reading:
How To: Make your posts reader friendly

Do let us know about your opinion and if you like this article then doshare it on Facebook and Google+.

Article Credit:Deblina

Image Credit

how to get more out of Googling

2012-01-16T06:44:00.000-08:00

Google is considered as the best source for any information you need. Even the word “Search” seems to be substituted by ‘Google’ in regular course of our speech! You must have heard people saying “hey Google that, you will get to know”. (They mean to say that search it in Google). You just type any keyword in the search box and Google surely won’t let you down, it will show some results, but have you ever encountered a situation where even if you get the results you don’t get the thing which you were searching for. Well you can expect a good search result by “refining your googling.”

The simplest way to refine your searching is the use of operators, by this you will get more specific results than you would by the use of generic search terms.

For example, if you want to search for all infographics related to Facebook in my blog all you need to do is-
Go to google and type:

Site: It tells the search engine to specifically search for all the queries in this site only.
~: will search for any related words too.
“”: Search for the exact term. If you give two words at a time it will search for the whole phrase and not each word individually.

You can also exclude some terms from search by using – before the particular word . To get the results for certain time duration you can type in your query like this:

.. -Represents the time duration in which the search has to be made.

One more common mistake which people make is asking questions to Google. Don’t ask questions to google. Instead think of how answer would be phrased and then type your query accordingly.
If you are searching for some kind of report then filetype: and intitle: can be helpful for you (especially for those who use google scholar).
Filetype: it only searches the file type you designate (eg: pdf,.jpeg,.doc)
intitle: Only shows results with that word in title.
While carrying out a search in google scholar you can use “author:” for more specific search which will look only for papers by that particular author . If you only need quick word definition then just put define: preceding the word you need. For quick maths problems you don’t need to open the calculator application, all you need to do is just type your query by using the basic functions.

If you have any additional ideas to share then please do write in the comment section.

Image Credit: Sciencebiotech.net

What happens in 60 seconds???? [INFOGRAPHICS]

2012-01-14T00:21:00.000-08:00

World Wide Web has been moving at a the pace of a lightning and number of internet users is booming. In just a flick of a second many things happen over here. Here is an inforgrapics view of how much can happen in 60 seconds online.
The datas are quiet impressive.
Every 60 seconds-

+60 new blogs and +1500 new articles created
98000 tweets made
6,95,000 updates,79,364 wall posts, 510,040 comments posted on facebook
38 tons of e-Waste is generated
$75,000 Added to Google’s Revenue
$2,19,000 of total Payments made by PayPal
1820 TB of data is created
12 Websites get hacked and 416 attempted

For more, see the infographics below:-

Infographics credit: go-globe.com

A history to be rewritten :Facebook’s IPO [INFOGRAPHICS]

2012-01-13T05:31:00.000-08:00

Coming April, the world will see the biggest IPO of any tech company in history tuned upto 10 billion (projected). This will be six times higher than the Google’s($1.67 Billion). The $10 billion IPO equals a
valuation of $100 billion.
This makes it bigger than Disney, currently at $61 billion, and Amazon, currently holding $88.3 billion.If facebook raises $100 Billion then Mark Zuckerberg will rake in $ 25 Billion i.e $50 from each of his daily users(facebook has 500 million daily active users).

The infographics below shows a summarized view of the all things related to Facebook’s IPO:

Created by: Accounting Degree
Online

When is the right time to run Ad-Campaign on your blog?

2012-01-11T01:35:00.000-08:00

Image Credit: cpmadvisor.com

When people start a blog they are in a dilemma on when to start running ads on it .Well, there are two kinds of campaigns for this :

Posting ads from day 1:

Many people think that posting ads from day one is not a wise decision, as it makes the blog look more commercial and in seek of money but this certainly has its own advantages:

Reader’s Response- From day 1 people visiting your blog will see ads running on it and they will be used to it, but if you put ads later then they might get annoyed as the readers are very particular about this and might stop coming to your blog. Starting your ads from the beginning sets the expectations of your readers.

Design- You don’t need to change the design of your blog later on to post your ads. From day 1, your blog’s layout will be consistent and if you change it after a while then people may find it difficult to

navigate through your blog.

Ad Optimization- When you keep running ads on your blog for a long time then you get a rough idea on what kind of ads work best on your blog and hence can optimize it accordingly. Starting early with your ad campaign will also give you ample time to experiment with your ad spaces.

Earnings- it’s pretty obvious that in the beginning you won’t be having a high traffic which in turn won’t fetch you a handsome revenue but meager amount per day can add up to make it a considerable one.

Running ads after establishing a reader’s base-

The argument of running ads from day 1 is that you potentially turn down your blog. Some say that they don’t want to put down new readers with advertisements.

So another approach made by many bloggers is to put ads after making a good reader’s base and Search Engine ranking. But this also should be wisely done; gradually placing the ads can also educate you about your readers’ response.

But the ultimate decision can only be made by the individual blogger.

Just give it a thought, which one can harm your blog more, putting ads from day 1 or changing your blog’s layout later?

Whether Google plus can Dethrone 'The Social Network'?

2012-01-09T21:06:00.000-08:00

When we come across the phrase “The Social Network”, then the first thing which comes to our mind is Facebook, that's because of two reasons. First being that FB is the marketing leader in social networking and secondly the movie “The Social Network” which is based on the life of the founder of FB Mark Zuckerberg.

Social networking is a private internet within the internet which never seems to die but from the past we have been seeing that the platforms are changing. Firstly it was Friendster which was replaced by Orkut and lead by MySpace which the Facebook dethroned.

Now people are wondering whether Google plus will dethrone Facebook???

Well for some people it’s a clear cut answer, they favor either of the two but still it’s a very controversial topic.

Social media nowadays are also being very vastly used as business marketing tool. This is the place where google plus seems to be taking over FB. Some people are moving away from Facebook to Google plus, reason being that they find it difficult to separate business and friends on FB. They don’t want their business people to peep more into their personal side but they fail to control it accordingly. To fix this issue, Google plus has +circle feature which has got more privacy control and individual can decide whom should they get their information exposed to.

Another edge which Google Plus has over Facebook is the +Hangout feature. Even after upgrading so many features Facebook still doesn’t have the video chat facility embedded in it. By using +Hangout upto 10 people can get into video chatting which can even be used for small business conferences purposes.

Now coming to the statics of G+:
Paul Allen who is well known for his title as “Unofficial Google+ statistician” has come up with the following data:

Google plus has crossed 62 million user’s mark.
21.4% of all users have joined G+ in the month of Dec,11.
Number of users expected to reach 400 Million by end of 2012(A big reason to worry for Facebook)
62500 new users are registering daily.

(I am sure Mark Zuckerberg won't this)

Further the revenue chart released by Paul Allen:

July 13 - 10million
August 1 - 20.5million
September 1 - 24.7million
October 1 - 38million (Larry Page announced ‘more than 40m users’ on Oct 13)
November 1 - 43million
December 1 - 50million
December 27 - 62million
January 1 - 65.8million (forecast)
February 1 - 85.2million (forecast)

No one can predict the fate of these two platforms. Let’s see how this marketing giant performs in the social networking arena dominated by Facebook. Some say that it is highly possible that G+ can outperform the
social media connectivity of businesses which Facebook has.

P.S. Mark Zukerberg too is a user of Google Plus :)

Few people who changed the way we look at internet

2012-01-08T19:47:00.000-08:00

Internet has seen some people earning fortunes and that too at a very young age. Some of them have also changed way the whole internet thing looked like. They have also become inspiration to many so I have compiled a list of some entrepreneurs who made a tremendous impact on the world.

Mark Zuckerberg (www.facebook.com)- Age-26

At the top of this list is none other than the brain behind the world’s largest social media site, Mark Zukerburg. Born on May 14 in the year 1984, he has a net worth of $17.5 Billion which isn’t bad at

all for a 26 year boy. Facebook is the second most visited site in the world. Zuckerberg founded Facebook at the age of 20 and in 2008 he was declared to be the youngest billionaire ($1.5 Billion).

Matt Mullenweg(www.wordpress.com) – Age-26

He is the founder of Wordpress, which is the world’s most widely used blogging platform. In 2008 he was named in top 30 entrepreneurs under 30 by Inc. Magazine and in Top 25 Most Influential people on the web by Business Week.

Pete Cashmore(www.mashable.com) –Age-25

He runs the world’s topmost blog mashable.com . He has earned nearly 1.8 Million followers on twitter making it to the 40 most-followed page on twitter, 0.8 Million likes on his Facebook page and 0.5

Million feed readers.

Sean Belnick (www.bizchair.com) –Age-24

He founded bizchair in 2001 at the age of 14.He has been an inspiration for many youngsters who want to earn online. Bizchair.com ranks 37 on the list of top 100 retail companies. Through his website,he sells a range of furniture. In 2010 Belnick’s sales revenue was $58 Million.

Neil-Patel (www.crazyegg.com and www.quicksprout.com ) –

Neil Patel is the co-founder of two internet companies – crazyeggs and issmetrics. Through these 2 companies he has helped large corporations such as AOL, general Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 not only was Neil named among top 100 bloggers by Technorati, but he was also one of the top influencial personalities on the web according to the Wall Street Journal. The thing that really makes Neil stand out as a top young entrepreneur is how he made many of the top blogs in the world to permanently link to his site.

Aodhan Cullen (www.statcounter.com) – Age-27

He is the Founder & CEO of Statcounter.com, a web statistic company. He founded it when he was 16 years old (1999) and at present this company has more than two million members globally and track over 10 billion pages monthly. In 2007, Cullen was named as Businessweek young European entrepreneur of the year. His company has a revenue of more than $ 30 Million.

Andrew Gower (www.runescape.com) – Age-28

He is the founder and CEO of runescape.com, a gaming portal which has also made it to the Guinness book of world records as the world’s most popular free MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game).It has got 160 Million registered users with monthly 10 Million active users. The company has a net worth of more than $650 Million.

Shama Kabani(www.marketingzen.com) – Age-27

Shama Kabani started The Marketing Zen Group in the year 2009 and it is a web marketing firm. It was formerly known as Click To Client. She has been honored with Dallas Business Journal’s 2011 Business woman.In September 2011 Issue of entrepreneur magazine she was listed as 1 of 4 young super entrepreneurs.

David Karp (www.tumblr.com) – Age-26

In 2007 David Karp launched tumblr.com which is a blogging platform.Tumblr raised $5.25 million funding from various investors, including 2 lead investors with the popular social network Twitter. In 2010, he was named by the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. (David’s blog)

Blake Ross (www.mozilla.com) – Age-26

Born on June 12,1985 he is well known for his work done on Mozilla Firefox. Firefox was first released in the year 2004 (when he was 19) and within a year from its release it grabbed market share with 100 million downloads.In 2005, he was nominated for Wired magazine's top Rave Award, Renegade of the Year, opposite Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jon Stewart. He was also a part of Rolling Stone magazine's 2005 hot list.He currently works for Facebook as Director of Product.

Some Facebook Short keys

2012-01-07T12:08:00.001-08:00

ALT + 0 – Loads the Help Center
ALT + 1 – Take your Homepage Facebook
ALT + 2 – Show your Profile
ALT + 3 – Recent Friendship Requests
ALT + 4 – Display the list of Recent Messages
ALT + 5 – Displays the Latest Notifications
ALT + 6 – Drive to Your Account Settings
ALT + 7 – Enter text in Search Box
ALT + 8 – Show Facebook Official Fan Page
ALT + 9 – Lead the Declaration of Rights and Responsibilities of the web

How To: Make your posts reader friendly

2012-01-03T22:04:00.000-08:00

Blogging is completely different from writing a book or reading a book about that matter. A good article need not be the one which has complicated and convoluted language. Using some unfamiliar words does not make your post popular but ultimately, it will tend to confuse the people. It’s all about how you present your views using proper and simple words.

For writing a post you should not be a great writer or a scholar. Just keep in mind how you frame your article and how it looks good on the screen. Reading a post online is not same as that of reading a book. The rules of creative writing do not follow here. If you are posting your articles online you gotta make it more interesting and reader friendly.

Its better to use big fonts for your articles as it makes readers comfortable to go through your article and ultimately helps in reducing the bounce rate.

Now coming to the alignment part, people get confused in what way they should align the articles. People have been using Microsoft WordPad for a long time and they are in a habit of using the ‘justify’ alignment, and they do the same for their blogs too. But if you look at such posts from the reader’s point of view, it creates hindrance in their reading as it creates gaps between the words to give an optimal alignment. So it’s better to keep it to the left or right, and out of these two left alignment is the best.

One more thing that you can do to make your articles look better is to change the color or include different background to the area(s) where you want to emphasize more.

Just try these few tips while writing your articles and you will be amazed to see the difference and how well people accept your write-ups.

Happy Blogging!!!! J

Setting Up Workstation @ Home

2011-12-25T23:16:00.000-08:00

Blogging gives people their own identity and it also has a great income potential. Many net savvy are being seen turning into full-time bloggers, and many are also quitting their jobs for blogging. To become a full-time blogger is lot more adventurous than any 9 to 5 job. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme but if you have that passion and love for blogging you can easily make your own space in a few months and can even earn a handsome monthly income.

People get attracted to blogging for one reason or the other, but if you want to make blogging your profession then you will have to take it seriously like any other profession. You have to be more disciplined because it’s a ‘Be Your Own Boss’ type of concept. Always remember, a person’s attitude towards discipline is the measure of that person’s own orientation to order.

The biggest advantage of being a blogger is that you don’t need to step out of your home for work, you can eat, drink, relax as much as you want and choose your own suitable work timings. And moreover blogging doesn't require a huge capital investment, but it needs time.

I am going to share some ideas that you can implement on your home office -

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A place where you can work -

Find a proper place in your house which is free from any kind of distraction. Blogging is not something in which you will be assigned work by someone, the success of your blog depends completely on your efforts. You have to make a strategy for your blog and write articles etc and all these require a good creativity. The more creative you are, more successful is your blog. For this you need peace of mind. It is advisable to choose the least active area in your house.

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Take care of your spinal cord-

Working for hours sitting in front of your laptop/desktop may stress you, so a proper posture is needed at the time of work. Working while sitting on bed is a bad idea (which many do) and should be replaced by a table and chair according to your comfort. Always choose something which has a support from back. The more comfortable you are more productively you can work.

Choose your device-

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After you are done with setting up the place where you can sit and work, it’s time to choose the equipments which you are going to use. Needless to say that it’s computers. You can use either a desktop or a laptop. It all depends on your convenience. Unless you are not a travel blogger or something similar to that I would suggest to use a desktop (keeping a laptop along is much better option). You can also install two monitors (if need be).

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Don’t forget your ISP-

Internet connection is your lifeline if you are coming into blogosphere, so you have to take a special care of it. Always choose a trusted internet service provider, and also keep an alternate source ready with you (like you can keep mobile internet connectivity with yourself). If you are going in the podcasting field then you should keep a faster internet connection.

Organizing the things-

From the time you start setting up your workstation treat it like an office. Of all the things you have, you have to arrange it in a proper way so as to make it clean and tidy. Fix all the cables under your table and to avoid distraction and to work efficiently keep minimum things on your desk. Try making the overall environment of the room warm and energetic. Just remember one thing while arranging your room - there might be a time when you will be stuck in that room for hours and sometimes you might have to write 5-10 articles in a single day, and at that time how would you like your room to look like?

If possible, also keep a relaxing chair in your room. If you are not an anonymous blogger and want people to connect to you via your phone then it is advisable to keep a separate mobile number for that to keep both your personal and professional lives separate.

Also make a habit of keeping a small notepad with yourself wherever u go (for those who don’t own a tablet pc). As and when an idea comes to your mind just jot it down, later you can refine that.

WORKING AT HOME IS STILL WORK, BUT MAKE YOUR ATTITUDE PROFESSIONAL

This is all which came to my mind while writing this article, if you have any advice or suggestion to the bloggers of how they can set up a workstation at home then write it down in the comment section.

how to overcome Writer's block?

2011-12-20T08:23:00.000-08:00

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A beginner or a problogger, everyone experiences “writer’s block”. So, what exactly is writer’s block? Suppose you start writing an article and you had a great start, but as you proceed you run out of ideas, you are blank about what to write next. You have the objective but not able to figure out how to get there. This is called 'writer’s block'.

It may be a great harm to your blog as there is a chance that you may loose your regular readers. People who are regular visitors of your blog have a rough idea when you will post your next article. If there are no new articles they will think that the blog is partially dead and might stop coming back to your blog. At the end it will be a loss to you.

There is a tough competition out there when it comes to blogging. Like you, there are others too in your niche of which some may be as good as you are. If you want to be a successful blogger you should have an edge over them. The key of successful blogging is “quality articles” (As they say “Content is the king”). Always remember “People don’t care what you know, they know what you care for”, they are not concerned about how much you know, what they look for is how you present yourself, how you make people learn from the knowledge you have. People won’t come back to your blog because it has a good layout or flashy design. The main things of which people are concerned about is your articles and what they can gain from it. It creates relationship with your readers. So don’t let anything hamper your quality of articles. No one wants to lose their readers so here are a few tips which you can consider when you face a similar situation:

Write something Different:-

Usually the niche writers fall prey to writer’s block. When you can’t figure out what to write, you can slightly deviate from your niche but always keep in mind not to completely move apart from your area of concern. For instance you cannot expect readers in your photography blog to be interested in articles on food. If you have a photography blog you can write articles related to cameras, wildlife conservation or other relevant articles. You can also share a part of your personal life but don’t overdo it, try including the professional aspect of your personal life too. For some good ideas can also read industry news and get updated with the latest happenings and write about it. A slight deviation from you niche also maintains the interest of your readers and can attract new readers too, if you include a part of your personal life people get to know more about you and it helps creating a long lasting relation with your readers.

Invite guest posting:-

This is one of the most impulsive methods of maintaining the consistency of your posts. You can invite others in your niche to write an article for your blog. You can also get different articles from different authors on the same topic, different views on the same thing also helps you to enrich your knowledge as well as you can provide your readers with quality articles. It also helps in making your blog popular.

So why would someone write for your blog. The answer is simple “they also need the same thing which you need”. Running out of ideas is very common among bloggers, when they run out of ideas they also want someone to help. In other words you can say it’s an mutual benefit for both.

Many people do it so that they can get a back link to their blog. When a author writes an article for a blog which has a larger reader base their articles get exposed to a greater number of people,hence gaining popularity.

Write about your experiences:-

Brief your journey of blogging and let people know how you started and reached the position which you are in at the present. This also helps the readers to share a personal attachment with you. If you own a business blog tell them how you started your business and what all challenges you faced, how your business flourished.

Just write something:-

One of the most effective ways to overcome this is to start writing whatever you feel like. Just think of the topic you want to write on and start writing. Whatever comes to your mind, share it in your article. Later you can carry out the reviewing/editing part. While reviewing just find out the answers of the following questions:

Whether the article is authentic?
Is it carrying a clear voice to your audience (what you meant to say)?
Is it relevant to your topic?
Will this be able to help viewers stick to your blog?

Write about what others are saying:

Carry out a research and find out what others say and what their opinion about any particular topic is. These articles need not be your own but a perfect blend of contents from various authors. With such kind of posts keep in mind to include the reference links.

Traffic/Income Reports:

Once in a while you can also include your blog’s traffic statistics and income reports. One of the examples of these kinds of posts can be seen on “Smart passive income”. In his blog the author (Pat) puts his traffic stats as well as his monthly income and how he earns it. But one thing that you should keep in mind is that it should be worth publishing and you cannot talk about a few hundred visitors who come monthly. It should be appealing to the people to revisit your blog looking for upcoming articles.

Blogging resides in everything we do, everything is blogging! Everything is a potential blogging material.

"India Get online"- How can small Businesses benefit from it?

2011-12-17T23:33:00.000-08:00

“India get online” This service has been launched by a joint venture of Google with hostgator.

Hostgator is one of the leaders in hosting services and Google is the online advertising leader. So when these two meet it can never go un-noticed.

What is “India Get Online”all about?

“India gets online” is a service which mainly focuses on small scale businesses in India and aims at online promotion of the same. The number of internet users in India is increasing day by day and ranks 4^th in number of internet users country wise. So there is a potential consumer base which can be reached online. “India get online” helps businesses to make an online presence.

Many small scale businesses wish to come online can use this service. This has many advantages which other services lack. Even if you don’t know what all to add to your business website you don’t need to worry, “India Get Online”will help you with this. It has fully customized templates. It may sound similar to “blogger.com” but it isn’t. Unlike blogger.com this service helps in setting up your website, and it guides you in what all you have to add to your webpage.

What is the offer?

According to the offer made you don’t need to pay any charges for one year (not even the domain charge). Only after one year is over you will be charged. To open an account you’ll have to enter your PAN card number. By this way they can prevent spammers take benefit from their services and also to ensure that one person has only one website.

How much will I have to pay after one year?

No one exactly knows how much one has to pay after one year because it has not been one year since its launch and even the website has not mentioned any exact rate list. As this service has been launched in association with Google, many say that like blogger.com it will be around $10 (domain charges, hosting is free in blogger) but one thing which they fail to notice is that the hosting part is done by ‘hostgator’. Even if you consider the minimum plan of hostgator you will have to pay more than 4000 (INR) annually. But they may have some other package to offer in “India Get Online”.

But I don’t know anything of how to set up a business website..??

You don’t need to. Like ‘blogger’ it has got pre-built templates (customizable), and you just need to give in all the necessary details. If you don’t know what all you should add to your business website, don’t worry. It’s all in there, you just have to give the information they ask for.

When you register, you get a sub-domain name and after you customize your website, you will be given full access to your website with your own domain name. It takes approximately 1 hour to fully set up your page.

Google has never launched any service with association with anyone. As for example take blogger, orkut or adsense. Google bought these first then launched these with their own brand name, it never associated itself with anyone. So some people find it hard to digest and rely on “India Get Online”.

But I think that it is the easiest way anyone could promote their business online. If one is not sure of whether they can benefit online or not and just want to give it a try, there is no other way better than this.

Though there are different views of different people about this service but many are being benefitted by this service and the company sees a great potential in “India Get Online”.

Why does your business need a blog????

2011-12-08T11:27:00.001-08:00

Business blogs can bring new customers to your business. It's a corporate and unconventional tool to communicate with customers and employees. Blogging can redefine your business if used in a proper way. Business blogs do not typically involve promoting a product or service but they represent the company as a whole. So how can a blog help your business?

Blogs can help you finding potential clients!

Like I said, business blogs are not just for promotion of a particular product but the whole company , so on this platform you can discuss the industry you work in and the products and services provided by you as well. This can said to be a passive way of promotion.

You can be an industry expert

Your blog can depict your expertise in some particular field(s). Writing good articles on the hot topics of the field which you are good at makes you popular in your niche and you can become a go-to resource in your field of excellence. In this way you can build a much stronger customer base.

Helps in creating a community of your own

Business blogs can help in creating a community of people of shared interest(s). A successful business blog is the one where readers actively communicate. Communication is generally through the comment box. By following the trend of comments you can learn a great deal about your audience.

What are the ADVANTAGES of business blogs?

Blog is a low-cost alternative to make a web presence.
These are dynamic in nature (as compared to the static web pages)
Updating a blog is much quicker and easier as compared to that of a website. Even if you are not a programmer you can operate blog on your own.
It gives exposure to a larger audience.

Some Essentials of business blogging:

Always have a personal string attached to your business blog: Share a little bit of yours thoughts, ideas and experiences. Let the people know more about you. This gives a personal touch and also an individual presence to your blog. Your blog looks much more original.

Try to include relevant points: Have a tendency to slightly go off the topic so that it doesn’t become monotonous and the interest of readers remains intact. But always keep in mind the flavor and individuality of your blog.

Categorize the contents: Sort out and arrange the articles in your blog related to the interests of readers of various fields.

Review your blog: Periodically go through the contents of your blog to check if it needs any modifications. This will help in the maintenance of the contents’ quality.

According to the studies done by Six Apart and Gawker Media, a blog reader visits thrice as many as times as that of internet average. It was also found that the blog readers are more likely to buy products online. So if you can offer a product that can be sold online, it will be beneficial for you and your organization.

Blogging in Brief.

2011-12-02T06:15:00.001-08:00

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I still remember,it was the winter of 2007. I had a small desire to make my presence 'online' but i was clueless of what and how to fulfil it.But one day i discovered a blog and after a few hours of surfing i understood what blogging is all about.I found this concept very interesting and read more and more articles on how it works. After a few days i created an account in blogger.com and launched my blog on a sub-domain.
I genuinely worked hard on my articles but that blog was a complete failure, there were no visitor activities. I was not able to figure out what went wrong and one day i deleted my blog.But it is human tendency to try harder and stick longer to something which you have devoted effort to, so to get a better idea i started visiting other blogs, learnt what distinct features they had in them which made them so popular. I noticed the plug-ins on those blogs too and learnt what they are for and how they work. Then i launched another blog on 'gadgets' and i wrote reviews on existing products and discussed about forthcoming ones. That blog attracted plenty of visitors. Though the volume was not so large but i was happy with what I got. Being on this platform for years I noticed one attribute that is permanent in blogging world and that is 'change'.Blogging trend keep on changing steadily and if you don't update your blog(s) accordingly you will be left behind.

So why do People Blog?

Everyone of us possess some talent or the other and we all desire to get appreciated in our respective fields.People find blogging a very good platform to showcase their views, ideologies and some facts and figures relevant to their area(s) of interest.The concept of blogging is not a novel one but since the last decade, it has gained popularity. 'Blog' has been derived from the term 'weblog' (By Jorn Barget,1997). Blogs created revolution over internet and this concept changed the way people used to communicate online.

Blogs are websites or type of websites which are supposed to be updated regularly and the main advantage of blogs is that there is a two way communication (good blogs are always interactive).

Earlier when there was no blog, mode of communication was one way. Someone used to post articles on websites and people used to read them, where the author used to be unknown of whether the audience liked it or not and what there views were on his articles.

Blogs changed this monologue way of communication over internet and have given people freedom to speak and express their views.After Google purchased Blogger.com in 2003, blogging gained more popularity (especially in the Asian countries). As people being curious of what it is all about they started trying their hand on blogging, and being free from any kind of charges it attracted a huge crowd towards it.

The sudden increase in number of bloggers as well as net users was well noticed by various business organisations and they realized that there is a potential consumer base online which they cannot afford to miss. Various companies opened their blogs and started communicating with their consumers and knowing their views to make their product or services better.

There are various kinds of blogs. Some of them are:

Life Blogging:- These blogs are created by individuals where they share some tits and bits of their personal life online.

Brand Blogging:- This type of blogging includes promotion and marketing of any particular product or brand .These are generally maintained by companies.

Video Blogging:-Making a video with some useful contents and posting them online.This is also called as podcast.

Event Blogging:-Promoting a event which has to take place or writing a review on an event which is over.

Link Blogging:-Posting content with reference to various sites.

Many people are successful with their blogs but majority of them fail to succeed. There are millions of blogs worldwide but only a fraction of them are active, rest of them 'die'-Reason :- they lose the will to continue.When no one visits you blog,no one accepts your guest posts, you feel really lost and destroyed,it feels like you are talking to yourself.

There is another fraction of people who have quality content but they fail to attract visitors. So why that happens? Its because they miss a few things they need to know as a blogger and how this whole blogging thing works. Some of the things which I think that every blogger should be aware are:-

blogging platforms,HTML/CSS,blog comments,RSS/syndication,feeds,pings,full vs. partial feeds, search engines,search engine optimization (SEO),page ranks,social bookmarking,traffic statistics.

Many people starts blogging to make money out of it,from the very first day their motto is'earning'. Very few succeed this way. So people I request you all not to think of earning from blog and start your blog. Blog because you want to not because you have to. If your contents are good then people will definitely join you, you don't need to worry about your ad click then. But if your content is not good enough, people will leave your blog with half-read articles.

Wish you all the best

Happy Blogging :)

A Few Commonly Used Terms

2011-11-27T01:55:00.000-08:00

Bounce Rate- Number (in percentage) of visitors who leaves after viewing single page.
Geo- Targeting- A method to detect a visitor's locations and providing contents/ads based on that.
Mouse- Trapping- A trick used to trap the visitor inside the site.This is generally done by disabling the BACK button or continuous loading of pop-ups.This helps the publisher to reduce their bounce rate.
Doorway Domain- A domain which is made intentionally to increase page ranking and which guides the visitor to the main site.

Keyword Density- Keywords represented in terms of total indexed words.
Meta Tags- Tags which are used to describe or highlight some particular portion of a webpage.
Sponsored Search- Search hits which are shown on the result page which are paid by the owner of that particular site.
Splash Page- A page or a short animation which are shown on a website before the home page.Mainly these are for promotional purpose.
Organic Search- Search results which are unpaid and are shown with their relevance with the keyword..
SERP- Search Engine Rating Point.
Web Directories- Organised and categorized listing of websites.