Here’s what the official website says:

Evo Wireless Broadband offers up to 3.1 Mbps downlink and up to 1.8Mbps uplink. Average speeds vary from 300Kbps to 500Kbps for downlink and 200 Kbps to 400Kbps for uplink. However it varies depending on the physical situation of the user and the network at a particular time.

As much as i love my wireless USB connection, I have to say that this is more than a little bending of the truth. Here’s what really should have been written:

Evo Wireless Broadband offers up to 3.1 Mbps downlink and up to 1.8Mbps uplink. However, unless you’re in a 1-2 km radius of the tower and unless you’re using the device late at night when there’s little congestion on the network, you won’t experience the full capabilities of the advertised speed and service. In fact, if you’re indoors, your connection speed will suffer even more.

Having said that, if you’re a frequent traveler AND your work requires you to be plugged in 24/7, Ptcl Evo is a fantastic device and a lifesaver.

It’s powered by your computer, so you’re not at the mercy of IESCO or LESCO or whoever determines when you get electricity in your area.

It’s plug-and-play, so you can use it on any computer without a hitch.

It’s still faster than most connections, so apart from the usual e-mail / browsing / IM, it also allows you to voice chat with minimal issues.

You can use it to share your Internet connection to laptops nearby, therefore giving Internet access to more than one person.

Combined with a decent laptop (with a secondary battery, of course), the Ptcl Evo will keep you working and online under almost any conditions.

There are a few problems – in some areas you won’t find any coverage (I experienced this in Cantt, Lahore) because of a lack of nearby towers. If you’re indoors then depending on how deep inside your house you are, the connectivity can be severely impaired (but that’s in extreme cases, and that’s to be expected.

All in all I wouldn’t use this as a primary connection, but this is an excellent backup / travel connection, provided you travel regularly and primarily work online (it’s good for downloading movies and TV shows too, if that’s your thing).

2 years as a blogger and consultant is a long time, and I’m proud to say that given the chance, I would have started out with TigerTech in the first place instead of wasting time and money at various ‘good but sometimes unreliable and often clueless’ web hosting companies for 6 years.

Talking strictly shared and VPS hosting (I don’t pretend to be an expert in dedicated hosting, although I know enough to know it’s bloody easy to waste money down that road if you don’t know why your site is consuming so many resources), most of the big names are actually quite decent.

The competition is good too

BlueHost is an above-average webhost. So is DreamHost. And A Small Orange. And Media Temple. And even the lads at Mosso and Slicehost. And WiredTree. Apart from Netfirms (whose staff really didn’t have a clue), all the companies I’ve hosted sites with have been good to great for a large number of people, but aren’t what I would call ‘awesome’ web hosts.

The guys at TigerTech are not only awesome, they’ve redefined awesomeness and taken it to a whole new level that only a $800+ / month server setup at RackSpace seems to get you. And they do it for $8 / month (basic plan – current highest plan costs you $20 / month, that’s what Soccerlens is on).

Yes, TigerTech offer shared hosting. What’s more, they only offer shared hosting. But for $8 / month (domain free if you register through them), here’s what you get:

World class customer support

You have to experience it to believe it. Ever had your site ’shut down’ by a shared web hosting service because it was getting too much traffic? Never happens with TigerTech. They will, in the following order:

Check your site to see what’s causing the problem, email you with a note if it’s something you can fix (i.e. install wp super cache plugin), install the plugin for you if you need help, take action to limit cpu usage if it’s a runaway script (without pulling down your site – e.g. a cron job run awry), propose fixes (actual php code!) to your inefficient scripts / wordpress plugins, wait for you to fix the problem instead of shutting your site down, even if your site is screwing with their server for over 12 hours.

All of this has happened to Soccerlens in the past two years. Actually, a lot more has happened, and every single time, without fail, the TigerTech customer support staff have come through and more than helped in solving problems.

And this is all through email. Living in Pakistan, I’m not always able to access tech support via phone, but first-hand accounts from Ryan Caldwell and Loren Baker confirm that their phone-support is just as awesome.

TigerTech is not perfect

They only offer shared-hosting (although their largest shared hosting package is good enough for a site with several million pageviews per month, and they’re close to launching a high-cpu-usage package for bigger sites).

They only allow one domain per account (last I heard they allowed more domains per account for an extra annual fee per domain, but that offer seems to be missing after their last redesign / info update), which is a bummer if you’re looking to host 300 sites on one account. There’s no Fantastico – if you want to install something, you do it manually. There’s no ‘live chat’ for support – you either email or call them on the phone. Their mailing list rules can be strict (but fair).

Their design (improved from last year, believe it or not) is ‘austere’ and in stark contrast to the usual web hosting sites. If you were going by first impressions and landed on their front page, you’d click away because they looked too simple.

Downtime? What downtime?

All these would be a significant drawback for any other hosting service. But for TigerTech – their world class customer support, their near-zero-downtime, their digg-proof, crash-proof, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-proof hosting – those are ridiculously minor issues that one adapts to.

The only time Soccerlens.com has been down since going with TigerTech has been because of a ‘runaway cron job’ setup by myself and for scheduled WordPress / design upgrades. You can see our site traffic here (with the number of plugins and scripts we run it makes for a heavy site), we crashed a 512mb ASO VPS back in April 07 before moving to TigerTech and safely negotiating through the summer peaks of 07 and 08 without any downtime.

What do you want from your webhost?

People who know servers and hosting? People who know the software you work in? People who help you fix your problems instead of penalising your for them? Near 100% uptime? Peace of mind?

I don’t worry about Soccerlens being down anymore, I haven’t for a couple of years. You only know how valuable that feeling is after you spend months fretting over your site ‘going down’ if you did anything to boost traffic to it.

TigerTech have a pretty decent affiliate program – you can go through either the straight links (all the other links on this page) or this affiliate link – it’s up to you. They do a fantastic job and it’s a company I have no problems giving money to. I hope you will give them a try.

A special thanks to Loren Baker over at SEJ for first pointing met in TT’s direction.

Thanks for reading. Hop over to TigerTech and stop worrying about web hosting.

How do improve conditions – security, living standards, health care, education, economy – in your country and in other countries?

A fundamental principle of human society is our responsibility to our fellow man – to aid, collaborate and generally work together for the betterment of society at large. We’re hardwired – genetically or socially, that’s up to you – to make things better for ourselves and for the people around us.

There are two ways we do this:

One is by supporting and contributing to the most prominent causes and issues in front of you. Considering that our day to day consumption of information is largely governed by the media, this means that whatever story sells comes in front of you looking for your attention. It’s a great way to solve pressing, immediate social problems – war, famine, political unstability – but it does very little for highlighting the core structural problems afflicting society that aren’t ’sexy’ enough to be headlined by mainstream media.

In some cases – in large-scale catastrophes especially – your help will do a world of good, and there are times when the people of the world must rise beyond personal gains and help those in need.

In most cases though – getting whipped into a frenzy by politicians to ’save your country’ every couple of years or donating money to help Palestine (touchy one, that) or skipping coffee today to feed a child in Africa – the impact is short-term, impermanent and does little more than help you feel good about yourself.

If that’s charity for you, hey, good for you. But if that bothers you – if the lack of real, long-lasting change bothers you – then there’s another way to help people.

The second way is to start from yourself – and grow from that point outwards to your family and beyond directly in proportion to your means to help people. From helping yourself, to helping your family, to helping your extended family and friends, to helping your neighbourhood and your co-workers, to helping people you employ, to helping your city, to help your province / state and so on, until you’re lucky enough to be in the position to make a positive impact on the whole country and in other countries.

But start at the foundations – as a matter of habit, start from the bottom and work to the top – for most people that is the best way they can fulfil their social responsibility and get mileage out of their charity.

And if everyone, everywhere, decides to strengthen their social network by investing time and money in it, if everyone helps those around them, if every single person were to turn to the person next to them and help them, it would do something subtler and far grander than an aid package sent to Africa – it will develop, across all societies, a practice of helping one another to the extent that it will spillover across societies and you will have a worldwide, grassroots impetus to solve problems on a communal level instead of waiting for outside aid to come in.

Of course there will be exceptions – people who dedicate their lives to helping others, or people who find a way to create big changes in the world around them beyond their immediate means . If you have the chance, or the dedication (or the means), to be an exception, I salute you.

For the rest of us, what we give, and who we help, closer to home is of more long-term value than what we give to those in lands far away.

• have their own opinions and
• find the truth if you’re lying to them

The Information Age has made gaps in our knowledge and gaps in the knowledge pushed to us by traditional information channels glaringly obvious. Citizen journalism is an evolving and effective mechanism for both finding those gaps and filling them where possible.

What is Citizen Journalism?

Modern technology and to a large extent the global reach of the Internet has enabled people to publish and distribute opinions, analysis, fact-checking and general feedback on local and global events relevant to them on a day-to-day basis.

Mark Glasser, a longtime freelance journalist who frequently writes on new media issues, explains it in a nutshell:

The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube.

[Source: Wikipedia]

Citizen Journalism and Traditional Media

In some cases citizen journalism is a formal label for the push-back of opinion and analysis from the ‘audience’ of a traditional broadcast media.

However citizen journalism doesn’t stop at feedback or personal blogging or fact-checking. It’s all that and much more. At it’s finest, citizen journalism fills in the gaps that traditional media cannot, or will not, fill. News that mainstream media won’t cover because it doesn’t “sell” – citizen journalism has got it covered. Perspective that mainstream media won’t give you because of various reasons (won’t sell, don’t have smart enough analysts, take your pick) – citizen journalism has it.

We take democracy for granted today, but the foundations of democracy were painfully eked out over centuries of social struggle and the wresting away of control from the few to a more equitable, balanced and transparent system of governance.

The struggle between traditional media and mainstream journalism is quite similar in shape and eventual destination if not in scale – traditional media will struggle to hold back citizen journalism until it learns and accepts that both have strengths that complement each other and weaknesses that can only be addressed through collaboration.

You can’t control how people think. You can’t control what people talk about, or read, or write. What you CAN do is create an environment where truth, transparency and objectivity are given the highest priority over personal biases and financial stakes. The principles of responsible democracy work just as well for responsible citizen journalism.

Traditional Media use the ‘lack of objectivity’ excuse as a convenient way to put down citizen journalism. That’s a fair critique, as most people styling themselves as citizen journalists are biased to the hilt.

Having said that, holding up the average blogger cum citizen journalist as the highest ideal for citizen journalism is akin to holding up News Of The World (a UK tabloid) as the hallmark of serious journalism.

Fact is (I’m surprised how often this fact is lost on people), everything you see on TV, hear on the radio or read in the paper is a product of someone’s limited knowledge, opinions based on that knowledge and coloured by their biases (and liberally manipulated to suit the publisher’s agenda, if any). The amount of filtering and editing that happens from an event occuring to you learning the details about it makes it impossible for anyone, anywhere, to deliver information objectively.

Publishers have agendas. Media houses, TV channels, newspapers, radio stations, your local daily, the blogger you follow on football – everyone has their biases and agendas.

Citizen Journalism – the Good and the Bad

Having said that, citizen journalism (public expression in the domain of news reporting and analysis) has advantages and disadvantages and in many cases the criticism leveled at it is justified.

Good:

1. Speed:

   We’ve already seen the Internet erode traditional print media boundaries by offering instant news publishing and near-real time access via news aggregators and search engines.

   A combination of mobile technology and innovation has meant that quite often it is the average citizen at the scene of an event who provides news coverage before TV channels can get their crews on the spot.

2. Simplicity:

   Have a mobile phone with a decent camera (who doesn’t?) Have Internet access at home? Can you access a webcam or a microphone at home or work? You don’t need a TV crew and an editing staff to be a citizen journalist – technology, innovation and a little perseverance goes a long way.

3. Low-Cost:

   Chances are you already have the equipment you need (or that it will cost you a tiny fraction of what it would cost to setup your own newspaper or TV channel). Promotion on the Internet is a factor of time and experience – by and large if you write about what people are interested in, have a unique angle and know online marketing basics, you’re off to a flying start. Costs? Minimal.

4. Gaps:

   There are gaps (in breadth and depth) in traditional media’s news coverage. There’s market demand for citizen journalism, there are gaps to fill, and more and more you will see citizen journalism filling these gaps.

Bad:

1. No moderation or clear standards:

   Speed and low-cost has its disadvantages – the onus of editing (and responsible editing) falls squarely on the writer. If their writing skills are subpar, their message, and therefore their platform for expressing themselves, will look unprofessional. If their writing is deliberately offensive, there’s no system of checks to prevent such messages from being distributed.

   With traditional media, their agenda may be defined by their bottom line but they are still subject to rules and regulations of their local journalistic authority. Citizen journalists? No such thing.

   This leads to a host of other problems – copyright theft, irresponsible journalism (we’re not journalists, the rules don’t apply to us, so we can say whatever we want to whomever we want) and a personalisation of news reporting – not in terms of how you say it but literally in terms of what you are saying, and as a result there’s a lack of perspective that seriously hurts the credibility of that writer.

2. Lack of mass proliferation:

   It’s easy to get started as a citizen journalist and it’s ridiculously easy to promote your work online, but you can’t match the widespread audience of a TV channel or a newspaper, it’s not possible on a stringshoe budget.

   Serious journalists often turn to traditional media as a career choice instead of striking out a path on their own because of this very reason – they don’t have the audience necessary to make a difference in public opinion.

Citizen Journalism, the World and Pakistan

Citizen journalism has strong roots in political discourse and sometimes is mistaken for public debate on politics and current affairs. However, if you go back to what I said at the start about citizen journalism:

The Information Age has made gaps in our knowledge and gaps in the knowledge pushed to us by traditional information channels glaringly obvious. Citizen journalism is an evolving and effective mechanism for both finding those gaps and filling them where possible.

These gaps can occur in any sphere of knowledge, from popular culture to sports to technology to child health to military affairs to local events. We’ve seen the rise of non-political citizen journalism in the world and while citizen journalism is still in it’s early stages in Pakistan, we’re seeing a trend in non-politicising citizen journalism here as well.

There’s news that we’re told happened. Then there’s news that actually happens. Some of us lucky enough to be in the proximity when it does (or have quick access to the details). Citizen journalism is about bridging the gap between what we’re told, and what happens. Sometimes we don’t get the full picture. Sometimes the news slips under our radar. Citizen journalism is about keeping track and making sure we know everything there is to know about everything that’s happening around us.

Is that a goal worthy of your support?

Further reading: Beginner’s Guide To Citizen Journalism.

"Citizen Journalism – A Primer" was originally published at Ahmed Bilal's Blog.

]]> http://ahmedbilal.com/citizen-journalism/feed/ 0 http://ahmedbilal.com/are-you-making-the-right-choices/ http://ahmedbilal.com/are-you-making-the-right-choices/#comments Sat, 13 Dec 2008 10:58:12 +0000 Ahmed Bilal http://ahmedbilal.com/?p=169 What’s Important, What’s Not?

There’s a guy down my street who lives alone. One morning he woke up, checked his fridge and realised he was out of anything to eat, so he thought about getting out of his house, walking 5 minutes down to the market and getting food for himself.

But since it was early morning he was lazy, so he plopped down in front of his computer, and started going through his email and daily blog reading.

A couple of hours later, a low growling in his stomach reminded him of more pressing needs. He checked the time, and split between replying to someone’s comment on someone else’s blog and going out to get food, he decided to wait for lunch time instead.

More hours passed, lunch time came and went, with him looking at the sun and wondering how hot it would be outside and whether it would be smarter to just wait till the afternoon when the sun had gone down a little.

By afternoon his stomach was positively growling and he could get his mind around to work on anything, much less sit in one place. He decided to step out but thought he should take a shower first. So off he went, showered, shaved and got dressed, and before heading out he thought he should check his email to see if something interesting / urgent had popped up.

There was nothing urgent but he opened his blog at the same time and started replying to comments a few readers had left in the last few hours. Some were angry at what he’d said, and with his pride sufficiently aroused he spent the best part of the next two hours replying, posting new articles and editing previous ones.

It was past sunset by then – he looked of his window and realised that it was almost night-time. “Maybe I’ll just go out for dinner then.”

As you must have guessed by now, he never made it out for dinner. Someone popped on IM, a friend from a different timezone, and my friend spent dinner time and a couple of hours beyond it chatting away, delaying his basic need to feed himself.

He went to sleep hungry that night, vowing not to repeat his mistakes again, that tomorrow would bring a new day, that he would do what was important first thing in the morning.

Where Are You Going?

Quite often we let distractions – some unimportant, some even less so – get in our way of what we need, what we desire and what is truly important to reach our goals. Like my friend from down the street, we rationalise and justify our willingness to focus on these distractions instead of focusing on what’s important.

The common response is to try to control our emotions and actions, to force ourselves to bend in one direction or the other. Willpower is an empowering concept but dreadfully misunderstood. There is no control or bending of will as we’ve come to think of it. We have impulses, and amongst those impulses we have an equal and impartial choice to make. There is no bias, only habit. The choice is still equal, similar to how a coin, after turning up heads 50 times out of 50, will still have a 50/50 probability of turning up heads the next time.

What happens in the past can influence our judgment but it does not influence the likelihood of any single choice. In essence, it’s not harder to do what is important or easier to be distracted because once you recognise and look beyond past habits and focus on what’s in front of you, the choice is very clear.

If it’s important for you to be caught up in life’s trivial pursuits which may seem terribly important in the present but count for little in the long run – then focusing on these distractions is the right choice for you.

If it’s important for you to eat, to be healthy, to be successful, to be loved, to be all that you can be, then you get it done first thing in the morning.

There’s no right or wrong, there are only consequences. There’s no control, only acceptance and resistance, and with that acceptance / resistance a flow of energy, a change of direction, down one path or the other.

As long you’re clear in what you want, and you can clearly see the consequences of all the choices available to you, getting from A (where you are) to B (where you want to go) is as simple as accepting the choices that lead you to B as inevitable and resisting those choices that take you away from B.

Provided that you’re willing to make that 5 minute trip down to the store.

"Are You Making The Right Choices?" was originally published at Ahmed Bilal's Blog.

]]> http://ahmedbilal.com/are-you-making-the-right-choices/feed/ 1 http://ahmedbilal.com/social-media-promotion-template/ http://ahmedbilal.com/social-media-promotion-template/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2008 02:00:17 +0000 Ahmed Bilal http://ahmedbilal.com/?p=133 This is a brief template for promoting your website using social media using strategies from my personal experience and from those veterans who average 2-3 front-page Diggs every week.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments section and I’ll update this page accordingly. Please keep in mind that this template outlines the process / steps; if you’re looking for an in-depth explanation of what the key concepts mean, mention this in the comments and I’ll cater for that as well in future articles.

How to get as many social media votes as you need for your linkbait promotion:

• Targets
• Networking Basics
• Social Media Basics
• The Process

Targets

Understand why you’re doing social media promotion. Your goals may change over time (as your business expands) and that will certainly change your approach but when you’re starting out, make sure you know what you want and what you don’t want.

Decide ahead of time whether you will:

* vote on ‘any’ article when asked or use a ‘quality filter’ (that is, only vote on those articles that you consider you would vote for yourself even if you weren’t asked to).

* create multiple accounts on one SM site to give yourself a voting boost or use a single account per site (multiple accounts give you a boost but are increasingly irrelevant for major social media sites and your time is much better spent cultivating relationships and improving your own account).

* write / brainstorm your own linkbait or outsource (unless you’re an expert, get help in this, even if it costs you ($100-$300)).

* go looking for votes yourself or outsource (this is a financial decision but it’s recommended that over time you build your own network as opposed to persistently outsourcing every article’s promotion).

Personally, I try to use a quality filter, build my profile on each site, outsource linkbait but do the brainstorming and editing, and I prefer to look for the votes myself.

Networking Basics

* You need to help people first before they will help you. Be available via IM / email for social media voting. If you vote on their articles, they will vote on yours. If you comment on / review their articles, they will reciprocate. Give and you shall get.

* As a rule, quality and quantity are both important. Always look to expand your network but also look to keep adding power-players to your circle.

* Get in on as many lists, forums and social media promotion groups as you can. Just try to make sure they don’t overlap in terms of the people involved too much.

* Once you’re ‘popular’ enough (you’ll know when), start your own mailing list that you use to send social media requests.

Social Media Basics

* Get a power user to submit your content whenever possible.

* Building a profile is the job of someone who works fulltime (or relatively fulltime) in the online marketing niche. If that’s your calling, go for it. Otherwise work on leveraging the power of numbers and try to keep your profile clean (don’t blindly vote up every article you see, only vote on those you’re genuinely interested in).

* Every social media website has a different ’system’ and pitfalls. Whether you’re in this fulltime or not, learn the culture and learn what will work and not work on each SM site. Digg and StumbleUpon are radically different and yet both can deliver massive amounts of traffic (Digg instantly, SU over time).

* Tap into non-English social media sites. Again, tailor your content to suit the audience. You’re looking for links as much as exposure, and if you can get links from websites your competition isn’t tapping into, it automatically gives you an advantage.

* Social Media is just one part of the equation. The key has always been and will always be the people you know and what influence they have over others. Target bloggers and journalists through your social media efforts and with really great content if you can get links before you push your campaign through, you’ll get a very nice natural voting pattern through the traffic coming through.

* Content isn’t king. How people feel about it matters much more. The same thing said one way to one set of people produces a different reaction to saying it another way to the same set of people. Changing your presentation, changing your positioning and changing your targets will have make a difference in how successful your promotions are.

The Process

* Create a weekly list of urls that you’ll be promoting through social media

* Position yourself as an active voter – offer to help and help as much as you can – write comments / reviews on social media sites, comment on the content as well, consider voting on other social media platforms if the content is really good.

* On your list of contacts, directly ask everyone to vote for one linkbait per week. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 or 1, ask them to vote on only one linkbait per week.

* Whenever someone asks you to vote, do so, do the comments, and then ask them to reciprocate on your linkbait (pick a different one from what you’ve asked them already). This will get you a guaranteed vote without you seeming like a greedy fucker who wants votes all the time. Spread out your linkbaits for the week and ask people to reciprocate on different ones. If you have few, ask them to reciprocate on different social media platforms.

Embrace the fact that you’re getting asked for votes. Embrace the fact that people will reciprocate. Embrace the fact that people love the ‘extra’ – the comments, etc. And then milk it by creating top-notch content that will garner momentum on its own, give it some push and enjoy.

"Social Media Promotion Template" was originally published at Ahmed Bilal's Blog.

]]> http://ahmedbilal.com/social-media-promotion-template/feed/ 2 http://ahmedbilal.com/pakistani-bloggers/ http://ahmedbilal.com/pakistani-bloggers/#comments Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:32:48 +0000 Ahmed Bilal http://ahmedbilal.com/?p=150 The Pakistani online community are a curious bunch. The IRC / forum / gaming vets stay underground, leading true double lives on and off line. The lone entrepreneurs plough on relentlessly, wondering when they will meet a fellow Pakistani entrepreneur while at the same time choosing to work instead of reaching out to other souls.

The idealists – every society has those but in Pakistan they take center stage – are vociferously vocal, active and prominent but not technical nor money making experts. And there are those who spend hours and hours on social media apps but balk at the thought of spending 30 minutes a day writing a blog.

The Lahore Bloggers Meetup (what, you didn’t know?) was an interesting experience – and now that I’m back home (don’t worry Lahore, I’ll be back soon), here are some takeaways:

• There are a few ‘elite’ who know plenty about SEO, blogging, webmastering, monetization, etc, while almost everyone else is a total noob. No disrespect intended here – but I think there’s a lot of education and training that can be done to help the local blogging community.
• We’re very disorganised – and perhaps part of the reason is, as someone at the meetup suggested, that we’re afraid of failing, afraid of taking risks, afraid of making mistakes. Having said that, we’re also very eager to learn and apply what we’ve learned if someone shows us the way, and that can work to our advantage.
• People have a burning desire to learn more about the basics of blogging and making money online – but there are few quality resources available and fewer still available online. The one book I would recommend to everyone here is the ProBlogger book by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett – and maybe we can set something up and give away a few copies at a future meetup.
• The next meetup / seminar / conference MUST be focused on teaching and training people, with separate beginner / expert tracks to accomodate everyone’s needs and interests.

I fully intend to link up with everyone I talked to at the Meetup in the coming week (before Eid hopefully), and with a few more trips to Lahore planned for December there’s a good chance that I’ll meet some of those people again. As always, if anyone has any questions on blogging / SEO / monetization / marketing / wordpress / etc, drop me a line or catch me on twitter.

"Pakistani Bloggers" was originally published at Ahmed Bilal's Blog.

]]> http://ahmedbilal.com/pakistani-bloggers/feed/ 5 http://ahmedbilal.com/blogging-is-not-writing/ http://ahmedbilal.com/blogging-is-not-writing/#comments Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:17:01 +0000 Ahmed Bilal http://ahmedbilal.com/?p=143 Defining ‘blogging’ is like explaining ‘God’ (without the likelihood of ensuing bloodshed) – every blogger and non-blogger has their own idea of what ‘blogging’ is (and every believer, non-believer and fence-rider has their own idea of what ‘God’ is), and they’re all wrong about both.

When you can’t agree on what something is, it’s time to agree on what something isn’t. Here I sense that we will agree – God is not man (and therefore should not be anthropomorphised with human attributes) and blogging is NOT writing.

I’m a writer and I’m a blogger. I write; unless I say what my mind is screaming at me, I cannot rest at ease. I have felt gripping pain before writing and euphoria afterwards. At times violent and pinching, especially when I don’t write for a long time. Other times it’s numbing, usually when writing has become a habit. You can become used to the numb pain and ignore it, but after a while it eats you up, chews you mercilessly until you summon the courage to sit down and write again.

I blog because it’s pays the bills. There’s no desire to share, no victory at the finish line. The joy comes in the paycheck, in the ad revenue, in the traffic numbers as I whore away words and time to increase the distance between myself and the gutter.

Absolutely no comparison between the two.

What’s more, blogging is a platform – a blog makes it easy for you to publish content online, blogging makes it possible for people without plush 6-figure salaries or graduate degrees to earn a living. If you love what you do, great. If you don’t love it, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it puts food on the table and pays for the roof above your head.

Writing? I write because I am who I am, and because until I write life is incomplete and without purpose or direction.

I’ll leave you with two quotes from a 1960 Harlon Ellison essay, when the respected author in turn quotes two of his influences:

There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is to write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

Hemingway, 1936

Produce, produce, produce…for I tell you the night is coming.

Mathew Arnold.

Write. And Blog. But not at the same time. Remember, one writes out of necessity. One blogs out of choice. Don’t confuse the two, because blogging cannot take away whatever is kicking inside you and fighting to get out, and writing won’t always keep you away from the gutter.

"Blogging is NOT ‘Writing’" was originally published at Ahmed Bilal's Blog.

]]> http://ahmedbilal.com/blogging-is-not-writing/feed/ 1 http://ahmedbilal.com/what-do-you-do/ http://ahmedbilal.com/what-do-you-do/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:40:25 +0000 Ahmed Bilal http://ahmedbilal.com/?p=135 Ever since I started working online, I’ve had trouble answering a very simple question – what do you do?

In university it was easy – you could tell them you were studying computer science and while you never wanted to write code again in your life, people would have no problems in attaching a convenient label to you (computers in this case).

But after university, things got complicated. Saying ‘I write for a living’ was exotic but invariably followed by the question ‘but what is your real job?’ or ‘when are you going to get a real job’. Apparently earning twice as much as my fellow graduates while working half as much was considered cheating and without a future. Maybe it was, but what did I know?

When I was consulting (search marketing), it was easier to explain – I helped businesses promote their products and services online (my favourite line was / still is: I help people make more money). I was always asked who I was working with, with the words ‘freelance consultant’ thrown back at me with a look of mistrust (disgust?), as if I was little better than a whore catering to foreign clients.

Labels are important to us as a society. In Pakistan, where independent thought or initiative is less common and / or less celebrated (even though small businesses are as common as anywhere else), going without a recognised label, without a box that they can put you in, is cause for being viewed as a suspicious outsider.

Here’s the unwritten rule – if you’re uneducated, you open a shop or work a menial job. If you’re educated, you get a job. If you’re rich, you join your daddy’s business.

What of those who get an education and then start their own business? Not really a fan club, much less an understanding culture. Still, things are better now than they were 4 years ago.

However, there’s one thing that stands out – if you’re not following the ‘traditional’ path of study->study->study->get a job, then there’s an unwritten rule that you must make more money than everyone else from your graduating class or you’re considered a failure. It’s an unfair expectation from the self-employed, but it’s the world we live in.

When I started working fulltime on Football Media / Soccerlens, it became harder to explain what I did (blog? what the hell is that? write online? why would you do that, who’d pay you to write?) until I realised that I had to explain things in terms people understood.

So now, whenever someone asks me what I do, I tell them that I run a sports newspaper like Dawn (leading local daily) except that it’s web-based so it’s updated 24/7, like Geo (top local TV channel), and that it’s the most popular independently owned football site, and if I’m really looking to impress, I segue into a discussion of the latest buyout offer the site has received, which always gets people’s attention.

It’s not as hot as being a pilot or as lucrative as being the country manager for a major multinational (I don’t get the same office perks, unfortunately), but people get it now. Still no office perks though…

"What do you do?" was originally published at Ahmed Bilal's Blog.

]]> http://ahmedbilal.com/what-do-you-do/feed/ 4 http://ahmedbilal.com/living-in-a-terrorised-world/ http://ahmedbilal.com/living-in-a-terrorised-world/#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:10:12 +0000 Ahmed Bilal http://ahmedbilal.com/?p=128 Thursday, 9 October 2008.

Another bomb went off in Islamabad today, this time hitting the Anti-Terrorism Wing in the Police Headquarters. Where was everyone? The other end of the city, providing security for a 2-day briefing session on Anti-Terrorism.

It would be a laughing matter if a bomb going off in Pakistan wasn’t such a common affair. Common enough that when the bomb went off this morning one of the primary sticking points wasn’t ‘who did it’ or why did this happen’, it was the size of the crater produced from the blast.

I was in a building roughly 500 meters away from the blast when it happened – but once we knew we were safe (windows shattered but the building was still standing) we peeked outside the window to see the smoke and in less than 2 minutes, we were back to work.

We’re not scared anymore.

Humans are an amazingly adaptable species and we’ve adapted to a world of increased violence and despair (not to mention diminishing resources) with relative ease. Bomb blasts, earthquakes, disease, economic meltdown, threat of invasion, etc etc – it’s part of who we have become.

There’s a problem with being ‘adaptable’ – you tend to adapt to the bad as well as the good, and in doing so we accepted the energy crisis this year (and last year) as a part of life instead of individually and / or collectively doing something to combat it. Similarly we’ve accepted suicide bombings (and more significantly, casualties) as a part of our daily life. Every day there are people dying from a bomb blast or a shooting spree or something else in Pakistan. Faced with a rising death toll, what do we do? We take it as the price one pays for living today.

Are we terrified? Not really. The sad part is we’re not angry at the terrorists either, so this will continue until there’s no one left to kill or there’s no left to blow themselves up.

"Living in a Terrorised World" was originally published at Ahmed Bilal's Blog.

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