Category — Internet

People who have failed to understand the true essence of social media keep looking for proof of it being a devil. In one such argument amongst a number of my blogger freinds, someone used the example of the Abraham Biggs Suicide Video as an example of how social media, web 2.0 and pretty much all web technologies have made our hearts cold.

What is exactly the issue of Abraham Biggs Suicide Video?

Abraham Biggs Suicide happened around 4 months back. The guy must have his own reason to end his life. However this story attracted a lot of attention as the guy had done a live webcast of his death and it is suspected that the viewers had egged him on, instead of trying to convince Abraham Biggs, not to commit suicide. It has been 5 months since Abraham Biggs Suicide, but still distractors of social media use it as a proof that web 2.0 is pure evil.

It is stupid to blame technology for Abraham Biggs Suicide

Saying that web 2.0 was responsible for Abraham Biggs Suicide is like saying that medicine is responsible for every idiot that commits suicide by popping sleeping tablets. Moreover he committed suicide may be because of the fact that he was suffering from a bipolar disorder disease. Even if web 2.0 was not there, he would have committed suicide. So how can you blame technology for what mr Biggs did.

I had recently written about most viewed video on youtube. Related research shows that there is a massive demand for free bollywood movies onine. There are many websites that allow users to download free bollywood movies. There is also no dearth of websites to watch online bollywood movies. I have been trying to figure out a feasible business model for starting a website where users can watch free movies. I am not able to find much content related to the legal aspects of the topic. If any of you happen to have any experience in the topic, then please drop me a mail.

Also do you know if working on a seo project for a website which may be illegal is legal or not. My previous posts about romantic hindi songs and romantic hindi movie may get me a project from a site about bollywood hindi movies. I am not sure if it is legal though. What should I do?

TRAI has allowed ISP (Internet Service Providers) to offer unrestricted internet telephony services in India. What this essentially means is that users will be able to call (dial) to mobiles and landline phones in India from their computers. Under existing norms, a voice call can travel between two computers but not from a computer to a mobile or a fixed phone.

As per the TRAI recommendations, the STD service providers would be connected to ISPs through public internet for the purpose and the two service providers would have mutual agreement for the same.

The Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC), a technical arm of Department of Telecom, will work out the number plan for the ISPs to enable them to offer telephone services. “Telephone numbers from identified blocks shall be allocated to ISPs, Unified Access Service Providers, Basic Service Providers and Cellular Mobile Service Providers for internet telephony,” TRAI said.

With a view to make internet telephony secure, TRAI said, all ISPs interested to provide unrestricted internet telephony would have to install “Lawful Interception” equipments.

I believe that this will be more beneficial to corporate customers than to normal users (retail customers) like us. Reasons:

• India has low internet penetration with only 1.1 crore connections with even lesser number of broadband connections.
• Net speed of 256kbps is classified as broadband in India, which is not sufficient for decent voice clarity.
• Even after having a decent broadband connection, calls from PC to mobiles/fixed phones won’t be free. Users will definitely be charged per call.
• STD Call rates are already very low in India. In fact call rates are so low that even ISPs won’t be able to lower them significantly. Almost all the mobile operators now have plans where STD rates are same as Local rates.
• It is always convenient to call from a phone or mobile than to switch on you PC, connect to internet and then dial the number.

For corporate customers, where the volume of calls is really high this is definitely a boon because they can now deploy VOIP Phones over their Wide Area Networks and can virtually run their internal phone usage for free, independent of the phone service providers. BPO and IT companies will really benefit from this. This will bring in substantial cost savings for these companies. “This is a welcome step particularly for the Indian IT-BPO industry,” said the National Association of Software and Service Companies, or NASSCOM.

But this will mean a loss in revenues for the telecom operators and it will definitely not be welcomed by them. But I believe that they should have a long term perspective of the view. Rather than opposing this they should provide better broadband internet connectivity to the users. In fact as I see the way forward will be rolling out of WiMAX services in coming years, with wi fi enabled mobiles and voice communication moving over from switching networks to IP (internet) networks.

This is a welcome recommendation from TRAI and lets hope government approves it fast.

Xeeber is one more service that allows you to detect invisible yahoo messenger users. I have not used Xeeber myself yet. Have you used Xeeber? Please leave a comment stating your experience with the service.

Google trend for websites is a tool from google that allows you to get traffic statistics for any website. It gives out details like countries of origin of the users to a particular site, other sites visited by the users of the particular site and most importantly the popular search terms that brings traffic to the website. You can see the traffic trend for techcrunch here.

You can know similar data for youtube with google trends, right?? Wrong. When it comes to google’s own sites like youtube.com or google.com, almighty google will not give you anything. You need not take my word for it. Check google trends for website for google.com or youtube.com to see for yourself.

P.S: If you are able to see the trends for google.com or youtube.com then do let me know. I shall take down this offending post

SMS prices might have dropped. However who does not like an option to send free sms messages? Here we profile some websites that allow you to send free sms in india. Bookmark this page now. You will need more than 1 of these sites as they have a restriction on number of free sms you can send daily.

way2sms.com: This is one of the earliest players amongst the free sms service providers. The best part is it allows you to send messages upto 110 characters long. Really hassle free registration.

160by2.com: This is one of the newest players amongst the free sms service providers. However it allows you to send messages upto 80 characters long. However they are getting a lot of traction among new users.

www.jaxtr.com Jaxtr provides many more solutions apart from free sms. It is functional in countries outside india as well. However it works quite well in India. It even gives 50 free credits to make free calls.

www.spicesms.com: They support a imited number of service providers. As a matter of fact they do not support any of the 3 mowas using to check out the free sms services in india.

I have been doing a fair bit of research for a new domain name for my second hand mobile website. Seems like most of the usable english names have already been booked. That made me think about using a hindi name for the website.

As a matter of fact if you look at the most successful indian websites, except for rediff, all other major sites have a hindi name. naukri, shaadi, sulekha all are hindi names.

Every domain name has two parts. One before the dot(.), and after it. In the previous post, I had talked about points to consider while choosing the domain name i.e the first part. However the second part is important part as well.

The second part of the domain name or the part after the . is known as the TLD. You can choose from among several TLDs for your website.

dot com (.com) is the most preferred one by me. Simply because majority of websites use this TLD and hence people just have the tendency of typing .com after the domain name. If you use some other TLD for your domain name, then you shall have to keep reminding the users that your site is not .com.

Using country specific TLD in domain name You can choose a TLD specific to your country as well like .in for India. Google seems to give a higher priority to country specific TLDs for searches done in the respective google domain.

Register multiple TLDs for your domain name If you see your users liking your website, then it is a good idea to register multiple domain names for your website. Keep one main site and redirect the other urls to this one. That will ensure that noone else can take your traffic away.

Do you use a TLD other than .com? If yes then please let me know the logic for the same.

Your domain name will play a significant part in the success of your online venture. This is not the most important factor of success.This is one factor in your cotrol. Till you choose it the first time!!

There are several factors to consider while choosing a domain name. Some of the important factors are

I had created a list of gmail proxy sites and gmail proxies. The response to those 2 posts has been phenomenal with the first post getting more than 2300 views. So here is aother list of proxy sites for youtube

Most of these are geeral purpose proxy sites that work for other sites as well. However you can use all of them as youtube proxy sites
youtube proxy
http://rcx1.com
http://polysolve.com: My favorite youtube proxy site.
http://www.greatproxiesonline.info
http://www.browseprox.com
www.facebookfirewall.com: This works as a proxy for youtube
http://btunnel.com
http://defusefilters.com
http://www.oneinoneout.com
http://www.filtersneak.com
http://browseschool.com
www.proxysite007.info
http://www.secretlysurf.com
www.jacoto.com
http://magictunnel.info

Please let me know any good proxy sites you know. The idea is to create a comprehensive list.

Most of the useful sites like gmail,yahoo,orkut are banned in my office. That is what prompted me to search for a proxy site. The first proxy site that I started to use was yoyahoo.com. However the IT department was uncharecteristically fast to shut down this proxy site as well. So I continued my search and prepared a list of gmail proxy sites.

During this reseach I realized that one can create a proxy of his own, put in some advertisement with adsense and make good amount of money. In this post I list some open source code that can e used to create a good proxy site.

HTTP/FTP Proxy in a CGI Script
A Simple Http Proxy Server
Java FTP Proxy Server

There are too many really good SEO guides written by SEO experts. However as a webmaster I found myself lost while going through many of them. So this is an attempt by a webmaster to write a SEO guide that will be better undestandable by other webmasters. (Hopefully).

What is Search Engine Optimization or SEO:

Google defines SEO as follows
Search-engine optimization means adjusting the content of your site so it ranks higher in the list of search results for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.

Shoemoney asked the same question to some of the leading experts. You can read their definitions of SEO here.

Why is SEO important?

Traffic from Search engine is free traffic. More importantly these are the users who are actively looking for buying some product. Hence they are more likely to click on an advertisement or buy a product. So you can monetize them better. Free Traffic + Better Monetization. What more can you ask for?

I want to be successful without depending on Search Engines:

Good Luck. I am not asking you to depend entirely on search engine traffic. However according to google analytics Binaryday got 62% of its traffic last month from Search engines (58% from google alone). If you think that is because binaryday is a pathetic unpopular blog then take a look at the sources of traffic for Techcrunch. Even Techcrunch depends on Google for 40% of its Traffic.

SEO is important but how do I go about it?

A good place to start your SEO activity is to go through this list of important ranking factors. According to experts the top 10 positive ranking factors are

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

There are some negative ranking factors as well. The top 10 negative ranking factors are

1. Server is OftenInaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
5. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages

Keyword Use in Title Tag and Keyword Use in Body Text

Incorporate keyword phrases While making a post
Think about terms that a searcher is more likely to use to search for your post and use them in the title of your post. You can find popular keywords using the tool here. AOL had released around 20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months. That is a great repository for finding popular keywords.

Target longer phrases if they’re relevant Feel free to use longer titles. Google now supports 70 character long titles.Use this title tag plugin to be able to customize the titles of your pages and posts easily.

Use the keyword and some variations of the same in the body of the post. Include the important keywords inside h1 tag once, strong/bold tag once or twice and once or twice inside the post body. However take care not to overdo it else google may think that you are trying to spam.

It is a good idea to use a good quality image describing your post wherever possible. My own experience says it is comparatively easier to get some decent traffic from google image search. Make sure to keep the image on your own website and use relevant alt and title tags.

You can check how well your existing page is targeting a particular keyword using the Term Target Tool.

Write an Attractive Meta Description

I know I know, most modern search engines have stopped using meta description as a factor for ranking search results. Then what is it doing here? Well meta description will NOT help you improve your ranking in the SERP. However given a search ranking directly, it will help you improve your click through rate. Higher click through rate means higher traffic.

This is because google uses the meta description to create the search excerpt. See the example below. The underlined text is coming from the meta description of Mywalkin

Golden rule for writing a rocking meta description tag. Think like you are creating a 2 line advertisement for the post. Write complete sentences and try to limit your meta description tag to less than 150 characters.

Here is a wordpress plugin for you to add custom meta description tags to your posts.

A site or blog downtime is every webmaster’s / blogger’s biggest nightmare. Now we do not need to keep checking your site to know if it is working. Set up an alert on www.pingdom.com. It will let you know if your site goes down. I am already in love with this site. Try it out for yourself.

This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 startup school at Stanford by Ycombinator.

Nice and inspiring lessons if you are serious for starting a startup.

A really successful wordpress blog can consume a lot of server power as each page needs to be dynamically created for each user. Now you can remove the need for doing so by using WP Super Cache plugin.

This plugin generates static html files from the dynamic WordPress blog. Once the file is generated your webserver will serve the static html file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Advantages of WP Super Cache

1. It saves server power. If your blog has become popular and you are yet to move to a dedicated server, then you should use this plugin.
2. It will speed up your wordpress blog. That in turn makes the user experience of the blog readers much better. Also a faster blog/website is liked by most search engines, including Google.
3. Static html pages are better than dynamic ones from SEO point of view

Many first time bloggers start out on blogger.com blog. As the blog becomes older, you may decide to go for a new layout for various reasons including better monetization. Here is a step by step guide on how to change the template for a blogger blog.

Log into your Blogger account

go to the dashboard at the upper right corner.

Click on “Template” link

Click “Pick New” Tab

Select a template of your choice and click on “üse this template” link

Select the template of your choice, and click the “Use This Template” button.

Hitwise has released the latest numbers for the search engine market. Google reaches an all time high with 67.25% market share. Microsoft and yahoo continue their downward movement. Ask.com was the only other major search engine to gain market share.

Domain Mar.-08 Feb.-08 Mar.-07
www.google.com 67.25% 66.44% 64.13%
search.yahoo.com 20.29% 20.59% 21.26%
search.msn.com 6.65% 6.95% 9.01%
www.ask.com 4.09% 4.16% 3.48%

The traffic data for video sites showed that youtube dominates the video makrte completely with 73% market share. If you add 4% market share enjoyed by google video then google has a 77% market share in video.

All of us know that incoming link can bring a lot of traffic. However has it ever occured to you that outgoing links can bring substantial traffic?

I had written a post about release of wordpress 2.5. I started getting an unusually high number of visitors on that post. (Unusual by the standard of this blog ) Most of the traffic was coming from the trackback link on the wordpress blog.

To test the theory I wrote another article about yahoo microsoft story with several links to techcrunch articles. The post has got more than 100 visiors from trackback alone.

So always make sure to link to the sources from which you are picking facts and ideas for your post. It is the right thing to do and additionally it will help you get some additional traffic as well.

If you have a good internet idea and you will like to get it funded then http://www.seedfund.in/ is a great place to try your luck. Unlike most of the other funds that do not look at any proposal less than a million dollar, seedfund aims to invest Rs. 1 to 5 crores in a startup company. It comes with a great team that comprises of Pravin Gandhi and Bharati Jacob came from Infinity Venture and Mahesh Murthy from Passionfund.

They are located in Mumbai and Bangalore and will like to work with companies situated closer to these places. They’re looking mostly at internet or media or mobile or telecom or retail or consumer-facing plays – and also for things that aren’t yet “sectors”.

Their existing portfolio consists of carwale, agencyfaq, redbus.in etc. Since they intend to invest in 15-20 companies, we can safely assume that they shall be funding another 10-15 companies soon.

Finf out more details here

There is just too much of importance given to getting new traffic. Most of the webmasters seem to miss the importance of one of the most critical aspects of growth of a website. Retaining your users and making them repeat users. I have just created an excel spreadsheet to prove the point.

If you play with the spreadsheet a little, you will see that if your website manages to convert 50% of the traffic, then in 3 years you will get less than 1 lakh users. However if you manage to retain 100% of visitors then you shall get more than 7 lakh users. 100% may be a bit unrealistic. However even if you manage to retain only 75% of your users then your site would have recieved close to 3 lakh users.

I hope the data below would manage to convince you that retaining the visitors is the single most important requirement for the growth of a website/blog.