Hi all,
Yes I know, I haven’t posted for a looooooooooooooooooooooong time. It was due to very many personal obligations related to my studies and social work. I hope that this will not happen again. Looking forward to get back and catch up in the blogosphere.
I’m back with a creative mind full of ideas, a few of which you shall witness in the coming days. I thank you for remaining faithful readers even through my writers block. 
Adios amigos, and brb…
Mohan
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Its with utmost pleasure that I inform you that the 5th edition of Bar Camp Bangalore, the 2007 Winter Edition, is in a few days time, and registrations are off in full swing! Its to be held in IIM – B on the 17th and 18th (Saturday, Sunday) of this month.
For those who do not know what a Bar Camp is, it like a workshop wherein participants from different areas converge to talk about a specific area of interest, and a Bar Camp will include many such specific areas of interest (each area is called a Collective). Each collective goes on for around 3 hours, with as many participants sharing ideas and developments. After a collective, the participant can go for another collective, and so on.
For more information, visit the Wikipedia entry on Bar Camp.
In this edition, there are around 32 collectives (I use "around" since more are being added), including Blogging, Photography, Security and so on…
To see the full list of collectives, see the BCB5 Collectives page.
To register, visit BCB5 Registrations page.
And for more information, or just to do about anything you want – sponsor, register, volunteer, check out venue etc. – visit the BCB5 wiki.
About me, well, I’m bunking class for this 
Theres a huge excitement in the Blogging collective since the renown Indian blogger, Amit Agarwal, from Digital Inspiration will be coming!!!
So where will you be on the 17th and 18th? At home or at IIM B? (Free T shirts and food as well!!!)
[tags]BCB5, Bar Camp Bangalore, barcampbangalore5[/tags]
Good evening everyone,
I will refer to today, as the Black Wednesday for Bloggers. Why? Google has started penalizing websites, mostly blogs, for putting up sponsored text links from their pages and posts. This is because a lot of cheating was going on, and the revolutionary Google Page Rank technology was being abused by websites.
How PR works – Google Page Rank works on a system of voting. Imagine we have 2 pages, Page A and Page B. If Page A links to Page B, A gives a vote for B. The higher the number of votes, the higher your page rank. Now, PR is not just a factor based on the number of links. It also takes in to consideration the quality of such links. i.e. A link from a higher PR page causes your page PR to increase more than a link from a lower PR page. So if Page B gets a link from Yahoo!, it’ll have a higher PR than when it got a link from A. Thats the basic idea.
What happened – Links are not easy to come by. Especially for slightly dodgy sites, like page names implying something, but having other content. Or for start up banks and mortage services. So what these guys did is, they paid websites, especially bloggers, who had the license to blabber about anything they wanted, to post links to these sites, either on their sidebars, or through reviews. Many get-paid-to-blog services, like PayPerPost, ReviewMe, and PayU2Blog, sprung up, and the advertisers made use of these services to get links from bloggers. These services essentially paid bloggers to post a review or a blog post about their clients, for a small commission. The links came in from all blogs – small and big, low PR and high PR, low traffic and high traffic. One of the nasty factors promoting this industry was Google PR. So these dodgy websites, which was supposed to have low PR because of negative factors, ended up with high PRs because of the link manipulation. Thus, Google’s search was effectively manipulated with money, and thus the search results were also manipulated.
So, Google got panicky. A variable against their revolutionary and near perfect search system? No sirree!
And they decided to go on the aggressive. Google decided to reduce the PR of websites and blogs, which they termed as link farms. Down went the PR of all blogs utilizing get-paid-to-blog services, and those blogs and sites which used direct text link services, like Text-Link-Ads.
The bloggers have started feeling the pinch today. Thousands of bloggers are feeling the pinch, and are running helter skelter for answers. Duncan Riley, from TechCrunch, reports that even big blogs, like Engadget and Autoblog facing huge PR drops (Engadget went from PR 7 to PR5, and Autoblog from PR6 to PR4).
Now these huge blogs wont feel the pinch too much, because they depend upon their huge established readership base, fan clubs, word of mouth marketing, credibility, feed readership, and community driven content networks (like Digg and Reddit) to sustain and develop their traffic and popularity. But smaller blogs, whose traffic is at least partially dominated by search engine traffic, mainly from Google, this will be a bit hit. BloggingIndia has not been hit so far, because we do not yet have paid links, but my other blog has felt the pinch.
What will happen due to PR drops?
Extracts from conversations in a get-paid-to-post service community -
- This is the most whack PR update ever. I’ve never seen ranks drop, and then drop AGAIN in a matter of 2 weeks?I found all of my blogs dropped again this morning. In 2 weeks, one blog went from a 5, to a 4, and then this morning is sitting at a 3. After being PR 4 for years.
- Mine went from 4’s to 2’s. Oh happy day…
- My PR5 blog is now a PR3. My PR4 blog went down last week to a PR3 and today to a PR2.
Meanwhile, bloggers worldwide are going on a rampage against Google. The first I came across was by Beth, at AFrogToKiss. She has decided to stop using all Google services. She advices users to stop clicking Adsense ads, uninstall Google software like Google Earth, Google Desktop Search, Picasa, Google Toolbar and so on.
From my part, I’ll say this, its our fault that we fell greedy to money and started putting up with such sponsors. We tampered with a system which Google thought was foolproof, which was bound to happen sometime anyway, and Google is plying for time, penalizing bloggers, while they try to develop a new foolproof alternative for PR, now that it has been proved that PR is biased. Yes, PR is very biased now. In their quest to penalize sites sporting sponsored links, they haven’t yet penalized the sites which sponsor the links. The actual fault lies with the sites which offered money in exchange for links. They should be penalized, not bloggers. So now, PR is biased with excellent blogs being given a low status. Before it was biased because of these excellent blogs trying to bring up not-so-good sponsors. It was biased then, it is biased now. But earlier, it was biased from the users side. Now its biased from the provider side (Google) which is a bigger bias than the former.
Anyway, I don’t see any reason to stop using Google services. I find Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Orkut and Google Search indispensable. I find Google Earth the best of all services around. I don’t think we should deny ourself a host of great facilities just because Google penalized us for a mistake we should understand. But I don’t think most of the bloggers will agree with me.
So what will happen shortly? I expect I-Hate-Google campaigns to spring up. Blogs, petitions, email campaigns… the works… I fully expect to see an anti-Google Firefox plugin coming up in a day or two Google will have a massive negative PR attack. Finally, there’ll be a small dip in Google profits for the quarter, and maybe their stock prices, but in a month or two, its business as usual for Google, while its not for all the bloggers.
So what next? If you’ve been hit, don’t waste your time sporting anti-Google campaigns. Try and utilize the time to try and firefight. Remove the links, or bargain with the advertisers to have No-Follow tags inserted. STOP all viral blog chains, like Technorati Faves and stuff. Put your efforts into blogging quality content. And have patience. Google can’t do this for ever. And where there’s a will, there’s a way. Monetizing blogs has come to stay. There’ll be a way soon… And we’ll keep you posted on it…. Ciao…. And fingers crossed hoping that BloggingIndia won’t feel the pinch…
[tags]google pinch, pr downfall, google pr, massive pr changes, pr changes, google, pr, bloggers, sponsored links, link farms, campaigns, anti-google, payperpost, reviewme, text-link-ads, blogs lose pr, pr loss, black wednesday, why did PR lose[/tags]
Good evening,
Yes All upgrades and modifications have been done. I’ve updated Wordpress to version 2.1.3. I’ve also inserted all other plugins previously available at BloggingIndia.
I’ve changed the theme to a heavily edited 3 column version of i3theme (made by n.design studio and columnized by MangoOrange ).
I hope that you enjoy the new layout…
If you find any errors, or inconveniences, please mail me – mohan [at] bloggingindia [dot] net
Thanks,
Mohan (aka Neo Garfield)
[tags]upgrade, wordpress 2.1.3[/tags]
Hi all,
The Wordpress upgrade has been completed successfully, but it seems like I
lost my sidebar 
I’ve been planning a theme upgrade for a long time now, so I
decided nows the time.
So hold on tight for a couple more hours, while I install a new theme
Cheers,
Mohan
Heya,
The Discover Magazine has a wonderful article about Mapping the Blogosphere trends.
The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.
Apparently, the numbers have meanings…
1 MR. POPULARITY
On the map, white dots represent individual blogs, sized according to number of links. Nearly 500,000 people visit the DailyKos every day, making it one of the world’s most popular blogs. A link from DailyKos is a guaranteed way of attracting Web traffic (and therefore advertising revenue), and as a result DailyKos has a strict link policy. Green links represent one-way links (that is, blog A links to blog B), and blue links indicate reciprocal links (blog B returns the favor).2 THE GOSSIP OF GADGET HOUNDS
The bright spot here represents the popular site Boingboing, a “Directory of Wonderful Things” that links to oddly compelling online news from the fringes of the real world but mostly offers gossip about gadgets and all things high-tech.3 SHOW ME YOUR FRIENDS
This isolated, close-knit online community of bloggers uses LiveJournal, an online host that primarily serves as a social networking site. This blogging island is just barely in touch with the rest of the blogworld.4 I’LL SHOW YOU MINE. . .
This blue blob represents a balanced sociopolitical discourse. The prevalence of blue in this area shows that most of these links are reciprocal, suggesting a sort of metadialogue between bloggers who hurl headlines at one another. The brightest light belongs to syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin.
5 NAH, JUST SHOW ME YOURS
No discussion of the blogosphere would be complete without a nod to online smut. This outlying island of blue represents the linked-up world of bloggers who traffic in the latest news and gossip from the world of pornography. Oh, yeah, and pictures.
6 LONELY JOCKS
Also on the outskirts is this group of sports enthusiasts, many of whom, unlike the lonely pornographers, have links back to the central hot spot of the blogosphere. “What you find often on the blogosphere is people on the outside pointing in to the middle,” Hurst says. “They’re on the outside looking in.”
Interesting, isnt it? I would have loved a bit MORE information about the entire thing, but ah well, looks pretty 
[tags]map, blogosphere[/tags]
Hey all,
Technorati has added 2 hot widgets more to their feature list!
1) The Authority Widget proudly shows off your rank.
Want to assert your authority? Proudly show off your status as an authoritative blogger whose fluid prose rakes in link love by the bushel with our new Authority Widget.
Looks cool Maybe I’ll get one… When my rank improves… 
2) The Blog Tags Cloud Widget
Yesssss! Its finally here! We are used to so many types and kinds of tag clouds(see Related Posts). And here, Technorati releases their own! You can have a tag cloud on your blog, for the top tags which you “technoratied”, or you can display the top searches/tags at Technorati.
Display your top tags with the Blog Top Tags widget in a beautiful cloud formation (or the top tags of any blog). Copy the code snippet below, replacing {URL} with your blog URL. Note: when you first install this widget on your blog, it will take us a few minutes to build a custom widget with your blog’s top tags, but then after that we’ll keep it up to date for you.
So, what’re you waiting for? Head over to Technorati, and get their brand new widgets for your blog … Ah, I defer until later, since I’m fashionably late
[tags]technorati, widgets, tag cloud, authority widget[/tags]
Hey all,
Guess who the world’s oldest blogger is? Its a 107 year old grandma by the name Olive Riley! Living in Queensland, Australia, Olive Riley maintains her blog, which she calls a “blob”, named The Life of Riley.
Its so nice and sweet to see these good grandmas blogging It keeps us young folk inspired and eager to see more to it! Cheerios Olive! And please do keep blogging
Oh, and I got the word from 2 sites simultaneously – ABC and BloggersBlog.
[tags]olive riley, all about riley, the life of riley, granda, blogging, worlds oldest blogger, 107 years[/tags]
Hi all,
The first ever Consumer Generated Marketing enterprise, PayPerPost, tried to pull off its best ever joke on April Fools Day, yesterday. In an unprecedented move, Ted Murphy, CEO of PayPerPost typed in an article to the PayPerPost Blog with the title ” PayPerPost to Acquire TechCrunch”.
TechCrunch, as you all know, is one among the top 5 blogs in the world. Its author, Michael Arrington, is a VERY well known figure in the blogosphere, and yes, Arrington was PayPerPost’s No.2 critic right from the start (The No.1 being Scoble ).
I dare say that many “posties” must have believed this story on the blog, and must have rushed in their congratulations to Ted on having acquired one of the world’s most populous blogs, and for beating their critic to boot, only to have received a cheery “April Fool!” in return
The post went on like this -
Sunday, April 01, 2007
PayPerPost to Acquire TechCrunch
I am pleased to announce that late last night Mike Arrington and I came to an agreement whereby PayPerPost will acquire TechCrunch
and all related “Crunch” properties. I am well aware of the irony of
this situation given Mikes comments about PayPerPost in the past. This
comes on the heels of TechCrunch’s acquisition of FuckedCompany, which
was already in progress and will be part of the deal. Through it all we
have been able to come to an agreement whereby Mike will continue to
run the Crunch sites but PayPerPost will be able to leverage the site
for its advertisers. As a result of this merger, we will soon be
launching a new “PayPerCrunch”
feature, whereby Advertisers will be able, at our customarily low
prices, to leverage the journalistic talents of Mr Arrington and his
staff to fully promote our customers products and services.Mike and I are now BFFs, don’t be surprised if you start seeing pictures of us partying together in Vegas.
This came as quite a shock, since Ted and Arrington were daggers drawn ever since the dawn of PayPerPost. But its like a “kick in the ass” for Arrington, who must have been shocked out of his wits when he say his worst enemy proclaiming that they had procured his beloved!
I guess that the shock is yet to sink in, since the particular blog post has only around 5 comments! I’m waiting to see what happens when the message sinks in But anyway, GREAT JOB TED!
[tags]techcrunch, payperpost, acquired, april, fools, consumer, generated, marketing[/tags]
Hey all,
In a *HOT* event today, it has been reported than John McCain, the presidential hopeful, had a MySpace page, which used a template designed by Newsvine CEO, Mike Davidson. Davidson, mad that the presidential hopeful had hot linked the images from his site, played a prank, by changing an image to pronounce -
Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full
support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate
females.
The full news was reported by Arrington TechCrunch which, I must say, produced quite a few giggles as it spread across the Digg net The post posted at TechCrunch(http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/) went on like this -
Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be
in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by Newsvine
Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it,
but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to
host their own image files.McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit.
Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has
to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning
as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the
site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement:Today I announce that I have reversed my position and
come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between
two passionate females.The story is also up at Newsvine here
of the owner, Niall Kennedy. Niall replaced the picture with a
pornographic image, which was then published on the blog. His idea was
to send a message to Microsoft on the importance of respecting
licensing of IP, although some peopleMcCain’s MySpace page is significantly higher profile than the
Microsoft blog, and Davidson isn’t posting pornography to the site.
He’s making a political statement while also sending a message about
respecting the property rights of others. I expect the changes to be
reversed quickly, unless the wrong person is sick or out to lunch
today. Either way, we’ve captured it above.
Interesting isnt it? I would like to see McCain’s reaction to this
[tags]John, McCain, MySpace, hacked, newsvine, davidson, prank, hotlinking, template, enhanced[/tags]
Vox Populi