Archive for the ‘blog’ Category
Blogging is easy – blogging right is difficult! A little help is always useful if you are planning to blog right.. The book “Blogger – Beyond the Basics” by Lee Jordan proved to be my bridge from blogging to blogging brilliantly..
The book is for users who have just entered the blogging field and would like to create a name for themselves in the blogosphere. The book quickly ramps you up from beginner to an advanced level user with ability to derive maximum out of your blog.
This book is for those who want to use Google’s Blogging platform – Blogger. However, many tips in the book go beyond blogger and are generally useful for anyone. This is the first book that i have found in the market that covers blogging. Frankly I have also thought about writing a book on blogging but never went beyond the initial TOC.
The key to blogging (as you may have heard) is content. Without appealing content, a blog will not get readers. This book is about getting the platform right so that your content can create maximum impact. At one place in Chapter 9 the author does provide interesting suggestions on how to discover content that you could be writing based on the keywords.
The book starts by introducing a fictional business that wants to ensure its social presence in Chapter I. The next chapter logically dives into creation and customization of the site look. It is here that they cover conversion to a 3 column layout (my absolute favourite!).. The interesting part of the book is inclusion of 3rd party tools and sites apart from blogger platform itself making it relevant to the person rather than the tool.. chapter 3 is all about social bookmarking including introduction to quintessential feedburner.com.. The theory on blogging isn’t left out as it makes its appearance in Chapter 4 and covers blogrolls, backlinks and suggestions on how to get ur blog interesting.. The blogger platform let’s you extend the functionality e.g. polling, slideshow, 3rd party badges on the site using widgets.. if ur interested, they even introduce you to setting up ecommerce on blogger.. for the tinkerers, you can get ur fill by learning to create custom widgets! yes, it is not that difficult (but u don’t know that if you haven’t read this book :)).. Web 2.0 is driven by RSS and the guts are opened up for you in Chapter 6. by now, you are expected to know everything that is there to know technically about this platform..
so how about making some money like a pro? Chapter 7 gets u started with google adsense & leaves u with more options of making money $$.. Chapter 8 covers 
analytics and measuring site performance with google analytics.. and if u thought adding the javascript was all there was to this chapter, you will be surprised by the comprehensive coverage of analytics here. Oh and they don’t leave you just yet.. the final pillar is the SEO and that is taken care of in Chapter 9.. some great tools and techniques are presented here and this is generic to all bloggers on any platform.. and if you are only running a blog, you are done with here. for all corporate honchos with their static corporate websites, the final chapter 10 covers integrating blog with their corporate website..
Since i have been a blogger user for long, this book proved extremely useful for me. The book is complete with required screenshots and contains code where required. The screenshots are useful and the code provided immediately relevant.
The language of the book is a tard dry but I am ok with it (after having read numerous technical manuals).
While the book covers a lot of ground I would have loved some case studies on popular blogs that would have customised blogger. Information on how regular users have found blogger useful for them would also have been a welcome addition.
One can only gauge the relevance of the book based on the impact it has had on one’s blog. For me I have implemented the following after reading the book:
- Converted my layout to 3 column and expanded my template to 1024 pixels
- Put up a comments feed (i had been looking for this for sometime now)
- Added a sitemap for the blog
- Verified the blog with google and live search webmaster tools
- Changed the blog XML Validation from Strict to Transitional
- Changed the Facebook profile from vertical to horizontal
I am sure that there is something for you in the book that is waiting to be discovered. really, this is worth a read if you are in the blogging world and are using the blogger platform!
and if you are in the Delhi/ NCR region, do remember to setup urself with fellow bloggers in Delhi at www.delhibloggers.in.. u can work out the finer details with other folks from the group…
MY RATING: 5 on 5
I am looking forward to the warm sun in Delhi winters, the real Delhi food from Chandani Chowk and the bonfire tomorrow.. A perfect setting to meet the Bloggers and indulge in some interesting conversations..
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This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Blogosphere in the world has become a strong medium in itself. With various corporates encouraging their employees to blog (e.g. Microsoft), the trend has picked up in India.
When it all started around few years ago in India, you could only hear of a handful of bloggers mostly from media industry. These bloggers in India had built their reputation due to their experience in the media industry and then went on to leverage the new media trend. mostly young or at the most middle aged, these individuals had one foot planted in India and the other in international arena. They picked up most reputation and knowledge working with other new media international journalists.
IMHO, IT industry in India picked up the trend early on but was never able to reach the level or visibility the journalists were able to (probably ’cause of natural flair journalists had for writing & closer links with media industry)..
as the fad of blogging matured, various collaboration models emerged. I have tried to captured them below:
- Collaborative Blogs: These got a panel of bloggers together and each of them contributed to the same blog. e.g. Desipundit.com
- International Federations: International groups who were already blogging established their Indian arms and recruited people from India or people of Indian origin based internationally. Their Indian arms provide content from India e.g. Global Voices
- Objective Based: Blogs were setup with specific objective in mind. These objectives were non-blogging related e.g. Tsunami Blog
- Blog Aggregation sites: Pure blog aggregators came up that offered to aggregate blogs from India e.g. blogadda.com or
- Corporate Blogs: Some Indian companies encouraged their employees to blog and presented their blogs on their corporate website. Most bloggers came here from their R&D deptt. e.g. Infosys
- Offline Blog Groups: People like to meet people and this community formation was natural outcome of social instincts. People interested in blogging aggregated together geography wise and formed groups. e.g. delhibloggers.in
So where do i see it go from here:
- Professional Associations: While most the associations were social groups, the interest in blogging is definitely going to take it when some professional association of sorts is firmed up. This association could be on the lines of Press Club of India or Nasscom
- Collaboration with mainstream media: This one’s already begun… u would see mainstream media – newspaper, TV & radio talk about voices from the masses in form of blogs.
The journey is still in its early stage in the country. blogs have hardly figured in the reading list of an average Indian. Primary constraints still remain internet penetration but it is clear that this is set to improve. In future, blogs are set to become one of the credible mediums and will derive their value from 3rd party independent opinions.
The challenge is if bloggers from India can leave their personal agendas behind and aggregate together.. can personal egos find peace with collaborations? remaining independent and aggregated together is possible.. agreeing to disagree is possible.. can bigger names in the blogging world help other names come up? would the India bloggers want to take on more responsible roles and do something significant?
Have you seen any more collaboration models? Share with me and leave a comment.
Delhi Bloggers group is an aggregation of people who blog and share interest in blogging. the group consists of some very known bloggers and some newbies. What is distinguishing here is the fact that the group intends to ascend to greater heights by virtue of collaboration and shared leadership.. this is a community of bloggers..
The Delhi Bloggers Event is being conducted as per the following schedule:
Date: Saturday, January 12, 2008
Time: 12:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: Westend Greens Farmhouse, (Near shiv murti NH-8), New Delhi
(More details on the location are located here).
The agenda of the event is as follows:
12:30 PM – Registration Starts
1:00 PM : Welcome and group Announcements
1:30 PM : Marketing your Blog
2:00 PM : Blog Monetisation
2:30 PM – 3:00 PM : TEA BREAK
3:00 PM : Webcast with prominent blogger
3:30 PM : Beginning with Blogging and Allied Services (Digg/ Del.icio.us)
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM : Open Forums Discussions
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM : Structured Networking
We will be finalising the event sessions shortly.
There is NO Registration Fee for attending this event. We thank our sponsors for supporting the initiative.
You can immidiately register yourself for the event at: http://wiki.delhibloggers.in/delhi-bloggers-meets
And in case you have not yet joined the new groups, please join at: http://groups.google.com/group/thedelhibloggers
I will be attending the event, will you be there?
It is well known and observed that blogger templates can be tweaked to get the desired results. searching the web here is a site that i discovered that really presents tips and tricks:
digg_url = ‘http://www.abhishekkant.net/2007/05/posting-silverlight-streaming-video-on.html’;
- Encoding the source with Silverlight Media Encoder
- Preparing the upload package
- Upload the video to Silverlight Streaming Service
- Modify the Blog Template
- Make the blog post
Encoding the video is accomplished by a free tool – Expression Media Encoder that can encode virtually any video/ audio source into Silverlight compatible format and provide simple player controls. You can encode any video by using File -> Import option. In the Settings tab (located at right of the screen), you should change the Video encoding depending on the server you are targeting. The result of encoding is a directory with various files.
For preparing the silverlight video, you will need to delete a few files and includng a manifest.xml file. Refer here for step by step process: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/04/30/silverlight-streaming-is-now-live.aspx
Zip the files in the package as per the instructions at the above URL making sure that all the files are in the root of the zip folder structure.
To upload to streaming service, login at: http://silverlight.live.com/ with your passport ID and click on Manage applications. After the upload, silverlight will present you with 3 chunks of code that you need to upload for video to reach you. checking everything is in working order is essential by browsing to the test page available on the link – “Launch Application Test Page”. DO NOT close the page as it contains details to be used later (shown below)
If you are putting up the silverlight streaming video for the first time on your blog, you will need 
to do a one time modification to you blog template. For blogger, you will need to modify the template to include a single line in the <head> section of the blog template. You can do that by going to the Settings of the blog – > Template Tab -> Edit HTML and then copying the following between the tags anywhere:
Copy this to the post body. then copy the content from step 2 and copy the content immediately after the above content. you will need to remove all white spaces from the code there (else it will get converted to
and create problems). You can use delete button to delete the white spaces so as to bring all the code from step 2 in a single line.
Publish the post!
You can see a sample post done by me: http://www.abhishekkant.net/2007/05/seans-message-for-mvps-on-open-day.html
Here is a great effort to award the Top Indian Blogs: http://www.indibloggies.org
This comes close on the heels of the reports that there are around 13.5 million blogs in India. The shortlist has 175 blogs in various categories from 750 nominations received. That’s a awful lot lesser than the “supposed” no of blogs we have in India. Just hope that the participation grows in this blogging contest.
There was a developer blog contest done by MS India some time ago as well at: http://www.microsoft.com/india/blogstars/
I am totally impressed with the way of nominating the blog for the award – through del.icio.us and that makes it ultra community oriented.
Now, I am a techie at heart. So i quickly jumped in the Science/ Technology area. Some very interesting blogs have made it to the category. I was however disappointed to see certain blogs with no tech content featured in the category. I point to:
http://shallowthgts.blogspot.com/
http://balancinglife.blogspot.com/ – based on the comment from the author, I agree that this blog is about “science” not “technology”.
Jurors please don’t include blogs in Science/ Technology when they don’t write about anything else. Do you want to reconsider this category ?
It is SUPERB that the list of jurors is available. Why not go a step ahead and announce the award criteria as well? Is it only the no. of votes that a blog receives?
I think the criteria’s got to be more than no of votes – the influence of blogs in the blogosphere. you can measure it today with various tools available.
I propose the following format:
- Popularity of blogs based on votes (30% weight)
- Influence of blogs based on bloginfluence.net (40% weight)
- Blog Age (10% weight)
- No. of blog posts for duration under consideration (10% weight)
- Juror’s Vote (10% weight)
(ideally i would also love to get the no. of comments made in the blog as a criteria but we can’t measure that objectively yet)
Stack rank each blog based on above in each category. multiply that with the weightage of the factor. total up the rank. The blog with lowest score should give you the winners.
I illustrate that with an example.
Based on the criteria we have the following stack rankings for each blog based on the above mentioned criteria:
| Blog X | Blog Y | Blog Z | |
| Popularity | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| Influence | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Blog Age | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| No. of Posts | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| Juror’s Post | 3 | 1 | 2 |
Now the calculation:
| Blog X | Blog Y | Blog Z | |
| Popularity (0.3) | 0.3 | 0.9 | 0.6 |
| Influence (0.4) | 0.8 | 0.4 | 1.2 |
| Blog Age (0.1) | 0.3 | 0.1 | 0.2 |
| No. of Posts (0.1) | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.2 |
| Juror’s Vote (0.1) | 0.3 | 0.1 | 0.2 |
| TOTAL | 1.8 | 1.6 | 2.4 |
From the above, Blog Y is the BEST blog followed by Blog X and Blog Z.
What say?
when technology is a part of the whole! 
