Digital Inspiration

At that time, when Problogger started showing off the Google AdSense checks, many blogs also got “inspired,” and AdSense became the default for blogs. I still remember getting my first check all the way from Mountain View, which takes about 30-40 days to reach my home in India. I never encash that one, just like the few others that serve as nostalgia pieces for my Time Capsule: the first DCMA letter, the tiny dollar checks one gets from Apple settlement checks, etc. Of course, the check size grew pretty big, and with other ad revenue that my personal website brought in, it was enough for me to live a rather lavish life in Bombay (INDIA) in the mid-2000s.

Just like Problogger, India has its own — Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal at https://www.labnol.org

In fact, a VC hinted to me that I should, or if I have the balls to convert my personal blog to the “Techcrunch of India” and become Michael Arrington. I wasn’t made for that and never wanted to be a blogger. My blog should be a very personal space. Well, my personal blog became a cheesy mess of personal ramblings with no aim or ambition. :-)

I think Kiruba Shankar attempted the closest to that one in India at https://www.kiruba.com and did succeed to a degree.

Fortunately, my website still enjoys direct links from a few Patents in the USA that reference my articles as a source of truth, as well as a few links from Wikipedia, WordPress.org, Adobe, and a few other well-established websites here and there. Quite a few of…

I've only taken a brief look at this so I could be mistaken, but this still looks a bit too automated. Might be based on people's bookmarks, but seems to be not much more than blog roll or twitter feed, but for bookmarks, or a popularity contest.

I'm thinking something more deliberate than that. Like an ordering the person chooses deliberately, because they want the links to be in a certain order.

I'm also thinking something a bit cleaner than this too. There seems to be too much extra on that site, lots of listed tags for every link, some links have multiple paragraphs of text with it and some don't, etc.

Like I might as well just use Reddit or Hacker News instead at that point.

I'm thinking something more like the following[1] as far as presentation (and not even really this, but I'm having a hard time finding a good example), maybe with some short blurbs by the curator, and with a chosen ordering.

I'd even be cool with something kind of like this[2] and text-based (maybe it could be a toggle that switches between a grid gallery view and text-view). But with a person being able to create multiple of these, and being able to follow a curator socially to see what other links they come up with, and maybe clicking a tag and seeing the most popular curated and deliberately ordered lists by individuals instead of just a list of links ordered by some algorithm.

I know people make their own blog articles and whatnot online, like in that second article, but it's just getting…

Check out the periodic table of SEO: http://searchengineland.com/seotable

Kalzmeus on SEO (click around his blog for more, guy's a genius): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

Also some quick, simple advice:

1. Blog 2/3 times per week minimum. Target a single, relevant keyword per blog post (relevant to your domain). The post title, H1s, H2s etc, image tags should all contain your primary keyword. Blog posts don't have to be long, but they do have to be useful.

2. Build a G+, FB, Twitter account for your site if you haven't already. Blast out your new posts to these accounts using Hootsuite (free, but you can pay if you like).

3. Build an audience on the social networks - just search around, follow relevant people and share useful, educational material. Don't spam.

4. Personalised mass email from Google Docs and Gmail (kind of hesitant to recommend this in light of Google shuttering services!): http://www.labnol.org/internet/personalized-mail-merge-in-gmail/20981/ you need to have "newsletter" signs ups (blast out a digest of your blog posts once per month), calls to actions etc on your site for this to work properly (i.e. optimise your site to capture names & emails). Great, low cost/free way to make sure your audience stays engaged and coming back to your site. You can pay for this kind of service too, e.g. Mailchimp (they've a free tier), Constant Contact, or the likes of Hubspot for full suite of marketing automation tools.

5. Best of Startup…

Bal Thackeray or communal politics is not the issue here. It is the freedom of expression of individuals. The Chairman of Press Club of India had an article on The Hindu (a national daily) which painted Thackeray in a bad light (http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/why-i-cant-pay-tribute-to-thackeray/article4108839.ece) - but the state won't act as recklessly against him as they have against these two.

Recent events in the country that sets the alarm bells ringing:

- Kapil Sibal (minister of communication) doesn't understand the internet. He wants active censorship of online media - http://www.labnol.org/india/censorship-in-india/20527/.

- An individual was arrested from his home at 5am due to a tweet he made alleging the son of an Indian minister was corrupt. He had 16 followers. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/iac-volunteer-tweets-himself-into-trouble-faces-three-years-in-jail/article4051769.ece

And now this - both the individual who made the post on FB and her friend who 'like'd it has been arrested. This abuse of power in a country with a lot more urgent problems to solve.

This very much seems to be a generation gap between people in positions of power (politicians, bureaucrats, police) who are not used to the internet and the way it gives voice to everyone.

I can only hope that as internet becomes ubiquitous across the country, people will realize the value of free speech and the need for an uncensored internet.

In order for someone to see your site and think they want to hire you, you have to change the wording of your actual work experience.

Instead of saying, "I worked on a team who did A and B", you should highlight what you did, "I was the architect for the database and monitoring the network" or "I built a relational database using python which allowed our customer to store their data on our servers."

Your CV should be focused on what YOU did and what some of your tasks were and what technologies and tools you used. IF I'm going to hire you, I need a lot more detail about your capabilities. Did you work in an agile or waterfall environment? Did you work mostly independently with little supervision, or did you work and collaborate with other teams (designers, project managers, business leaders) and did you have to work out issue and be able to communicate effectively? Are you capable of working on tight timelines and meet your deadlines effectively?

You probably have the skills, you just have to communicate your capabilities and achievements a little better is all.

You should also get rid of the Inconsolata font, it makes your site look amateurish as others have pointed out. Here's a good article on other fonts you can pair that will look much more professional. Just switching your fonts out will help polish your site.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/best-google-font-combinations/28987/

I think I've found another troublesome method that Facebook is using to suggest new friends.

A few years ago, I created a Google profile with a vanity URL [1] and a Facebook account with the same Gmail address. I never linked those two accounts, used third-party apps or imported contacts into Facebook. I recently created a Google+ profile and publicly circled some users when I suddenly noticed that those circled users started showing up in my Facebook account as "suggested friends". Those users don't follow me on Google+, aren't linked to any of my Facebook friends and they don't know my Gmail address.

I can't think of any other method used by Facebook to recommend those friends, except by crawling my Google+ circles. It's as easy as extracting my Google+ username from my Gmail address and scanning my circles at profiles.google.com/username.

I can't reproduce this with different accounts as vanity URLs aren't available for new Google accounts.

Could anyone with confirm this with their own Google profiles?

Do you think Facebook should be authorized to "scrap" contacts from other social networks, to extend build their own social graph about their users, without possible opt-out and no disclosure?

[1] http://www.labnol.org/internet/vanity-url-for-google-profiles/8202/