Stardust and the Return of the Fairytale

Stardust and the Return of the Fairytale

Once upon a time, at the height of the Soviet era, Russia and India were good friends. And not just the kind of casual acquaintances who exchange pleasantries across high-level conference tables; We were friendly enough that the two peoples were interested in how the other lived and thought and dreamed. During this era of cultural exchange, it was quite common to come across Russian literature and Russian published technical books on the bookshelves of academia and the street corners of Bombay. Mir Publishers was a well recognised name in Indian geek circles and I still have some of their books on quantum physics and other miscellanea in my collection.

But that is now. At the time I was one of the millions of kids growing up in metropolitan India whose staple for entertainment was Star Trek (The Original Series) on the single terrestrial television channel on Sunday mornings, and comics that included a healthy dose of The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and the entire cast of swash buckling Indian Gods and Goddesses from the talented people at Amar Chitra Katha. But if you were really lucky, like me, and you had parents and family members who were book nuts, you were also treated to the weird and magical world of illustrated Russian story books.

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Why Paper Dictionaries Are Better Brainstorming Tools

Paper Dictionary for Brainstorming

If your first reaction to reading the title of this piece was, “Since when are dictionaries brainstorming tools?!”, you obviously haven’t heard the news. Dictionaries are in fact excellent brainstorming tools, and I’ve been using them in that capacity for years; They are an essential part of my creative ideas arsenal. To find out more about the specifics I suggest you go over and read my article describing some techniques for brainstorming with a dictionary.

Once you recognize the fact that dictionaries are an excellent resource for coming up with new ideas, I would like to go further and convince you of the fact that the good-old traditional dead-tree paper dictionary is a more effective tool in idea generation than all its modern digital counterparts. I can see some of you clutching on to your CD drives and broadband modems protectively, but stick around and let me tell you why the printed paper dictionary can be more fruitfully employed in the creative ideation process.

What it comes down to is the three Ss, and for all you fellow graphics nuts out there, no, it has nothing to do with Sub Surface Scattering. Old-fashioned paper dictionaries have three important properties, or features if you like, that make them more effective brainstorming tools. They work better because they are:

  1. Sensual
  2. Slow
  3. Sequential


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Content Building and The August 2007 Report

Samir Bhardwaj dot Com monthly reportAnother month has gone by. Some progress was made, some articles were published and some fun was had.

New Traffic

Articles in the Best of SamirBharadawaj.com list in the sidebar really started to pickup this month, and I have started to see about a half-a-dozen articles here become the major traffic magnets. That is a good thing and exactly as planned. In fact this month I even did a planned assault on creating some new major articles to add to the arsenal (see below).

The other improvement is the increase in search engine traffic. Articles here are being found for more and more search terms which is resulting in search engine traffic to this site growing from negligible to almost 15%. I am sure that figure will steadily increase in time, as it should. Now that this blog is a few months old and the search engines are ageing it a bit, they seem to take it more seriously for relevant results. The hot favourite search terms that are bringing people here at the moment are how to crash a wedding, pop up card, best action movie, feedburner alternative and taking professional photos. There are actually hundreds more, but these are the star athletes of the group for now.

Content Building

One major task I took on this past month was my try at the ProBlogger group writing project again. This time, I decided to write a series of posts rather than a single one and that resulted in the Be Yourself in Blog Land series. I came up with a clean new layout element for series articles, a spiffy drop-cap (as you can see at the beginning of this post), and managed to finish the four parts I initially planned.

All four were linked by ProBlogger throughout the month of August and some of these are already getting a whole load of traffic as a result. If you are a blogger, these articles should be of interest, so I highly recommend you go over to this article on the importance of a unique blog design and start reading.

Blog Carnivals

August was actually a slow month for Blog Carnivals on this site, because I didn’t submit to any for the first three weeks of the month. Then in the last week I got back into the mood and those submission came through as you can see below:

ToDo

“More great content”, is really my only aim for the near future. Hopefully the content will find its readership and its search engine traffic. Above all else, I would just like more people to read this stuff, and judging by the increase in commenting here, I think I am on the right track. Make sure you don’t miss any of the upcoming new content by subscribing to my full text RSS feed.

If you need more guidance in the realm of blogging and starting or running your site, I found these resources to be very well put together and comprehensive. For my take on making the right choices for your blog, do have a look at my article series Be Yourself in Blog Land.

Another month lies ahead and there is plenty to do. See you around the comment threads.

Samir

How to Setup Kontera ContentLink in WordPress

Kontera ContentLink

I applied for a Kontera ContentLink account for this blog about a week ago, and I was finally accepted. The whole idea with this site is for it to be a repository of my ideas about creative ideas, and also a test-bed and exploration of my various experiments into online enterprise. Like many other bloggers, I signed up for Google AdSense quite early in the game because it is the simplest advertising system to get into. Now that that has been running for a few months, I thought it was time to try out some other avenues of monetization, and so Kontera came into the picture. In case you don’t know what Kontera is, find a link in this post which has a double underline, and hover your mouse pointer over it.

Kontera has been around for a while, but it really started to increase in popularity when Google finally got rid of a restriction on using other contextual advertising systems with AdSense. Kontera was always an attractive option because it converts existing text into ad links without adding any more elements to the page. Now that you can use Kontera on the same page as AdSense, it’s a great additional ad network for diversifying your advertising space.

Since a lot of you wanting to implement Kontera ContentLink on your own sites are using WordPress, I though an article on the methods of setting up Kontera in a WordPress blog was required. Like AdSense, Kontera provides you with some unique Javascript code to insert into your pages. Unlike AdSense, you don’t need to insert the code multiple times. Kontera studies the entire page (or at least the selected parts of the page – see section targeting below) and automatically inserts the in-content links. The code for Kontera can be implemented into WordPress in two different ways:

  1. Install the Plugin
  2. Hack the Template

Both the methods work fine and each has its advantages, so you need to decide which method best suits your needs. Now on to the details of how to implement Kontera in your WordPress site.
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MyBlogLog and the Free Toaster

MyBlogLog

This is to announce the addition of the MyBlogLog widget to the sidebar. Woohoo! If you are a member of the MyBlogLog blog community site, your username and avatar should show up under the recent readers list in the sidebar when you visit this blog.

For those of you who don’t know, MyBlogLog is a blog community site like Technorati but with some additional tracking functions. There is also a very strong community building component, including the ability to see a public list of recent visitors to the blog as you can see at the bottom of the sidebar, and also a sort of private message board per author where other MyBlogLog members can leave comments and shout-outs. Check out the MyBlogLog page for Samir Bharadwaj dot Com.

I actually signed up for the MyBlogLog service quite some time ago, but I never got around to implementing the widget on the site. Since I was a member, I did show up on other people’s blogs when I visited, which was a plus. During this silent time, one person has already taken the trouble and done me the honour of joining the MyBlogLog community for this blog. Jon Anderson of SucessPart2.com has not only been kind enough to include many of my posts in various editions of his wonderful blog carnivals in the past, but now he has also set the ball rolling on my MyBlogLog community. For all that I am thankful, and for his efforts he wins a FREE toaster! … well, a “virtual” free toaster actually, in the form of the new and extremely prestigious Free Toaster Award! *applause*

The Free Toaster Award - to Jon Anderson - for online friendliness above and beyond the call of duty

Congratulations Jon, on winning the inaugural Free Toaster Award! Feel free to save it and do with it what you will — use it as a bumper sticker, a snazzy ID tag, a sexy tattoo, or whatever suits your fancy. If you want a print a large wall to wall poster of it you might need a better version, which I will be glad to supply. šŸ˜‰

All you other wonderful people out there, you know you want the Free Toaster Award, don’t you? Maybe I will make this a semi regular feature and give these out to some deserving people once in a while. Meanwhile, if you enjoy reading this blog please join my MyBlogLog community and leave a comment or two on my author page. It will be good to know who my readers are. As far as you keeping track of me, you have already subscribed to my full feed RSS haven’t you?

Samir

Why Drive Errors Lead to Cleaner Computers and Better Photos

Dirty Circuit board - Better Photos and Cleaner Computers

A couple of days ago Vishal woke up in the morning to find that one of our computers wouldn’t start up. In that monochrome text graphics limbo world of PC BIOS screens, it was deciphered that one of our hard drives was missing. Well, not physically missing, because it couldn’t disconnect itself and walk off for a stroll now could it? But it wasn’t listed in the hardware detection screen that shows up when a computer does its initial starting and beeping (POST). That meant trouble!

Drive Errors

Disassembled Computer - Better Photos and Cleaner ComputersMy first reaction in situations like this (at least in my head) is to run around screaming while throwing my arms into the air in utter despair and panic. I have a lot of por… err documents and work files stored on all our drives and losing one can be quite disastrous if I haven’t backed-up for a while (which like all human beings is most of the time). So after doing a silent mental panic run, to which I added in the elements of being naked while in a class room taking an important exam just for maximum effect, I settled down and decided to get on with the rest of my morning business and come back to the computer issue in a while.

“When in doubt, use a screwdriver”, is my motto when it comes to anything mechanical or electrical that dares to malfunction on my beat. I opened up the old tower and stared into the abyss. Being a very small box very far from a window, it usually gets very dark in there, but even in that darkness I realised after a bit of wire shifting and cable moving that I was looking into a disaster zone. I quickly forgot about the malfunctioning hard drive because I was mesmerised by the tenuous tangles and enough accumulated dust to fill a small desert. When I tried to blow away a little dust and was greeted by a storm of fine fluff that cover my head, I knew this was going to be a long day.
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Be Yourself in Blog Land: (Wo)men of Mystery Wear Cheap Spandex Suits

Public personality & secret identity in blogging - Be Yourself in Blog Land

This article is part of the series
Be Yourself in Blog Land
which includes:

  1. The Face That Launched
    a Thousand Ships
  2. Embrace the Fanboy Within
  3. Don’t Join the Rat Race
    Unless You Like the Bait
  4. (Wo)men of Mystery Wear
    Cheap Spandex Suits

To keep track of new additions subscribe to my Full Feed RSS



From the moment that first BBS user looked at his glowing login screen and decided to type gandalf14 as his name, there has been a bit of an illicit relationship between personal identity and the online world. Suddenly there was a whole new existence where who you really were didn’t matter, and you could be whoever you wanted to be. This need for a sometimes false anonymity grew to a point where people considered this to be the norm rather than the aberration. Fast forward to today, when the blog has taken on the mantle once owned by the BBS as the de facto top medium for digital discourse, and we can see that the trend has not only continued but flourished. There are tens of millions of mostly anonymous blogs read by hundreds of millions of mostly anonymous readers. In this faceless mass the online entities that win the greatest following are the ones with the most personality. So ask yourself this: Is my secret identity costing me my readership?

For almost all of you reading this, the answer will be a very definite yes. Unless your blog deals with the highest order of secret or personal information, which for whatever reason you think you must still share with the world, there is absolutely no reason to push your online anonymity to the point where your online output is faceless, headless, and characterless. To blog well and get the kind of reader response we all hope for in our serious blogging endeavours, it is essential to infuse a large dose of your own personality into the content and the presentation of the blog. This personality and identity will get you the three kinds of reader response, which are must-haves for any successful blog:
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