Domain Names to be Non-English Soon

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — the non-profit group that oversees domain names — is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every website, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters.

That could potentially open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic — in which Russian is written.

"This is the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Mr Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature."

He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference's final day.
The internet's roots are traced to experiments at a US university in 1969 but it wasn't until the early 1990s that its use began expanding beyond academia and research institutions to the public.

Source: Deccan Chronicle

Engineering College Aims To Donate INR 10 Million for Kurnool Flood Relief

G. Pulla Reddy Engineering College, Kurnool, AP in India is the college where I completed my engineering. This is the college which broomed not only me but may such people to build their career. I owe the college, my teachers and staff a lot - because of them I am at this point of career.

Last month the town, Kurnool was submerged in water. The college alongwith the ex-students is co-ordinating to collect donations and extend the help to the needy in Kurnool and the near by towns and villages. The college aims to donate ten million rupees towards the relief for the flood victims of Kurnool and adjacent towns. The college popularly known as GPREC among the students and alumnae has launched a new website www.savekurnool.org to coordinate the donations.

More than 300 people died in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and North Karnataka after the worst floods in years. Livestock and crops have been lost as well as numerous homes destroyed, leaving more than 200,000 people homeless and vulnerable to hunger and disease.
The move to have a website for the cause is to generate funds from the former students of the college who are residing outside India. This will help the NRIs to extend their bit for the cause.

The G. Pulla Reddy Trust has already donated one million hundred thousand rupees and the college management and staff have coordinated and donated five hundred eighty six thousands rupees towards the cause.

I request each one of you to extend their bit for this project to help the society. It is the time to give back to the society.

At Last Twitter is Making Money

Google and Microsoft are in talks with Twitter separately to strike a deal to include the tweets in the search results in real-time. Both the search engine rivals are engaged in separate talks with Twitter according to a report from Wall Street Journal’s website, AllThingsD. It also reports that numbers of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users.

"This could be a way for Twitter to make some money, and maybe more than just a little money. It finally means a business model for Twitter, or at least the beginnings of one. And, of course, it means real revenue, which is very important. Not just in licensing revenue from Google or Microsoft, but also in potentially getting a piece of the action on an ongoing basis. So there could be considerable upside here for Twitter," said Dan Olds, an Analyst with The Gabriel Consulting.
This is good for the search giants and Twitter. For us we get the search results as a mix of web results and personal messaging. But…

• will this not spam Twitter with all the tweets of the folks who want their website on the top of the search results?
• how well these tweets can will be segregated as natural or real tweet to a spam one?
• what will be the criteria or filter used to get the tweet included in the search results?
• how can retweets be managed in the search results? Will they also appear?

The bottom line is if the deal (or deals) is (or are) through then Twitter will have a business plan.

Related post: What Can Be The Search Algorithm for Twitter Search?

Inside Adwords: Stay Connected With Google Industry Team on Twitter

Apart from Google on Twitter, the Google’s Industry teams too are on Twitter. Now, follow the industry you are interested in to get regular updates (through the Tweets) related to the industry – latest trends, additional info, special insights, news updates…

To follow, please click the industry of your interest: Auto, Media and Entertainment, Financial Services, Retail, Tech, and Travel

And on top of that Google has about 56 accounts in Twitter. It is good to see the way Google is leveraging Twitter to reach out to its customers. Does this indicate something? I am just trying to read between the lines to know if Google is taking Twitter more seriously.

Related post: Google Signs Up on Twitter

Courier Companies Opt For Digital Signatures

Do not get surprised, if next time you are asked by a courier company to sign on a digital scanner. Courier companies are now opting for digital signatures to deliver important consignments like credit cards or a passport. The customer needs to sign on a digtal scanner which is carried by the delivery personnel. Once the receiver of the consignment signs on the scanner using the stylus, the data is automatically updated on the company's central server. A photograph may also be taken by the persoannel for added security to know to whom the consignment was actually delivered.

Nice to see the move which is in sync with the latest technology. Banks like HDFC, ABN Amro, Citibank... are already using digital signatures for sending account and other statements through e-mails. This not only saves paper and cost but, helps them to deliver the documents to the right person.

If you look at the statements that come from these banks, at the bottom right corner of the document will be a signature with a thumb impression. That’s a digital signature which adds authenticity to e-document received for the customer to establish trust with the sender. If anybody changes the signature or successfully tampers with it, the signature will change indicating wrong doings. “For messages sent through an insecure channel, a properly implemented digital signature gives the receiver reason to believe the message was sent by the claimed sender. Digital signatures are equivalent to traditional handwritten signatures in many respects; properly implemented digital signatures are more difficult to forge than the handwritten type,’’ said B Robert Raja, CMD, Odyssey Technologies, which focuses on information security software.

But, can anything be done to avoid phishing? I guess we need to be careful to identify such emails and report the same.

Source: Times Of India

Effective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and Current Practices

Your profile page is on Twitter is not just to showcase your profile but can also provide an opportunity to showcase your visual brand and possibly communicate additional information that can last longer than a tweet. Know how you can customize your profile page by changing background image, text and link colors. It’s as simple as changing the skin, but ability to change background image has allowed designers to create really unique profile pages.

Smashing Magazines is one of the blog I follow. Not only the blog but I also follow them on Twitter @smashingmag. This particular is post is really awesome and provides good examples and ideas to make the look and feel of your Twitter page. I bet you will really love it. Check it out here.

Google's Project 10 to The 100th

Google’s Project 10^100 (pronounced as Project 10 to the 100th) is a call of ideas to change the world by helping as many as people as possible. About 150,000 ideas were submitted by people and Google selected 16 top ideas under different categories. Now, we folks need to vote for them before October 8, 2009. And Google is commenting $10 million to implement these projects and their goal is to help as many people as possible. Which ones should Google make real? Cast your vote, and help Google change the world.

"We received over 150,000 ideas from users which far surpassed our expectations," said Jamie Wood, a Google spokesman. "We've never managed a project like this and it's taken much more time than we imagined to judge and sort through the ideas." Wood promised that "within a month" Google would announce the next phase of the competition. That will likely involve the release of 100 proposals for the public to vote on and choose 20 finalists, from which a Google board will choose the five lucky winners.

Categories:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Criteria that is considered:

• Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
• Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
• Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
• Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
• Longevity: How long will the idea's impact last?

And, I am sure you would like to know the TOP 16 ideas and here they are -

1. Community: Create real-time natural crisis tracking system
2. Community: Make government more transparent
3. Opportunity: Help social entrepreneurs drive change
4. Education: Provide quality education to African students
5. Shelter: Create more efficient landmine removal programs
6. Energy: Drive innovation in public transport
7. Everything Else: Build real-time, user-reported news service
8. Education: Make educational content available online for free
9. Education: Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
10. Opportunity: Build better banking tools for everyone
11. Environment: Work toward socially conscious tax policies
12. Community: Collect and organize the world's urban data
13. Community: Create genocide monitoring and alert system
14. Education: Enhance science and engineering education
15. Health: Promote health monitoring and data analysis
16. Community: Create real-world issue reporting system

Why this project?

Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big.

In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people.

Thanks Google.

Also friends, please take out sometime to vote on the projects. Voting ends on October 8, 2009.

How to Sign Out of Your Gmail Account Remotely

If you do not remember if you have sign out of your Gmail account from a public terminal or you have a doubt that somebody is also accessing your account else where then, here is a very simple way to sign out of all your Gmail sessions by checking the IP addresses which are unknown to you. This video from cnet demonstrates how.

How to measure Offline Sales Which Triggered Online?

One of my friends asked me how to measure conversions where a buyer does a research online and finally end-up buying the product offline at a retail store nearby. This is a very tricky issue which most of the etailers are finding it difficult to measure. I think there is no accurate method to measure such conversions.

Here are few tactics that can give rough figures and analysis can be done to frame the objectives and strategies for future campaigns when you know the numbers of offline and online purchases.

1. Give an option to order online and pick-up offline.
2. Provide a 'store locator page near you', beside the product details or price. If the prospect buyer clicks it then you can roughly measure this.
3. In continuation to #2 provide a feature to send the offline store address to be sent to the prospect via SMS or email.
4. If a visitor spends more time on the website and leaves without purchase - usually interested buyers spend more time on the site. We can assume that such visitors are prospects and can be contacted through email for further queries (if he/she is logged in).
5. Have promo code on the website which can be used for online purchase or offline at particular stores.
6. If sales at offline store(s) spike during the time you have an online campaign for the product, then you can make the assumption.

This way you will know how many buyers are moving out of online purchase to a retail store and thus, can help you in framing the strategies. Let me know if I have missed anything.

Related post: Google Analytics To Track Telephone and Live Chat Leads

New Update in Google Webmaster Tools: Submit URL Parameters to Ignore

I think this is definitely a good initiative by Google, allowing the webmasters to let the Googlebot know which URL parameters to ignore while crawling or indexing the site web pages.

1. Log in to your Google Webmaster tools account
2. Click on the ‘Site Configuration’ link on the left and then on ‘Settings’
3. At the bottom you will find ‘Parameter Handling’ to adjust the parameter settings.

Dynamic parameters (for example, session IDs, source, or language) in your URLs can result in many different URLs all pointing to essentially the same content. For example: http://www.example.com/product?pid=123 might point to the same content as http://www.example.com/product. You can specify whether you want Google to ignore up to 15 specific parameters in your URL.

Also, Google lists the parameters they have identified in the URLs of your site and suggests if the parameters are vague for them. You can confirm your choice to ignore or not to ignore. You can also add parameters that Googlebot was unable to identify and list them.

The reasons why I find this useful are:

1. This will really help Google in identifying the duplicate content pages and help them in proper indexing with fewer duplicate URLs.
2. This can result in more efficient crawling of Googlebot.
3. Googlebot can crawl more pages and index them, as the crawler efficiency is increased.
4. This can reduce the PageRank dilution as external website may be linking to various versions of your URLs and this will help Google understand that all these pages are same. Thus, providing the proper PageRank credit to the page.
5. Simple way to indicate the parameters to ignore or consider, instead of using the canonical option.

Yahoo Site Explorer has a similar feature and Bing is yet to include this. If you want to opt this method then you will be ignoring Bing and other search engines which do have the parameter suggestion option.

Related posts: Duplicate Content Issues and Probable Solutions

Aggregator Tools to Update Your Status on Multiple Social Networking Sites

My first question and probably for most of the readers – Is it right to use a tool or aggregator to update your status on most of the social networking sites without really logging in and updating it individually?

Yes, it really saves time of logging into each of the site say Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Xing or LinkedIn. But, one should also note that these networking sites attract different sets of audience and with varied interest. Moreover, social networking is more of conversations between like-minded people and should only be used for sharing of knowledge and discussions. It should not be leveraged as sales pitch and use automated tools to update the status. One needs to be very personal in participation on such networking sites.

Lastly, is it necessary to be on all the networking sites? It is better to use two or three good ones where you feel is the best community for you and build network, share knowledge and keep the engagement as lively as possible. You will be benefited by this in the long run. One has to realize the real value of social networking sites.

Short-cuts may not work always. But, still if you are interested then here are few good tools which can be looked at.

Ping.fm: Allows you to post on Facebook, Wordpress, LinkedIn and Twitter
HelloTxt: Update status on Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and more. It takes status updates from web, mobile, sms, email.. to more than 45 social networking sites.
GlueNow: Enables you to post content across the social networking sites using web or mobile phone.
Posterous: Is a blogging platform that allows you to post to multiple social networking sites except for Ning, Viadeo and Xing.
Flock: A Firefox plug-in and enables you to aggregate most of the networking sites.
Postling: Can be used for blog posts and simultaneously update the status in social networking sites. They have a 30-day free trial.
Digsby: Manage various IM, Email and social networking sites. You can update Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn status from Digsby directly.
Yoono: Is free software that allows you to connect and share with all your social networks and IM services in one place.

But, still the bottom line is use social networking sites carefully, thoughtfully and strategically. Definitely, no one likes to read the same status message on your profile when they visit Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. All are different and so should your status messages.


Also, please take time to answer the poll question on LinkedIn.

Related post:

• More Than 100 Free Twitter Tools for You
• 5 Important Approaches for Social Networking for Companies
• Update your Facebook Status from Twitter

TiE-ISB Connect 2009 on Oct. 22nd and 23rd at Hyderabad

India’s most exciting annual networking event for entrepreneurs and investors, the TiE-ISB Connect '09 will be held on October 22nd and 23rd, 2009 at Hotel Marriott Hyderabad. TiE-ISB Connect enables interaction of aspiring entrepreneurs, early-stage ventures, and growth-stage ventures with potential investors, successful entrepreneurs and mentors.

The conference will focus on bringing together first-time entrepreneurs and seasoned entrepreneurs with investment community and explore the opportunities and challenges in the current economic times, while exploring specifically into highly relevant areas of starting a new venture and raising funds through the seed to the growth stage of the company.

TiE-ISB Connect 2009 is also bringing in a new feature of “Company Showcase”, a unique opportunity for young and exciting companies to set-up stalls and showcase their products / services to the niche audience participating in the conference. Companies participating will have the advantage of discussing and receiving quality feedback from fellow entrepreneurs, venture investors and business leaders.

Another important workshop is JumpStart. If you are thinking of starting something on your own after several years of professional experience then this is the session not to be missed. JumpStart your Enterprise – is a workshop for experienced professionals and starting entrepreneurs. The workshop will provide with a practical toolkit to start and grow business in these early days. It also address the real issues that bother entrepreneurs about:

• How to write a Business Plan?
• How to get support from the ecosystem: incubators and mentors?
• How to work with partners?
• How to work on a shoestring marketing budget?

Click here to register yourself for the event.

Channel [V] Uses Twitter to Promote Re-launch Of Website

After Advani it is Channel [V].

Channel [V] used this novel way to announce and promote its new website on Twitter. The deal was – Members can opt to replace their profile picture to Channel [V] logo. And the logo is displayed on the registered member’s profile on Twitter for 50% of the time. Rest of the 50% the member’s picture is shown.

What do the members get in return? If members stay registered for 5days continuously, then they will be given a neat Channel [V] T-shirt (again branding). If they continue having the logo as their profile pic, they may be lucky to win an iPod.

The good thinking which Channel [V] has done is it did not hijack the profile pic completely. No one likes their pic to be hijacked completely. This helped many people to participate.

What still makes me think is why have they not used MySpace for this? They would have got more participation and target audience. Twitter and Facebook need to get smarter to cash on such things. They need to build good apps and features to build such brand communities and promotion which can attract advertisers. Cheers!!

Source: Medianama

Obama’s Advise to School Students on Using Facebook

Obama recently advised a group of school students that they need to be very careful about what they post in Facebook and other social networking sites. Stupid posts on such sites can haunt you back later. Many organizations are using LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to know more about their prospective employee. Not only Facebook, a video posted on YouTube can ruin as it can be pulled up sometime later. Who knows, you may need to pay for the words which came out from you on these sites much-much earlier in your life.

Obama, himself was a victim for couple of times to the YouTube age, when some off-the-mark remarks came up on YouTube and blogs.

One young person asked the president whom he would choose to dine with if he could make only one such selection. "Gandhi," Obama replied. "He's somebody I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. (Martin Luther) King" with his message of non-violence. "He ended up doing so much and changed the world just by the power of his ethics," Obama said of the inspirational leader Mahatma Gandhi.

Obama also says: "At the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents and the best schools in the world, and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities."

Source: Huffingtonpost

Duplicate Content Issues and Probable Solutions

Photo credit: http://www.personalbaby.com/

I am sure many of the webmasters have this duplicate content issue and the Big G still does not has a clear-cut solution of solving this issue. Mat Cutts in his blog/videos did address this issue but, I do not think it completely solves the issue of giving the ranking credit to the actual owner of the article. How does Google know who the actual owner is?

Knowingly or unknowingly over the web duplicate content is developed and the SERPs are hijacked. So, let us know what leads to or is considered as duplicate content by Google or any other search engine.

1. Treating mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.com as different website. The simple solution for this is to use 301 re-direct for mywebsite.com to www.mywebsite.com.


2. You want to have specific regional websites catering to different geographical areas. You have business.com and you also want to have business.co.uk, business.ca and so on. And you use the same content on all these domains. Matt Cutts says, it is not a big concern and webmasters need not worry about it. Do you have the answer for this?


3. Issues with subdomains having the same content as the main domain. If at all you want to use subdomains then, it is better to use 301 re-directs.


4. Dealers or affiliates taking the content from the website of main seller or the manufacturer to market and promote the products. These are honest people who want to sell the products and are caught as dupes as they usually copy the product description from the main website and have it on their own website. Sometimes the SERPs are also hijacked in such cases. If you want to get traffic from the search engines then, use your own content. Google always and will love “original” content.


5. If you have an affiliate program then the program usually generate affiliate links similar to www.yourwebsite.com?affid=007. Search engine will consider this as a separate page to www.yourwebsite.com. Your affiliates will use the affid parameter links, so that they get the credit of sales/clicks their website generates. The only way to avoid this is ask your affiliates to use rel=”nofollow”. But, this can be a dumb idea of losing the link credit. But, this affiliate link can hijack your main site rankings.


6. If your site is getting few pages dynamically with duplicate content like
   http://www.example.com/products.php?trackid=123
   http://www.example.com/products.php?reportid=123
   http://www.example.com/products.php?sessionid=123
   http://www.example.com/products.php?favouriteid=123
   http://www.example.com/products.php?print=yes&trackid=123
   Specifying a link tag in the section of your page content (as seen below) will indicate to the search engine robot that the URL is present and that it should be represented as the preferred canonical URL designated as: link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/products.php” using proper html open and close tags. Please note that the tag will be treated similarly to the 301 re-direct.

Please note that this is just tip of the ice berg and still there are more such innocent duplicate content issues which are difficult to identify and resolve. So, always be careful you do not make such mistakes.

If the Ramayan were on Facebook

In my earlier post, I did mention that Sreedharan is trying to re-tell Mahabharata on Twitter. Now, here is an imagination of Ramayana on Facebook. Kokonad. If the Ramayan were to have an status update like Facebook, how would it be like! He has used the appropriate icons and apps to come up with this.

Read If the Ramayan were on Facebook

The Ramayana: A Modern Retelling of the Great Indian Epic

Woof – When Twitter’s 140 Characters Aren’t Enough

Sometimes we find it bit tough to limit our tweets in 140 characters. Moreover, if I have to provide the reference to a link, I need to use a url shortening service. But, here you have Woofer which says you to be eloquent, use adverbs and DEA (don’t ever abbreviate). Can I say it as an anti-twitter “macro” blogging platform?

So Woof as opposed to Tweet.

The Woofer website looks similar to Twitter except that they limit the woof (yes, not tweet) to 1400 characters. And to mention it – that’s mandatory. It does not take anything less than 1400 characters.

The Twitter logo is replaced with the Woofer one and which indicates, you don’t have to tweet but “woof”.

The Twitter style search box simply re-directs to Google.

On clicking “Is this Twitter?” link on the top right will lead a giant letters “NO”.

But the bottom-line and the most important thing to know about the Woofer page is that it is mainly an interactive advertisement for Shuffeltime, suggesting that the website is simply a marketing stunt for Join the Company’s main website.

Google Reader Goodies

Here are the three Google Reader Goodies (or gadgets) I like to use. They are very easy and simple and save a lot of your time while reading the different posts or subscriptions. RSS Readers was itself a great tool to save time. Now, you have these gadgets to make it very simple and thus saving more time.

1. Reading Comments From Everywhere: gCreations (not from Google) is a very cool and free Firefox extension that allows you to read comments from all over the web to your posts, directly in Google Reader. For each post in your feed, it gets comments from Blogger, FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Digg and more.

1. Send To Feature: Now send and share the posts directly from your Reader to Facebook, Twitter, Blog…more using the Send To feature in Google Reader. Just click on the Settings tab on the top-right corner and enable the services you want to use.



2. Google Reader on Google Desktop: Using this gadget, you can track your feeds and subscriptions directly from the desktop. The Google Reader gadget is designed to be familiar for existing Reader users, yet compact like our other Desktop gadgets. You need install Google Desktop gadget first and then you can download this gadget.

Do let me know if you know more Google Reader gadgets which can be added here. Please put them as comments below.

Basic Initial Compatibility Tests Before You Launch a Website

So, you have a new website and really do not know any HTML coding. And you are not sure the website delivered to you is up without any errors or bugs. Here are few basic initial compatibility tests which you can do, before the launch. These are just the basic ones.

1. Browser Compatibility: Check the website in different browsers. You do not need to install all the browsers. BrowserShots is an online tool where, you have to provide your website address / web page address and the tool gives the screenshot of the page as seen in different browsers. You can check the website for different versions of IE, Firefox, Opera, SeaMonkey and Chrome as well. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue in BrowserShots. A number of distributed computers will open the website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server on BrowserShots.
2. Different Resolutions Compatibility: ViewLikeUS is an online tool which lets you view the way your website seems to look in different resolutions. Just submit the url and check how the page looks in different resolutions from 800 x 600 to 1280 x 800 and still more.
3. HTML Validation: Use W3C Validator to check the HTML conformance to the W3C standards.

These are just the basic compatibility tests for the website to use best practice HTML coding.

Facebook Going Lite on Twitter

According to TechCrunch, many social networkers who have been asked to try out Facebook Lite saying - Surprise, it is more Twitter-like.

The message sent out to beta testers reads, "You have been selected as a beta tester for Facebook Lite! We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It's not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far."

Check out Facebook Lite now at http://lite.facebook.com.

It has already purchased FriendFeed and according to some sources, Facebook earlier tried to buy Twitter for $500mn last year. And now, it has come up with Lite. What is next?