Agriya

There is a certain kind of web property that seems to find extra special success exploiting a certain take on social networking. Their success comes from putting to work the need people have to share with the whole world whatever comes to their mind,; not share with just a select list of friends as on Twitter. These websites, best represented by Answers.com, just keep moving higher and higher up the Internet charts, sometimes even breaking into the top 10 for short periods. Success on Google’s search listings as everyone knows, comes from finding a way to put new content on your website as often as possible. Webmasters usually pay to have writers think up content, one pains taking piece at a time, to add to their website every day. On the other hand are websites like Demand Media that with no effort at all, have people around the world add thousands of pieces of new content on their own, at no cost to the website. Answers.com, has about 40 million pages of content on its servers so far. Google has no choice but to list these websites on the top of its search results; and they therefore get lots of visitors and advertising income, and are on their way to Internet superstardom. But is this something to worry about – that websites should become popular not for the quality of what they have online, but for the sheer quantity of it?

Answers.com has no bother with trying to edit content for quality, like Wikipedia does, either. They just have all the content, at no cost. The profits they make, they use to advertise on Google AdSense. All of this just gives the bloggers great ideas about how they just have to pump out nonsense on a massive scale , advertise a bit, and there you have your instant millionaire formula. Demand Media actually pays freelancers for this too.

Google is the reason why these websites choose their path of mas content-isation – Google’s policy of how the most new additions to a website makes it the most popular. It is quickly becoming so that any standard search for information on a topic gives you nothing but a results page that is clogged with banalities from Answers.com, WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers. This is also what happens with any standard newspaper that has grown fat and old on its own success. How could this be what the Internet has turned into? How will people find articles from genuine freelancing experts who aren’t on the payroll of a major magazine?

Getting anything done on the Internet is all about advertising. As resentful as people are that the advertising that comes at them is constant, is privacy-robbing and obtrusive, it does bankroll the services out there that we use. Today, premier services cost you money; but what if you were given a choice to either pay, or give them enough personal information to allow them to target relevant advertising at you? The advertisers would pay the website for the ability to target advertising at you, because they would have a better chance at making a sale. In the future, privacy will no longer just be a simple box you can casually leave checked by default. It will be something that will end up either saving you money, or costing you. If you choose to have a lot of privacy, the website may well ask you for a $5 subscription. Your privacy or the lack of it, could be your credit card; and your privacy could mean different things, depending on what part of the Internet you were visiting.

Social networks always had a hard time trying to protect your privacy while encouraging you to share as much with your online friends at the same time, to make for a more enjoyable social networking experience all around. Protecting your privacy has become more difficult now ever since real-time search entered the Facebook equation.Facebook has tried every kind of balance between privacy and openness, and still doesn’t seem to be quite comfortable.

The policy adopted by Tumblr, Twitter and Yelp over privacy when you are on these networks ask that you only put out anything on the services that you don’t mind having everyone hear about. Location-based apps like Foursquare and Loopt are services that have the luxury of not really needing a formal privacy policy. If you are on these, you’re supposed to want to share freely. Privacy is the currency these services use too; although there is really no need for it. You only get to look into others’ lives, as far as you let them into yours. And everyone is supposed to share freely. Indeed, Foursquare is set to become the Twitter of this year. Twitter got people addicted to sharing the banalities of their everyday lives. Foursquare gets people addicted sharing with everyone the places they’re going to all the time.

The only real guarantee to privacy is not in any policy anymore; it is about self-restraint in curiosity over other people’s private lives. You only need to share anything if you wish to look into other people’s lives yourself. But when the entire point of a service is the fun of giving up any semblance of privacy, why have a privacy policy at all? If it helps everyone save money?

When people in the 90s sat down for the first time to sign up to their first e-mail account, they would typically take the password part of the form either very seriously or completely casually. The very serious would dream up an impossible mish-mash of numbers and letters to keep safe from spies. The more regular types among us would treat the password as a joke – who would it even occur to, to want to hack into our worthless accounts? Why not pick 12345, we would wonder. As people got more and more inured to the dangers of poor security on the Internet, websites and e-mail services began to require that people used six characters at least, with at least one number. So now, Internet security has been raised immeasurably to the use of abc123.

A couple of months ago, a company called RockYou, that makes software for the social networking sites, made a mistake and allowed a hacker to copy and publish their entire database of tens of millions of passwords. It wasn’t online for very long before it was taken down, but lots of people interested in computer security, managed to download a copy. No one has ever had this kind of window into the password habits that people have. You have to be in law enforcement to have access to something like that. As for insight, students and computer antivirus experts pored over the lists – and they quickly found that of all those millions, one in 100 just used 123456 as password, and an equal number did 12345. Lots of people used their girlfriend’s first name, or a popular car model name. There was a collection of 5000 very common passwords that were used by one in five.

All that a hacker would need then is, an automated program that can try the 5000 passwords one by one, until something hits. If making more than three wrong guesses within three minutes locks them out of an account, they’ll have the program just make no more than two attempts at a time, and come back after three minutes. It’s not like they don’t have millions of accounts to try to break into while they’re waiting. People don’t really need to make the best and strongest passwords out there to stay safe; they only need to be somewhat better than people who choose elementary passwords. They only need to stay one step ahead of the simpletons. When there are so many of them to be caught, why would any hacker want to waste his time guessing a slightly more difficult password?

The Web 2.0 has been around for a few years now, and it has been exciting enough. It gave you a chance to shape a website yourself; and if you have a vision powerful enough, you could really shape the entire web even. But using the Internet today, to use search in particular, admittedly feels thoroughly last-century by most accounts. Today’s search experience is still very keyword-dependent; you could get very different results searching for, say, movies versus searching for films. Bing, especially, has received a lot of criticism for being too literal, and not trying to interpret a search, the way Google does.The next iteration of the Internet is around the corner ( a rather long corner); they call it the Web 3.0, and it’s all about putting a little intelligence into the way the Internet works. And will this ever be an SEO game-changer.

If you ask your friend about what he thinks of the Yeti, what will he think Yeti means? If you are an anthropologist or a biologist, he may think you mean the rumored giant ape that is supposed to live in the icy upper reaches of the Himalayas. If you have no such special interests, he would probably think you meant the new SUV from Skoda that goes by that name. Web 3.0 is promoted as something that would be able to tell the difference. Web 3.0 is believed to achieve its additional insight into your searches, by keeping online an Internet profile of yours, that contains all the searching you ever did. Right now, if you are signed in to your iGoogle account, you could conceivably do something like this – it remembers all your searches. But the Web 3.0 experience is all about intelligence that can interpret this information. You can ask your search engine open-ended questions like, “Where should I go on vacation if I only have $4500 to spend?” And it should be able to look at different vacation packages based on places you’ve been to before, and places you’ve spoken about in your e-mails, look at all the different offerings on the Internet, and come up with a properly compiled results page.

There are currently intelligent music referring services even today that try to “understand” what your musical preferences are like, based on songs you already like. And it will try to look up all the new music that could fit your listening profile. But as anyone who’s tried a service like Pandora music explorer knows, the results of that artificial intelligence can often be very trying on the patience. Admittedly, science hasn’t advanced far enough to make Web 3.0 a reality. The intelligence comes from what they call Ontologies. An Ontology is a file that contains collections of information, and additional information on how everything in the file is related together. In fact, this was a part of the way the Internet was envisioned when it was first designed back in the 80s by Tim Berners-Lee. Software agents, automated web crawlers, use Ontologies to understand your browsing habits, and looks around the Internet for you. These Ontology files will be created manually, by people who donate their time – sort of a Wikipedia for computers, not people. Once the browser (and it would be called a semantic browser) is able to think for itself based on this information, undoubtedly, learning, knowledge, and science itself will change beyond recognition. SEO will probably need to evolve as well.

Most video serving websites will look at YouTube with awe and feel hopelessly dwarfed; but could there be anything that actually dwarfs YouTube? As it would happen, YouTube, a site that has a guaranteed lock on about 15 minutes of its viewers’ time every day on average, feels envious of the kind of command the regular boob tube has on people ‘s time that they would not mind spending hours in front of it. The way a small niche YouTube clone site looks at enviously at YouTube’s 15 minute sand thinks “Now if only I could get two of those minutes, what a difference it would make”, YouTube salivates for a couple of hours stolen from television.

It’s not that YouTube lacks the content; they once said that viewers pumped a couple of dozen hours of video every minute into YouTube’s servers. They have the content; they only need a way to help viewers find the things they like, and watch them. It could take YouTube through the the roof. And this barely profitable company could really begin to pull in advertising.

What is the biggest search engine on earth after Google? Well, it’s YouTube search, of course. And YouTube searches are much more difficult for search algorithms to decipher, because there is actually nothing in the videos that actually has any keywords that the algorithm needs. No search engine actually understands the images in a video; they depend entirely on the tags submitted by the uploader. They need all-new approaches for YouTube search; kind of like the data mining that eBay or Amazon use, to give you recommendations based on what you already are known to like. Maybe they need to announce a search design prize like Netflix did, to improve recommendations.

And of course there is negative marking; if their recommendations are often wrong, they could turn visitors off.YouTube and Google figure that they need personal information for this; much, much more than what they have already. They’ll need to spy on your e-mail, look at what you do on Facebook, look at what your friends do on Facebook, before they can get something right.

They figure that perhaps users need to be given a more TV-like experience if they are to compete with it. Maybe if they could get their viewers to relax a little, and have instant gratification like with TV, they could get somewhere. If YouTube could just move away from having users used search to discover videos; if users could just flip through stacks of videos with the minimal buffering wait period, then YouTube will finally have it made.

The 2010 annual campus recruitment is in full swing at Ahsan and this week a team of seven people headed down to a city called Tiruppur to carry out a campus recruitment at one of the many Engineering Colleges.

The team comprised of the HR Manager, HR Talent Recruiter and several developers for the technical interviews.

Over 200 students turned up to hear the presentation given by the HR Manager and Online Marketing Manager (that’s me!) and when it came to passing around application forms after hearing the terms of the employment virtually all the students remained in their seats.

The next job was to conduct group discussions where the recruiters could get a feel for the candidates, observe communication skill and overall attitude. The candidates were shortlisted and passed over to the technical team for an online aptitude test – developed exclusively for Ahsan by our Head of Projects and comes with a difficulty rating of “evil” to ensure we only interview the best candidates!

From the 97 people that took the test, 34 managed to impress and were taken through to the technical interview round and after a full day of interviews 26 students were given offer letters – around 14% of the initial 200+ that were there for the presentation on the first day.

Throughout the trip there were lots of laughs, from the startled reaction of the Online Marketing Manager when he was awoken by the HR Manager, to the never ending teasing of one of the developers after he was caught talking (”Enna Maa?”) to his fiance!

We’re looking forward to welcoming all 26 freshers in to the House of Ahsan in the coming months.

In the coming months we’ll be conducting several more campus recruitment drives, we’re just in the process of shortlisting the colleges to ensure we are only picking from the best talent pools available.

Leave your questions or comments below!

Chrome is Finally Here for the Mac OS, and for Linux. Even if in Beta
Google’s Chrome has delivered what has been promised for months – versions that will run on the Linux and Mac OS. From the looks of it, the Beta Chrome on the Mac is going to be a serious hit, even if it is a few features short. One of the reasons Chrome comes a little lighter than usual is that Google really wanted to not have Mac users enter the new year still waiting, and preparing all the features for Snow Leopard would have taken longer. To begin with one of the most anticipated features on Chrome – the inbuilt App Mode, will be unavailable. Fluid, for example, a program that works on WebKit browsers, will be able to work on Chrome with no modifications; but this will only happen, once the App Mode is enabled.

Google Gears and the bookmark synchronizing feature Sync for Mac, are all features that will have to wait a while too. And Oh!, extensions are not fully supported yet either. But let’s look as the cup half-full now. The Bookmark Manager, a feature that everyone missed when Chrome first came to the Mac last month, has just been enabled – on version 4.0.295.0.Google calls it “rudimentary” at this stage, but it seems quite okay. Recognition of input from multi-touch screens and the Mighty Mouse, that was missing a month ago, is back with a bang. Hold down Command, and swipe on the trackpad with three fingers, and you have a new tab. Do the same and swipe left, and you should have a copy of your last tab, and so on.

The entire Chrome experience is so sharp, fast and fuss-free that they can’t stop pointing it out. But Chrome’s speed is impressive only when you compare it with Firefox; compared to Safari, Chrome can seem just a touch slower. Installing updates is pain-free and invisible too. The address bar on Chrome Google calls an Omnibox (perhaps a play on Omnibus). It is an address bar and a Google search box all in one. If you want to change your default search engine, there is no need to go to preferences either. Users begin to type in the name of the alternate search engine and press the tab button, and auto-complete will do the rest for you. Perhaps Chrome doesn’t have Safari’s glossy and colorful user interface; but it could do some things better for you. If you would give it a chance.

One of the most well-used and addictive features on Twitter has to be the ReTweet. People find an idea they like, they just pass it on so quickly; and millions of people can get on to it in no time. It is practically viral. Facebook,the name that gets mentioned in the same breath as Twitter, happens to be much more popular, and is much larger; but it doesn’t spread news like wildfire quitein the way Twitter does.Facebook is all about privacy; Twitter is all about letting it all hang out, with almost all Twitter profiles listed as public, open for anyone to see. On Facebook, you could not even make your profile public until a year ago. Facebook has the need to change its culture, turning away from jealously guarded privacy, to compulsive sharing. So far, names have not been clickable on Facebook as they have been on Twitter; and of course, there is no simple ReTweeting syntax. ReShare has been Facebook’s lukewarm attempt at bringing in the sharing function, but it hasn’t been successful so far.

But Facebook is not done with tweaking its own ReTweeting feature. They’ve just released a Facebook feature called Via. It lets you repost something a friend shared with you, and it stamps the originator’s name on it with a Via attribution. It’s online already; you just need to pick up an item a friend has posted in your News Feed, and click on the Share button. You’ll get a Via option here with the name of the original friend stamped on it. When you finish sharing it, it will show up on your profile, with a link that goes to your friend’s profile too. Your friends will also find them on their News Feeds, and that is the closest thing to the ReTweet that you can imagine.

But Via Is only useful for links that someone’s posted. You can’t Via a status update, or your picture for instance. But it’s a first step, and it could evolve. They have the most useful kind of reposting feature up now with the link reposting ability, and that is what counts. Facebook will probably have a service like Tweet meme tracking how far a reposting of anything goes, and it could make Facebook really valuable in a world where instant real-time search is becoming deeply mainstream.

NewsCred is an Internet company that, and by the standards of the Internet, has been around for an eternity – since 2007. It started out as a tiny business in Switzerland that aimed to help people with the best sources they could look to for the most reliable news stories. NewsCred tried to do this with a special combination of community votes, and also intelligent algorithms. As ambitious a concept as that was, NewsCred found little success with it. They haven’t given up yet though; the are trying a new tack. Perhaps they got their inspiration from Ning, the website that allows you to create your own social network, in minutes, to run off its servers. NewsCred is trying something similar, and it’s a ground breaking concept. They want to help you create your own custom Internet newspaper in minutes, aimed at whatever niche you have in mind. Once you sign up, you get to put together a professional looking journal, even in the free version; in the premium paid version, you could create a site that combined the standard news and opinion principle with the aggregator concept, much in the way The Huffington Post works.

NewsCred is simple enough to use. You open a new paper ; you submit information on what topics you want to pick up. NewsCred offers all kinds of ready-made topics that you can choose from, religion, science, politics, or anything else; or you can generate a new topic not already on your list, with a new keyword. As soon as you hit Submit, the website will right away publish your news paper for you with a bunch of basic current stories on all the topics you choose. They choose your stories from several popular news domains and blogs around the world. If you want, you can even give your paper an RSS feed, if NewsCred does not have it on its directory already.

Amazon is a website that is perennially at the top of Google’s rankings – for its popularity with customers of course; but as those in SEO know, Amazon’s pioneering efforts in allowing customers to rank its products, and write reviews, have given the site a boost in a way that only a constant stream of new content is known to be capable of doing. Amazon realizes that an active user community on its website helps newcomers trust the company more. In a recent move, they’ve started a program called Vine that helps reward the best contributors to its website, with free products.

SEO is usually is all about paying attention to every last word that is published on your website: you have to be careful that the right keywords come up often enough, and so on. Using user generated content is a new kind of SEO though. You are supposed to exercise your SEO while you trust other people to do the right thing while you have only a moderate degree of control over it. You usually need to pay attention to areas like seeding the forum when user input thins out, and judging to see whether there are enough tags and other opportunities at interlinking the content generated. There is actually a software product that helps you analyze the user content on your forum; it is called Leximancer. It helps you analyze your user content to see how often your targeted keywords turn up, and analyze link ability in those keywords. You could easily check, for instance, how often a brand or product that you promote, comes to be associated with a positive or negative term. It also helps you gain some insight into the psychology of your visitor by analyzing the content for you.

Software like Leximancer also helps you moderate your forum by giving you some tools in text mining. On a very large forum with hundreds of pages of user generated content,you can easily zero in on hecklers, bullies and people who break your rules for, say, family-friendly content. With the way webmasters race for fresh avenues in obtaining free content, user generated content and software to manage it effectively,certainly deserves a close look.

To anyone with the foresight to plan their SEO approach right at the start when they think of a website concept, it has to occur at some point to them to wonder – should they go with an international domain name suffix, a .com or the like? If they choose a local domain with their own country’s suffix, will they forever sound to all visitors like they are some kind of a provincial loser? People have been wondering about this for about ten years now; even if the rule has always been clear. A local domain name beats an international .com hands-down any day. If it is all that clear, why do people constantly look longingly after a .com suffix for as if they couldn’t believe they’re really on the Internet until people get to type in a .com to reach them?

Let’s say you live in Madrid, and you are looking for a classifieds publisher where you can put up your used computer for sale. You just type ‘computer classifieds’ into a search engine, and you get results like ‘loot.com’ and also ones like ‘loot.es’. If you didn’t know anything about either site, which would you choose? Since a classified ad is really all about your local region, surely you would think that the .com sites were just too generic to waste your time on. People do tend to gravitate towards local offerings over the generic, because they feel that there would be more relevant information there.

In link building endeavors, other local sites in your region are likely to be better disposed to linking to you if you have the same local domain name as theirs. What is more, there are many local directories that won’t approve of indexing your name, unless you’re local. And basically, search engine algorithms tend to reliably rank you, if you’re local. Sites of the same dot com linking to one another are not all that valuable. Having really different websites linking to one another is. If you split your dot com into many different countries with different suffixes, you stand a better chance. Moreover, it is quite common these days to find hosting in a country other than your own. You would be virtually guaranteed a proper listing and ranking in your own country if you used a proper local domain suffix getting your site served there. And in hours too.

So why do SEO experts still continue to think that a .com suffix is somehow more equal than the other suffixes? It could be that they just use English keywords in their research to test sites they design for search availability. The language barrier is just too great. If people could just move out of their comfort zone and research all the parameters that actually matter, language and others, the local domain suffix, or the ccTLD would always come out the winner.