The Power of Retail

Ah, the sad truth of living on the Internet!

There seem to be tons of new comics especially for the internet and for bloggers, which makes it so much more interesting that just the regular comics. This one I got via email a while ago, and have been wanting to post here for quite some time.

I already have a couple of favorite comic sites that I go to for a good laugh everyday, bLaugh which has been around for a while and recently resurfaced after a two month break and a new site that I discovered a couple of weeks back called Being Five. Both sites are just superb and extremely with it.

Social bookmarking is all the rage these days and if you want your blog rankings to rise, then it is simply a must to get involved. When I started to blog in 2004, I had no idea about page rankings, alexa rankings etc and couldn’t have cared less. I used to blog for myself and that was it. Unfortunately, now I do bother about rankings as it is somewhat of an indicator of how ‘worthy’ your blog is.

When you start to worry about page ranks, you start to write things to cater to those rankings and that’s when things start to not look so good in the world of blogging. So, you have to be sure of why you want to blog, is it just for yourself, so that you can write whatever you need to, share your knowledge with the world, or do you blog for some other reason.

For whatever reason you blog, it is important to make sure that you are following through on it so that your blog stays true to what it is about. Social bookmarking is what makes everything connect, and as bloggers being able to connect to others is one of the most valuable things one can do.

My personal preference has been to use Digg and Technorati so far, but I believe there are lots of other and newer social bookmarking sites now.  Here’s a good list of the top 30 social bookmarking sites that are out there.

Did you know that you could write for Associated Content? I wrote to them quite some time back and set up my account there, but still haven’t got started on publishing anything as yet. I certainly plan to do so, as I think it’s a great platform, certainly one of the best in the industry these days. I want to specialize what I write for AC, instead of writing general stuff, like I often end up doing here. But since this is my personal blog, I get to do as I please, right? Right!

I’m having a tough time keeping up with all the things I need to do now that I am connected again. Besides catching up with my mail, I am busy contacting clients and colleagues again, to let them know I’m back in the loop again and ready to start working. While we have been waiting for the internet to happen for over a week, now that it has finally happened, it seems to have put everything else on hold, in a good way, that is.

How is it, that I’ve come to depend so much on the Internet and being connected that I feel out of sorts when I don’t have an internet connection at hand? The process started about 4 years back and before I even realized it, I was completely and utterly hooked. Every once in a while I need a complete break from the Internet, where I switch off from work and being connected. I did this for the last ten days of December 2006 and it was a much needed repreive and getting back to work was all the more better.

I heard about this new site called Streamy which offers a new way to read and share news stories on the web. They are still in private beta as yet, so I have sent a request for an invitation and am waiting to get one soon. There is absolutely no information about them or their ‘new’ system on their site, so the curiosity is really getting to me.

The reviews I have read about it in other sources such as alarm:clock describe it as a combination of Pageflakes and Digg, which does sound quite interesting to me. I’m already a member at Pageflakes, although I am yet to really get into it and organize my page. I got some great feedback and comments from Stephanie at Pageflakes, who shared lots of tips on how to get started and different ways of using the system. Waiting to see more of Streamy now.

Just completed an interesting survey for Marketwire that I read about in The Blog Herald. The topic of the survey was how bloggers gather information for their blogs. I use a variety of sources, but the bulk of my information comes from online newspapers and magazines. I have written some posts from Press Releases (including the post before this one….talk about coincidences!!) and I think I will be using these resources more, although only for products and companies that I am familiar with, so that I don’t get a one-sided review (as in a glowing one!) of the product/company/service. Blogs are becoming quite mainstream these days (although, I still don’t have anyone in my entire friends and family circle who has created a blog!) and even if not everyone will create theirown blog, they do end up reading others blogs at least. The concept is only going to grow further, although it will become more fine tuned and niche, I feel.

Bloggers write about a lot of things, a lot of products and a lot of companies, so what happens if a blogger writes about your company or product negatively? Should you respond or completely ignore them? According to Robert Cox, president of Media Bloggers Association, a New York based consultancy for consumer packaged goods companies, no company should ignore or intimidate a blogger, unless of course they are writing defamatory statements.

There have been several cases where bloggers have brought intense media attention due to their findings, such as in the Dell case where a blogger wrote about poor quality service and also in the Kryptonite bike lock case where a blogger uploaded a video showing how easy it was to pick the lock with a Bic pen.

While companies are being held accountable for what they promise to provide, the same goes for bloggers and publishers. Bloggers also need to be aware of the potential risk in writing negatively about a company, they must have their facts checked and double checked before bad-mouthing a product, as they can be held accountable for their words and its effects as well.

There’s a new site that is entering the highly competitive paid blogging industry. Bloggerwave is the newest company to have started a platform where advertisers and publishers can connect to promote products and services. The concept has been around for a while but really took off last year and has created quite a buzz in the marketplace in itself. Signing up at Bloggerwave is easy, all you have to do is provide the basic blog details and if your blog meets their requirements, it will be approved and you can start taking opportunities from advertisers and marketers. Payment is done via PayPal after 30 days, which is the norm for the industry. While a lot of people resent the entry of paid advertisements in the world of blogging, it really is a natural progression of things in the world of blogging as well as advertising. Social networking has taken the world by storm it seems and is invading our lives in every way, and this is just one additional way.

Changed the look of the blog, but not sure if I’m going to keep it, since I can’t seem to add stuff to the links on the top of the page. In fact, I can’t even find where they lead to, so it’s going to take a bit of research and hunting and reading on how to fix it. This theme is called Fastrack and is by Sadish Balasubramanium a software consultant with Microsoft.

I absolutely love the motion and atmosphere of light in this theme. It’s completely different and very refreshing. Interestingly, I am using another of his themes on my other blog The world around us too. He has some really great themes, have a look at some of them here.

EDIT: Switched back since I didn’t have the time to make all the required changes at the present. Will definitely be going back to the fastrack theme though, since I really like it.