That was a great opportunity to let others know that I blogged. Like you feel when you announce to your classmates that yesterday you had your first ####. Yes I know, you understand. Well, blogging is far different from doing four letter word things, but B L O G is also another 4L word! And as it happens everyday, other guys also started revealing their blog sites. There were cool ones too. And I liked the fictitious site very well. You can also check out these guys (no idea why no gals offered their blogs for scrutiny) at http://concuco.blogspot.com http://museman.fullhydblogs.com and http://irfu.blogspot.com whereas anoother blog which came up in the discussion – hey, you are already on that!

Slowly the participant numbers swelled, but they came, they saw and they just logged off. It seems like they wanted to hear something too. Later in the day, as everyone were logging off (including the presenter) the wonderful webinar server ws reassigning the presenter as one of the remaining guys. As I was obstinate (read determined) to not logging off unless kicked out, at one point of time, the presentership was presented to me.

Ha, that was really good. I could move thru the different slides on my own, and could do everything on the screen. So I started a mute presentation with typing my comments on the screen, over the slides.

I had a good amount of interaction and interest. Some latecomer (probably habituated) logged in at the end of the day and was asking everybody whether the presentation is on and what is the problem with the audio. He should have looked at the list of participants – 4 at that time including him and me – and decided for himself what the hell was going on.

Anyway, leave those funny parts to be attended by my corporate system guys. Lets us take a serious (hopefully) look at the idea of blogging.

As I said before, this is a review of the presentation. Hence I did not ask the original presenter whether his thing was copyrighted or not. Anyway he will be hating the somebody who writes reviews on a presentation where everyone were interested more on the audio than his slides!

=============================================

The question was “What’s this deal about Blogging?” posed by some avid blogger who wanted to prompt people to start blogging at the corporate blog site.

Topics had to start with an intro followed by an overview. Then the presenter was supposed to tell you what you should do with a blog, and how to catch a growing viewer base for your blogs. The session was to end with a review of DON’Ts for a corporate blog.

Probably he did everything right, and everybody came out happy. Possibly that didn’t happen, ’cause somebody at the systems side forgot to plug in the microphone cable into the small hole behind the PC that has a label that says ‘mic’. Possibly I was the only person who came out of the webinar laughing. Not laughing at the webinar. Not at the presenter. Not at the systems guys. Not at the poor guys who attended. I always laugh. Especially when I’m happy. And happy I was, after the webinar, as I could OPERATE the webinar thingie on my own, before relinquishing my kingdom to the last person left on the site. Yes, there is atleast one guy in this world who is more obstinate than me. And rejoice, he shares the same organisation with us! He probably never logged off. Even till now. Nobody will ever know. Probably he is locked in the webinar server. Possibly, he locked his terminal and left for home at x Hrs.

Sounds pretty boring, isn’t it? Yes, that was how the original presentation was. Now let me do my kind’a presenting the same.

Your blog – a place to present your private thoughts.
 Like your diary. Not the personal one where you jot down what you did with your girlfriend(s). Something like your memoirs, which you want to be published in your biography some day (and make money probably)

Your blog – a place to keep all your knowledge.
 In the form of scraps, notes and the like. Instead of jotting it down on a piece of paper and keeping it safe in your shirt pocket, so that your wife (or girlfriend, or dhobi whoever does it for you) washes it thoroughly and hand back you a ‘clean chit’ with a ‘never do that again’ kind of look. A note in the blog is useful for the entire humanity. Just think of that! The entire human race is waiting for you to share your knowledge through some blog!

Your blog – a place to drain all your frustrations.
 But ensure that whoever frustrated you doesn’t get frustrated because you mentioned him in your blog very colorfully! Don’t take names of your enemies. Just describe them. and people (the people who matter) will certainly know who it is! And of course, your guy at the receiving end will certainly know who it is. And that scores

Your blog – a place to have casual conversations.
 Here I differ. I would like to use my mobile, yahoo messenger and the like, google talk, and orkut scraps for this purpose. And not scraps. I differ because I didnot understand what the presenter wanted to convey. If it is discussions on specific topics, OK, I savy.

Your blog – a place to put up your issues.
 And hope that one day somebody will come through with a solution. Worth the wait. Hope for the best! Anyway, you can let the world know what your issue is. And within few seconds, there will be a flood of free advices. Hopefully. As the only thing that comes free in life is advice. Woh bhi fokat ki.

Your blog – a place to comment on things happening around you.
 You can put up your objections or support to whatever happens around. You can feel like you have had a say in international matters which are not normally in your control! Yuo can offer free advice here, and start unending discussions on the topic.

Your blog – a place to project yourself.
 Where you can picturise your true self. Your true identity. Or for that matter your fake identity. The way you want others to know you. As a great man, a crusader for the rights of humanity. As an intelligent man, searching for the meaning of life. As a guy who has nothing else to do, so keeps on blogging. (No, not me!) Whatever …

Your blog – a place to shout at the world and still stay alive.
 Take the advantage of anonymity. Ramble on anything or everything. Abuse or diffuse. Do whatever you want. All knows that it is the ramblings of an anonymous entity. And you will be forgiven. Or forgotten.

Your blog is what you want it to be.

Yes, I liked that line. So it is an exact copy. That line makes sense, tells the truth.

That was the general public internet free kind of blogging. Now let us look at the other kind. The specific private intranet restricted kind. Welcome to corporate blogging.

Your corporate blog – is a place to project your professionalism.
 Where you can prove that you are a professional. An intelligent professional. An experienced professional. Just any kind of professional. Enough to make your friends envy you. Atleast they should know all those hidden skills you have got. If not friends, the Resource Co-ordinators should know. They know that you fill in your resumes only because they force you to. And that it has only a glancing mention of your true professionalism, your intelligence, your skills ….

Your corporate blog – is like dressing in formals at work.
 And hating that dress. You like casuals. Everybody does like casuals. I prefer my lungi. But you can’t wear them at the office. So is your blog. This is your formal blog. Where you show others that you are wearing a tie. At home, you can be in your lungi. Got the point?

Your corporate blog – is done as per the corporate policies.
 I don’t think the policy makers do blog. I may be wrong. I don’t think they even do read blogs. I may be wrong here too. So stay safe. Don’t use the corporate blog as your frusty pad. Here we show our professionalism. Tell long technical stories, get people confused. That’s the only way you can vent ire on the corporate blog. No name calling. No copyright infringements.  No porno thingies. No gossip. No entertainment. No merchandising. No numerous other forbidden things as specified by your internet proxy server (that thing understands the corporate policy better than me, and blocks me 80% of the time. (:-P) The rest 20% i browse the corporate mail or self-service portals.) No this. No that. Just technology. And hope policy makers don’t understand your technology.

Your corporate blog – is for knowledge sharing.
 For work related knowledge. If you have knowledge across functions, that is also welcome. Finally it ensures that when you leave the organisation, your knowledge does not. I would like to speak something not related to this. Don’t put all yur eggs in the same basket. Now that I have said something unrelated, you are free to relate it with anything you want. I am just sharing knowledge.

Your corporate blog – is a great way to present your professional skills.
 I know we have already spoke on that. I do not know what the presenter had in mind. Probably stressing on the fact. Read a good book. Expand your virtual skills. Especially in the language side. And present your skills. Atleast you’ll know where to look for when sending your “updated” resume to the consultants.

Your corporate blog – is a tool to create leave an impression on your colleagues (and your boss!)
 Let the corporate world know what you are. Let your friends envy you. Don’t let your boss envy you. Atleast till it is time to move up or move out. Impress everybody. And let them estimate their losses when you move out. Your friends will assess the losses when you move out. And your boss will assess the loss when you move up. Not every time. Not every boss. So do. Some don’t. I don’t know. One more thing to add to the list of things that I don’t understand, but should.

The presentation moves on to the next slide.

What do I write about?

Ask yourself the following questions first. What can I write about? What am I best at? Who is my audience?

Throw away the answers and write what you feel like. Only on your personal blog. Not on the corporate one.

For the corporate blog, list your experiences, ordeals, best practices, innovations etc., relevant to your work or your organisation. In short blog on something that can be useful for the organisation. Most of the things you are writing will be known to everyone. But just make sure you are the first one to blog it down!

The next slide of the rpesentation deals with the growth of the blog. And of the readership.

The blog content starts inorganically, with blogs about this and that. Slowly it tries to be a bit organised. And pointed. So there might be an identity crisis evolving. You are not sure what should be the main topic of your blog. You like this as well as that. Now it is time to take stock of the readership. And comments which become discussions. Try to focus more on what others want and what they are interested in, and your blog comes to the organic phase. Moving on, there will be multiplication of topics of worth, and you can go in for pruning of topics which are not even read by anyone other than you. Make sure you have some way to generate a readeship report. Check the features of your blog service provider.

Coming to the growth in readership of yuor blog, the initial days will be having sporadic visits. Most of them from spiders which move all around the web searching for morsels. Slowly people will be noticing your blogs. There will be links to your blogs from elsewhere – search engines as well as other people’s web pages. (So be sure to have something worth linking in the first place). This will be the equilibrium mode, which will be phased out by push mode if your blogging is less than the demand for your blogs. And as demand is more than supply, others will jump into the fray, comments start growing and becomes discussions, and becomes the main item of your blog. This seed mode is the saturation of your blog, which is self sustained, and grows by its own. You just sit down and watch. (And enjoy the money coming your way – for those looking at the revenues from blogs).

Now the question arises, “How do you know if your blog is growing?”. It might be growing. It might be dying. It might have dead already. But how can you know? Look at the statistics offered by the blog service site. Specifically the patterns of hits, and the repetition of hits. Some people just blunder in to your blog before they realise that it is not the place for them. Some do come back for the blog, because they want something that you have put on offer. Those returning people are to be kept amused, with a few new bits now and then, so they keep on coming.

Look at the comments and discussions on your blogs. Interested people and informed people will certainly want to leave their marks. Encourage comments. Provoke them for new ideas. Add fuel into the comments so that they grow into big discussions. If your blog has become the discussion forum for any topic, it means that it has matured!

Check for the incoming links. Regularly do some research in the web, through google, yahoo, and milliards of other sites. There will be direct hits. That just shows how smart the spiders are. There will be mention of your blogs in others sites. Post your site url as a phrase to the search engine. See any links that are not your own? You are in luck. You have been linked. (I would like to admit that just now I googled with http://www.google.com/search?q=”seby.wordpress.com” and found that I am yet to grow in the blogosphere! Hey wait, I tried yahoo with the same phrase and found that I am linked in certain splogs – the spam blogs – the latest keeda of the blogosphere!) The idea is, the more you get incoming links, the more probability of others finding you, and the more chances of growth!

There might be offline discussions about your blog. But you probably will never know, as the web is global, and you are not! But suppose you are travelling some place, and hears somebody quoting your blog. Hey, I am waiting 4 that moment of glory. Rare chance?

Also be on the lookout for requests – for posts, further details, or whatever. Somebody is interested. Just amuse them, and soon they will be eating out of your hands. Atleast for a while. Till you have somenthing in your hands, that is.

There might be some page rankings somewhere. Like that available with google. Or like the one with hitbox. Monitor the rankings, make a graph, and understand the blog market. You don’t have to be a stock trader for knowing what is happening in the blogosphere. Basically rankings reflect your popularity.

How can you help your blog grow? Well, there is no sure shot method. Here are some recipes for the blog-fertiliser.

Content is the key to your blog. People just look at the titles and the colors and the layout first. Have clear titles, smooth colors and a cool layout so that people will want to stay and read. The simple funda is books are judged by its covers. Have some appeal in the first page, and people will actually click on a few links too!

Watch the comments carefully, and understand what they actually want. Also check for the posts which caused a sudden rise of visitors – bingo! you have hit upon a favorite theme!

Regularity is another important factor. If you update your blogs on a regular periodic basis, your visitors will know when to come back for more, and they will.

The next factor on content is to build credibility by being your true self (or atleast true as they know your online self). And the contents should be true and not just fiction. People should treat yuor blog as a reference for things, with a sense of authenticity.

Coming to the navigation part, you should categorize yuor topics with common tags. Help your visitors to find what they need to see and not what you want them to see. Most popular topics should remain on your front page. Recycle them to give them a new time stamp. Or just make them sticky notes, so that they remain on the top.

Collaborating with other blogger brothers in the blogosphere is another way to promote your blog. Have reciprocal links. You put links to his blog in yours, and he puts links to yuor blog in his blog. Both of you are benefitted. Do this when you have common topics. You can also put your comments on other blogs, spiced with a little reference of your blogs – with a link here and there as reference. So people going through the other blogs also will know where to look for more information. In short just spread the word around, without actually spamming!

Promote your blog by any other means like the MNCs do. Sponsor a beauty pageant, donate a hefty sum to charity, put an ad in media, put up hoardings, ….. not for my blog. But mails to friends regarding the new blog site you started, promising a free drink to the one who gets his friends visit your site (keep the promise or not, your friends are yours!). Just promote. Also look at place where people of the same interest flock in, and spread the word.

Now coming to the golden words – WHAT NOT to do on a blog.

Let me quote the presenter “An arrow fired or a word blogged cannot be undone”. Quite true. Before unleashing fury, just think about it. Your words can heal, and they can hurt too. Be quite polite unless you blog only to express your hatred to the entire world, your distractors, your neighbor’s cat ….

“Think about how it will look to a hiring managed in ten years”, the presenter continues. Quite the best reason to start a professional blog. And put a few incoming links and testimonials along with yur profile. Sounds good. So be good.

Your blog needs constant attention to grow till maturity. You have to feed it, care for it, give it a new dress this Diwali, and you have to clean them up too. Nurturing and pruning … Blogging or gardening … So donot neglect your blog, or else the visitors will also neglect your blog. And everything will be history.

Well, the golden slides of Tushar has come to an end. And here is his blog : http://tusharc.blogspot.com

Be courteous, atleast give him a visit. And tell him that I appreciate his good work and enjoyed his presentation.

And special thanks to that system guy who forgot to plug in the mic. You really made me do this blog! Thanks a lot.
P.S: The 4L word I used at the second para ? Hey what do you say to your classmates in school when you had a first shot at BEER? No, I know you are all perverts out there. Thinking something else. Sure, there are better 4L word things to do than a beer. You are free to do what you want. You are free to blog what you want, That is the life in open blogs unlike the corporate blogs. So why don’t you start blogging about your first #### ?

A great place to start will be with this site itself.

wordpress.com
blogspot.com

Or find your own obscure place here – http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=free+blog+site

Happy blogging

==== More details soon ====

I’m tired after writing the Blog on blogging thing, and it is ready now.

So you want to start blogging or you want to know whether you want to start blogging, look at http://seby.wordpress.com/corporate-blogging/

Ya this is 4 thos orKuters who are like chameleons – changing pics and names on the fly. I was inspired to do this by my favourite orKut friend whom I greet with “I O Rama”.

I find they do keep changing the names and then scrap me. As I am not that intelligent, I cannot make out who the hell is here, scrapping me like he knows me very well. I’m thinking …..

Now I see that whatever is left for them to change, their IDs are a constant. This id is used by me in my orKut scrapbook 4 IE tool. So I decide to make a list of my friends, capturing their asli names and IDs. Just lookup the ID from the list and find who is your new scrapper.

But manual lookup is tedious. So I had to put up some scripts as before, with context menu in IE.

The reg file:

The last line should point to your docs storage and not mine. So edit it.

—————-cut here—-orKut frIDentifier.reg———–

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\Orkut +&Identify]
“Contexts”=dword:00000022
@=”C:\\Documents and Settings\\seby.mi\\Mes documents\\MyProgs\\OrkutID.htm”

—————-cut here—————

Now the script: 

 saved as OrkutID.htm in the location specified in the reg file

—————-cut here—————

<SCRIPT id=UIDtable>
var UID = new Array();
UID["4948924980577190674"]=”S K Ramasubrahmaniam”; // here goes I O Rama

// I have deleted the rest of my friends list from here

// to keep this short

// do not think that I have only 2 friends in orKut

// add your buddies here as the others, starting with UID["

// followed by the UID and then "]=” and ending properly

// with “; after the name

UID["10429294012944577227"]=”Seby Manalel”; // thats me
UID["17937118960165716484"]=”Vivek Gupta”; // thats my buddy

</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT TYPE=”text/javascript” LANGUAGE=”JavaScript1.2″ id=UIDdisplay>
// http://www.orkut.com/Scrapbook.aspx?uid=16260132007885728923 who is it
// http://www.orkut.com/FriendsNet.aspx?uid=10429294012944577227 Its me !
// http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=10429294012944577227 Seby Manalel

  var srcEvent = external.menuArguments.event;
  var srcDoc = external.menuArguments.document;
  var srcElement = srcDoc.elementFromPoint(srcEvent.clientX, srcEvent.clientY);
  var srcAnchor = srcElement;
  var sURL = “”;

 while(srcAnchor.tagName!=”A” && srcAnchor.tagName!=”AREA” && srcAnchor.tagName!=”HTML”) {srcAnchor=srcAnchor.parentElement;}
 // die with error on badformed document

 if(srcEvent.type==”MenuExtUnknown” || srcEvent.type==”MenuExtImage” || srcEvent.type==”MenuExtAnchor”)
 {
  if(srcAnchor.tagName==”A” || srcAnchor.tagName==”AREA”) {sURL = srcAnchor.href;}
  if(srcAnchor.tagName==”HTML” && srcElement.tagName==”IMG”) {sURL = srcElement.src;}
 }

//find number after uid=
 var iPos=sURL.lastIndexOf(“uid=”);
// check here if ipos=0. then break.
 UNO=”"+sURL.substr(iPos+4)+”";

 if (UID[UNO]!= null){
  alert(UID[UNO]);
 }
 else{
  alert(“User not yet added !”);

/* here i will put my new function for appending to the existing list

and let you specify the correct name

*/
 }

</SCRIPT>

—————-cut here—————

This is still under development. I am trying to figure out how to add new guys into the list with the fileSystemObject object thru javascript to build up on itself.

If you got better ideas, let me know, i’ll steal your ideas and do something with them.

I was invited to join orKut by Dejoy. I joined it, started looking around, poaching friends and friends’ friends. Scrapping and messaging. A waste of time but lots of fun. It needs a gmail account for logging in.

Then I landed at cookbooks in eSnips after guidance from Neeraj Rawat. Looked around and saw many more things than just recipes :-O

Then I started hunting for some harware prices and found The computer Ware House at Barton Center, Bangalore. They have really good prices. Also looked at Nehru Place IT Hub where many dealers sell their wares. I was looking for an external HDD with built in media player. Also for some special cable for my HP laptop. Could not find the cables and that prompted me to go hard again. Started with the Handbook of harware pinouts and moved on to Pinout cable and connector diagrams to understand that the cable I am looking for is a kind of 9 pin ATI cable with S-Video and composite Video.

In the meanwhile there was a demand for Shakira shaking her body, and I landed right on mv3gp where I caught Shakira’s hips lying. Also caugt another naughty girl. All in 3GP ready for my mobile. A nice place to roam around looking for naughty people for your 3G mobile.

Also found some mp3 files disguised as .class at emp3world making it accessible thru a proxy that blocks mp3 files directly. Also found some real media hindi songs in eSnips.

Looking for some hindi lyrics landed me at GeetManjusha with reference from Kiran Bagul. They have 1000+ songs with hindi and english lyrics.

 I was also looking for MIDI stuff and landed at Media-Convert and at Convert-Ringtones to do my stuff. Also picked up a few bits from Dishant.

Well, that is what I am doing here. Other than enjoying SAP of course !

Now I feel I should update my d.e.l.i.c.i.o.u.s. list (Just forgot where they put their dots, so everywhere is the next best option) and the other one (what was its name again?).

And for the new visitors, I feel that I should do some blogs regarding blogging and about Algeria, the wonderful place where I am now. Hope to do it soon.

The whiteboard of iMeeting was good, but somebody enjoyed the eraser tool much more than my paintbrush

The messaging function – sending notes – was better. A great day, made two new friends, and got to know about a few more.

Now I feel that I should put more direction to this blog, and specialise in some nuances and then get some directed audience. I have no plans to do earnings thru hits though.

And I hope no government will want to block my blogs

I have been here since 13th of this month. Spending the day time at Mittal Steel Annaba (MSA) and the night at ES Safa.

Now, I want to leave at 6 pm, so this be it. I am calling it a day

Opened an account in imageshack.us for uploading images. from office mail. Put one pic from geocities at http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/4175/sebypp17mc.jpg. Blogs at http://blog.imageshack.us/content.php?page=photoblog. BTW, what to call those people who posts their imageshack login urls on del.icio.us ?

Some links:

1. http://www.adelaider.com/google Google cheat sheet
2. http://www.avesh.com/blog/DesktopZenReducingVisualClutterOnYourDesktop.aspx Apt for me with a cluttered desktop!
3. http://www.digilife.be/quickreferences/quickrefs.htm Good collection
4. http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html Good googleGuide
5. http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets A good collection
6. http://www.netcoole.com/VB6TOCS/vbhtml/vbfuncs.htm VB v/s C# cheat sheet
7. http://www.petefreitag.com/item/455.cfm Cheat sheet roundup
8. http://poignantguide.net/ruby The guide to Ruby on Rails!
9. http://www.rubyonrails.org
10. http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.7/pod/perlcheat.pod The pearl cheat sheet
11. http://www.tagworld.com Dating ?
12. http://www.thedailywtf.com Really good site
13. http://wiki.ehow.com/Exercise-Your-Eyes A must see and follow site

 Further, Do take backups of your blog! RSS is the best option