No Windows, No Gates, It is OPEN; No Bill, It is FREE
Yesterday, I attended a press conference on board INS Kirpan (corvette) of the Indian Navy, followed by a reception on board the INS Rana(destroyer).
INS Rana
INS Kirpan uses Windows XP!?!?!?
The Schwag
Just now I noticed an interesting post from seroundtable on my feed-reader and it immediately caught my attention. Nice to hear things directly from the horses mouth, most of them are what I assumed. searchengineland also posted some comments on this issue.
Having an image next to your article improves your ranking: MYTH
Having an image in an article might not improve your ranking, but it is a very important aspect for a Google News Publisher. Say if you are reporting on a story which has many sources, you stand to get greater exposure in case the image from your site is picked up for this story. Once, a story I had about “Britney Spears” had an image of her. Now the news story which showed up on organic SERPs for “Britney Spears” had the image from my site. Got shit loads of traffic on it.
Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News: TRUE
Google said it would re-crawl the articles for updates in the future. This is good for me as some websites (including a popular English newspaper in Thailand) simply remove most stories after a couple of days of publishing and they still show up in the Google News search. This sux. They would be un-indexed if Google started to re-crawl news stories.
Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking: MYTH
I don’t necessarily agree. It may not affect the ranking, but would definitely affect the traffic. Well Google does give some storyrank based on the freshness of the story. If my major target were the Americans, and I post a story during morning(Thai time), the story might get lost/replaced by fresher stories by the time the Americans wake up. <– This is something I haven’t researched a lot, but my common sense says so.
Articles that are just images or video won’t be included: TRUE
Agree 100%
There’s no way to see why my articles weren’t included in Google News: MYTH
As the Google’s blog post says, the web master tools does an excellent job in finding potential issues with the crawling your site.
Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings: MYTH
But… it does help Google find new stories. or a story which they might have missed on the website.
Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News: TRUE
AFAIK this should not be such an issue. I launched a new section on an entirely different CMS and from the first minute Google has had no issues in crawling the content. I even make tweaks in the template here and there and they don’t have problems. I think the problem occurs if your layout is crappy with lots of junk in it. But for most properly done sites it shouldn’t be an issue.
If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve: MYTH
We have faith in Google. Even if the Google blog said this were true I wouldn’t believe it 
As some of you may have noticed (or not!) I haven’t updated my blog in the last 11 days… Maybe someone gets the wrong idea that I was kidnapped by some M$ goons and brainwashed or something. This post simple proves that I am still here and here to stay!
Just some of my projects are taking a lot of my time. I have the following planned out for my blog.
w00t!
Just noticed today. Thaindian.com now has sitelinks on Google Search Result Pages. I found it while mucking around inside the Google Webmaster tools. In the web master tools, I can “block” pages from the sitelinks if i wished to do so.
Now i wish I would have some way of easily adding/editing the links in the sitelinks!
As a relatively new news publisher accepted into the Google News Search, I am exploring/testing various ways to rank better in the Google News Search. When I first started, I faced many problems like the MTU issue, but since there was(and still is) a lack of online resources and blogs discussing how it works, I had to learn the hard way. On my blog here I intend to change this. Sure there is a Google News Blog, but the posts are targeted towards news surfers not news publishers. A good place to ask questions would be at Google news publishers group, but most queries there are left unanswered for weeks.
As per wikipedia :
Google News is an automated news aggregator provided by Google Inc. The initial idea, StoryRank - related to Google’s PageRank formula, was developed by Krishna Bharat in 2001, the Principal Research Scientist of Google. Google News left beta in January 2006. Read the rest of this entry »
Like many other people his age, Mark Zuckerberg the founder of social networking site Facebook spends most of his day in front of a computer screen. But he is no ordinary 23-year-old he’s officially the world’s youngest US billionaire.
Worth 1.5 billion dollars, the young man has made a debut in this years Forbes magazine’s list of the World’s Billionaires where he has secured the 785th rank. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday mk of blognone.com announced the launch of a new sub-forum to conduct discussions in English Language on the site which is otherwise in Thai.
The Announcement :-
Dear non-Thai members (or Thai members who want to talk in English),
This forum is for discuss on (almost) everything you want to. The only thing you should know is Blognone uses Markdown as default input format. Please see the instruction manual from the link if you’ve never heard of Markdown before. Anyway, HTML is also selectable in the input format tab under the textbox.
Now enjoy talking!
This is excelent news for those who dont read or write much Thai as well as the Thais who want to communicate more in English to have more practice. Finally there is now a place where foreigners and Thais can chare ideas and views.
About Blognone :-
Blognone is Thai independent IT news site. It was found on August 2004 and driven by geek community in Thailand. Our goals are:
- deliver update and high quality IT news in Thai language
- sharing knowledge between IT industry/community
- promote use of open source, open standard and other good alternative concepts
IMHO Blognone.com is also a good example of a community website built using Drupal.
w00t w00t w00t!!!!
Got some inside scoop today that there is a high probability of IIFA awards for 2008 would be held in Bangkok. This is great news for us Indians in Bangkok….
For the uninnitiated,
The awards of the International Indian Film Academy (commonly known as the IIFA Awards) is a prestigious award ceremony, honouring Hindi movies (Bollywood) around the world. In the past, IIFA awards have been hosted at Yorkshire, Dubai, Amsterdam, Singapore, Johannesburg, Genting Highlands, Sun City and London.
Ive even started fantasizing which stars im gonna see, who can i meet, and most importantly who can I photograph.
This event is bigger than me taking photos. It is great for many things… Read the rest of this entry »
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