Blogcritics Author: Ajay

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Popularity: How do You measure it?

Ajay — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 06:18:22 EDT

I haven't been very active in the Indian blogosphere and so missed the entire discussion over Kiruba being the No. 1 blogger in India (according to Blogstreet). Patrix has expressed his opinion on popularity in the Indian blogosphere. He goes on to list several Indian blogs (including mine) according to their Technorati Ranking. His post did get me thinking. Popularity can be defined as the quality of being widely admired or accepted or sought after. But, how does this translate in the world-wide web? How do we measure popularity? What are the various methods today? Are they reliable?TechnoratiToday, a lot of methods exist for measuring popularity. One, like Patrix pointed out is, to use Technorati's Ranking.Technorati ranks blogs based on the number of incoming links. This rank is updated several times a day and only considers active links from the past six months. As of today, Technorati tracks around 50.9 million blogs!A point to note is that the incoming links don't just belong to posts or blogrolls, but also from credit lines (e.g. like that of my Connections Reloaded Theme).AlexaAnother method of gauging popularity is Alexa Traffic Rank.Alexa's ranking system has been online from as far as i can remember! Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. They have a page detailing the process. This is a stark difference from that of Technorati. Having a higher traffic rank is a more accurate sign of your site's popularity because it measures the number of users actually visiting your site. However, Alexa ranks can be slightly inaccurate because it depends on users of their toolbar.TopsitesTop Sites are often used to compare the popularity of blogs with one another. There are way too many top sites run by way too many people. A few well known ones are Blog Top Sites, Top100 Bloggers, RankingBlogs.com and Indian Bloggers.While Top100 rates people on the number of votes they receive or the number of users visiting Top100 from the blog (which in my opinion is an highly inaccurate method of rating), the other three rate the blogs solely on the basis of unique visitors (i.e. traffic) which is how it should be.Feed SubscriptionsA good way of ascertaining popularity is by looking at the number of feed subscriptions. e.g. Feedburner gives you buttons that let you display the number of subscribers to your feed. This, however can't be a sure-shot method because you may have a lot of subscribers but no readers. Yet again, this doesn't track the actual traffic that the site receives. Additionally, it only tracks those who have signed up for the service and put the code on their site.No. of CommentsVisitor interactivity in terms of number of comments that the posts receive is another way to find out how popular a blog is. This can also be further used to determining visitor loyalty to understand how many repeat commenters are present. And yet again, this isn't the best way, because you could have a lot of visitors who love reading your blog but would not want to comment on it.To conclude there are several ways to determine blog popularity. However, all of these methods may not give the same results. So which method should we actually adopt?Give me your opinion. Which method would you use from the above? Do you have still another way of measuring blog popularity?Or have do you believe that since your blog is personal, you don't really care about how popular it is?And just a note to us Indian bloggers. Let's quit the squabble about who is No. 1 in the Indian blogosphere and look beyond. There is a whole world of bloggers out there.

A blogger for over two years now and a the creator of a few plugins, hacks and themes for WordPress, Ajay can be described as a true geek. You can find him at http://ajaydsouza.com. He is also a webdesigner by passion and an Electronics Engineer by profession, current working at an Indian Multinational.

Movie Review: Poseidon

Ajay — Thu, 18 May 2006 08:22:43 EDT

On New Year night, Poseidon, the luxurious cruise liner was hit by a majestic rogue wave flipping it upside down. With help several hours away most of the passengers decide to sit it out. However, Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) decides to get off the already sinking ship, by climbing to the hull (now on top). He is joined by Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett) and her son Conor (Jimmy Bennett), Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel), Elena Gonzalez (M�a Maestro) and Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss). Will they all make it out before the ship sinks?The remake of Poseidon borrows it's storyline from The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and so you do know the initial part of the story.I am glad that they didn't stick to it completely, or you would have had a remake of the original with special effects.Speaking of the special effects, they rocked! It is also the main reason you actually should go out for the movie.The entire scene right from the generation of the tidal wave, to it striking the boat, to the capsize, the overturning, and finally the blackout are amazing. They kept me glued to the screen with my mouth open!The depiction of the dead bodies is also done really well. Some of them really made me squirm in my seat! It surprises me how the actors managed to work around them! Coming to the acting ... well it failed to impress. While Josh Lucas does a great job and Emmy is really gorgeous (lucky Mike), the other actors didn't perform so well that it would make you want to give them an award.The end was of course predictable, as were most scenes in the movie.There are a lot of questionable parts of the movie, which definitely need more explanation. I won't call them goofs but just scenes that just didn't seem possible nor sensible.I would not like to elaborate on this as it will make this review a spoiler.Overall, a decent movie. Worth watching once, for the special effects.My rating: 6/10