DWS Extra

Been thinking about this for a while. Why not create some funny malayali t-shirts and try to sell it online? If it works, great and I make a lot of fellow mallus happy. We all get to wear mallu t-shirts! What can be better than that?

On the other hand, if nobody wants to buy them by spending their hard-earned money, i waste only an hour or two of my time. And Vendel venda, poda!

So I set about creating my funny mallu t-shirt. I think I am resoanbly happy with the results as you can see here.

This one is a V-f-r-vendetta T-shirt. As any malayali would agree, vendetta is overhyped. It is not as important as vendakka. Vendakka is the Fount of Life, just like Viskey is the elixir of life.

So here it is, presenting the all-new V for Vendakka t-shirts for complete and total enjoyment of all my malayali friends and enemies. If you are a vendakka thalayan, obviously you would not like it. For the smart and intelligent mallu, here is the best gift.

Update: News sites are now reporting that 2 people were killed, and 18 injured in the blast.

This just in. There has been a bomb blast at Jahaj Mahal flower market in New Delhi. According to reports, 5 people have died and 50 injured.

The injured have been rushed to Safdarjung Hospital and AIIMS in New Delhi.

Eye witness reports say that two men planted the bomb and escape. We also hear that they were on a motorcycle, planted the bomb and got away on a motorcycle. No reliable reports on the blast yet.

Police and ambulances have rushed to the spot.

Jahaj Mahal and Mehrauli are crowded areas in New Delhi.

The blast happened at around 2:30 PM.

You can track breaking news about the Mehrauli bomb blast at any of the major news websites below;

Rediff

IBNlive

NDTV

Hoping all of you are fine.

Jahaj Mahal, Mehrauli photo

As if one has to re-state this. You would think everyone would agree. But the current state of media reporting of car or motorcycle accidents, and the attitude of society, and possibly the judgements compel me to write about this.

I am not a Delhiite - but I have been here for two years, and been driving here for eight months now. Before that, I was in Mumbai (Bombay) where I dare not drive or ride, and before that, in Kerala where I lived on two wheels.

There are accidents every day in Delhi. Speeding buses, speeding cars, trucks and tractor trailers parked on the wrong side of the road at night, drunken driving, ignoring traffic signals. Pedestrians and two wheeler riders are in serious danger on Delhi’s roads, and even traveling in an autorickshaw or car is not safe.

But.

From my experience, two wheeler accidents are more than often the fault of the motorcycle or scooter rider in Delhi. I am truly sorry for those who lost their loved ones in such accidents, but I am here talking to those of you who ARE going to lose your family or friends in accidents.

Or you yourself, the delhi two-wheeler rider. You are a danger to others, even even more, you are a danger to yourself. You, the average motorcycle or scooter rider of Delhi, is an idiot, retard, fool who endangers everyone else’s life the moment you are on the street.

Traffic rules? They don’t apply to anyone. in Delhi And even less so to a motorcycle rider.

Blind spots behind cars

Do you know that a car or SUV has a blind spot? There is a particular position behind a car or SUV where we cannot see you at all. If you follow a car staying exactly within that spot, despite all my rear view mirrors, I cannot see you. If I take a sudden turn thinking there is no one there, you are going to crash headfirst into my car.

Do not dare accuse me of being elitist, being a car guy. I was riding a motorcycle before a lot of you ever saw one - and guess what? I knew about the blind spot when I was riding. Booya. You are an idiot, sirjee.

Turn signals: They are there for a reason

Have you ever noticed those bring yellow lights that blink before a car takes a turn? If the yellow turn indicator lights blink on the left, you retard, that is not an invitation for you to accelerate to the speed of light and overtake me on the left before my car turns left.

I switch them on when I am going to take a left turn, and to warn you that I am going to take a left. Once I know that you have seen them blinking, I feel SAFE to turn, as now you would not be an asshole and try to make an omelet out of your brain against my left side door. But you do.

It is shameful that one has to educate a Delhi motorcyclist or scooter rider about such things.

Four wheels are more stable that two

Somehow, your little brain does not seem to notice this. Do not come within inches of a much larger vehicle. Sure, we are both going forward, and the 5 inch gap remains so - but if you skid towards me after riding over a slippery stone, you crash into me and very likely bounce off under a bus or truck which is following you.

Junctions with no signals

If there are no signals, do not think you can blast past the junction at 70 or 80. LOOK. If there are no signals, I can blast past too and in all likelihood, 1 tonne meeting 150 kg ends up bad for the guy on the 150 kg vehicle. I may end up in jail, but you are dead - and a dead persons don’t have much fun. Not to mention, in 6 months’ time, your girlfriend would be getting laid by your best friend.

This is such a common sight on Delhi roads - cars and motorcyclists crossing a signal-less junction without a care. It is criminal of Delhi government to allow any junction without signals.

The moving roadblock - the slow rider in Delhi

Yes, you guys are the ones - usually middle aged or above - who decide to ride in the middle of a three lane road at 40 kmph. You know, your motorcycle or scooter would be in fourth gear at that speed, probably going at the optimum speed for fuel efficiency. Not cars or SUVs. They usually are in fourth gear around 50, and often the engine turns smoothly only at 50-60 - for large cars, its even higher. So, cars and SUVs tend to drive some 30-30 kmph faster than you on an empty road.

now lets say we suddenly see you there. We approach you much faster than we expect - as most people on the road now drive at 50-60 kmph, and for someone in a car at 60 or 70, a motorcyclist at 30 or 40 looks, well, stationary! You are bloody not moving, relatively speaking. It makes us panic, miscalculate the distances, step on brakes, swerve - often driving into someone who is riding 5 inches from my left side in my blind spot. Thank you, you have just deleted his leg. Or head, if you are lucky.

Burst into traffic at high speed from a lane

Yes. You do that. And you are splattered on the road.

Recent motorcycle - car- bus accidents in Delhi

Cars, especially BMWs, have been driving into people on two wheelers often these days. Riders are often killed in the accidents, and the guys in the cars get thrashed, and put behind bars.

First, no one really knows if the motorcycle rider or the car driver is at fault. At least 50 % of the time, the motorcycle rider is, I think. And what happens?

First, there is you - the accident victim - lying on the road. Instead of helping you, a crowd gathers and beats up the driver. Instead of getting the driver to take you to a hospital in his car, they trash the car. Then, after a long time, as you are breathing your last, someone remembers to call the police. By the time you read the hospital, you are dead. The driver is in jail, sometimes bailed out, sometimes not.

Now, imagine that there is an accident - if a driver is scared of a mob beating him up and trashing his car, he is not going to stick around. He is gonna hightail it out of there, and fuck your sorry ass. If he knows that he can do something - remember he is also in shock - he would try to take you to a hospital. After he does not want you to die. But remember that he does not partcicularly want himself to die either - and if it comes to a choice of putting his life on the line, he would flee.

So, people of Delhi, cut that habit of beating up drivers. You are not helping anyone. I read so much about road accidents and people dying and drivers getting thrashed, sometimes lynched - and let me assure you, if I get into an accident, I would help you only if I am sure I won’t be thrashed. Thanks to all of you who are happy to beat up drivers, I won’t be taking the risk. Make it safe for drivers who may or may not be guilty, and you may have a few more saved from death.

To the courts, on road accident victims and culprits

You know there is often no way there is any conclusive proof of who was at fault considering our cops’ investigative skills. I mean, if they even bother. Recently you put a BMW driver behind bars, after he crashed into a motorcycle. Two riders were killed. The judge himself expressed the opinion that the left front side of the car was damaged, so it was likely the motorcycle crashed into the car there. Still, he was sent to jail.

Why?

Most likely, there is no way it could be proven that he was at fault. He was not drunk, a separate offence. he escaped from the scene - I think it was because of that hero who ran to him and whispered, “Aap ne toh inhe maar diye”. Very nice. Considering that drivers are beaten up for much smaller crimes, telling a shocked driver that he just killed someone would reaaallyy make him want to stick around and take the victims to a hospital.

Be logical. If it really is his fault, send him to jail after its proven. Putting someone in jail when there has been almost no investigation is not justice. Maybe that is how our justice system works - jail first, and investigation later.

The Electronic Cigarette or E-Cigarette that has been developed in China by Hon Lik of Ruyan is gaining in popularity in India among smokers who want to give a shot to quitting without getting rid of their nicotine fix. Read the rest of this entry »

This has beena bad habit for a long time. Check once a day what’s been going on with my Alexa rankings. Everyone knows the ranking were not of much relevance unless you were comparing sites in the same industry or market.

So when I check today, surprise, the ranking of my site has gone up form 36,000 yesterday to 16,000 today. Brillianto! Once I got rid of the doubts about an error, I opened my eyes and saw this message:

Yay. Click and go in. And there is a more detailed explanation of the ranking changes.

The most important change seems to be that Alexa nowrelies not just on the toolbar, but also on a variety of other data sources. What are these other sources? Metacrawler.com etc? No clarity on that yet.

My first impression is that yes, the new rankings are a lot more accurate. Till now, it was easy to find sites with just 5k unique users a day, and maybe 10k pageviews a day ranking much, much better than my own site which easily has 15-25k users on any given day. So this ranking change seems to have got that right.

For this site, around 40 % of the visitors have been from India - a demographic which Alewxa never seemed to bother about much. Now it looks like it has changed.

From my quick checking of sites whose traffic levels I am aware of, and comparing them to my own site, things are a lot better for Alexa.

I will be doing some serious study of where everyone stands - and will keep an eye out for all those analyses by experts that are going to come in anytime now.

Cutts did not say that in those words, of course.

He talked to Tedster at PubCon first, then Tedster posted about it in WebmasterWorld, then Tedster posted a clarification. Here’s the latest I have found there:

This change will NOT mean that it’s 100% impossible to rank subdomain urls in addition to urls from the main domain. The current plans are to make it harder to rank a third url, then even harder to rank a fourth, and so on with an increasing “damping factor”.

So this change will NOT mean that it’s 100% impossible to rank subdomain urls in addition to urls from the main domain. The current plans are to make it harder to rank a third url, then even harder to rank a fourth, and so on with an increasing “damping factor”.

But basically the title is right - for those of you who were using subdomains to get additional rankings and branding in Google SERPs, those days will soon be over.

At first, I like the idea. Very often I have come across subdomain after subdomain ranking for stuff. You can find a few examples of this in SEORoundTable.

From what Matt Cutts has said, it looks like Google is moving in that direction. So at some point, we can expect to see only 2 results max from every site. So they may either be a result from the subdomain or from the main domain in whatever combination Google thinks fit.

Fine by me. But this confuses me a bit as a webmaster. One of  my plans for my site goes out the window immediately. Not panicking or anything, but Google messes up often. And while they are planning this rollout, I would be stupid to end up being collateral damage.

See, I had this plan that I would create a few subdomains on this site. For example, you are now reading this in a subdirectory, but it is a blog, and I wanted to create similar stuff that I can create a brand that is a bit different from the main site with a subdomain and all that. You can see one I have here - f1.dancewithshadows.com. This is a Digg clone where I wanted to develop a Formula One racing social news site. Still connected to the mothership, but separate at the same time.

Similarly, I wanted to offer some subdomain blogs to bloggers. I have a friends, who were interested.

But what happens now? Let’s take the tough scenario.

Say my blogger writes something on his blog in the subdomain. I have something that tangentially touches upon it on my main site. On account of higher age and trust, there is a good chance that my tangential page would outrank my blogger-friend on his subdomain. Would he like it? Nah.

In an ideal scenario - from my point of view as a webmaster - I would have preferred if both of us had relevant pages, both of us would rank. I am not sure of this anymore.

Sure Google would rank two URLs. But that is what they say now - they are not that super at implementing exactly what they want, and things go wrong. In the ideal Google world, he would rank and I would rank too. 2 URLs. Sweet.

In the real world, probably he would rank when I should, and I would rank when he should.

So its time to sit back and wait.

If there is one thing I have learnt in all these years, it is to act like Google is a mad cop with a taser. And me, the guy in the towel.

P.S. There is a discussion over at Sphinn on this.

When Google reduced the PageRank of several blogs and sites which had participated in pay per review programs, bloggers whipped up a storm.

It was unfair, and a solid hit on the revenue opportunities for the upcoming blogger and all that.

All that is true. Some of us were bored, some were outraged, and many went campaigning against Google’s plan for world domination.

And some made fun of Google.

It is the era of Page Rank Demotion and like the seventies, the more outrageous you are, the more hip you will be looked upon. It is an era when the lower your Page Rank gets, the more popular you become, especially if your blog is a few years old and has a high PR before the trend started.

Well, always good to have a laugh, right?

The fact is, Google reduced toolbar PR for the sites which it thought violated its terms and conditions. Toolbar PR, as we know, is a ’snapshot’ of PR as it existed soemtimes a couple or more months before it is actually displayed in the toolbar. Along with Alexa ranking, this is the measure which services like PayPerPost and ReviewMe, or TLA, use to calculate the kind of money you are gonna make. So basically Google just took that measure away, and made it harder to estimate the value of a link from a blog or site.

What they did not do was to actually hit the sites with a penalty.

If they did that, that would have been something! A lot of sites get most of their traffic from search engines. A penalty would mean that traffic would dwindle to nothing.

And we would not be laughing, either.

This may not affect those blogs or sites which either command a very high reader loyalty, already have a high brand value, or depend on social sites such as Digg or StumbleUpon to get their daily traffic. But if you are not one of them, or if even a substantial percentage of your traffic came from organic Google search results, boy, wouldn’t you be weeping.

After talking to a lot of bloggers - most of them young - I realise that this is all a joke for many. Try to make some extra moolah, of course I have a right to do that, Google would not be hurting me, my site is too small… and all that. Wishful thinking.

Go through the Google News Archive in Webmasterworld. Search for the word penalty.

You will see a lot of sob stories. I got banned for this, I got a -30 penalty, a -950 penalty and whatnot.

There are rather large established sites which had to fire people when a Google penalty hit them. There were sites which had to close shop when a Google penalty that hit them for no reason they could understand or fix continued for six months.

Make no mistake.

The toolbar PR reduction is a joke. But it is also a warning shot across the bow.

Mess with the Google Gods are your own peril.

Matt of WordPress does not like sponsored themes. Google does not like sponsored themes either.

You know what Sponsored Themes for WordPress are. They have a link or two at the bottom or in the sidebar, linking to the sponsor’s website. The sponsors have, of course, paid the theme designer. They get a backlink from every page of the blog where the free theme is downloaded and uses, and the designer makes some money.

The problem is that Google’s PageRank - a major factor in evaluating the relevance and ranking of a website - relies heavily on links. And Google has been making it pretty clear that these links to the sponsor are skewing their PR system. It is easy, pay a theme designer, and your site gains new backlinks with every download and install of the sponsored theme. The designer is happy, and the blogger cares two hoots about Google’s PR.

But Google has been on a penalty spree, downgrading the Toolbar PR (the PR displayed on the toolbar) of several blogs and blog networks recentlyby a few notches. Have they already started doing the same to those sponsors’ sites benefiting from the sponsor links? Not yet, but this is quite likely. Google has not particularly cared about collateral damage when they do battle, and they may not care in the future either.

So what about the link back to the theme designer, on almost all free WP themes?

That is not a paid link, you can say.

It is normal on the Net to link back to the author or designer, you can say too.

But Google’s idea of what a link is, is different. For them, a link is currency, a vote. A vote that says that the linker is giving a thumbs up to the linkee. No, more than that. It is some kind of an editorial endorsement.

Now, we can argue till forever that every link on the Web is not an endorsement of any sort. It is pointless. That’s what Google thinks, and we care about what they think because it’s their search engine and they can do what they want, blah blah.

So are you making an endorsement of the designer when you use a free theme with a linkback to his site? Sure he gains PR. Was that your intention?

Was your endorsement of the designer strong enough to give a link to him from every page of your 100 or 1000 -page blog?

Even the default WordPress theme has links to the blogs of its developers. You never chose those links consciously, or intended to endorse each of them, did you?

My point here is that in the Google world, every link on the Web is to be given consciously. Not that any of us are going to particularly bother about that. But that is how it is.

The fact is, whether you do it consciously and deliberately in the case of a sponsored theme, or without caring in the case of a free theme, you are passing link juice. The blogroll links which you never removed are passing link juice. And that is not acceptable to Google.

Today, they draw a line in the sand -  and say sponsored themes are bad. Ever link and little square ad on a TechCrunch or Mashable pass PR - deliberately or unknowingly. For now, they are on the safe side of that line. Maybe not tomorrow.

But it is only a line in the sand.

According to Google, every link which is not an endorsement should be NoFollowed.

Imagine a scenario where a theme designer has people downloading and installing his theme on ten thousand blogs. He gains links from every page of those blogs. This has the potential to skew Google’s PR measurements.

But so far, Google has not objected to it.

Why? I have no clue. Can they discount the effect of massive links to the designer? I have heard this is possible.

But if they can  do it, why not discount the links to the sponsors’ sites too and let us all have some peace of mind? The sponsors won’t like that one bit, but why do we have to end up doing Google’s job for it?

My feeling is, there will be more such warnings from Google. Penalties, warnings, instructions, PR downgrades… as long as they do not manage to do the job of identifying and negating the effect of links which are not editorial endorsements. Some of us will be collateral damage, when they mistake a genuine link for a paid link.

And in the real world, there is nothing much we can do about it.

I have been waiting for this for a while: A complete analysis of what has been going on in Nandigram.

Greatbong has written exactly that - what are the root causes, the role of Trinamool and Maoists, the role of CPI(M), Buddhadeb and the Bengali intelligentsia.

This is not the kind of stuff that you hear about on TV or read in newspapers, focused as they are on the immediate horror - that’s where the story is, after all.

Do read it. In its entirety. It is a pretty longish post.