DWS Extra

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.

Street harassment and rash driving. Two of Delhi’s most well-known evils. Both out of control. They came together yesterday to kill Pearl Gupta, a 17-year old first-year-student of Aditi Mahavidyalaya.

This is what happened according to Parul, her friend who was walking with her when it happened:

“Barely 20 metres from the college gate, a scooterist came from the wrong side and tried to drive between me and Pearl. He was passing lewd comments. We both fell – I got pushed to the footpath, Pearl fell on the road. A Blueline coming at full speed crushed her head. By the time I ran to her, she had died. The scooterist fled; the bus driver jumped off the bus in panic and ran away.”

In this case, the Blueline bus may really not be to blame. Even at a legal speed of 40 kmph, a bus kills you if you fall in front of it on the road. The real culprit here is the man on the scooter. And he got away. The women constables posted near Aditi College did not even take down the number of the scooter, and no one else did either. Chances are, he won’t ever be caught.

So there you have two of the worst things about Delhi. A complete nonchalance for harassing women, and rash driving on the streets.

Would someone do something about this? I am a bloody blogger; this is the best I can do.

From what I hear, Delhi’s campuses have an active political life. Is street harassment not something they can take up? Imagine the student unions jointly deciding to protest, across Delhi, that harassment of women should stop.

From what I have seen of Delhi, that seems unlikely. Two reasons. The male students – a good percentage of them – are as casual about street harassment as a good eprcentage of Delhi’s male population. They, frankly, don’t care. Often, at the street level, a bit of pestering or nudging girls and women is actively encouraged upon even now. Men find it embarrassing to tell their friends – its not macho – to refrain from the commenting and touchy-feely behaviour.

Cops are not immune to this either. I can’t find a link to this online – but the cops who landed up at the accident spot asked the protesting students why they were creating a hungama; the girl was after all not their family member. Typical. These retards infest the police across in India. Nothing, really, is a problem for the typical Indian unless it is to do with his own family, right?

This is not exactly a short post. But when I saw this news in today’s morning papers, I was quite speechless. This is happening a lot to me these days: a general, helpless speechlessness when the unfairness of things hits me a bit hard. Maybe it’s my age. But there is young blood – a lot of it in fact – in Delhi’s campuses. And if they want, they can put an end to it. Governments have always succumbed when students decided to protest – so if Delhi’s students are more interested in their own new shiny mobiles, cars, malls and making MMS clips, they have only themselves to blame.

Boys and girls, if you do not want this to happen to someone you know and love, take this seriously and do something. If you can take a break from shopping and Orkut-ing for some time.

Everything is so communally charged in India these days. Genius observation, isn’t it?

1. All those historical wrongs that have to be righted

2. All those religions conversions that have to be done to add to the flock

3. All that past ruling-class status to be regained

4. All those westernizing influences to be purged

Ha, what a beautiful Saturday morning!

This is the Weekly religion bulletin for all my dear communal friends. (The weekly bulletin for my Communist friends will begin shortly. Right now the audience is missing, all in Nandigram paying back someone in their own coin and all that.)

All my Hindu friends have super reason to worry this Saturday morning. The Indian government, led by one Christian lady from vilayat, has decided to grant full adoption rights to minorities! That means, they can adopt Hindu babies born on the streets, abandoned babies and all and make them Christians.

This is a sad day for all of you, I am sure. Till now, Christians and Muslims who adopted abandoned, born-Hindu babies, could not legally be their parents. They could only be guardians. So the kids could be adopted, but officially the people who have adopted them cannot be their parents. In school, they would be known as the kid’s guardians. The kid himself/ herself would always remember by the system that these are not my real parents, this is not my house, this is not my religion my parents practise.

The beauty of the system as it existed was obvious.

Now, all that is gonna change, my Hindu friends on Saturday morning. The bloody kids will now feel practically a part of the family! Then it is a matter of time before they go to Church, accept Pop Corn as their master, and vote for the Congress. So wily na, that Christian lady and her chamcha sardar. Together they will make this a Christian country I am sure. Tell me, if we want a Christian country, we would go to the US as we already do. Why bring the USA to India, tell me.

There is only one way to fix this. There will be some Malayalee Christian nuns in North India or MP, usually with names like Sister Jincy, Princy and Lincy. Easy to recognise them, their wild eyes and wild talk in strange monkey language. Sudarshan, our own Hindu Pop Kaun, thinks that they are the most Hinduised Christians in India, but no matter. Stop their car, and beat them up. After all, Lincy, Jincy and Princy are on their way to convert the Hindus of the cow belt in their monkey language.

But do not worry, my Christian listeners, there is hope for you too. You can update with your conversion oriented websites with new updated projections. Effectively utilising the new adoption laws, you will be able to convert another ten percent of Hindoostan and make them accept the loving Yeshua as the one and only true God in another 1,563 years. (Hungama and singing ensues in listener household in mid-West USA: Better adjust that and make it 15.63 years. Who wants to wait. Yay! Darling, will you tell those stupid kids there to stop doing whatever un-Christian things they are doing in the haystack and go update our website with new data please? And get someone to leak our new projections to those Hindoo bloggers, will you?)

To all my Muslim listeners, now. Very confused today, aren’t we, like always? I mean, life is complicated as it is, with new fatwas, and fatwas against fatwas… Adoption? Is that Islamic? Is that Islamic according to Sunnis? Then it will be un-Islamic according to Shias. Excommunicate! No? Yes? Shall we consult with Saudi mullahs? What – Bin Laden says Saudi Mullahs are not Islamic? There is a fatwa from Saudi Mullahs against Bin Laden, and even speaking his name is un-Islamic? Please don’t shoot me, can I adopt Bin Laden?

See what I mean. It is by confusing us like this that the infidels overthrew us in India. It is a Christian-Hindu conspiracy against us. This adoption law change is just to confuse us, they have figured out our weak point – they will deliberately come up with new ideas not mentioned in the Holy Book, and throw us all into internal squabbles. We can’t even agree on what is written in the Holy Book, and new ideas are the worst form of weapon against us. A fatwa against new ideas, please.

Whew. That’s it on the weekly Communal News Bulletin, my friends. Catch you all next weekend. Go on, and have a great grumpy weekend. Bye and out.

The ‘pseudo secular’ media is keeping totally quiet about Buddhadeb and Nandigram. Not a peep out of them. Some of them, in fact, are reporting that it is a ‘reaction’ to the ‘action’, initiated by violent Maoists and the CPI(M) retaliation was spontaneous, and entirely natural.

Not!

According to this screenshot, taken at 11.05 PM on 14th Nov 2007, Google News  shows 2292 results to the search ‘nandigram’ And as you can check for yourself, most of them are what you call pseudo-secular media reports. As some retards still keep saying, most of them are anti-Buddhadeb and CPI(M), and there is nothing at one look that I can find that supports the marxists’ stand on what happened in Nandigram.

There are some super-retards who still are wondering aloud why the media did not cover the violence while it was happening. They were chased away, and not allowed to enter Nandigram. Oh, it is quite possible that the reporters of TV channels were just making a show of having to run away – such are the times, right?

There is one important lesson for Modi and co. to learn from Nandigram. How to allow a massacre without letting the media in and generally making a nuisance of themselves. I am sure that whenever we have the next organised riot, it will be practised.

Buddhadeb and the rest of the party behaved in a partisan manner. Look at the phrases being used.

• Us and them.
• Our people and those people.
• Paying back in the same coin.
• Used the same methods as our opponents.
•  Followed the tactics of the opposition.
• The media can face serious public ire.

Buddhadeb, you have learnt a lot. From the wrong people. Or did they learn from you?  I see no practical difference in the tactics the VHP-Bajrang Dal-BJP goons used in Gujarat to what your people used in Mandigram.

Only the ideology – as if it matters! – was different. The methods, reactions, abdication of responsibility were all the same.

Fascists all. Thanks to Modi and co., you guys were having a great time playing the good boys. This, sadly, is a welcome reminder of what the Marxists are.

I remember Thalassery, Kerala where the CPI(M) and the RSS have been murdering each other for more than a decade. Same tactics, same revenges. (For those of you who are North Indians, RSS because of a lack of large numbers cannot afford to have the distinctions they have in North India, and stick to being a single violent entity and matches the marxists cut for cut.)

Back to what the secular media is saying about Nandigram and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. Here are a bunch of sample headlines from different sites and newspapers.

Intellectuals flay Buddhadeb

Well, Mr Bhattacharjee?

Buddha defends recapture of Nandigram

Buddhadeb defends ‘Nandigram takeover’

Nandigram row: CPM issues veiled threat to media

CPM re-enacts Vietnam in Nandigram

Buddha says we paid Opposition back in same coin; these mothers and kids agree

Buddhadeb accuses Centre of delay in CRPF deployment

Keep writing trash, Buddha tells media

I feel I have cheapened myself a bit here. Bothering to reply to people whose entire perspective on politics and violence is shaped by a sense of being wronged and desire for retribution. The ones who would prefer that we forget Gujarat, and look at the bright side of Modi. Well, why not look at the bright side of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, and talk about the investment he is bringing to West Bengal?

Because unlike some of you, I am not looking to kill people today because of Muslim invaders and Partition.

In one of the ads on TV, a kid uses the phrase “look daddy, same to same.”

Modi and Buddhadeb – “Same to same.”

Hmm.. website stats programs are never accurate. They are not meant to be. After all, no one is still clear about exactly what a visitor or reader is!

But sometimes you find such variations that it is quite crazy to reconcile them.

On this blog, I use Mybloglog stats to figure out what is going on. I have loved the click reports in Mybloglog – the ones which tell you what my visitors clicked on. Always used to take a look at that to see how many are clicking on the Adsense ad units.

So imagine my surprise. Mybloglog reported today morning that a total of 22 visitors clicked on the different ad units yesterday. Great, I thought. Most of that traffic was from StumbleUon, so I really did not expect anyone to click on ads anyway. Then I checked Google Adsense reports for the day, and strangely, the stats for the blog showed the same number of visitors, but only 3 clicks!

So what was really going on? I have no idea. The questions I have are:

Does Mybloglog misreport clicks?

Did 19 visitors click on the ads, and then press Esc and did not bother to actually let the page load?

Does Adsense misreport clicks?

19 invalid clicks – what explains that?

I have no clue.

A bit of research on the Net turned up these two sites (1 and 2 ) The second site is by Amit Agarwal who has one explanation – and I think he is right. He says that clicks on CPM ads are not counted by Google. And the clicks which I see in Mybloglog may have been clicks on those skyscraper ads that Google keeps showing on my pages.

Fine, in that case. But then how do I ever figure out exactly how much I make from the CPM ads?

Seriously, running a site like DanceWithShadows without a proper CMS is a pain. It has been bothering me for a long time. I have been exploring how to integrate the site into a CMS for a while – and that quest still goes on! But occasionally, looking at Magazine -style themes for the WordPress blogging platform, I feel I should blindly go for one of them, customise a bit, and have a super-easy life.

Yea, I know that’s not so easy. Wordpress, with or without a magazine theme, offers a lot of conveniences and some challenges. Convenience? Every blogger knows what they are, considering the number of mature bloggers who have had it with Blogger and have moved over to WordPress.

Problem 1: The WordPress Magazine themes available are still not as flexible as I want them to be, and this is likely to be so – they are meant for structured blogging, and my site is a pretty wild beast. It will not be tamed easily to fit into the WordPress cage. Not that this would be a problem for 99 % of you who will be more than thrilled with WP and its millions of themes.

Problem 2: Internal linking. I don’t know where I read this, but WordPress’ internal linking structure slowly hits older, archived pages which tend to lose PR transferred through internal linking. This is pretty insurmountable, without some serious hacking of the WP code, adding nofollows and suchlike. Not for the faint of heart.

Now that we have got those two issues out of the way, here are my favourite WordPress magazines themes that have almost broken my heart.

Revolution News Wordpress magazine theme

Da best. It can’t get better than this, an that’s why its a premium, paid theme. It will set you back by $ 59.95.

Revolution is a widget-ready, customizable theme that is an ideal solution for online magazines, online newspapers, and other websites that wish to use WordPress as a content management system.

Extremely well designed, this one will fit the needs of most publishers who have a magazine of news website. Like every theme, you will need to do a bit of customisation, add your own logo and change the colours to suit your liking and all that, but for most purposes, this is all you need.

Revolution News magazine theme

Can you beat the Revolution theme? You can, perhaps, with the Revolution News theme. For one, it looks better. Two, if you have a news outlet of some sort, this will fit you like a glove. Costs a bit more – we are talking $ 99.95 here for this magazine theme.

So if you are a normal blogger and want a cool theme, the first one is for you – and if you are a professional blogger willing to invest, the News theme would serve you better.

Moving on, what else do we have?

Darren Hoyt’s Mimbo Magazine theme for WP

If you do not have the bucks to shell out for the Revolution themes, here is one that comes real close. The Mimbo magazine theme is a clean, good looking magazine theme, and most of you would be happy with it. The right sidebar is still a big blog-like, but customise it a bit, and you have something that is pretty much in the same territory as the Revolution theme.

For me, if the problem was entirely about choosing a magazine style theme, I would have definitely gone for one of these.

But as of now, I have the little problem of internal linking to solve. Once that is fixed, I would probably take another look at them.

There, I said it.

The scale may be smaller in the case of Nandigram. But the basic fact is the same. There was violence by a large group against a much smaller group. There were deaths, more on the side of the smaller group. There was looting, there was rape. No one knows the details; Buddhadeb, or his party and government, made sure the media did not manage to enter the war zone. So there were no devastating TV visuals that would convery the horror of what was going on.

But essentially, the West Bengal government did what the BJP government did in Gujarat. Closed its eyes, thus giving a free run to the goons. Moral support too, by its statements at the time. And delayed deployment of central forces so its cadre could ‘recapture’ Nandigram.

I am sorry that I end up calling Buddha a Modi. Buddhadeb has generally been good for the state, good for bringing in a good dose of realism into the party, a good dose of capitalism too. But you are judged by your worst performance. So live with it. It was the same in the case of Modi too. Modi has been good for the economy of Gujarat pre-riots, he was good for it post-riots. But he will always be judged by his one big error. Same for you, Buddha, no mercy for you here.

Oh, and I came across this post rightly attacking Buddhadeb, but also playing apologist to Modi.

If the BJP’s Narendra Modi who responds to riots within 48hours is called a “Modern Day Nero”. what title will the sanctimonious conscience keepers confer on this Chief Minister of Bengal who has slept over the complete breakdown of government and constitution in Nandigram ?

// Got it wrong, pal. The line should have been: If Narendra Modi who did not respond to riots for 48 hours…! Buddhadeb’s screw-up does not absolve Modi’s screw-up, you guys are as sad as commies. //

It is easy for the leaders to sit back while their followers unleash violence, and talk only in terms of general ideas and motives, while the dirty work is being done on their behalf. It is important for them to keep that mental distance with what really goes on at the grassroot level, while, they spout philosophies and principles. But those very principles are translated into blood and gore and systematic looting and violence as we just saw in Bengal, before in Gujarat, even before in Delhi…

Buddhadeb, you would like think that this was inevitable, when worker power meets anti-state elements, this is exactly what would happen and all that blah. The same way a Modi would tell himself that the anger of a hurt community was pushed beyond a point and it lashed out, and it was inevitable. Like an Advani would tell himself that the Rath Yatra was critical for the self-respect of the nation, and some unfortunate incidents happened in its wake. Like a Rajiv Gandhi thought that the ground shook when a big tree falls.

Fact is, all of you are liars. And all of you are responsible for blood on the streets, violence, rape and mayhem. No court may ever punish you, but there are some saving graces.

Like never being able to wash the stigma away. The curse of spending the rest of your political life wringing and wiping your hands. The curse of being the Lady MacBeths of politics. Hopefully your worst judge will, one day, be your own mind.