BISE COMMUNITY

Am I the only one? (I hope not) Who has been disgusted by not only the overzealous coverage of the whole Shoaib Malik – Sania Mirza marriage? On the one hand it’s a brief and much needed distraction from all the pointless violence and even more pointless and unexplainable lack of governance that we have to watch parade before us on our television screens. On the other hand it’s also quite sad to see some of the actions and reactions of certain individuals. The army of politicians, personalities and well wishers all seem to be nothing more than opportunists trying to jump on the media dubbed, “Shania” bandwagon.

A piece in The News says “love would finally prevail no matter what the enemies did”. I wish the same PML-N protestors would show such support of all those young couple who marry out of choice and then have to face the spectre of banishment by their own family at best, or worse declared Kari and hunted down and murdered.

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After Lahore blast, people will give you different reasons for the blasts; they will say that it is Pakistan and America’s fault; America and Pakistan trained these people earlier to fight against Soviets, and now they have turned against both; they will say these people have nothing to do with Islam, and Islam is a peaceful religion; they will say these people do not represent Islam. May be it is true. But somehow, somewhere religion is involved, and one can not deny that–hence, these savage killers believe that they are just about to meet 71 virgins after committing mass murder. They are doing all this in the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful; whether with his approval or without.

It is not just one particular religion, most religious people, whether belonging to Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism or Islam, are different from people, who let’s say have very casual attitude towards religion or do not believe in God at all. Here in USA, I have personally experienced, the more religious a person is, it is more likely that person would hate certain “others”. In the case of Christian religious fanatics in USA, they have long list of people whom they hate, but these days mainly Muslims.

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Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was sent to live with a Bedouin family soon after his birth; Bedouins were thought to be the pure speaker of Arabic language, while people living in urban center of Mecca were considered too cosmopolitan, and it was felt that language spoken in Mecca was corrupted. It is astonishing how much the ancient Arabs cared about the pureness of their language, and the effort they put into their kids learning the pure form of language.

If we look into the situation of present day Punjabi, it is facing similar sort of problem. The only people who truly speak close to genuinely pure Punjabi are the ones mostly residing in the rural areas of the Province. If you belong to cosmopolitan city of Lahore, it is very likely that either you don’t speak the language at all–even if you do speak it, it is corrupted. The requirement to speaking pure Punjabi is that you should have no education whatsoever. This is because all the education is either in Urdu or English. As literacy increases further, the future of Punjabi becomes doubtful.

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There are hundreds of ways out there on how to improve the visibility of your websites or blogs, and at times that information can drive you out of your focus on your Search Engine Optimization campaign. To prevent what we usually call as “information overload”, I have set up a brief 10 to-do list.

Do the actions listed below for a consistent three months and see the results for your websites or blogs:

1. Constantly update your content: if you want more traffic, you have to continuously update your content. People will not visit your websites if they do not have good and high quality content. Without a constant update, there will not be any returning visitors as well.
2. Apply good design and layout: if your website is messy on its designs and navigations then visitors will leave at the very moment they arrive on your website. Make sure you apply good design, content-focused with proper color schemes.
3. Use your own domain name: using a professional looking top level domain name will make you look more professional and will then make visitors to trust you more as a serious business entity. The cost of a domain name is as little as US$8 per year and it can make a serious difference than having a free domain
4. Use StumbleUpon: I have had a lot of success using StumbleUpon for my websites, especially those specifically talk about a specific niche, such as soccer. When you put an interesting article from your website on StumbleUpon, then people will rate it higher and in turn make the article more popular. Remember to also make friends and connections in StumbleUpon to increase your personal popularity and credibility on the website.
5. Become a guest poster: offer your unique writings and articles to other people’s blogs. People love to get free and high quality blog content. In your article, make sure you put a link back to your website. Again, make sure that the article you submit as a guest blogger is unique and cannot be found on any other blogs.
6. Put keywords on images: if you use images on your blog posts, then it is crucial for you to give them relevant title and tag them with relevant keywords. In my soccer website, a large portion of my visitors come from people looking for soccer wallpaper from Google’s image search.
7. Comments, comments and comments: when you give comments, people will know that you give notice, and they will appreciate that. However, please do not spam. Some people just love to put comments such as “Hi, nice blog, how about visiting mine?”. Those kind of comments will be removed without question and you will only offend your blogger peers.
8. Use MyBlogLog: sign up to MyBlogLog and join to all the communities available there and you will see visitors start coming from MyBlogLog.
9. Do not waste your time: don’t waste your time with “get rich quick scheme” promises. Concentrate on giving quality content, then the traffic and the money will come.
10. Most important, always review your stats: by reviewing your sites’ statistics using Google Analytical tool, you will find out what kind of keywords that your visitors use to come across your site and which articles that are the most appealing for them. The results of your review can then be used for more effective and efficient future campaigns.

Millions of new pages of content are being created every day and the vast majority is created by the individual publisher, but the advertising inventory is growing at massive multiples to the actual demand. With this, publishers will need to find new ways to be found and advertisers will need to find innovative ways to get in front of this micro created content. Here are some online advertising trends for 2010.

Advertising Marketplaces
These directories, such as our own AdvertiseSpace marketplace, will sprout up out of need for advertisers to find grouped niches that meet their needs and don’t have the time to scour the entire web looking for great sites to market their products on.

Social Media Advertising
We saw the birth of Twitter Advertising in 09 with companies like Sponsored Tweets and Ad.ly. In 2010 expect to see tons more advertising in your twitter feeds. Facebook and MySpace advertising also grew in ‘09 with their self serve create your own banner, platforms and for this year expect more growth and hopefully some innovations with the tools. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Its very very hard to stay focused in a country like Pakistan. Not so long ago in the ending weeks of 2009 I wrote a very upbeat cheery article about the incoming new year and how Karachi was going to celebrate it. On the 10th of Muharram, that article and any future hopes of celebration had to be shredded. Every one knows what happened that day during the bomb attack on a procession of our shia brethren and the horrible events which followed in which 3 city blocks of Karachi’s main whole sale markets were razed and torched to the ground. So I am not going to dwell on those horrible facts, I wont even mention the ghastly mistake made by our main stream tv media in showing as many grisly images as they could or trying to create some sort of morbid horror version of daily life in Pakistan to the International world.

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