Lil General’s blog URL changes

Lil General Rules is now at http://lgrules.blogspot.com

Among the best Indian Blog

“Reflections” has made it to the list of best Indian blogs maintained by Amit Agarwal under the General category. Naturally, I am surprised. I wrote about this in a post titled “LG’s mommy also rules“. Lil General Rules blog is featured in the Mommy/ Children category. I wasn’t surprised with LG Rules being listed despite its readership being a miniscule of this one and somewhere honestly I think it deserves it but this one was a surprise. I wouldn’t imagine changing a thing on this one despite

A blogging milestone..

4 years and 2 blogs. This blog “reflections” started in April 2003 and on last count, I have authored 445 posts. The other one on Pregnancy started in October 2006 (there are a lot of backdated posts because I wanted them in the chronological order of occurrence as a reminiscence of my pregnancy) has 115 posts till date. The name of this blog has changed from “The Pregnancy Journal” to “Pregnancy and Parenting” to “Lil General Rules”

A lot of posts that appear on these blogs deem fit in either of them so it is just a momentary decision that I make as to which one of them they should go to. Like the one on Child Rearing : Are grad parents being exploited? is an ideal candidate for the Pregnancy blog or the one titled How to raise a child multilingual and Guilt and motherhood can be featured here too.

Readership has not increased substantially and that is not my idea either to promote my blog by leaving comments and linking to a zillion places. You might ask, whats the point in blogging then? Well, that’s the only thing that takes my mind off other mundane things, so I indulge in it or waste my time :) and sometimes lose my sleep over it. I love the fact that a few of my friends have been reading what I write in this space the past 3 years and have come back often to tell me what they liked and what they did not. I don’t resent their criticism but I do if it comes from unknown quarters that makes no sense, which is perhaps why I haven’t been able to reinstate the comment section on this blog yet. I’m not here to make a few extra bucks or to network with other momma bloggers or reveal myself totally so as to attract undue attention.

Squidoo. A lens or a mirage?

Seth Godin launched his new online company called Squidoo recently. With little or no knowledge about the product, I waited anxiously for its announcement as my friend Harper worked as a summer intern on this “secret” (sssssssshhhhhh…) project. But I’m disappointed, atleast for now. Lets see why…

What is Squidoo?
Before digging deeper into Squidoo, it is important to understand what a lens is. A lens is a single webpage that highlights one person/group’s opinionated view on a subject or topic or ideas. A webpage that points to other websites / blogs /wikis (sources of information) that the lensmaster(person creating the lens) thinks is important to him/her. For instance, a lens on Formula 1 will (or should) tell you the races for next season, driver’s contracts, stores selling Formula 1 merchandise and such. Or to see Tom Peter’s Lens on all-time great books.

Squidoo helps you build lenses. Squidoo becomes a window through which other’s can see your views!

What are people saying about Squidoo?
Interestingly, for a couple of days after Squidoo’s announcement (it is not yet released), articles on Squidoo did not offer any user’s personal views or insights. Part of the reason is beta testing invitations weren’t sent out until this Monday.
The early birds were simply re-quoting Seth by extracting sentences from the e-book - Everyone is an expert. Few examples are Squidoo, Seth Godin on Squidoo and Squidoo Beta. Quite a few interesting comments and heated exchanges here.

As you can see, there are mixed reactions.

Why Squidoo?
Every product has to have a purpose. A mission. A goal. Seth does a good job of defining what Squidoo’s purpose is in Squidoo organizes lenses. We host them for free. We make them easy to build. In short, what MT/typepad or blogger is for blogs, Squidoo is for lenses.

Squidoo, in principle, is a co-op that will earn $ for you and the links that appear there. The trick here is only lens that are ranked high by the proprietary algorithm will attract traffic in the first place.
So are we not falling in the same SEO trap as with Google?

Would I Squiddo?
It is definitely not synonymous to asking “Would I google?”. Atleast not yet. I haven’t recd. a beta invitation. So it remains to be seen
if it can really go beyond the marketing air surrounding it. So I don’t know if I would Squidoo. Only time and its acceptance and usage will tell.

To quote Seth, “If you can’t describe your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position.” I am eager to know “why one should Squidoo” would be described in eight words.

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BlogMap

I followed the instructions in How to add a BlogMap to your blog and added a BlogMap (above the Flickr Section on the sidebar). BlogMap is a service from FeeMap that displays the geographical location of a blogger. It is neat. However, if your location is outside the U.S. you can Google to determine your latitude and longitude. BlogMap also gives the locations of your neighbouring bloggers. How does it help? I don’t know..I don’t network with other bloggers but I thot it was cool and added it!

Secret Corner on the Web

There are times when you feel like punching the nose of someone (for the record I was never violent) or swearing out loud or blog about it with an identity. But one cannot do these for obvious reasons like keeping the job, out of courtesy etc. Some people take out their frustrations by writing on a piece of paper and when they are totally satisfied with the outcome, feel relaxed and get back to normalcy!

I discovered one such site called iWorkWithFools this morning. It is slightly similar in concept to the famous/infamous blog Post Secret but not as picturesque as it. This site has people anonymously describing their experiences at work with tough/dumb/moron (or as the site calls “fools” that I disagree with) peers, subordinates and bosses. I read a few posts and then said to myself “Vivek is right. I’m insane to be reading this and poop stories. I definitely have better things to do in life.” I hate to agree but some experiences were what some of us encounter in our everyday work life too but gossip about only in private! So much of animosity, hatred is demotivating to read!

Talking about Blogging

The most often asked question when you join a new college/organization or goto a team building exercise is “Introduce yourself and tell us what your hobbies are.” I would have gone through this ritual more than 5 times in the past 2 weeks. This is one question which sounds quite simple on the surface. It is only when you start talking that you wonder “gosh..what are my hobbies?” I was literally fishing for answers after answering the easy part — muttering my name which btw is strange to hear from your own self. The day I joined, I was asked to fill a form for the HR in which the last section was about hobbies. Laziness and the inability to think clearly took the better of me and I just scribbled what first came to my mind which was blogging”. 2 days later, the HR approached me scratching her head spelling out the word - b l o g g i n g. She said, “L..i, What is your hobby and what does this word mean?” I explained that it was an online journal and she still seemed confused.
Apparently she had asked the same to a couple of people and no one seemed to know what it was! I went through the same situation a couple of times at various meetings and was lucky enough to find a few who did know what “blogging” was about. My answers on blogging became more passionate by the day and that was when I realised that I really love to read and write (which I obviously don’t regularly do) blogs.

As an Aquarean my interests have changed with time. I don’t know why I couldn’t think of my other interests such as watching Formula 1 and the crazy habit of seeing “Friends” every night. It is only the TV channel and the time that I still see “Friends” every evening has changed between Chicago and Bangalore.

Does anyone out there see Joey? I observed that the rating for Joey has dropped by 4%.

Spouses aware, Bloggers beware


–link via Ross Posted by Hello

Blogging Addiction

A conversation this afternoon at a corner cubicle got me thinking. There was a talk about blogs and it surprises me how popular the blogging phenomenon is. Anyways, my coworker made this statement - “Why do all this people go on vacation?”. She was expressing her disappointment when there are “no daily entries” on the blogs she follows closely, when the blogger takes a vacation. I’m sure this is not a alienated feeling. I start my day by reading a few blogs and am disappointed too when there are no new posts for a long span.

After this conversation, it got me thinking if blogging was an addiction or an obsession? What do you call this compelling feeling to read/write blogs everyday? Here is a post on the same topic - Is blogging the opium of the Internet Generation?

This story appeared on New York Times.

TO celebrate four years of marriage, Richard Wiggins and his wife, Judy Matthews, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms. Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom. He stayed there for a long time.

“I didn’t hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on,” Ms. Matthews said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log, a collection of observations about the technical world, over a wireless link.

I know I wouldn’t go to such great lengths as to blog during a vacation or miss deadlines at work to make 5 posts a day. Comments on a blog and increased traffic can be compulsive reasons to blog regularly - because then you are not writing for yourself, you are writing for an audience and there probably is an obligation and yearning for acceptance of views. Well I don’t know………..

Information spreads like Plague on the web - Blogs’ contribution

I was reading about the Memespread project on Wired. Meme is a unit of information that passes from one person to another person as defined in the Memespread project Analysis. The objective of this project was to determine the route a piece of information takes to be transmitted and the duration it takes for it to get popular. It is indeed a interesting thing to have used blogs to test this phenomenon. Regular bloggers will observe that any popular piece of phenomenon - be it a cool software or a game or a mpeg doesn’t take more than 30 days to gain popularity! The ones that strike me instantly are the Penguin game (yeti and penguin), the big line in front of the new Apple store at Tokyo.

Some of the most popular blogs are listed here.

In other news, I’m really exhausted with the all-day meetings. It is taxing to listen to someone for 8 hours. It is a meeting after meeting and finally when it comes to doing real work, I’m burnt out! Right now I’m really looking forward to the long weekend.

Appearances can be deceptive. I looked at someone today and wondered why would someone so authoritative present himself not-so-elegantly. All it took was just a 10 min conversation with him to change my perception and more importantly be very impressed! What would have taken me atleast an hour or more to figure out took him a mere 5 mins and he presented it so beautifully and made it so simple.

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