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Orkut has launched a promotion campaign which is by far their best attempt to promote their new design features to their dissatisfied users who are gradually losing all hope and strong loyalty bias towards orkut which they had previously held. Promotion activity includes a community linked to their sub-domain “The New Orkut Community” which hosts contests which would be providing invites to the declared winner termed as “Orkut Champ”. Frankly speaking the members activity is motivated with the sole intention of gaining invites to tryout the new interface (and not out of passion or interest). From our experience of community management, this community would have moths and cobwebs after they officially release this feature to everybody.
There are very limited invites provided by Orkut team themselves to famous Orkut Members, Orkuteers and Orkut Bloggers thus generating hype and at the same time engineered scarcity which has triggered a massive response of desperate members wanting to try out the new interface which Orkut promises to make their social networking easier or rather less painful.
Many famous bloggers like Orkut Plus and Orkut Heroes have provided their review on the new orkut.
You can look back to see how far we have come by seeing the rare screenshots of the first version of Orkut. After using this new interface for last 3 days for all our Orkut activities, we do not deny that few activities have been made simpler, For Example browsing through friends list from profiles and communities list or adding members to your community but we are still not very happy as the changes because most of the changes are cosmetic in nature. It was a bit slower to load as reported by our invited team members who had slower internet connection. Sadly there were almost no changes in the Orkut Communities interface. It’s just like the saying goes “Same wine in a different bottle”.
We doubt that this new interface by itself would keep the user’s from rapidly losing interest. More changes and updates are urgently needed as the web technologies used and features provided are inferior to the competition. Users are demanding more features everyday in the help forum for more interactivity and ease of use. Most people are satisfied with the overall security and privacy features. Orkut is now at the crossroads and its destiny would soon be clear to everybody. New Orkut is just like your ex-gf trying to patch up with you but her same old problems persist.
Thanks to the Orkut Team for the privilege inviting the Blakut Team to preview the new orkut version, but this was just our opinion, we hope that it would be taken constructively. Users please don’t ask for invites we do not give them for promotional purposes/ money, we only give them to the deserving volunteers who have been helping others out consistently for a “long time” in our communities as a gift.
Image Source: Ars Technica
Orkut has started warning Internet Explorer 6 users that the browser will no longer be supported. When you log into Orkut with IE6, you are prompted with the above message.
Last month, Youtube made a similar move. Digg has also shown interest in blocking IE6 users from certain activities and Facebook has been prompting IE6 users to swap out their browsers since February 2009.
This bug is a bug which might go unnoticed. As many people vote on polls, there is no way to figure out if your vote has actually been counted or not. As you can see in the above screenshot that I have already voted on a poll (about 14 hours ago) and it is acknowledging that with a tick but it has not been counted.
Most of aware that Orkut is unable to count some posts, this has been an issue for more than 2 years and still needs to be fixed.
JamLegend is one of the best Online Music Gaming websites we have ever come across. If you’re a music lover and would like to play some music then this site is for you.
If you want to try it out first, they’ve got a few demo songs which you can play without registering. From our experience it was very entertaining, hence we went ahead and registered to review how it’s like.
You can login with your Facebook Login and follow through with the prompts. The best part is that you can play against a computer or invite your friends to play with you in duels and showdowns agaisnt other registered members who are not your friends.
You also have a list of Achievements with come into categories of Scoring, Songs, Social and Multiplayer. You can start with beginner level, and Advanced level is very hard.
Visually it was pleasing and it was really good fun to play.
Overall if you do not have Guitar Hero equipment and you still want to experience the fun of it on your keyboard without any software which slows you down, Give JamLegend a visit.
You can reach out to the millions of youth and masses logging on to Orkut everyday. Promoting your business by easily creating text and image ads . Target the users by their age, gender, location and their interests.
You ads would appear on the profile page, homepage and popular communities. And you choose how much you pay per impression and click on your ads.
You would have to create an Adwords account with Google which requires a credit card. You can choose the amount you would like to advertise it ranges according to your need.
For more information visit Orkut’s Advertising Microsite
Orkut has rolled out it’s latest feature to few people, which attempts to integrate social bookmarking. You can create promotions to share text, pictures and YouTube videos.
You can view your previously created promotions. There is a restriction of 5 promotions per day. There is no feature with which the people who are spreading the promotion can leave any comments.
I’m not sure how many people would use this feature for social bookmarking and how many would use this feature for spamming their own communities and websites. I would not be surprised if this feature fails, there isn’t much into this really!
Microsoft is going strong with their products lately to compete with Google, Yahoo would soon be shutting down it’s search engine and would be handling ad sales whereas Microsoft would be directing the traffic to the data with Bing.
The combined search market share of Yahoo and Microsoft would approach 30%. That's still far below Google's 65%, but analysts say it may provide enough of a critical mass at least to stave off further Google advances and help the enlarged search engine gain some ground.
Soon you would be searching with Bing from Yahoo’s Homepage.Bye bye Yaaahhoooo---ooowoooh!.
It is very easy to create a blog with lot of tools available but it is not that easy to manage it, so first decide why to start. IF your answer is ‘I want to help other people or I can provide lots of useful tips or Useful News to readers’, then you can start blogging, It is of no use if you want to start only to check how it works or to show to your friends that you have a blog.
Starting any journey without any aim is not good; similarly starting a blog without any idea in your mind is also very bad. After setting up your blog, what will you write there? Decide this first. For finding blogging ideas, think what interested you most or what do you know about. At the beginning, start from a specific topic and later you can expand your topics slowly. It will surely help you to manage your blog properly. You may also consider reading this article on BlogKori.
There are lot of tools and softwares available to create a blog, it depends on you and your future plans about the blog. If you are new to the world of blogging then you should use free tools, so that if you fail in blogging; you can quit without any loss. Blogger is the best platform for this. Later you can also set up your own Domain for your blog.
Selecting Domain for your Blog is also a very important part, select a unique and Professional looking Domain name, for starting you can also use sub-domains like yourname.blogspot.com but it is always advised to use a TLD. It gives your reader a better impression and also it performs better on search engines.
There are lot of free and premium templates available on Internet and also you can easily modify a default template, but one thing you need to remember is to use a clean and SEO friendly template. Blog with Flashy widgets and images look good but those are not good for SEO and your blog readers, they need a clean template. Always try to use most important widgets and images on your blog and use nice color combinations. For speeding up the blog loading time, you can take help from Google.
So, now you have decided your Blog topic and also you have set up a blog. It is time to write your first post. In the beginning a blogger is always full of ideas because he has started about what he knows much, so ideas flow from your brain, but once you have written many articles, you find it difficult to get a new idea. For this you can use Twitter, Digg and subscribe to other blogs in your niche to find new ideas to write.
So these were our Tips for new bloggers to start their blog, tell us if it has helped you and also share your views about blogging with us.
Twitter recently changed the ‘Followers’ page that shows a recent tweet of your follower along with the basic information of the user. Twitter users daily follow many people and get many new followers. Twitter is also full of spammers, so it becomes difficult to decide to follow a user back or not. Twitter has now made this much easier to decide to follow a user by showing his/her recent Tweet on your Follower page. You can follow people back by seeing their recent tweets without visiting their profiles.
The Newly designed page gives you a better view of the user and also better controls. You can send that user a reply or direct message and follow him back. So, Twitter has simplified your this work too.
Twitter is always improving its structure to save genuine users from spammers. Few months ago, Twitter also improved the new followers Email notifications to help you identify your followers.
The World’s most popular Torrent site ‘The Pirate Bay’ has been sold out to a software company for $8 million. The company ‘Global Gaming Factory X’ will acquire it in August, 2009. Read the Official Blog post from The Pirate Bay for more info. regarding this.
The New owners have stated that they are going to change the business model of the site. The Pirate Bay is used for download Movies, Games and Software for free. But the new owners are likely to make it paid or remove all the pirated stuff that is more than 90% and keep only legal content on the site, that changes the meaning of the word ‘Pirate’. They have also stated that they will also pay Copyright holders for their stuff which is downloaded from the site. The site will also close its Trackers soon and would be no longer hosting torrent files.
So, according to officials, The Pirate Bay is changing completely. We are yet not sure completely how they are going to manage the site now, but The Pirate Bay is saying it will not change, only owners are changed, read what it says -
“A lot of people are worried. We're not and you shouldn't be either! If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And - you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now.”
The Pirate Bay blog post gives fans a relief but it is clear that Pirate Bay will continue but not in the same way, if users have to pay for the content, they will use other official sites instead. What do you think about The Pirate Bay? Is it going to die or it will remain the same Pirate Bay?
To solve this issue, Facebook recently added a new privacy feature for your status messages. Now you can select who can see your this update.
You can select people from your Lists or type their names to exclude from your feeds. You can also select your status message visible to all, it is a good feature for professionals. 
Facebook is soon launching a new Real-Time search, so it would be good if you post useful links, updates or your new Blog posts on your status like Twitter. It will help you to grow your network and also to get extra Traffic to your blog/site.
So, with this new feature, we can post more and better excluding our friends from our Professional updates. How do you use Facebook and How you are using this feature?, share with us through comments.
Some time ago we were having some discussion on our DFS community about the best Free web-hosting providers. After some investigation on this topic we ultimately found best ones in this field. Although there are many Free web-host now a days giving loads of bandwidth and space, they are indeed over used resulting in slow server speed and huge load time. Also many web hosts shows their advertisement on your web-page which does not look good!
So here is a complete list of FREE web hosting providers giving ad-free hosting and plenty of space with relevant bandwidth.
The best at this service. Gives only 60 MB of space but the bandwidth is unlimited and also it is the top rated by all users. Below given are some of the features:
| Overview
Domains and subdomains
| Site management tools
Misc features
OS, connectivity and back-up
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The only disadvantage of this is that it does not give PHP support for Free hosting. If you want to make your Web-site totally HTML based then this will be the best choice for you.
Link: Click Here
The second best for Free web-hosting and best when we talk about features. Supports Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP4/6 [LAMP] and also Perl and CGI. Below are some Features:
| Overview
| Emails, Scripting & Databases
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It is good if you want to design your own PHP based web-site from scratch. Awardspace server is pretty fast and they don’t give scripting errors. So for newbie PHP developers awardspace is the best option
Link: Click Here
This web-host serves best for bloggers. Supports PHP, MySQL [All you need to install wordpress]. The only disadvantage is you will not get an automated installer for Blogging software like Wordpress. So you need to install them manually [Which generally does not take more than 10 mins]
| Overview
| Emails, Scripting & Databases
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As said above, Zymic is good if you can install PHP based software at your own. Also their servers are pretty fast and they give unlimited number of websites to be hosted.
Link: Click Here
The best web-host for beginners. Supports PHP, MySQL and also gives advanced Vista Panel from where you can install popular Blogging and site-builder tools at one click. Below are some features of 07x…
| Overview
| Emails, Scripting & Databases
|
If you wish to start a Blog on wordpress without a paid host and don't have any php knowledge then 07x is best for you. But note that you won’t get server response similar to awardspace.
Link: Click Here
So that was our complete list of 4 top free hosting providers available on Net. Choose the one that fulfills your criteria. If you are serious about blogging then having a paid host is always recommended. (Else use blogger). Also do let us know if you have found any better free hosting service than this!
You can download your Videos in MP4 format and quality of downloaded video may be less than your original video. But this feature is good if you want to backup your videos or want to save them for watching offline and this allows you to download without any waiting.
So how is the official method of downloading videos? Share your views with us through comments
A good news for all the people from Iran. At this very moment of Political Crisis of Iran, two Internet Giants Google and Facebook has just rushed to support Persian [Farsi] translation. Obviously this is going to have a huge effect on Iranian turbulent politics. For surely this will open up a new console to the Iranian youths to communicate with outer world and vice-versa.
Yesterday, Google first launched this service and it was announced under the Google Blog. According to Franz Och, Principal Scientist
“We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa — increasing everyone's access to information.”
Obviously as it was released under a rush so it is not yet fully perfect. But Google team surely is working to fix any possible errors that may creep in. Also it is clearly mentioned there that it is under Alpha release. To try out the Google Translator now, click here.
Only after a couple of hours of this announcement, Eric Kwan announced on Facebook blog that they have also launched a Persian version of Facebook. On explaining it he said that
“Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared has been in Persian—the native language of Iran—but people have had to navigate the site in English or other languages.”
From the above discussion it is already cleared that Google and Facebook together have taken their step to stretch their hands towards the needier people of Iran. Lets just hope that youths there manages to take full advantage of it!
It has only been a few day we have discussed about the Google’s upcoming search engine for Microblogging services like twitter, Microsoft ex search engine team leader, Ken Moss has gone a step ahead. He has spent a whole 9 months to build a new Twitter Search engine named “CrowdEye”. Today it has been released publicly as beta. Below given is a screenshot (Credits: CNET news)
On explaining CrowdEye Moss has emphasized that
“I think that real-time search is the next big thing in search, It's an area that has been underexploited to date”
On saying about the features that CrowdEye can give, Moss said
“Right now that's all we support, but its definitely something I'd anticipate growing over time”
Obviously working with his only co-worker Becca Moss, [his wife as well as former ‘softie] all these features that CrowdEye can give are really amazing!
Obviously although the CrowdEye has launched, but still we can see a “Under Construction” tag there. What ever it is, all the features mentioned above seems to be really something we want from a better twitter search engine! What do you think? Can CrowdEye beat its competing search engines like Topsy, OneRiot, Tweetfind, Twingly etc? Or better say can it stand against the upcoming twitter search engine by “Google”? Do share your views through your comments…
Mainly it depends on your blog template and the ad placement but According to Adsense official resources and most of the publishers, ads with bigger fonts perform perform better, Adsense is also soon going to set ‘medium’ font size as default to increase performance of ads. For blogs with normal fonts, you should use Adsense ‘medium’ font size. It will help you to increase your ads performance and increase your earning.
What do you think about this feature, which font size you like to use?, Share your thoughts with us through comments.
