[ Sajith M ]

No I have not been nominated for any award at the Indibloggies India Blog Awards, just a plug for my favorites :-)

Best IndiBlog directory – DesiPundit
Best Community IndiBlog – The Great Indian Mutiny
Best Topical IndiBlog – Atanu Dey on Indias Development
Most Humorous IndiBlog – Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind
The Indiblog of the Year – Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind

Go ahead, cast your vote. Hope your choice matches mine :-)

Update: The results are out. Congrats, all the winners. Except for The Great Indian Mutiny, everyone else I voted for managed to win in the respective categories. All you mutineers, you are still my favorite, and there is always the next year :)

Posted under: Thoughts , Blogging
Tagged with: Awards, Blog, India, Indibloggies, vote

Simon Phipps in his post Edited Out of History talks about how IBM’s former Fellow, “Father of Websphere” Don Ferguson, is already in being airbrushed out of history with his blog redirecting to the home page for IBM’s dW bloggers.

Now that is sad. This is no way to manage a corporate blog, or to encourage corporate blogging. IBM sure can do better than that. Frankly, one fails to see how his views could have suddenly became irrelevant now that he has left IBM for Microsoft. Shame on IBM.

If you have a blog on the corporate site or were planning to start one, maybe its time to rethink. It’s probably better to have the blog on blogspot or wordpress than leaving to the mercy of people in-charge of the corporate website. Of course, having your domain and hosting is better still :-)

Update: The blog is back :-)

Posted under: Thoughts , Blogging
Tagged with: Blog, corporate blog, corporate blogging, IBM

I had written about the need for disclosure in my earlier post. When you are being compensated in any manner, you have a moral obligation to let your readers know that you are being compensated for what you have written.

This blog always had a little notice at the end of every PPP post that said that this relates to a PPP opportunity. I am glad that the good folks at PPP too think that disclosure is a good thing to happen, and are now encouraging bloggers to have a disclosure policy on their blog. This blog has its disclosure policy here.

If you too want a disclosure policy for your blog, head straight to Disclosure Policy Generator. Its pretty simple and in less than 5 minutes by answering some simple questions you will have your own disclosure policy. I would strongly recommend that you read the generated policy and edit it to suit your requirements before you put it on your blog.

By disclosing your affiliations or compensation received for post, you let your readers know more about what you have written. If you have received any compensation for your posts, don’t you think your readers should know that? Or if you have an affiliation with a company whose products you are writing about, should your readers know that too? So go ahead and increase the transparency in blogosphere by adding a disclosure policy to your blog.

Disclaimer: This post relates to a PayPerPost Opportunity.

Posted under: Thoughts , Blogging
Tagged with: Blog, disclosure, disclosure policy

TechCrunch article says Controversial PayPerPost Raises $3 million.

So what’s up with PayPerPost blog advertising that seems to be generating so much controversy?

I believe that it all boils down to how people think this will affect blogs and blogging. Blogs have always been about personal and frank opinion. The problem is that if you are paid by PayPerPost for a posting a review and the advertiser has mandated a positive review, then your review might not be very frank and you may be tempted to be positive about the product.

Sure enough, this is not the best thing to happen to the blogsphere, but is PayPerPost the evil responsible? I don’t think so. At the end of the day, the author of the post is squarely responsible for the contents of the post, how can PayPerPost be held responsible if the author has decided to sell his soul for about $5 (that seems to be the average earning per post).

While an advertiser can specify that he wants a positive review, the blogger is under no compulsion to take up that opportunity unless he feels that its a product or service that deserves a positive review. And anyway, it looks like there are lots of opportunities that do no require a positive review. I leave you to figure out who is responsible for taking up an opportunity that is mandated as positive review, and then providing a post that is a lie.

But could PayPerPost have done something that would have made it better? Yes, mandating every post be marked as an advertisement would have been a worthwhile option. But even if its not mandated by PayPerPost, bloggers should ideally disclose the same in the interest of transparency.

Disclaimer: This post relates to a PayPerPost Opportunity.

Posted under: Thoughts , Blogging
Tagged with: advertisement, opinion, PayPerPost, transparency

Ok, so you have read this elsewhere. You were told to add quality content, and that is something you find though. I usually blog about anything that comes to my mind and that does not usually qualify as quality content. Like every other blogger on earth, I have been trying to increase traffic to my blog, and here are 3 things that I thought have had a very desirable effect.

1. Verbose URL for your permalink. Customize your permalink structure so that the post title becomes part of the URL
2. Be Part of the community. Be active in the community, comment on others’ blogs and include your blog URL.
3. Tag Your Posts. Technorati tags seem to help you get traffic, that’s been my experience so far.

Posted under: Thoughts , Blogging
Tagged with: Blog, increase traffic