Technology, Business, Social Media

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Youtube recently release a new subsection of their website titled YouTube EDU. This site aggregates lectures from academic institutions from all over US. According to LifeHacker there are more than 100 universities from across the US participating in this programme.

I know a lot of people who have used Youtube for watching lectures and educational programmes. As faster internet connections become mroe widely available sites like these become a very welcome addition to the web-sphere. I know that I am going to be certainly visiting this site a lot.

Read more on:
Lifehacker
YouTube EDU

From TED:

“20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.”

Those people who are interested in photography would know by now of Canon and Nikon’s new cameras with video capture facility in it. From what I have been hearing and reading in the forums, many people are excited about the inclusion of video capture facility in still cameras. Perhpaps I am the only person, the odd one out, who is not too excited about it. Reminds me of feature overload.

Yahoo at one time was the king of search engines, and then as time got along it failed to keep up, the home page became too cluttered and slowly it lost it’s position which it is still trying to grab. In came Google with it’s simplistic and minimalistic search engine home page and it gained popularity at an alarming rate. Ok, the popularity had a lot to do with the search results, however the user interface and the features being offered and the way the were being offered had a large part to play in it.

Google can be a simple search engine and it can be a lot more if you want it to. My concern with cameras is the same. I am afraid that they are going down the line of ‘feature overload‘ to capture market share. Digital SLR technology is at a point where we can call it stable, and there are no major leaps in the near future in terms of technological advancement, hence the manufcturers are turning to these extra features to grab market share, I just hope that they don’t turn into Yahoo.

Photo by edans

I am freakish about my email, as some would say. I on the other hand think that it is necessary for me to be able to check the email and response in a timely manner, not just because I need to, but because I love being connected. I have a lot of commitments, my job, running Colours Magazine, working on some other web related projects, volunteering in various community projects etc. This means that the people that need to reach me should be able to reach me. Ofcourse, this also means that my family should be able to get in touch with me as and when they want. From the description above, it may appear to some that I am a workahloic, but I am not. I love my free time more than anything, spending time with my family and playing Call of Duty4 on XBOX360 are my favourite past times. However this just means that I have to try and be super organised when it comes to planning my days/weeks.

I like to travel light, be it a meeting 5 minutes drive away or in another city, I don’t like to carry around a lot of luggage. This makes my mobile phone ever so important. In the sturggle to find the right sort of mobile phone I have gone through several, I first started with Windows based smartphones namely HTC C500. The most useless piece of technology I had ever seen, need a hard reset atleast onece a day, and it had the uncanny habit of going into flight mode when ever it just felt like it and wont come out till my mobile phone operator did it manually. Once I missed an important phone call which cost me a job because of it.

So for the past couple of years I have been using Blackberries. I was in now way a fan of the Blackberry, I just didn’t like the look and feel of it. Well, that was till I got a business contract with Vodafone for my first every Blackberry, the Pearl.  The phone jus did what it was meant to do, never in the two years I had it did it cause me a single problem, and hence that is way my mobile connectivity solution now is based around the Blackberry. Simply because they are the most reliable piece of phones I have ever come across.

To me, email, my calender and my contacts are the most important things to have in a phone. Internet is an added plus but not a huge thing for me. I am currently using the Blackberry bold and it really helps me to stay connected and do most of the things I need it to get done. Here is how:

Email:

The email address for this website is the main personal email I use. I use Google Domain tools for the website, hence the email is handled by GMail. I use push for this email account meaning I get near instant delivery whenever I receive email on this account. However this is not the only email that I have. I have email for Colours Magazine a couple of other accounts, that I check from my Blackberry by using Gmail for mobile. It means that I have to login at various points during the day to check my email, but that is ok with me that i what I have unlimited internet and data plan for. This way, if I am sitting waiting for someone, or travelling in a bus or train, I can easily use that time to catch up on email and respond to some of them, leaving me more quality time to spend with my family.

Calender:

I used to keep a filofax, meaning I had to carry it around and then enter things manually to my phone as well so all could stay synchronised. I don’t like to carry around a lot of stuff, in fact I simply hate it. Now, I use Google Calender, which gets regularly synchronised automatically with my blackberry calender. If you are using a Blackberry, you can download the Google mobile tools which will include the calender synchronisation application. It is great, now if I am out of my home or office and don’t have access to the internet, I simply enter the details of an appointment in my blackberry and it simply gets synchronised with my Google calender or vice versa, without me having to worry about anything at all.

Contacts:

Since I am not using a Blackberry Exchange Sever, I don’t have anyother way to synchronise my contacts on my phone to the ones in my email, so this is still done manually. Doesn anyone have a wordaround? If you do then please let me know.

Youtube

I have recently discovered that I enjoy watching Youtube clips using my wifi on the Blackberry bold. It is an added and extra benefit and I am greatly enjoying it, yes it is a drain on the battery, but hey, I don’t care I get to watch Chris Tucker standup comedy before turning in for the day.

At the moment this serves my purpose, I don’t think that anyother phone on the market can serve it’s purpose in the way the Blackberry does for me, sure the iPhone does a lot of things however I don’t think I can live without copy/paste or the high price O2/Apple are demanding for iPhone 3G.
I am always looking for ways to make things even more simpler so I would love to hear your suggestions.

To be perfectly honest when I started Colours Magazine I didn’t know much about Analytics tools and SEO for monitoring site traffic and increasing the exposure of the site. In the past two months however I have been trying to learn as much as I can about using various Analytical tools and different techniques for SEO. I am using this post to share what I have learned and how it has helped me in the hopes that perhaps others can benefit from it.

This is a very wide topic and I simply can’t hope to cover it in depth in just one post, so I am going to cover one small topic each time.

Let us start at the very beginning, something that everyone who has ever written a blogpost or published online recently has come across, keywords. Many people would think of keywords as the words that you would type in a Search Engine like Google which will generate relating search results and hope that their website will be one of them as the keywords will cover the subject area their website deals in .

One thing that perhaps many don’t realise and certainly I didn’t with regards to Colours Magazine, was the fact that the search terms I think people should be using to search for my website are entirely different from what they are actually searching for.

For instance, take the example of Colours Magazine, an online magazine dealing in photograpy. Photography itself is a very wide and generic term, how do we know what keywords people are actually searching for and how then to leverage that trafic for our benefit. I am going to illustrate my point further with the help of three free and extremely useful tools by good old Gooogle.

1. Google Insight

Google has a tool called, Google Insight for Search. What does it do:

It analyzes the Google Search data and finds out how many searches have been done for the terms that you would have entered.

For example, take the word ‘photography’, and let’s see what data google insight produces:

Click on the picture to see a larger version with more detail

There is a lot of data here and all of it is relevant. However I am only going to discuss two things. The bottom two red boxes. Remember that we searched for ‘Photography’. So the bottom left red box shows the current top searches related to photography, the bottom right red box shows the upcoming or breaking  ‘hot’ search terms related to photography. This gives you an immediate idea of what people are searching for and how or what sort of keywords you might want to include.

2. Google Trends

Another similar tool is called Google Trends. It lets you chart search information data for a particular category over a period of time to see how the popularity of a search term has evolved over time.

3. Google Analytics

Of course every one is aware of Google Analytics, so perhaps I don’t need to go in much detail. One thing that I would like to mention is the Website Optimizer tool. Website Optimizer let’s you run experiments between two versions of the same page to see which one works better. So you can use a set of keywords for one page and another similar one for another page and chart user behaviour against them both to find out what works best for your audience.

For instance, when Colours Magazine was first launched, I had a page called ‘The Gallery‘ which just had photos. I wasn’t sure how many people were going to that page or what was their behaviour when they got to that page. Using Website Optimizer I tested two different versions of the website with different ways of presenting the same content. In one version I had photos on a seperate page called Gallery and in another version the same photos were placed towards the bottom of the homepage.

The data I got told me that the Gallery page wasn’t really serving it’s purpose, people weren’t spending the amount of time on it as I thought they would, where as the alternate version towards the bottom of the homepage was getting a lot more attention and hence this led me to a better visitor oriented design.

These are just some of the tools that I use, and as I explore them further I am learning how can I better leverage them for my needs. Hopefully in the soon I shall discuss more about this subject, in the mean while why not leave a comment and share how you use Keywords and Analytics tools, which is your favourite and how have you benefited from it?

Links

Google Insight for Search

Google Trends

Google Analytics

Please bear with me as I am going to test some new themes here, let me know what you think of them. I planned to get this done sooner but work on Colours Magazine (http://www.coloursmag.com) was keeping me very much occupied. Hopefully when I have finally settled on a theme I can dedicate more time to developing this blog.