Tech News Beats

Apple Premium Resellers (APR) are hosting a series of iPhoto workshops in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Gurgaon, Jaipur, Pune, Kolkata and Hyderabad on 28th – 29th June and 4th to 6th July. The workshop will engage customers by demonstrating benefits of iPhoto on a Mac.

You can discover new ways to bring alive your digital photos. Learn how to import, organize, edit your photos and print calendars, photo books and cards as PDF’s through a home printer. You can also take home your Family portrait. A lucky winner will be chosen from a lucky dip, who will walk away with a brand new iPod shuffle.

Store Details

Imagine
210, Level 2, Forum Mall,
Hosur Road, Koramangala,
Bangalore
Contact No. 080- 32999099/100
E-mail: asit.b@ample-india.com, rajesh.narang@ample-india.com

iStore
No 87,Almas centre,
MG Road,
Bangalore 560 001
Contact No. 080 - 41571068 / 69
E- mail: sriram.swaminathan@zmail.ril.com

Pic by niallkennedy on flickr

Yesterday Bill Gates bide adeiu to the company he founded and propelled it to the biggest technology company in the world. Microsoft, which he founded with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975 in a garage, has made him the richest man in the world for 12 consecutive years. Though now he has slipped to 3rd position after warren Buffet and Carlos Slim. However, he will still work part time on various technology projects and will become the non - executive chairman. He is looking work full time for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationclick here

True to American culture Bill gates is doing, as once Andrew Carnige said, the first half of the life one should spend earning and the second half one should spend giving it back. Gates foundation has large contribution in India too particularly in the health sector. From today the business world will be missing a full time great leader. Read more about Bill gates.

Microsoft will have to work hard to maintain its position with ever rising Google and a resergent Apple Inc with its new ipod and iphone. It may not be easy with gates not around. However, I think he will have a say in all major decisions even now.

I have attended a bloggers meet in Bangalore which took at the campus of Microsoft. Microsoft also sponsered the event. But this blogger’s meet on a house boat looks a new concept and refreshing. Kerela has taken lots of initiative in tourism and by hosting this conference on a large house boat - they taking it further by blending with technology and tourism. So if you want to be there, Hurry Up! as seats may be limited.

Venue: House Boat, Alappuzha

Date: 16/08/2008

To register visit the following link:

Url : http://www.contactvirus.com/blogcampkerala
Shared Key : godsowncountry

They will contact you to confirm your attendance

I am glad to break the news that technewsbeats.com is now out of the harmful site list of Google search engine. As I mentioned in the earlier post, the issue was with some malicious codes which were there in the free website templates I was using. This malicious codes downloads stuffs on the website users computer without their permission and sometimes even redirect users to other sites. It also attacked my wordpress installation files and injected malicous codes over there. However, you can clean than as I did. This things happen mostly when your FTP password is compromised. So first change your FTP password and then remove any malicous codes you may find apart from codes which are required for the template. The codes may have “eval”, “escape” and may have number of digits and alternating %. Just remove them and upload the newly saved file. To clean the wordpress, you will have to remove all the old wordpress installation files and uploaded a newly downloaded one. This should do the job. In case Google has flagged your site, then after cleaning the site, file for a review. If they find your site clean, Google will clear it.

So as I mentioned technewsbeats.com is has been cleaned and cleared by Google of any badware. It is fully safe now.

Welcome to the First ever Carnival of Tech NewsBeats. The idea behind starting a carnival was to let other bloggers or site owners to share their valuable knowledge with the readers of TechNewsBeats.com, while the readers getting access to more info without leaving the site.

The first edition of the carnival is as follows:

Stephen Dean presents How To Buy A New PC posted at Stephen Dean’s Copywriting And Internet Advertising Blog - Copywriter.

WM Media presents Creating A Website Using Social Networking Skills posted at Sell Website Blog.

Eric Brown presents WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION posted at SEO TIPS 4 U Blog.

Marcus Hochstadt presents SEO vs. Design posted at Marcus Hochstadt.

John W. Furst presents Serendipity Weblog Software - Finally it’s in a Book posted at E-Biz Booster Blog.

Sheamus presents Which Wordpress Plugins Do You Use? posted at i am Sheamus - [Very] Personal Development.

Only Three Notes presents List of PR 10 sites posted at Business & Controversy of Technology.

Bloggers or for that anybody is naturally frightened to write anything about his/her present company, ex - company or for that any company. With tons of blogs coming up these days, you can find a disclaimer on many stating that all that in a particular blog his/her view and not necessarily reflect the employer’s view. It is quite fair and understandable that the companies image is at stake. But now you have new place where you can discuss all about your company, rate your company, rate your boss, share or review a salary etc at Glassdoor.com anonymously. Yes, anonymously. There will be hate reviews, as some dead frogs will write that way after a bad experience. But honest review will be very helpful for knowing about a company and while choosing a job as these reviews will be coming from Company Insiders.

This is a new service, so add your reviews for all the tech geeks.

These days it is very important to check anything for its illegitimacy that you going to put on your website. It may be a software, a script or giving a link to any website. You should be more careful if you are using free or open source stuffs. It is the major source of spyware, virus or as a whole badware. You may not even know that you have been affected. I was carefree about this until I found on Google search that visiting to this site “www.technewsbeats.com” may be harmful.

It was quite a shocker as I was not trying to install automatically any software on any of my user’s system and to the best of my knowledge there is no software or script on the webspace for this site. So for further checking, I logged into Google Webmaster Tool. There I found the news that I may be having badware on my site or my site may be linking to sites which may be spreading badware. Indeed bad news for a new site! Following this I quickly did a search of my site using bad-neighborhood.com and found 2 bad neighborhood sites. One was a link from one of my post and the other was the link on the free template I was using. First I checked the link from that of the post, but the domain had a good listing on Google and did not look too bad. Then my attention went to the free template link which I was using for my home page. Making no delay, I removed the link. Then when reloading the site I noticed it is downloading something else too apart from the regular features. I noticed this before but did not gave any heed to it thinking it may be a part of the template. Accordingly, I downloaded the template from the webspace and checked the codes. To my amazement, there was a Java script, which did not looked like had to do anything with the template. Also, there were some junk codes. Swiftly, I removed all those codes and reloaded the template page to see if it is working. It was working, while confirming my thought that these codes had nothing to do with the actual templates. So here was the Badware, which got my site the harmful tag and I did not event knew about it.

So all webmaster, particularly amateur site builders and bloggers, be very careful when you are using free blog themes or websites templates. As this may come in-built with Spyware/Badware and you may not even know until you get into trouble. Check all the links with bad-neighborhood.com to check for any potential problem. If you are giving any software for download, check Google’s Software Download Guidelines. After you believe that you have cleaned your site to the best of you knowledge, then request a review via Google’s webmaster Tool. You can also do so via stopbadware.org. I have filed via stopbadware.org as they claim to test your site and tell where the issue was along it forwarding to Google for a re-scan. Now keeping my fingers crossed - hoping the notice will be taken off quickly.

If you have good blog and have good articles, then definitely users would like to bookmark you site and pages. This lets your users create a relationship with you and give them a reason to come back to you. So you would definitely not like to miss on this opportunity. To help you accomplish this, there are various bookmarking tools which integrates various online bookmarking services and put it in one place and lets your users sign-in to those services directly from your blog or website to bookmark a site or page. Some of these services even lets you email a page and blog it to another blog. The best part is it help removes the various buttons you might have put and have just one button. So lets which are those bookmarking tools:

1. AddThis: AddThis claims to be the number one bookmarking or sharing button on the internet. AddThis offers tons of online bookmarking services. It is free and you just need to sign-up for an account, select your settings and copy/paste the code to your blog/website. And bingo! you are done. Now users can click on the button and select the bookmarking service they want to use. In near future they come with premium services also.

2. Share This: Share This is also a one button, multiple ability online bookmarking tool like AddThis. But Share This also have the ability to let the users to send a web page/post via email and blog a post directly to another blog. Wordpress and Typepad users can use the plugins made for this purpose.

3. Social Bookmark Script: This site lets you generate your script for a multiple ability bookmarking tool. On the Script code generator page, you select the online bookmarking services you need , then your button options and finally click on the generate script button to generate your customized script. Just copy the code and paste it in your blog template or website and it should work.

4. Socialize it: It is another single button, featuring multiple online bookmarking service. It has a huge list of online bookmarking services. It offers codes for various types of publishing formats like Wordpress, php, typepad etc

Bloggers have always been looking for some avenues to make money. It may be either to meet their hosting cost or for some cash. Today is show you an easy way which do not require you to implement anything. It is almost same as writing your own post. Aint it sound easy? yes, you need to write review for various prodcuts or service and you will paid for that. The cost of your review will depend on the rank of your site, number of subscribers etc. Here I will list a few sites where you can sign-up to write paid reviews.

1. PayPerPost: PayperPost allow bloggers to earn money by posting reviews on their own blog as they post articles. Once a review is available, you can take that and if approved you will earn cash.

2. ReviewMe: ReviewMe brings advertizers and bloggers at the same platform like PayPerPost. Once you sign-up there, you will require to choose some category. Depending on that you will be alerted when some reviews are available. Once you accept a review, you need to post that within a deadline. If review is accepted then you will paid anything starting from $5. Your commision depends on your PageRank, alexa rank, subscribers etc.

3. SponseredReviews: Again brings bloggers and advertizers together but claims to give the bloggers to write honest reviews. You get paid for the reviews.

4. Smorty: Another review advertizing service.

5. 1CoolFile: If are into paid reviews, you can even try this one. Here, you need to submit your blog for 1 year. after that you need to resubmit again. Looks like they need to make sure only current blogs feature on their network. You chosse either a free blog listing or paid one(faster inclusion).

Ok you have created a new website or blog and you are looking to make some money. If you think that monetizing your site goes against your ethics then this post may not be for you. But most blogger or site creators look forward to atleast recover the domain and hosting cost. I dont think that is asking for too much. As a beginner what do you look at? At first make sure you have atleast 100 unique visitor every day. Then beginning with ad networks is probably the best way.

An advertising network or ad network is a company that connects web sites that want to host advertisements with advertisers who want to run advertisements. Increasingly Ad networks are companies that pay software developers as well as web sites money for allowing their ads to be shown when people use their software or visit their sites.

Ad networks serve advertising on your website and share advertiser revenue for qualified clicks each time your site’s visitors click on ads. An advertising network (also called an online advertising network or ad network) is a collection of (often unrelated) online advertising inventory. When it is clear that the environment involved is the Internet, companies who run or administrate such networks are also called Advertising Agents or simply Agents.
Source: Wikipedia

You do not need too experiment much. Experimenting with too many ads in the beginning could become a hindrance in your user experience. You can close your eyes and choose Google Adsense. At any given time Adsense will win among all ad networks hands down. Adsense serve ads on your site matching its content. Adsense pays based on CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click). In beginning since your traffic may not be huge, you will be getting paid mostly when your visitors will click the ads on your site. In order to receive payment you need to reach the threshold amount of $100. It can take time depending on where you are located. Have patience and you will come up. Do not click on your ads or encourage your users or anyone to click on your ads as this goes against Google Adsense’s Terms and Conditions. Dont get greedy. In order to make a few quick dollars you may get banned from the Cash Cow program. Adsense works good in any region of the world, so you can try this without any hesitation.

To earn more you need to optimize the position of the ads as some position and size of ads get more clicks. Also, blending the color of the text with your site is a good thing. For blogs, you may try the adsense heatmap.

Now do you implement Adsense ads on your site?

Simply create an Adsense account and choose the size, color of the ads etc through the wizard. Lastly copy/paste the codes on any location on your site you deem fit. Within 10 minutes your ads will start displaying. If you are using wordpress, then you can use a adsense plugin. Which requires you to just upload the plugin in the wp-content/plugin folder of your wordpress installation and activative it by going to the plugins tab. For wordpress 2.5 under “Settings” you will find Adsense tab, click on that and enter your Adsene publisher ID. Also, configure the size, color etc and you are done.

Here is list of Adsense plugins for wordpress:

1. Adsense Delux at: http://www.acmetech.com/blog/2005/07/26/adsense-deluxe-wordpress-plugin
2. Adsense Injection

If you are using Blogger then you you can implement Adsense from inside Blogger, as Blogger is also owned by Google.