Why blog?

Why blog?

Blog, as a verb. The 'action' word.

It is of a human's nature to want to express their feelings and thoughts. And out of all the other communication method, here's the reason I chose blog:

There are many choices. Facebook, Twitter (a micro-blogging site, technically), Reddit, Youtube, Blogger, WordPress, and all the web services there to provide you with a way to express yourself and broadcast your thoughts to the whole world (hence, the Youtube's motto, 'Broadcast Yourself').

Why do you need to express yourself? It's just the human nature! A human being cannot live by him/herself and we know we all have the tendency to talk to our friends whenever possible and we do quite enjoy it. In fact, we can't live without others! But sometimes just friends and family doesn't cut it, due to some restrictions, which might include the fact that there are only a few people, they might not share your opinions, they might be stubborn, or you just want even more people to communicate with / broadcast to! That's why we're here in the internet. Welcome to the 21st century (that line is 12 years old now).

So we cleared off why we need some sort of a service that lets us talk to the whole world of the internet. Now it comes down to which service you should choose. Before you get into anything, let me tell you: all those services have different purposes, 'feelings', and 'audiences'.

Facebook is for your actual social life. Where you can chit chat with your friend, send wedding photos to your mom, dad and your friends. Basically, it just stays within your friends (normally).

Twitter, like I mentioned before, is a micro-blogging service that allows you to write what you want in less than 140 words. But in reality, Twitter is just an 'announcement platform', you know? Where your person of interest 'announces' something that you might not want to miss. It has a more 'official' feeling than Facebook.

Reddit is actually the Jack out of all these services. This website is sort of a 'popularity contest' website, so to say. There's no real way I can explain this, but the website allows you to post link, picture, funny or awesome status, etc that might get attention of other people and get 'up voted' by people. It's all about popularity in Reddit. Some place you might not want to go if you're just looking for friendly place where you can broadcast yourself.

Youtube, 'Broadcast Yourself', is a video streaming platform that allows you to upload a video and watch other videos. This is a very, very, versatile web service. There are just so many ways people use this website. Blogging, blogging (video blogging), gameplays, announcements, humour videos, funny & cute videos, activism videos, ideas, and all those other things are possible on Youtube. In the form of video. There is no general audience or feeling about this website. It becomes whatever you would like it to be, because there are just so many contents and people who create contents out there in Youtube, that you would see only what you want to see in Youtube. That's the case even if you are creating videos. You see videos, interact with viewers / content creators of your interest only. Be aware though, as there are many 'trolls' and mean people who sit behind monitors and attack others. Also, join this website if you are able to manage all your thoughts and blogs in the form of videos.

And there's WordPress. Simply put, this website IS your personal blog, but it doesn't have the feelings of it. Quite often it doesn't work, and while it is designed for simplicity, it is quite not so if you're trying to surpass the 'basic' layout and customize or make the blog more friendly. Yes, this website has no friendliness, at least in my opinion. This is mediocre in my opinion compared to others. Why use it? is the first question you'd ask.

Last but not least, there's Blogger, the 'traditional' blog site. Keep in mind that other form of blogs are also included in explaining my thoughts on Blogger. Blogger is basically like any other blogging sites (and you can even create your OWN blog! For a cost though). But Blogger is managed by Google. This comes with a few good extras: NO fee to host & serve the blog, NO ads (unless you become popular and want to monetize your blog), very good customization (you have direct access to HTML code of every post you create. That's a lot of freedom), and nice, easy, and clean interface to use and learn! If you haven't already, check out my other two posts on my opinions on Blogger: here and here. It's good to check those out if you're new to blogging (or the internet)! Also, Blogger comes with free, pre-installed analytic tool provided by Google, the Google Analytics. It gives you pretty much ALL the information you need. How neat is that? Other blogs (that you create yourself and pay for it) may have all or some of these features depending on what you want, but Blogger is the most friendly, easy, and best to use for your personal (and not so personal) blogs, for the purpose of broadcasting your ideas, thoughts, and so on.

If this helped on deciding what blogging service to use, then please subscribe to my blog!

What Microsoft's New Bing Enhancement Inspired By Facebook Means For You!

Microsoft just revamped their Bing search engine not too many hours ago, and this time, they've learned something: although it might be extremely irritating and annoying for the users, the social integration works. So, inspired by Facebook, they made the Bing search socially integrated. From all the Google's posts, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Quora, Foursquare, and more, Bing search engine now depends heavily on the socially optimal search results. I repeat, Bing now depends on socially optimal search results.

First you need to know how this system works. Basically, just like Google's "Page Rank" system where the individual pages are ranked by how important it is, how much back links it has, etc, Bing search engine relies on page "rankings" to search and show the results correctly. But this time, instead of how many links or how much it is approved all around the web/net, Bing now depends their search results in how people from social networks rated each page and how much each page has been recommended, shared, liked, etc.

So on to the part where I talk about what it means for you! It's simple, all leading to one point: unless you are big right now and you have much buzz around all the social networks, especially Facebook, your pages/contents are going to be rated less importantly than others and traffics to your contents, let it be blogs, videos, etc, will definitely decrease. But the popular pages with lots of backs in the social networks, will get more views.

Of course, Bing takes up only like 20% of the all search results, but it's firing a signal - it is highly likely that Google and Yahoo will follow this. In fact, Google already was doing this with the Google+ and the page rank, but this shows that unless you are prepared to take social networking as a big part of creating your content, you are going to be screwed. Big social networks, big fame, enormous amount of fans/likes, more backtracks/backlinks, many, many views, and deep social integration will be critical. Only the 'big' ones got it, and they are the ones with all or some of these criteria.

But you are in hope - I will tell you how you can optimally take your chance to increase views to your channel, blogs, pages, sites and stuffs. You should share all your contents with your actual friends. That way, more friends will see it, more friends will share it to even more people, and that just goes on like a chain reaction, where your contents' popularity rise fast. But of course, there are costs for everything. In this case, you really need to give up your privacy and grow some extra layers of skin on your face. I know it's hard, because I run a small Youtube channel and I have to constantly share my videos with 'real' friends on Facebook where they will see me, and me as a content creator, which is extremely embarrassing. I know. But you need to do it. That is the next trend.

Some of the really good websites to share your contents are Facebook, Twitter (especially if you have a large amount of followers - if you don't, then start today by '#' ing every single word in your tweet!), Reddit, Foursquare, and Google+. Google plus is a virtual ghost town, but many people visit regularly even if they don't spend much time there, so they will stay up to date with your contents and they will share more. Google+ is all about being empty. But the 'socially viral' method works well in Google+ because it's all about sharing, Google, contents, and profiles.

So yes, build a good profile, make many social networking accounts, share with your 'real' friends and just random people, get lots of back links, get lots of shares, get them to share your contents because it is so awesome, share portion of it by yourself, keep putting lots of tags, with ample amount of description, continued effort and scheduled release, and all those strategies are now required, or mandatory in order to survive in this digital web world. It was a perfectly competitive market to begin with!

SEO optimization - update

In my previous article - here - I discussed about what elements of your contents makes your contents, let it be blogs, articles, Youtube videos, etc, show up higher in the Google's search results.

This time, we add more to those tips. This is something I have found after over 30 hours of research, both online and offline. Also, I have few corrections to the previous blog, with the first being that the strategies actually works for both Yahoo search and Bing search! Second, remember how I said SEOs don't matter when the user has personal results on? Well, I was wrong. The more tags you have, the more likely you're going to show up in a personalized search. I experimented with it after reading an article about it, and it seemed to be true. And here's the last thing I forgot to talk about.

This is a really big thing when talking about showing up higher in the search results. So it turns out that the more back links you have, the higher your contents are going to show up! Even if it's your own websites, fan page, or twitter page! So constantly keep sharing links to your contents even if nobody sees it - at least the Google crawler does, and it gives you a huge boost. Link to your videos on your other contents, cross-link your contents, ask websites to share link to your content, and even share it on Reddit - it's an excellent way to share your contents if your contents are good, as at least 5 people read your post there, no matter what time or timezone you are in.

So that is a short, but extremely useful tip as to how to get large/big on Youtube/Google and get way more views than you do now. Try it, and tell me if it works!

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Making Your Post Search-Engine Optimised (SEO) - how to get big on youtube

Sometimes you feel like even if you had a great post/page/Youtube video/review, nobody ever watched/read your stuffs. That is because nobody actually saw it at all in the first place. To make your contents out there more, you need to focus on optimizing your contents for search engines, so that your contents would show up at the top of the search results.

Bing is virtually impossible, and useless to do this as it tries to understand who the searcher is, and makes attempts to get results relevant for only them. This would be useless, again, but you can have a lot of key words, labels, and tags to attract viewers at all times.

So Bing is out, and Google remains. Google is known for its accurate search results, with the reason being that it uses straightforward algorithms to mechanically analyze datas from pages and its servers. So it's unbiased, given that the users turn the setting to 'hide personal results' instead of 'show personal results', because in the first case, it would be the same as Bing if the users did. Crossing our fingers, we get on with our comprehension on the Google's 'The Algorithm', that made Google rise, made Microsoft fail so much, and made Google one of the predominant companies in the world.
Google rates pages/videos(in case of YouTube) in following ways:

Title>Description>Tags

Now on the pages, there is a certain complicated thing called 'page rank' which you probably wouldn't be able to control at all, just because a. It's so complicated and b. It depends hugely on luck.
What Page Rank is that it ranks pages that are more important, more viewed, and more liked and supposedly more people think it's relevant to the search result. The Page Rank system is extremely difficult. All you can do is to keep making creative contents that people would enjoy along with good tags and plenty of descriptions. But make sure the tags are relevant, as irrelevant tags might cause you to lose a couple of people viewing your contents.

On Youtube, there are some extra stuffs that you can control(which is always good)!
The below shows how it ranks videos. As no company can search video by its content, it searches videos by its metadata, so more metadata ensures that more people watch your video. There is an upward limit though.

YouTube ranks videos in following categories:
Spotlight Videos
Most Discussed
Most Viewed
Top Favorited
Popular
Most Responded
Top Rated

One other thing most Youtubers don't do is to add subtitles. Subtitles count hugely when determining the search results, because like I said, no company can rate/search by video's contents, so subtitles is the only way they can know about your video, so it counts highly when rating the video's importance and relevance. By adding subtitles, you get ahead of 99% of the people, because only 1% of people do it.

There is a rumor that comments on videos and pages also count towards search result by a small margin. Don't know if it's true or not, but it is always good to have many comments. There is nothing to lose from it.

Things that are both useful for pages AND Youtube videos:

1. Add as many tags as you can.

2. Google shows results that include the search keywords in the exact order the person searched.

For example, if I look up RFID 2013, results with RFID 2013 will get higher in the search results, compared to RFID...2013 where there are words between RFID and 2013. Also, it means that 2013 RFID won't show up at the top of the search result.

3. LOTS of description. There is no limit on description, so use that wisely. Describe your videos well, along with putting the title across the description and constantly repeating the keywords in the description. Don't spam by putting too much words. Words that are not in sentence and not in order, especially just random array/soup of words and tags, is not gonna work. Instead, you have to be precise yet include all the details and cover a bit broader than your video/content.

4. In tags, try putting very specific terms such as "thunderbolt drive" in double quotation marks. That way, when a person is searching specifically for that term, your contents is the most accurate result.

5. I know this is BS, but you do have to get a lot of views from people to get higher. Yes, this is unfair. But it is better for Google, so just try to stay alive.
6. You need a lot of reference from other sites/videos. Try sending links to your contents to various websites. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. When it gets on Facebook and Google, it gets you so much more viewers! I once got shared on Facebook, and guess what? The guy with 10 subscribers suddenly got 1000 extra views just from Facebook because some whale just shared it! Reddit is also a good place to share it...That is, only if your contents are good.
7. Constantly create contents (alliteration?) for your increased chances on getting higher on search results.

8. More interactions are better!

So those are the many ways you could increase traffics to your contents that not much others tell. Hope it helped you, and if it did, subscribe to me to stay up-to-date!

UPDATE: I added more info and corrected some of this! Check it out here!

Tip Of The Day: Why Does Word Take So Long To Start Up/Load?

Microsoft Word can be sometimes cumbersome to even load up. Especially if you're on the older machines and older OS, such as the Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.3 Tiger. So, here are a couple of tips on how to speed that process up.
First, delete some stuffs. When the disk is more than half full, it gets slower. That's why the old machines run really slow because it's full.
Second, delete some fonts. If you have loads of fonts, it takes just forever to load them!
Third, delete some templates. In my case, and especially for the newest versions of Word for both Mac and Windows PC, templates takes a really long time to load. Deleting the ones you don't use really help. You can always get them back later from the Microsoft website when you need it.
Fourth, try clearing some processes. Many background processes running at once will slow your computer down, and by a lot. This is especially problem if you have many programs checking in the background such as network.
And lastly, remove some of the unused extensions. Without extensions, the newest version of Word starts up in 4 seconds. Extensions take about 10 seconds for each of them.

This applies for all Microsoft Office components, that is, the Word, Powerpoint, and Excel.
Hopefully you'll find this useful and you speed up your process!
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