1.   WordPress.com Stats :  Something like Google Analytics. Very efficient and its right there in your Admin panel, so not more tedious work to log into Google Analytics and look for your blog stats.  This plugin provides an incredible depth of information and the best part, its FREE. To install this puglin, visit here to download the zip file. Unzip it and place the folder in your WordPress Plugin folder using a FTP tool  ( I use FileZilla, if you don’t have it then download it here ). One installed, it will ask for an API key. That’s it !

Requires WordPress Version: 2.7 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.0.1

2.  All in One SEO Pack :  If you don’t know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or want to try your hands on it then install this plugin in your WordPres blogs. All in Once SEO Pack automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo..blah blah).  You have the option to upgrade it to Pro, but then its PAID and the free version works pretty fine.  Installing is it easy and does not apply much brains. Use the above steps to install and activate in your WordPress blog.  One installed, it offers variety of features.

Features listed on the installation page are  :

• Support for Custom Post Types
• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Requires WordPress Version: 2.8 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.0.1

3. Simple Social – Sharing Widgets & Icons : One of the best social networking plugin for your blog. Offers you 14 Social Sharing features,  like Facebook Like, Twitter…blah blah. Installation is simple – download plugin, unzip, upload, activate. This plugin adds a set of cool icons and widgets at the end of your post for your readers to share. Widgets are Twitter and Facebook. It supports large icons and small icons.

Requires WordPress Version: 1 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.0.1

Nikhil

digital producer, blogger, obsessed with music and web technologies, loves basket ball, tennis n traveling.

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A screenshot of an early tweet from Founding CEO Jack Dorsey :

According to Nielson, Twitter ranks on the top, leaving behind some of the largest social networking wesbites when seen between the duration from February ’08 to February ’09. Following stats gives you a better picture:

In our previous post, we had highlighted the age group using twitter. In February ‘o9 the largest age group on Twitter was between 35-49 years old, with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42% of the website’s popuation.

Nikhil

digital producer, blogger, obsessed with music and web technologies, loves basket ball, tennis n traveling.

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This browser has been in beta version for over a year now, so it’ll be interesting to see how the final version will perform. Million dollar question now is “What would it take for IE8 to lure you away from your current browser?”

Click Here to Download IE 8

Nikhil

digital producer, blogger, obsessed with music and web technologies, loves basket ball, tennis n traveling.

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This is what Google announced in its official blog.

“At Google, we believe that ads are a valuable source of information — one that can connect people to the advertisers offering products, services and ideas that interest them. By making ads more relevant, and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, we can create more value for everyone. Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers. Advertising is the lifeblood of the digital economy: it helps support the content and services we all enjoy for free online today, including much of our news, search, email, video and social networks.

That’s why Google has worked hard to create technology that makes the advertising on our own sites, and those of our partners, as relevant as possible. To date, we have shown ads based mainly on what your interests are at a specific moment. So if you search for [digital camera] on Google, you’ll get ads related to digital cameras. If you are visiting the website of one of our AdSense partners, you would see ads based on the content of the page. For example, if you’re reading a sports page on a newspaper website, we might show ads for running shoes. Or we can show ads for home maintenance services alongside a YouTube video instructing you on how to perform a simple repair. There are some situations, however, where a keyword or the content of a web page simply doesn’t give us enough information to serve highly relevant ads. “……Source: Google Official Blog

Google today released it beta version online advertisement on it YouTube as well as on its partner sites, which will use additional information from the websites visited by people. It will start placing cookies on user’s browsers to collect information about their interests whenever they visit websites that show AdSense contextual ads. Ads targeted to those interest to the same user as he browses the other websites that also have Adsense will be presented.

“We think we can make online advertising even more relevant and useful by using additional information about the websites people visit. Today we are launching “interest-based” advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.

We believe there is real value to seeing ads about the things that interest you. If, for example, you love adventure travel and therefore visit adventure travel sites, Google could show you more ads for activities like hiking trips to Patagonia or African safaris. While interest-based advertising can infer your interest in adventure travel from the websites you visit, you can also choose your favorite categories, or tell us which categories you don’t want to see ads for. Interest-based advertising also helps advertisers tailor ads for you based on your previous interactions with them, such as visits to their websites. So if you visit an online sports store, you may later be shown ads on other websites offering you a discount on running shoes during that store’s upcoming sale.”

Does ” interest-based” ads intrude user’s privacy?

Google Answers…..

“This kind of tailored advertising does raise questions about user choice and privacy — questions the whole online ad industry has a responsibility to answer. Many companies already provide interest-based advertising and they address these issues in different ways. For our part, we’re launching interest-based advertising with three important features that demonstrate our commitment to transparency and user choice.

* Transparency – We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and

Nikhil

digital producer, blogger, obsessed with music and web technologies, loves basket ball, tennis n traveling.

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The heaviest contributors to the Web 2.0 phenomenon — the people who upload YouTube videos, keep blogs, and tag articles — tend to be youngish, outside the middle class, and equally likely to be men or women. Unsurprisingly, they also tend to live much of their life on the Internet, and use more than one device to get there.

That’s according to a new study by Netpop Research, entitled Media Shifts to Social 2009. The study examines people engaged in what the report defines as one-to-many social media — uploading photos, blogging, tweeting, file sharing, and so on.

The Netpop report is based on a survey of 4384 broadband users, age 13 and up, conducted in September and October of last year. It purports to provide marketing trend insights on “the new consumer media habits shaping businesses today.”

The study breaks down broadband users by how much they contribute to these social sites. Heavy contributors, who on average connect with nearly 250 people a week on a one-to-many basis, make up seven percent of the whole. They are relatively young, with an average age of 33. They’re evenly split between men and women. (Surprisingly, women outnumber men among medium and light contributors, but men outnumber women amongst old-fashioned non-contributors.) People making between US$50,000 and $75,000 tend to contribute less than those richer or poorer than themselves, according to Netpop’s data.

Heavy contributors tend to be what Netpop Research defines as Online Insiders, who “do more of everything there is to do online” and “see themselves essentially ‘living online.’” They’re more likely to use multiple devices to access the Internet, including smartphones and publicly-accessible computers. They like to blog, and tend to post content that relates to their interests and reflects their opinions.

The report is available for $500.

……Source

Nikhil

digital producer, blogger, obsessed with music and web technologies, loves basket ball, tennis n traveling.

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