Is was a wonderful experience, so I went ahead and created one for myself, by signing in there, URL is http://blog.com/wp-signup.php free of cost. It has been almost a month by now that I have created my account and posted my picnic/trekking experience there. I then invited my social networking friends and some of them joined and shared their views and experiences there.

Here is my blogging experience

(a)   Do you think your blogging experience was a success?

Yes, it was a nice experience and can be called as a success, I got to see many comments and people shared their own experiences about it. It was nice exchange knowledge, helped to improve the writing skills. Perhaps, I was been recognized more when I shared and discussed my knowledge on the Information Systems topic.

(b)   Do you think you will continue to blog?

Yes, I think I will continue to post my blog/discuss for at least few years. It is a great thing wherein you get to know new updates, follow on something and more than anything helping needful people like students, etc. Also, you get paid which for the number of visitors and the time they spend.

(c)    What were the most difficult things to do with your blog?

• Some of them difficult thing from my experience include
• They get hacked and it is difficult to maintain
• For blogger like me from a non technical background, learning technology like HTML and using it to design the page
• Usage of images and it optimization was little difficult
• The overall design of the web page and then every time taking the back up while updating
• Some of the person’s comments were discouraging and trying to say that I am wrong, it was hard to convince them.
• Understand about the blog optimization to include primary, secondary keywords, allow backtracks and enable for high traffic toward my blog.

Melanie Nelson, July 28, 2011. “Blogging Basics 101″ [Online] Work cited from URL: http://www.bloggingbasics101.com/ and http://www.bloggingbasics101.com/category/blog-maintenance/

(d)   How easy was it to come up with new idea every day?

Ideas use to flow initially but after a while, people made me to think and I started understanding to them and responded in new ways. Often, I used to get the updates and posted the same. Apparently, it was more to do with your interest and curiosity towards the domain knowledge and ideas will follow you.

     (e) After this experience, do you have a new perspective on blogging?

Yes, to a certain extent. First, I want to become a professional blogger, I need to back up my blog template every time when I want to change/update something. It can be a good source of income and should be careful with Hackers.

After this long experience, my eyes have opened and point of view towards blogging is that

• It is to broadcast the news, helpful in marketing and journalism (for uncensored news broadcasting)
• It can be for personal purpose and can be made as an hobby during leisure for photographs, events just like a social networking site to stay in touch with friends.
• In order to cumulate the customer feedback on new products, policies etc
• For commercial purposes to fetch money out of each click on advertisement programs

Rafi’s Blogging Tips Becoming a Successful Blogger, 2011. “Different uses of blogging” [Online] Work cited from URL: http://www.rafid.org/different-uses-of-blogging.php

Compete: It is a web-based tool that that can be used to get the information on the number of unique users who access the website. It gives the ranking of any website in the internet. You can get the information on which the website on which people spend more time and many other various parameters can be obtained from this website. The URL to access this website is http://www.compete.com/.

One has to get registered with the website to get all these information.

Under Analytics tool one can search for the website which received highest number of users.

The search gave the result as below:

1. Facebook is the most visited website in the internet, it is followed by

2. Google.com

3. Yahoo.com

4. Youtube.com

5. Msn.com

6. Live.com

7. Bing.com

The screenshot of which is attached below.

Now let us analyze the number of unique users who access Facebook on the internet.

The below is the screenshot of the graph where the X-axis represents the month and the Y-axis represents the number of unique users in million

From the above graph it is clear that there were around 125 million unique users on 06/2010 who access Facebook and by the time 06/2011 the number of unique users rose to 146 million users.

As a matter of fact, Facebook is the most popular website in the history when you consider the growth rate at which it evolved.

The below is the screenshot of the graph for twitter where the X-axis represents the month and the Y-axis represents the number of unique users in million.

Now let us compare Facebook and twitter. The below shows the graphical representation of Facebook and twitter where X-axis represents the time duration and the Y-axis represents the no of unique users in million. Here blue line indicates Facebook users and green represents twitter.

From the above graph it is very clear that Facebook  get more number of unique users and the rate of growth is 17.22% for year and the twitter get very less number of unique users when compared to Facebook  and the growth rate is 10.13% a year.

Also, the number of unique users may be compared and it looks clearly that Facebook gets more than 4 times than twitter. It is obvious that Facebook is very interactive where you can share videos, photographs; you can comment on photos, one can search for friends, and they can make a group of their interest and has many more features which have attracted millions of users across the globe.

Twitter lacks all these features and you can only text your ideas that too with a very little words and this is quite obvious why Facebook is more popular than twitter. Facebook and twitter both have their own pros and cons.

The logical and obvious answer one can expect from a guy who loves twitter says that he does not have time to spend on Facebook rather he feels comfortable with twitter, and one can expect a very quick response on twitter when compared to Facebook .

Even the Facebook user has his own explanation for why he loves Facebook than twitter, where twitter facilitates only text messages and that too with very little characters (140 characters). Online chatting is not possible in twitter. Now Facebook has come up with lots of online games and apps which really entertain youths and of course this present generation.

Compete, 2010. “Compete” [Online] Available at: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/Facebook .com+twitter.com/

Compete, 2010. “Compete facebook.com” [Online] Available at: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/Facebook .com/

Compete, 2010. “Compete twitter.com” [Online] Available at: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/

Compete, 2010. “Compete twitter-versus-facebook.com” [Online] Available at: http://www.twitip.com/twitter-versus-Facebook /

Note: To access the above mentioned URL’s, we will need to be a registered user.

Points to consider/ perquisites to earn well with blogging

•   Higher page rang provided by search engines like Google, eHow, Wolfram Alpha and etc.
•    Site traffic – Good number of regular visitors
•   Clear search engine optimization to be done to increase the search friendly level of the blog

Interesting facts on how to make money with blogs

•  Money from advertisements egg Ad sense (from Google) – whenever a visitor clicks on the advertisement.
•   By selling ad spaces on the blog (however, the blog should have high rank recognized by search engine)
•   Commission from product companies – Encourage for affiliate link which are in association or partner links to promote their products. When a visitor purchases a product accessing a link via the current blog, a part of income is shared. E.g.  Clickbank.
•   Advertise skills, market own product and introduce to the world about his/her profession, this way many new clients can be attracted and credibility with existing ones will improve
•   Initially advertise and do brand marketing more for SEO – Search Engine Optimization companies to make sure your blog sites gets recognized and page rank will be higher.
•   All the old projects which have been done should be updated so that this becomes a clear point of discussion for the new visitors to see the old credentials
•  Case studies should be made and posted as articles on the latest projects on how your skills helped a person who was very much in need of assistance and how he is happy after dealing with you
•   Have a preview of some interesting news given on the blog and the full story can be read only upon subscription from the site. Hence tie up with some of the online payment companies accordingly.   
•   Avoid more of advertisements which are flash based, loading time will be more and visitors loose interest.
•   Daily or hourly updating the blog would attract more and regular visitors and therefore the cycle of ad, links etc will multiply and grow.
•   Part time working as a professional blogger for companies as blogger or content writer is also possible
•   Develop people/visitors trust so as to be the better blog site for a long run.
•   Apply the search engine optimization ideas to enhance the page rank if the expected results are not achieved
•   Create modern, contemporary, up to date resource centers; publish the content on niche topic. E.g. Squidoo, HugPages sites which can be collaborated with.
•   Provide Microstock photography for websites such as stock photography

List of hyperlinks of popular blogs or articles relating to the discussed topic.

JEL MEDIA, 2011. “Internet Media – How to make money blogging” [Online] Work cited from URL: http://jelmedia.net/you-can-earn-from-your-blog.php

JEL MEDIA Internet Media – How to make money blogging, 2011. “Blogging And Making Money Successfully” [Online] Work cited from URL:  http://jelmedia.net/

Scott Allen, 2010. “Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime)” [Online] Work cited from URL: http://entrepreneurs.about.com/od/homebasedbusiness/a/makemoneyonline.htm

Both of them are more tools for an extensive, in depth and goal specific search engines tools. Lets us explore each of them and find out which one is better than other. Google Squared

Google Squared
No wonder it is amazing, I just attempted to provide “New York Good Hotels” in the search, here are the results. A square was built and the results are as shown below

Here are its details

• Spontaneously forms square and get data from different sources and present them in the form of excel – spreadsheet on the web online.
• The squares are termed as “Small Dogs”, when we try the same search term in normal Google or any other Search Engine, the data will be scatter and unstructured.
• Allows the structured data to be presented in columns under headers. Here Item Name, Image, Description, Address, Email, etc are column headers.
• Behind what we see, there will a remarkable amount of work involved to form a square.
• Squared is a newer search engine tools which is discovered after Trends
• It is accurate, computationally achieved search results and known to be as Semantic Search based computing
• Allows the flexibility to add any new information as a column to the existing ones
• Underwent an immense amount of improvement as it was been under test and research to enhance it under Google Labs for a year.
• Users have always appreciated the way it functions and the amount of time that it saves for them
• Publishes maximum possible of contents as search results, the significant things are highlighted and easily get noticed
• Allows implementation of filters to cut short the data and retrieve only the required information
• Made a big difference when it over took Wolfram Alpha because of its simplicity and effectiveness.

Google Trends

Just shown above is the snap shot of Google Trends when a term “Microsoft” was searched.

• It’s more like a traffic analyzer to particular website, gets the often searched items information
• Depicts of the searched item volume of item with respect to geographical regions, their cities and language
• Enables wide number search patterns, the outcome is first a graph, time as its horizontal line and frequency as vertical being searched globally
• Results are not accurate all the time, rather in many situations approximates and rounded values are shown.
• Initially Trend’s data were outdated and were not fetching new results; frequent data update was not done. However, now the information is being fed on day to day basis without fail
• Visitors and end users are more likely to be Online Marketing (Marketers)
• Analysis of data/information is remarkable that is done at a deeper level
• Analysis of website traffics is its main usage to track visitors and the time each of them spending in a particular web site and etc.

Following are the reasons why Google Squared is much better than Google Trends

• A fine product as it underwent improvements and then only released
• More generic and widely used, suitable for most of the searches
• More number of visitors visiting it
• Results are accurate, handy and presentation of information is more flexible

Sources
Nathaniel Johnson, 12^th May, 2009. “Google Launches Search Options-Previews
‘Google Squared’” [Online] Work cited from URL: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2052352/Google-Launches-Search-Options-Previews-Google-Squared

Wiki, July 2011. “Google Squared” [Online] Work cited from URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Squared

Tom Krazit, May 2010. “Google adds more content to search pages“
[Online] Work cited from URL: http://news.cnet.com/posts/?keyword=google+squared

Barry Schwartz, May 2010. “Google Squared Powers Answer Sources &
Something Different Refinements” [Online] Work cited from URL: http://searchengineland.com/google-squared-powers-answer-sources-something-different-refinements-41889

Avinash Kaushik, August 2008. “Competitive Intelligence Analysis – Google
Trends for Websites” [Online] Work cited from URL: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/competitive-intelligence-analysis-google-trends-for-websites/

File Transfer Planet, May 2009. “Google Search Options, Google Squared“
[Online] Work cited from URL: http://www.filetransferplanet.com/google-search-options-google-squared/

Here are some suggestions for your first post.

1. You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
2. Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting  page you read on the web.
3. Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can always preview any post or edit it before you share it to the world.