message

My 25th Birthday and A Message!

I had no idea that I’ll be blogging about this to night, sitting on top of my home in this cool breeze. Actually, I dint want to blog about this quite intentionally and I had a reason for that, which I’ll explain shortly.

The Past
I had no idea of how to celebrate my birthday, in my childhood. For me it was special prayers and a visit to temple, for many years.

It was in my masters degree(MCA) that my friends started it and I continued it for my friends. I love them. I love them all. They are special to me.

We spent a lot on parties and sometimes it would take at least 1 or 2 days to come out of the hangover :p

It was fun and a sweet memory in all our hearts, to carry forward..especially the things we talked and did in the party and it’s not just about the ffOOd.

The Present
I finished my masters degree last year and continued with my usual works, not much changes in my life in terms of lifestyle, locality and work.

But it isn’t same for my friends. They had to move to other places get job or to get some special coaching. So the party hangover was all over!

The Intuition
All these years while we had party, I would tell everyone that we shall celebrate next time in any ashrams. We could donate the helpless and could make life more meaningful. Everyone was supportive and were ready to contribute.

But it never really happened 🙁

But Why?
Because we just talked. We just thought.
There is lot of difference between thinking and doing.

It was something like: As thinking is like half doing, I’ll be thinking twice :p

We never acted upon it.

Birthday
Today is my birthday again..and I dint want to live in the planning phase any more.
So made firm decision and took action.

The Influence
Now suddenly everyone is charged. Self motivated and ready to serve and make a difference.

Again, Why?
At least, why now and not until now?

I could find the answer to this question on this day of my 25th birthday!
It is because, people need to taste it at least once.

The Message
Today we could feel the difference between sitting in a cool comfortable place, talking random stuffs, passing time(as if we live forever) and to be in a place where we realize we can help too. We distributed food and fruits to hundreds( 180 to be precise ) of children with our own hands. We are blessed enough and we should do whatever we can do and beyond what we could do, if we did not have the goal to serve. yes its possible.

The Future
We have decided to continue with this activity, even more actively and to help more and more people in coming days.
It need not be birthdays. We never knew we are so blessed until we saw the world of physically disabled and mentally disordered: those are just worldly name to them, which many of them have proved wrong.

Rewind
When I decided to get out and contribute, I thought not to blog or Facebook about this as I’m doing it for my own satisfaction. But later on learnt that, there is a message. And I must communicate it to the world.

Golden Words

“There are people who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.”
– Khalil Gibran

“At the end of life, what really matters is
not what we bought, but what we built;
not what we got, but what we shared;
not our competence, but our character;
not our success, but our significance;
Live a life that matters. Live a life of Love..”

“It’s not what WE get. But who we become, what we contribute..that gives meaning to our lives.”
– Ton Robbins

“People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you.
Be honest anyway.
If you find happiness, people may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough.
Give your best anyway.
For you see, in the end, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.”
—— Mother Teresa

Ask And You Shall Be Given.
Give And You Shall Deserve.
– Satish ( your’s truly 😉 )

“If you do good, people may accuse you of selfish motives. Do good anyway.”
– Mother Teresa.

Do Good Anyway!

Simple and effective way to get VOTES for your article: Web Traffic

We have seen many people struggling to get Diggs, Stumbles (or votes in general ), all over the web!
Most of the time its frustrating for both the parties, the one who asks for vote and the one who is been asked to vote. If you start asking for vote continuously 100 times on twitter, then I guess everyone will unfollow you. And if you try in IM quite frequently, then chances are you will be blocked by your friends.

And one more important thing which I have observed is, if you start asking for diggs or stumbles directly on your blog(giving some incentives or otherwise), and if you start getting lot of diggs or stumbles from that page, then there is a high possibility that your blog URL will be blocked by those services.

So the best way to get more votes with less effort is: Make use of RSS Signature plugin. And politely ask for a Digg or stumble.

Why is this effective?
If people have subscribed to your blog, it is most likely that they get some value out of it and they will be more generous to vote for you when compared to search engine visitors or random visitors.
And it does not take a lot of their time. Just click the link and then hit the thumbs up or digg button. But take care that, you ask votes for only those stories which deserves their time and that one click. And ask only when it is needed. Do not always have a message to vote for some story. This will surly make readers blind to that particular message. To avoid this, ask for the votes only when there is a high quality article and which is already getting good response from your readers.

Do you think it works?
Yes. And this works best with Stumbleupon, than with DIGG. If you have 1000 subscribers out of which 100 to 200 people have stumbleupon account and if 30 to 60 people like the article and hit the thumbs up button, then the story will become popular in stumble and many more other stumbleupon users will be presented with the same story. And there is more chances that they will also like it, as almost 30 to 60 people have already liked it, so I guess it would be a good article. So you may get even more thumbs up. Making the story even popular.

Using this technique may help with Digg stories, if you have more followers who are active in Digg.

Why will this footer message work?
If we have the same message in the article, then also it will be read by our regular readers, then whats the need of RSS signature message — This is a good point.
But to get votes of most of the regular readers you need to make the message more clear and personal. Make it clear to the subscribers that you are asking for votes only with subscribers. Make the message as personal as possible and you will get more votes.
If you ask for votes generally in the article, then chances are that it will generally be neglected.

One Silly commonsense tip 🙂
After activating the plugin and composing a good personalized message, just don’t sit and expect hell lot of votes. Instead write an article, so that it gets delivered to their inbox or RSS reader. So that they open your article there and notice your vote request 🙂

Do you think this technique is simple and effective to get votes from your regular readers? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.

Using #tags[HashTags] in Twitter

For those of you who do not know twitter here is a video to explain Twitter in simple, plain English.

Now a days you might have seen bloggers around the world announcing twitter contests, wherein the person who want to participate in the contest has to follow the blogger and tweet one of the message to his followers, like:

#200giveaway Just entered the Technotip.org $200 giveaway contest. You can win by following @technotip and retweet. http://xr.com/giveaway

Ever wondered how they track your tweets?
There are two methods widely used to track them.
Hash tags and Search.

Search is simple and most of you know about it. If not, then use Tweetag to search for any keyword being discussed by twitter members. To easy the job Tweetag itself tracks and displays the 40 most frequent topics being discussed on Twitter.

What is a #Hashtag?
Tweeples using “#“signs in front of “Keywords” or “Groups” and “Locations“ [This works almost similar to the tags in flickr and other services.]
For Example: recently Thin Air Summit held a conference and called their Hashtag #TAS08 for Thin Air Summit 2008.

These so called # groups are called “Hashtags“ .

Hashtags by definition are used to create real time track records of creating groups on twitter. Placing the # sign in front of keywords or targeted groups, makes it easier to track all conversations in the twitter time line via search.
The hashtag (#hashtag) provides a way for a tweet to be directed at a group and disseminated to people in that group.

Now assume that you have created a (hashtag)group #Google. If you search for keyword Google, you will get thousands of results. But if you search for #Google, you will get the messages of your group only. So this is a big advantage in tracking the tweets of your group.

I recommend using either one tag at the very beginning or at the very end in most cases and try not to put tags in the middle of the tweet – for easy and accurate tracking.

And the popular services that help you to track hashtagged tweets are hashtags.org and twittgroups.

To get started:
Follow @hashtags on Twitter. They will follow you back automatically, and your hashtags will be tracked in Hashtags.org

Its a good feature in twitter, but if used extensively it will surly spoil the twitter environment, by making it look spamy. And some spammers can also take advantage of it, by using some automated scripts(which work using twitter API) to post frequent hashtagged tweets.

You can follow us on twitter @technotip.