It is said that “human nature never changes”. At the core of every tale are human beings. They love and hate; give and take; create and destroy; hope and despair and experience all the emotions that we do today. There is also the eternal triangle of love that dominates this tale–be it love for another human being or love for a nation or concept. So, though the tale is retold, the story does not seem old.  We can still experience and empathize with the characters. We can relate to the situations and concur with their decisions. Old wine in new bottles are completely palatable.

“What about creativity?”–You may ask. Being creative is not merely creating new characters and situations. You can be wonderfully creative interpreting and retelling the tales told by Shakespeare!  Every time As You Like It  is played in the Globe theatre or elsewhere, the actors are giving creative interpretations of the characters, the director is creatively directing the play or the viewer is creatively viewing the whole! A mother telling the sotry of Cinderella to her little daughter is also being creative in her own way.  Creativity is not the exclusive forte of new tales.  It is the essence of presentation; interpretation. So, presenting old tales in new ways is as creative as presenting new tales in new ways!

So, if you are sitting on the fence thinking about creative writing, you could begin by putting old wine in new bottles! It will help you create your new tales in new ways !

1. Address for sending your review:  smnthsai@yahoo.co.in.
2. All entries to reach us by the 7th of January 2010.
3. Reviews that are accepted will be published by 10th of the month
4. The copyright for published reviews will rest with us. You may not submit it elsewhere or publish it eslewhere online or offline.
5. If for some reason we do not post your review, please understand that we receive a large number of reviews and only publish the best.
6. Unpublished reviews can be used anyhow, anywhere by you.
7. Of course, you understand that you will not get paid for the published reviews!
8. You can get a linkback to your site or blog.

Note: I have received some articles which are not in keeping with the theme of the site. I am afraid that the error lies with me. I apologize for the same.

I request writers to submit articles that are related to the theme of the site: Content, types of content, defining content, content markets, game reviews, book reviews, audio content, video content and so on.You can even review a website content and submit the site review. You can review online games and submit them. However, articles on career couseling or self help will be out of sync with the blog theme.

I also find that the articles submitted are not free from plagiarism. Please make sure that the articles are original and your own. All articles will be checked with anti plagiarism software before publishing. All articles will be published in your name and responsibility for the content will vest with you.

Why is that so?  Search engines are after all computer programs. You need to create databases and databases means records of something. So search engines create data bases of frequently searched words and match them with websites in which these words occur. They also create databases of links that connect  or from one site to another. When a user types a keyword, the database is searched and results are produced. When ranking sites access a website, they check the number of links to the site or from a site from the database and award the ranks. Hence, it is not surprising that a new world of commerce has grown around search engine optimization and link building!

But what about the googlies? I thought we were talking about search engine googlies! Yes we are. However, if you look deep into the issue you will find that it is not the search engines that make the googlies but the site owners who force search engines to produce the googles that visitors see! How?

Many site owners set out to improve page rankings for their site by ensuring that their sites are search engine optimized. Of course, they do not make a fetish of providing their visitors with information or knowledge in the process. They include the keywords in image descriptions, title of the page and scatter the keywords in sufficient percentage to ensure that search engines are hoodwinked into thinking that the site is relevant to the keyword. After all search is a computer program and the law of garbage in garbage out never changed since the introduction of the computer.

These site owners also love article directories. They will buy or create quantities of articles that are qualitatively poor but provide links back to their sites to make sure Alexa and other similar sites rank them high because of the number of incoming links to the site.  While this is cheating for links, how does it matter?

In the circumstances it is not surprising that “searchers” experience the “goglies” when they search for relevant information.  What is your experience? Do you get googlies when you google? Come share it with us!

Perhaps the characters in the novel would be amazed if they were to encounter the techies and consultants of today who are struggling to guess the “true name” of websites!  Is this a game for better control of business or……… what?

It is clear that the players of the game “Web Presence” begin with a well defined  set of rules. The rules fall into neat categories–Search Engine optimization, Search engine marketing, Keyword optimized content, link building, Page ranks, site scores, Partnering, affiliating and so on.  Each rule based evaluation produces a tally. The tally and subsequent rank, marks the extent of control or lack of control.

The contest–as usual–is with the opponent–your competition (such fierce competition at that!) to grab positions (page ranks, incoming links etc) and seize assets (keywords, traffic) and wage cyber wars for a variety of reasons–sometimes based on rules and sometimes lawlessly (if you consider the hackers, virus producers etc). The “web presence” or “true name” will also be determined by how effectively and efficiently you win the cyber wars and stand terrorizing the attackers.

On the stands are the hordes of spectators who watch the game and influence it. These are the poeople who blog, twitter, forum or socialize and create the traffic to the site and also discuss among themselves about the merits of the site (with or without reference to the tally). These are people who have something to say about what intersts them and what the “true name” should be.

Ultimately, getting at the “true name” may well prove to be too much to “bite off” and chew….

So, what is your take on that?

Who are you friends in each of these social sites? Are they the same? Are they a different? What do they feel? What do they think? What do they like? How often do you meet? ARE THEY REAL?

The truth is that the social media inhabitants are AVATARS of ourselves.  The social media world is a chance to create the person we think we should be. (Not all of us may do that, but why not? It is harmless) We endow ourselves with a personality that is a figment of our dream about ourselves. Of course our friends avatars are the same, so I suppose it is as it should be.  It is a social world where avatars interct with avatars using tools of interaction.

The reality is, we have began to rethink the human interactive experience. We are convinced that we are designing immersive, intelligent and communicative interfaces that can replace physical interaction in cyberspace. True, everybody gets to voice their opinion (no powerful voices cutting you out). True, everybody has the same tools to communicate and everybody can reply anywhere, anytime. It all seems very democratic and above board.  Of course, this world is also not devoid of influencers or networkers.

Interestingly, a few of us may struggle to influence our groups or friends, by developing enough clout on the network. We may put in the necessary hard work to be the “bully” on the network or to prove that we know the “notables” and are in the inner circle of the rich and the famous!

Most of us would prefer to be networkers. As a networker, we can be a “creative”, if we contribute actively to the content on the network.  We can be “immersed” if we are there for professional reasons. We can be “Observers” if we just browse and read and do not contribute. Finally we can be “inactives” if we just have social media memberships that we do not exploit.

Of course, categorization can vary based on perspective, but we will certainly must be fitted in a category by the Social Media world.  After all, we are a name on the list and we perform operations on a site. Our activities are data and data has labels and trends.

So if you are on digg, twitter, facebook, orkut or linkedin or what not–Welcome to the world of Social Media.  The game is getting serious.

It is the testimony of psychologists  that language is a powerful tool that can be exploited to create a cult, brainwash an audience and prompt them to behave in predictable ways. This power of language stems from its ability to communicate, inform, incite, prompt, attract, fascinate and capture the attention of the recipient. In fact, a whole new industry has grown up around this concept of communication through language–it’s referred to as social media consulting. There are  professionals in this industry who make it their business to tell you how you can exploit the power of language in social media sites to reach out to a vast audience and brainwash them into using your product.

In order to make the most effective use of language you need to first develop a customer base that consists of your actual target group. Having done this, you can then use language tools to build content that attracts, informs, prompts and brainwashes your customer base into behavorial modes that bring a business advantage to you! Working with the assistance of content developers, social media consultants and advertisers you will then be able to determine the best ways to exploit the power of communication that is inherent in language and other auditory and visual modes in order to facilitate the maximum recognition and notice for your product. You can also opt for other mediums of mass linguistic communication such as  blogs, microblogs, social networks  and consumer groups in order to reach out to your select audience. In this way you will be able to draw a greater mass into the thrall of your language – in essence creating your own cult!

Sadly, despite its all powerful role, language is often the most underexploited tool! Making language work for you could very well prove to be your greatest advantage yet! Get on the bus now, and you can watch as your erratic customer base transforms itself into an organized, vast, cult-like, mass of loyal  believers!

1. Read the posts
2. Leave comments about the post
3. Blog about content (if you are permitted to)

My blog is all about content. What makes for “intelligent content”. How intelligent content is important in the Information age. How content gets indexed; how content adds value to a website; how content is a marketing tool and so on….

Chris Baggott, will certainly dismiss the purpose the purpose of my invite–to share my knowledge– as so “first generation”.

If I say my blogs are all about citizen journalism, I stand in danger of being dismissed as “so second generation”.

If I say that my blog is a compendium to attract human visitors, I would probably be branded as “third generation” blogger!

So whatever the “generation” to which I belong, at the end of the day, I basically want more active, vociferous visitors. I want visitors who share my views or are willing to at least disagree with my views actively. I want them to argue a case or add to my argument in meaningful ways. I want the blog to be a social platform where I can share my views or argue a case with my friends and visitors on the exact nature and quality of content and its role in our daily lives.

So join me in actively discussing the different nuances of content and create the necessary verve and interest around a blog post–so that others too, are prompted to join us in the debate.

If you are visiting my blog on invite or suo motto, please do read the posts and pitch in with your own comments on the rightness or wrongness of the hypothesis that is being expostulated per post! We value your opinion and would love to debate on issues with a gusto!

Search engine algorithms were designed with only two concepts in mind–the frequency of keywords and the linking between pages.

The first algorithm aims to index the relevance of pages on the basis of  statistical frequency of the keywords that users may input into the search engine.  They were not concerned with the quality of the pages being indexed or the intrinsic value of the content that is to be found on these pages.  The higher the frequency of a keyword, the higher the relevance of the page. So keyword stuffing and spamdexing became the order of the day. Of course, Google is trying to get round this problem with its new algorithms.

The second type of algorithm was designed to analyze the way  web pages link with each other on the web.  This algorithm aims to find out whether the page is considered relevant on the web and if the linked pages has similar keywords etc ,  so that the rank of the page can be determined vis a vis other similar pages on the web.  Here too, the intrinsic value of the page content is irrelevant.

It is therefore, no wonder that the web user is often frustrated when he finds that pages that have been ranked high on the search engine result page contain nothing but a list of keywords scattered over the page or has just rubbish in the place of the information he is looking for.  It follows, content and information are not taken into consideration by the all powerful search engine algorithms that influences users choice of which websites to visit!  In this context, it must be admitted that search engines  seem to be killing content.

Increasing commoditization of content demands that brand value content be distinguished from mediocre or rubbishy content.  What is the mechanism to be adopted for this purpose?  The future will be a witness to that!