Exactly 3 minutes ago, the chennai super kings won the IPL 3, the DLF IPL 2010.

Suresh Raina with a superb knock helped CSK reach a formidable total of 168 which was successfully defended by CSK. Bollinger, Ashwin, Raina, Murali all did a great job of bowling tight lines and not giving easy runs away.

I would have liked it if the run outs had been tighter but no worries. CKS WON! It was a well deserved victory since CSK have been 3 time semi finalists and 2 time finalists. So now this makes them one time champions too

I know most of you will be Firefox  patrons. To be fair, Firefox is awesome. But I have never taken to Firefox. I started with opera and even though few sites don’t work on it properly, I have used it consistently for the past 5 or 6 years. I used to use it back when it was paid. I loved it back then and I love it even more now

Here is why I love opera 10:

• The Looks
• Speed dial
• The NEW sync feature which lets you sync all your bookmarks, notes etc
• This sync feature has to be mentioned TWICE. Its that good. It has a lot of features that you will love.
• Notes
• POPUP blocker is effective while still making the INTERNET enjoyable. Firefox throws up too many popups saying it blocked a popup. That’s very good, but somehow I dont feel it ever came as good as opera.
• The turbo feature is useful when I am browsing from a really slow line.
• I had always envied the Firefox users as they had the dictionary feature. Now its there in opera too.
• torrent client
• The LINK feature is awesome from a webmaster standpoint.
• Opera Mini…need I say more about why I love Opera Mini???
• Opera has always been faster that Firefox. At least for me. I just found that I was not wrong check this link

Some features that I sorely miss in Opera:

• I wish opera had an open source-code like Firefox so many more plug-ins will be released.
• Opera just doesn’t work right with some of the sites, I hope they would fox it. (Opera 10 has been working fine with some of the usual problematic sites).
• Toolbars from various sites are not made for opera. I sorely miss this. Again hopefully opera will open up more.

Get Opera Here

After my last stint with wolfenstine, I went ahead and looked for an FPS. I was told by my friends to get prototype, so that’s what I did.

The game installed fine and I started playing it. Initially they started with the end of the story, which was VERY confusing in the beginning as I had no clue about the controls. All I could do was run around and keep hitting whatever I see. But then it started making better sense. Though the controls are a little flimsy as the targeting is not too great, but this is how the game was supposed to be designed I guess. Aimless destruction, with a solid plot behind it.

The graphics are pretty good and was far far better than Wolfenstine. While wolfenstine was plasticky and rather plain, prototype has a definite solid look with great texture. So eye candy wise, its a solid 8.5/10 …

You play as Alex Mercer who has been infected with some strange virus and remembers nothing much from the past. You are given multiple missions throughout the game. Each mission brings you closer to understand what happened to Alex Mercer. MNU is the company behind this all, that’s all you understand initially. Then as you go, you consume people and absorb their memory to understand the plot better. The storyline is very solid; I liked how he gets cornered at every turn but emerges victorious after each level.

Combat:

The most interesting part of the game is the combat and the upgrades related to it. Claws, hammerfist, Sword, chain, super Muscle strength are all great. The ability to buy these upgrades as you go along is great. The upgrades give you really great advantage over your enemies.

My tactics:

Sword or Claw against humans or hunters

Sword against the Super hunter

Hammerfist against the armor, though I prefer t hijack a tank and blast others to oblivion.

My most loved ability is the chain fist and the upgrade which allows you to bring your enemies closer. I use it to grab on to helicopters and then hijack them. Helicopters have good mobility as well as great firepower, but remember they have low armor and are easily shot down. Tanks on the other hand have a high degree of survivability and firepower but very low mobility.

Must have upgrades:

Glide (VERY VERY important)
Claw and the devastator attack
Adrenalin surge
Chain with grab upgrade
Ground shatter, very useful to kill groups of smaller enemies.
Armor, it is given automatically after one of th major levels.
get as many sprint abilities and health boost as you can because both of them help you to improve your combat effectiveness.

There are a few more but I leave it to personal preferences.

Gameplay:

Its very difficult to control what Alex does in a tight battle as it is pretty tough to target specific people in a big crowd of baddies. Gameplay is an average 6/10 … even though the gameplay and controls are not that great because of the bad targeting and the multitude of options, it is really fun to play the game as this game is supposed to be chaotic and not really a linear organized game.

Really loved the consume feature where you consume and absorb someone to take their knowledge, strength and shape. This is especially good inside military bases.

Well its been a long time since I have posted here. Been very busy with college and IMing. Anyway I got a day off due to ONAM. For those of you who have no idea what Onam is, it’s a harvest festival of Kerala.

I had a copy of Wolfenstein, the new PC game and I popped it in and installed it today. I finished the game in 6 hours or less. Took a couple of breaks in between. Anyway this is what I felt:

The story plays pretty smoothly and not a bad storyline either. The players are given an unfair advantage with respect to the medallion and the crystals. The bad guys rarely stand a chance. I played the game in the normal mode and had no problems picking off the targets. I pretty much sailed through. A caution here, the game is extremely linear. The compass points, you go, enemies in between, you shoot. As simple as that. There is no food for your mind.

The weapons are great. Especially some of the more native ones like the cannon and such. I especially liked the upgrades that you can buy from the black-market. Gold is pretty easy to come by and hence the add-ons are almost a given.

Enemies are VERY stupid. AI is bad; I mean they run straight at you. The dialogs used by the soldiers are very limited, gets annoying after a while. But people who like to gun down things and blow things up are going to love this. Pure and simple mindless fun.

In spite of all this, the game was pretty fun to play. Enjoyed my day off. I would rate the game as 8/10 .

PS: I haven’t played the multiplayer yet.

Wow, its been a veryt long time since I blogged here. The reason being that there was nothing worth blogging about for quite some time now. But there is something worthy of blogging now.

Keyword Elite 2.0

Brad Callen has reased the next version of the famed Keyword Elite.

read the Keyword Elite 2 Review

Have you ever noticed that titles on the cover of magazines sometimes differ from the actual title of the articles themselves? The next time you purchase a magazine, look at the titles and see if they are the same. In the latest copy of Wired magazine on my desk, the headline on the cover is “The Rebirth of Music”, however, the actual name of the article is “Music Reborn”.

Why is this?

This is because the objective of the circulation department of the magazine is to sell as many copies as they can. In their effort to do so, they often simplify, modify or reconstruct the titles of the articles to make it more interesting and make people buy their magazines. In effect, the circulation department is “working the headlines.” They simply try and make a good headline better. To make the title better, they sometimes lengthen the title, as with the example above. Sometimes they shorten it. Other times, they change a word or two. And sometimes the entire title is reworked.

To improve your online campaigns, it is a good idea to review printed marketing material to spur ideas and to get you thinking creatively.

As often is the case, looking at printed marketing material can spur ideas in your head on how to improve your online campaigns.

Here are some more examples taken from the book, “Tested Advertising Methods”.

These titles were given more impact by being shortened:

[Original Title]: Hot Tips on Heating Your Home
[Revised Title]: How to Cut Fuel Bills

[Original Title]: A Smart Shopper’s Guide to Bargains
[Revised Title]: Shopper’s Guide to Bargains

[Original Title]: Three Ways to Mothproof a Marriage
[Revised Title]: 3 Ways to Save a Marriage

[Original Title]: How to Understand the Perplexing Teen-Ager
[Revised Title]: How to Understand Your Teen-Ager

[Original Title]: Which Diet Tips Pay Off?
[Revised Title]: Diet Tips That Pay Off

The following are article titles that were given more sales appeal by being lengthened:

[Original Title]: When Your Husband’s Affection Cools
[Revised Title]: When Your Husband’s Affection Cools – and what to do about it

[Original Title]: Birth Control for Men
[Revised Title]: Now – Safe, Simple Birth Control for Men

[Original Title]: You Can Read Faster
[Revised Title]: Read Faster – a 20-Day Plan

[Original Title]: Key to Fitness at Any Age
[Revised Title]: Key to Fitness at Any Age for Men and Women

Here are article titles that were given greater interest by reconstructing them:

[Original Title]: The Smugglers of Misery
[Revised Title]: Where All the Drugs Come From

[Original Title]: Building on the Positives in Marriage
[Revised Title]: 4 Ways to Keep Your Marriage Young

[Original Title]: High Blood Pressure – New Light on a Hidden Killer
[Revised Title]: New Protection Against Heart Attack

[Original Title]: Backyard Gardeners Are Back in Style
[Revised Title]: How to Start a Backyard Garden

[Original Title]: What You Can Do to Combat Inflation
[Revised Title]: 10 Ways to Beat the High Cost of Living

Look at your Titles, not just in your PPC campaigns, but on your web sites as well. Could your Titles use a rewrite to improve the message?

Here are some of the secrets to getting your articles, newsletters, sales copy, squeeze pages, blog posts and press releases noticed. Not only that, but you will also discover the techniques that will encourage your readers to become an army of promoters who will spread your sales message far and wide for FREE.

So why is it important to get your website noticed?

Imagine that there is a giant bar with over a billion men who are looking for a sexy lady. However, for every 1,000 men there is one woman. Your website is one of the men and the women are the customers. Let’s say that the design and layout of your website determines the physical appearance of your man. However, your site’s content is the clothes , hair, sense of humor, charisma, intelligence, etc. A site with good content is like a man who is the ultimate charmer . He will have the ability to attract all the women and he will stand out from the crowd. This is how the Internet works. There are millions of new men entering the bar every month so it is becoming more and more important to learn how to not only attract the women but also how to satisfy them over and over again.

Now it is time for some science:Being noticed is something every human craves for. It is in our blood and in the DNA of our society. Everything from your hairstyle to the car you drive has the effect of getting you noticed. In the big wide world it is nice to be noticed, but on the Internet

IT IS VITAL!

You could have a great product or service but if nobody reads about it then your sales will be a big fat ZERO. There is nothing worse than putting blood, sweat and tears into an article only to find that just a handful of people read it.

We don’t know about you, but if we’re going to take the time to make great content then we want as many people as possible to see it. The key to all of this is to ensure that your site stands out from the crowd and causes a reaction.

The late, great, Prince of Print (Gary Halbert) said: “The worst response you can get from your readers is meh.”

Meh is the sound you do not want your readers making. Meh shows that they are not really interested or motivated by your content. In fact Even a negative response is better than a ‘meh’
A negative or controversial response is not ideal but it gets you talked about and that means free promotion. So by now you should realize the importance of being noticed and standing out from the crowd.

As of yesterday, twitter seems to have introduced a new cap on how many followers can be added. The cap seems to be 1000 a day. This is seen as a measure to curb rampant twitspam. There is also speculations as to if this is a temporary measure or a permanent one.

For the unenlightened ones out there, twitspam is when someone uses automated tools to auto follow people and then normal people respond by following them back. This then enables the spammers to spam the followers. Twitters 2000 followers cap notwithstanding, twitter spam has seen enormous rise in the past 3 months.

Hopefully this measure will curb twitter spam.

Introduction to the Importance of Content Development

Here’s a secret that very successful bloggers know:

Even if you screw everything else up, great content has wings! Even if you don’t set your blog up properly. If you do everything else wrong, which you won’t, you could become popular on the sheer value of your content alone.
Now let’s flip that…

What if you don’t develop good content but you excel at marketing and link building? Will the same apply?

No.

The heart of a blog is content that people want to read, view, or listen to. And they want to tell others about it. Now, let’s not get cocky and just think it is a simple matter of “content is king.” Odds are, with the massive amount of content on the web today, that even with good content your blog could just sit there with no readers for a very long time.

That’s the other thing that pro bloggers figured out…
Once they understood how to market their blogs they quickly realized how much time they wasted just writing great content for a few visitors per day. Some pro bloggers have been blogging since 2002 and even earlier. It didn’t have to take them as long as it did to get popular. They just didn’t know the marketing techniques that go with great content development. So they had to wait for the web to discover THEM instead of launching themselves to the web. But, First Thing First!

In the Content Development section of this site you will find all the tricks for coming up with great, sticky, crowd-pleasing content that will grow your readership and get into the search engines. You have to have something worth visiting before you start marketing the site, or it’s all for nothing.
But I Can’t Write!

That’s fine. But anyone can blog! This site is called Blog Success, not Writing Success! But you will find yourself becoming a better writer in the process. Writing is like anything else. You get better the more you do it and study how other successful bloggers write.

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Attention = Money

Everything about having a profitable presence online revolves around getting attention. Every website owner from beginner to the largest company wants all the attention they can get for their site, ads, products, content, or services.

With blogging it is no different. For your blog to thrive and profit, it needs targeted traffic…attention! But wanting it and getting it are two different things. We are all fighting for attention. The internet is a gigantic popularity contest. The biggest the human race has ever waged in our history.
Sound Daunting?

Don’t let the perception of massive competition for visitors fool you. Out of all the websites on the web, a tiny fraction makes up the most popular. We are here to put you into that elite group. And it isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds! Most Sites Suck!

Most sites on the web, as you’ve noticed, are really crappy places to visit. If that weren’t the case, you’d have hundreds or thousands more bookmarks than you do. The reason your bookmark file is manageable isn’t because of your “bookmark discipline” or your pickiness. It’s because there really isn’t that much out there on the web that moves people to bookmark or subscribe. 5+ years ago I would have told you that by 2009, everyone would have picked up on the fact that you have to actually do something, anything, remarkable to get noticed and be “bookmark-able.” I thought it was obvious then, and that everyone with a website would have figured out the game by now.

Very few site owners have figured out the game to this day. Most sites on the web are still crap. Most people who throw up a site are still just phoning it in. Most websites, to this day, don’t have any content “worthy of devotion” as my friend Clay Cotton puts it. Most sites in every niche have owners who think you can just slap together some junk and “make it big.”

Here’s the Big Secret to Getting All the Attention You Need: Don’t Suck! You must set yourself above the rest of the people in your market. You must be remarkable and stand out. Sound hard? It really isn’t given that most sites, well, suck. The big, magic formula (and you can go back to your very most favorite sites on the web to verify this yourself) is that good, high traffic, profitable sites, including blogs, are remarkable in some way.

Smacked In The Face

Have you ever been surfing and you just seem to hit one poorly designed, crappy site after another? And then, just as you are about to give up, you click one more link and BAM! A site the likes of which you haven’t seen for weeks or even months smacks you right in the face. The content is exactly what you’ve been looking for. The navigation is easy to understand. You seem to find something great around every corner of the site on every link you click. Its that moment when you think to yourself that you can’t get this site into your bookmarks fast enough. You can’t wait to tell someone else about it. You devour the content, and once you catch up with everything on the site, you wonder when the owner is going to post again so you can read, view, or listen to more of what they have to share.
Again, you may be thinking to yourself right now: “How am I ever going to create that feeling for people? Sounds like you have to be a genius to do that!”

More than anything else, this site is here for the exact purpose of training you to build one of those remarkable sites. And that’s how you are going to get the attention you need to make your site profitable. Excited? A little bit? Good. Because right now the only thing standing in the way of you and blog success is a bit of time, some learning, discipline, and application of what you learn here. That’s it. As you go through the training you will start to believe this is really possible. That you can be one of those super popular bloggers that people talk about and follow. You will learn how to put together an interesting blog around an interesting topic and drive traffic to it like a pro without ever worrying about whether you have what it takes. You have everything you need right here. Take it seriously.

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

We’re about to point you to an extremely well-done resource for beginning SEO. It is one of the best written documents on all the important points for SEO on the web today. But Before You Go! The way we train you to set up your blog, the software we use, along with the plugins and settings we use, will get you 95% to the finish line with SEO. The absolute necessities for optimizing your blog posts for the search engines are as follows:

1. Your Post Title: Always keep your titles as brief as possible with your main keyword phrase for the post as close to the front of the title as possible.
If your keyword is Leash Training, then… “Leash Training Your Dog” is better than “Training Your Dog To Walk On A Leash” for the search engines.

2. The Post Body: In your first paragraph, following the keyword example above, you want your keyword to appear as soon in the first sentence of the first paragraph as possible.
Paragraph One of your Blog Post
“Leash training is a necessary evil for all dog lovers. It might not be as much fun for you or your dog to spend a day on this important training, but walking properly on a leash is good for you and your dog’s safetly and well being. Here’s how to put the fun back into leash training while getting the job done in less than 1 week.”

The Rest of The Post

From here on out, don’t stuff your post with the keyword phrase “leash training.” Use natural language to describe the probems and solutions and let it flow. The worst thing you can do is make the post hard to read and far too “dense” by using your keyword too often. If it sounds funny or if it doesn’t seem to fit or read well, you probably need to choose better wording to make the post something worth reading. You are going to have natural placement of the word “leash” in a post about leash training. You are also going to have natural use for the word “training” by itself in a post like this as well. Your keyword phrase DOES NOT have to be together (leash training) to have an affect on your search engine rankings. “Leash” and “training,” no matter where they appear throughout the post, will support your case to the search engines that you should be ranked well for “leash training.”

3. Links: With a post constructed properly as in the example above, the only thing left to do is getting links to it.
Google, for example, judges content by cheating. They like to see what OTHER people think of your content before making up their mind where you should rank. So they look at all the sites in their index that link to you and decide how many of those sites really matter in your niche to give you a score for ranking. A link to your post is a “vote” from another source on the web for your content and its relevancy. So getting other bloggers in your niche to link to you is crucial to making the top 10 rankings in Google. If you are networking with other bloggers and they are following your content, or they find you through a link on a social site, then it depends on how good your post is whether or not you will get natural links to it.

A good mix of links from inside the posts of other bloggers (who point to you as a resource to support what they are talking about) along with social links from your social networking and other social profiles (fans of your site who submit you to places like StumbleUpon) will usually ensure that you beat all other similar articles on the topic in the engines who have fewer links.

The only sites that will beat you for your key phrase after all the above has been done are sites with more “authority.” This means older sites that Google and others have a longer history of “trust” with and sites that overall have more links than you do. You can overtake more authoritative sites in time through good habits of link building and writing great posts with the SEO techniques outlined here.

The purpose of this article is to show you the biggest social websites on the net. Once you have created your content you should submit it to the relevant sites. Social media websites are one of the most powerful resources available. There are literally hundreds to choose from, and many of them have millions of users, but below I have listed four of the biggest and most powerful.

Promotional Website Number 1 = StumbleUpon

www.stumbleupon.com
Description = StumbleUpon is highly flexible. You can promote almost any type of content on StumbleUpon, and its userbase covers all ages.

WARNING: We have had hundreds of thousands of hits from StumbleUpon. However, the quality of traffic is very low. Most users flick from one site to another with the Stumble button so won’t stick around to subscribe or click your ads.

Promotional Website Number 2 = slashdot

www.slashdot.org
Description = SlashDot is a site for geek content. Anything related to the web, technology, computers, etc. If you have content related to these topics, then submit it to SlashDot and hopefully a moderator will put your content on the main page.

WARNING: We have been on the main page, and it crashed our server.

Promotional Website Number 3 = digg

www.digg.com
Description = The Big Daddy, the monster, the biggest and most powerful of them all.

WARNING: We have been on the Digg.com main page three times. It is probably best to avoid the often childish comments from users. However, many bloggers use Digg as a way of finding stories so for link building they don’t come much better than Digg.com.

Promotional Website Number 4 = prweb

www.prweb.com
Description = PRweb is a press release distributor. If you have content that is newsworthy then a press release can be hugely powerful.

WARNING: A payment may be required based on how wide the distribution is. It is also advisable to hire someone to write your press release for you.

Action points: Take five minutes and subscribe to all of the above sites. Have a play with each site and get a feel for how they work and the types of articles they prefer. These sites are your ticket to Internet riches so take the time to get to know them.