Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

That Social Networking thing!!

Many a times I am asked whether social networking is worth it ( Yes) and why it is so tough ( No, it isn’t).

 

       Social Net Working ??

All screenshots and trademarks are acknowledged of respective owners.

So here I am putting together a bare bones essential set of Social Networks dos to help you be a social networking master.

1) LinkedIn

  1. Profile – Go and create a LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com ( if you don’t have one, I suggest you create it and then come back to the article).

    2. Make sure your LinkedIn profile has the following

    • Nice presentable professional photo
    • Correct Work history
    • Good and Verifiable Recommendations
    • Enough keywords to help people searching for people of your skills
    • Make your profile visible with a customized URL (as in www.linkedin.com/in/ajayohri )
  2. Groups – Join enough enough groups of both primary skills and secondary hobbies (limited to 5) .Introduce yourself there. Create a group and invite people if you feel like doing so ( Our group now has 700 people on LinkedIn). You can export the group email addresses in a csv , put this for a newsletter from www.feedblitz.com or invite them for a www.ning.com special networking site.
  3. Connections – LinkedIn will help you import your address book from email providers , and even csv files . Send invitations to people you know, a Don’t Know on your invitation will set a bar on your ability to send invitations again.
  4. Open Networking – Open networkers accept invitations from all, do not flag any invitation as I Do not know. They feel that the small loss of privacy is much smaller than the huge variety of contacts they get- especially since most people have shared their email address to many people. It is recommended you choose a Gmail email for open networking to handle any spam etc.You need to join groups like Top Linked.com ,Invite Me, Linkedin500, LION (LinkedIn Open Networkers) and display your email address for people to connect to you.If you connect to people having a lot of connections already, you get their network as a second tier network so it is smarter to just connect to the top 50-100 most LinkedIn people.

2) Ning.com – This is for small communities , and you can create customized communities based on your interests or join existing ones. You can even put ads and earn from the ads, pat a small amount to ning.com to  transfer your domain name to a ning.com website. The best such community I have seen is www.analyticbrdige.com thanks especially to the hard work put there and quality of people coming in. More interactive the community, more buzz it spreads, and attracts even more people- It is a circle of virtue.Opposite for low activity communities.You choose and create a group on a big existing community rather than re invent the wheel by creating a small community on your own.

3) Facebook.com  – You can create a Facebook page for your business, send invites asking your friends and customers to be fans , give updates via Facebook, even set multiple levels of what people can see or cant see in your Facebook profile to separate your friends with your business associates. The groups features on Facebook is just as well designed as for LinkedIn.

4) Twitter.com – A very good article on using Twitter is by Sandro here http://smartdatacollective.com/Home/16336

Twitter can help you attract many small followers, and you can give updates of your website or your business created to your clients ,associates,colleagues,friends and the whole world. It can even be chosen as a live chat for customer service or for answering questions.It has privacy options as well so you can send it only to the people whom you choose to connect with.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning and Twitter – 4 great ways to start social networking and get free publicity for your business and your website.

5) Blogs – Blogs or weblogs can be created on www.blogspot.com and www.wordpress.com for writing about your product and service in semi informal manner.

It is recommended you create your own website and do your blog there ( see previous article at www.decisionstats.com )

Add www.Skype.com for communicating with people all over the world without exposing your phone number and a Website for displaying your goods and services, and your Web 2.0 strategy for a small player trying to survive the recession is ready to begin.

And that my dear reader, was the social networking thing !!! Let me know your comments and thoughts below

A Website in less than a hour

I just created a new website (www.swanplc.com ).It took me around 45 minutes from the time I put in my credit card information for getting new server space to getting the final look of a website.

If you are a SME / Academic who has always wanted to create a Web 2.0 website but were skeptical  about the whole thing a jig, read on.

1) Choosing a hosting provider (www.bluehost.com  I chose Bluehost because for a 24 month plan I get the domain name registration also free . This works out to 6.95 dollars a month.

2) Choosing a domain name (This was simple and part of the sign in process above. Since my organization is Swarajya Analytics Private Limited , I chose the name www.swanplc.com as other alternatives were too long or not available.

Note I tried to choose a domain name that

  • is easy to remember
    • (not too long ,
    • not too short,
    • doesn’t have similar sounding websites),
  • is very related to my original task/name,
  • and is available)

3) Choosing a web software –The website I am making is just a place for people to come, read and then contact me. The number of webpages would be limited to less than 5, so I choose WordPress. If I had to choose a large website with many web pages , I would probably choose Drupal (see www.decisionstats.com/drupal )

4) Use Simple Scripts – When you log on to the C-panel ( arrived after logging onto www.bluehost.com with your domain name and password emailed to you), search for the Simple Scripts icon. When you click it you can then choose the software ( here WordPress) for a 2 minute installation.

5) Choosing and Configuring a Web site Theme – For WordPress  I just Goggled WordPress themes (Works for even Drupal themes). Then

  • I find the theme which I like,
  • and download it to my desktop,
  • unzip it 
  • and upload it to my server using FileZilla
  • Go to Site Manager
  • Click New Site
  • Enter Username and Password (same as going to C-panel)
  • Click Connect
  • When you are in the website on the right side, click on www icon (top right)
  • Click again to wp-content and then to themes
  • Click and Drag and Drop you theme folder from the left top (Desktop) to Right Top (/www/wp-content/themes )
  • See Screenshot

image

Use www.yorwebsite.com/wp-admin (where yourwebsite is the hypothetical name of your website ) to login with your WordPress Username and Password ( which is different from your Control Panel Username and Password)

  • Go to Design in the Dashboard – Activate Theme.
  • Go to Plugins- Activate Akismet (Anti Spam Plug-in).It will then ask you for a WordPress API key .
  • Create a username and password on www.wordpress.com to get a WordPress API key (Alphanumeric) ,which would be needed to activate Akismet and thus avoid Spam contents.

6) Start Filling with Content – Start Posting posts or Pages ( For Separate Sections)for the content you have planned for in showing

Everything said and done, this whole process should take you less than an hour , after which you can tweak the website content or even the theme or add plugins to your heart’s content.

Use websites to write and express yourself, and also as a 24/7 showcase for attracting work /consulting /research assignments.

R Successor Language ‘Tea’ announced

The article was first announced in 2008/4/1. Here is a reprint.

The successor to the popular open source language R has been announced. It has been called “Tea”.

Tea language and the software has the following features –

1) The Tea ( pronounced ‘teah’ ) community is divided between users and developers.Users use and file tickets, developers develop and use a wiki and they use a forum software  like vbulletin or PhPBB 3.0 (see https://decisionstats.com/forum/ )for posting appropriate threads.

2) It uses only GUI and menu driven features for its users. Most legacy R programs can be run in Tea, provided you click the icon for launching the command line separately ( like MS Dos and Windows). If you like command line for the love, then you should be having love ,not be having Tea.

3) You can download video tutorials of Tea shortly from www.youtube.com ( see dedicated channel for Tea Project in You Tube) and also use bit torrents to download it. Tea may be also available on Sourceforge and Downloads.com shortly. There will be no plans to create and maintain a CTAN or repository of folders around the world.Source code would be available both on Google Code as well as Microsoft Developer sites. They would also be searching for one Linux site for source code- as soon as they get all the Linuxes to agree who is going to take over the world.

4) Tea is not free, as it recognizes users have to spend a lot of time learning from its single click menu driven program, video tutorials or even search indexed  help guide. Tea help is updated based on statistical analysis of usage of popular packages (using advanced analytics on the Tea wiki and the flashy website www.tea-project.org)

5) Tea will cost 1 dollars for download (refundable within a month). Money will go to someday One laptop per child which will have Tea pre installed.In addition the Tea project will work with laptop manufacturers like Dell, Compaq and IBM/Lenovo and Acer for pre installation of Tea with its Tea Excel ,Tea Web (especially for the net books)and Tea Core builds.

Note from Ajay- I tried to arrange an interview but surprisingly the Tea Core Team wont be giving interviews to anyone.Apart from the New York T of course.

Note-This is not to be confused with the Template Language developed by the University of North Carolina at http://www.sdsc.edu/srb/index.php/T_Language

Adding all the numbers

Once again I was just adding the numbers in the stimulus package of the US Senate.The economics pendulum has swung , and it has swung all the way to the left while staying there.

So here goes the math-

1) Money already spent in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program)

700 Billion

2) Money promised in Stimulus Package

800 Billion

Adults in the United States – =306-82=224 Million

Excluding the top 10 % , we have 200 million Americans qualifying for direct tax or indirect stimulus and stimuli.

That’s Total Money ( Bush TARP + Obama Stimulus) per Person =

1500 Billion/200 Million= 7500 USD

Or 15000 USD per Household.

What is wrong with this math ? Why does this number seem so low even though people /senators complain about pigs with lipsticks and pork barrel etc.

Why does the new CHANGED administration need approval for ALL 700 million ( i MEAN billion) at once ………………rather than say how about taking it 100 billion at a time.

Mortgage Relief

If instead of the usual 30 year mortgage loan, banks were told to increase loan tenure to 45 years , where 50 % defaults would be insured by the TARP after the first 20 billions of defaults- this can help bring DOWN the EMIs to say without costing anyone for healthier mortgage holders ( assume 80%)- thus giving a tax relief which is paid by the people themselves.

The Law

In eight years , the US managed to lose trillions of dollars in financial and economic crisis. Why don’t we see any lawsuits ? ( psst– Because all the US lawyers are all reclaiming houses and doing middle class bankruptcies . When not running for President .)

WASTE Again!

If you are interested in cryptology ,or would just like to pass messages securely without worrying too much ( especially corporate messages ,while on the road traveling,and using a public wireless network on the airports) you may try WASTE Again.

Note – We had blogged on the Tor Project much earlier and this is a step like that !

From the website-

What is "WASTE again"?

"WASTE again" enables you to create a decentralized and secure private mesh network using an unsecure network, such as the internet. Once the public encryption keys are exchanged, sending messages, creating groupchats and transferring files is easy and secure.

Creating a mesh

To create a mesh you need at least two computers with "WASTE again" installed. During installation, a unique pair of public and private keys for each computer is being generated. Before the first connection can be established, you need to exchange these public keys. These keys enable "WASTE again" to authenticate every connection to other "WASTE again" clients.

After exchanging the keys, you simply type in the computers IP address to connect to. If that computer is located behind a firewall or a NAT-router, you have to create a portmap first to enable incoming connections.

and the features include-

 

image

Ajay- It is based on the same historical legacy of the PGP ( Pretty Good Privacy) project of the early 1990’s and offers up to 4096 bits of encryption. It offers a simple intuitive interface for a 4 step process in creating private and public key.Combine some John Le Carre novels tradecraft,one touch keypads and residual creativity :)  and your network is securely assured from goodwill hunting.

The downloads are here-http://wasteagain.sourceforge.net/downloads.shtml

image