Breaking The Ice

First impression varies from person to person and situation to situation. It is human to feel nervous about the “first”. However, overcoming the awkwardness by being aware of yourself and the situation, and more so by simply being natural and confident, helps in making the right first impression. Never will life give us a second chance to create a first impression, but being aware of yourself and not faking it to create the first impression will be the lasting impression.

Read the complete article on:

http://wordwiserr.com/ 

What's Up, Man!

 

Smartphones are the necessary evils that keep our day busy with activities. With the amount of software downloads, as such, our life is centered on finger tips. Facebook, PIP Camera, EBook  Reader  and many such applications are in offer. These  are not only useful but also sources of image enhancers, which keep  the happy hormones flowing. Along with these, there is this software called WhatsApp messenger that offers cost cutting messaging applications and easy functionalities to keep us connected and entertained 24X7.

I remember the first time I set a Facebook profile. The long lost friends and acquaintances were soon only a click away. Yet with time, logging on, updating, reading the comments and counting the number of likes were waning away. My face then searched only for mails, the messages my friends and acquaintances from the book, sent through Facebook message system. Wow. That was such a relief. I was no more worried about a PC, an android phone insisting on software download, and if ignored the profile or pictures going public.

That is when I was gifted an android phone. My well-wisher, my husband, wanted me to have all the facilities under one roof. And he introduced me to WhatsApp.

What’s up? I cried out. Hush hush, as it sounded, I defined it as an application that did not disturb me much, especially when the setting is put on silent mode. And at the same time, it helped me share the messages, videos and images on an immediate basis. Along with it, there was entertainment in the form of jokes, current affairs, notification, and information circulation, which brought the WhatsApp users on the same platform.

Interestingly, the same joke may come from more than one contact and so do the dissection of news, views or even the jokes, for that matter. Though I am a lazy Facebook user when it comes to  reading and liking various Facebook pages, I could not resist ignoring the little jokes, and tit-bits on WhatsApp.

Wonder, who are the people behind? I like to call them the creative heads that can visualise and execute a joke from nothing. At the same time laugh at situations and make a joke based on their personal experience.

And as I kept myself fully occupied as a WhatsApp user, the dear old Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, at a time when there were about one billion users.

Now, what do I say, we belong to both Facebook and WhatsApp. And we love tampering with our privacy settings and account settings. The creative heads continue to churn, irrespective of the software, and the audiences continue to pursue their entertaining and messaging means. In short, we feel smarter day by day in our online world.

Binding Memories

Life without gadgets, especially our dear mobile phones, has become a dream impossible to even imagine. A recent incident in my friend’s life, was about to make me believe the same. The endless list of contacts, the pictures clicked at various occasions, the thoughtless pranks captured, family and friends in different poses, and the downloads from mails saved…. 

These minicomputer like devices, technically speaking, the high end phones with high end technology, bring the world into the small frame, and link us to the people, places and things at the tap of our fingers, which are too large for those tiny keypads. Hmn…. 

A day without that phone was miserable for her. 

Two days after the loss was reported, a complaint was filed; and then the phone reappeared miraculously. Yes, miraculously. God knows the reason for it. 

My friend was surprised… Happy … Life could not have been more joyous. 

Of course, expensive it was. And the plan to buy a new mobile phone was discarded. 

My friend decided to reset the instrument with the new SIM and bring her life back on track.

She opened the phone carefully and I could see shadows of unhappiness setting in. I could not help but look in her direction. The storage card or memory card was missing. 

In that shocked moment the only thing I could hear and remember was…. “Somebody has wiped my memories”. She did not cry. No tears rolled out. 

As a friend I stood by her watching. So right! Her memories….

The instrument was instrumental in binding memories. What will we be if our memories could not be captured? In bits they remain, somewhere ingrained in our subconscious….

Content Writing: A Marketing Strategy

Writing is an art of expressing ideas, thoughts and information.  The concept of writing has been used through media as journalistic writing, creative writing, research writing, personal writing, and many other forms; and in the current context content writing.

In fact, content writing gained its prominence with Internet. This is mainly because “content writing is a branch of content marketing, which aims at writing in a way that draws the targeted audience to the site in engaging them to active participation. This participation may include readers commenting on blogs and social networks, clicking ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ or ‘Tweet’ about the written post or uploaded video.”

A good content strategy often begins with the use of search engine optimization (SEO) technique to obtain higher number of visits to the site.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be defined as an Internet marketing strategy that helps to improve the visibility of a web page or a website in a search engine’s (e.g. Google, MSN, Yahoo) search results. A web writer makes use of keywords, searches for new keywords and works on specific keywords to get new traffic.

Here, it is necessary to mention search engine marketing (SEM), which in short, “is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).” In fact, it is a rather broad term that utilizes the technology of search engines with the goal of “combining the two processes of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC)”. Indeed, it would be better to say that, “no SEM campaign is complete without SEO.”

A link to the power point presentation on Content Writing- A Marketing Strategy –

http://www.slideshare.net/DeeyaN12/content-writing-ppt

Love For A Lifetime

Shobhaa De writes in Spouse, “While (the) wife had ‘adjusted’ to his long absences, he felt quite lonely and said excitedly that he was looking forward to spending the next few days catching up with her life.” Now that’s the kind of life we are all a part of; we get to read about celebrity couples preparing for the V-Day but like them every other person appreciates the essence of the day even though it’s western culture that is getting Indianised. So even though you are very much a part of each other’s life, the much commercialised Valentine’s Day gives you the chance to express your feelings. No more do you get butterflies-in-the-stomach; it’s just the desire to spend the whole day together and revel in nostalgia. Studies of dating and engaged couples find that feelings of passion and infatuation tend to fade quickly in the first year, and a year or two later often it’s all gone. By then love takes a new meaning. You learn to accept situations, circumstances and make sacrifices along with a lot of give and take to keep the relationship going. Gradually, love, marriage, children and with growing responsibilities, forty becomes an age to participate in work and more work. There are days when you don’t take time to be with your beloved or just touch and reassure your feelings. With time every relationship gets caught in the ‘taken for granted’ syndrome. You know you love but hardly get time to put forward your thoughts and feelings. And then it is stealing time to relax and spend time together, just the two of you. Of course nothing is easy and so is finding true love in your valentine. The beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and as psychologist Robert Sternberg puts it, if you have the three ingredients of love - intimacy, commitment and passion - the relationship is going to last forever. Excerpts from Article published in btw, Love's Labour Found by Deeya Nayar-Nambiar

Red Alert

Take interest in what your children are doing for it will not only help them be an open book, you will also be able to satiate their curiosity without them misusing the Internet.

By Deeya Nayar-Nambiar

Surfing the Net is like an early morning cup of tea that makes you feel incomplete if you do not catch up with your friends, check e-mail or book movie tickets online. It has made the world a smaller place, but along with that it has also brought unforeseen influences on the young, curious minds. So it is essential to monitor your children when they are in cyberspace to ensure their physical, mental and psychological growth in a safe and secure environment. For this, it is necessary that parents acquaint themselves with the Internet to understand the warning signs.

Last year a 13-year-old Mumbai schoolboy from the upmarket Bombay Scottish School died while trying to perform a choking game, a fad among teenagers in the West. Though the death was initially attributed to suicide caused by academic pressure, his parents later came out to speak about the ‘choking game’ where participants strangle themselves in order to experience the high that comes with the deprivation of oxygen to the brain even though the website warns of the dangers but peer group influence encouraged the young lad to practice the lethal stunt.

Children often engage in activities they consider adventurous or fun. The Internet to a great extent serves children in their pursuits, be it finding new friends, updating their blog or getting entertained. Parents, however, are unaware of the dangers or even the existence of such popular activities. And even if they know, peer pressure makes most of them overlook the parent and child age difference as a ‘generation gap’.

The result is that cyber crimes involving children are on a rise on the Internet with the various chat rooms, networking sites and search engines encouraging forbidden activity. But again, in every case the Internet is also an information provider that binds people in the cyber world to your children. As said by author Parry Aftab in her book The Parent’s Guide To Protecting Your Children In Cyberspace says, “Information does not harm children, people do.”

Concerned parents have started self-help groups to educate their children about the dangers and also to increase their knowledge of the same. But there are many parents who are not even aware of the basic Internet operations and these groups help to explain the concepts. Although well-read and competent professionally, they are often unable to distinguish harmful data for themselves that becomes a handicap in protecting their child.

A number of filter programmes such as NetNanny, CyberPatrol, CyberSitter, SurfWatch can stand guard against these dangers. Filters not only block out content that you do not want your child to access but also monitor the general content viewed and help you keep a tab on the time spent on the site. It can also help you to trace and protect your child from strangers on chat rooms.

For example, with CyberPatrol you can customise the filter levels depending upon you child’s age and decide how much of your personal information is open to the world. It can even limit the amount of time a child can use the Internet. There are even websites like www.website-blocker.com to help parents ‘block’ harmful or inappropriate websites. But the hitch is that in most cases once the free trial period is over, you must to buy the software if you wish to continue using it.

Here is a simple way to monitor your computer’s activities. Begin with looking into the machine’s history. Click on the Start button on the left corner of your main screen and go into My Computer -> C: -> Local Settings -> History. The history tells you the websites that have been visited along with the day date and time. You can also go and view the web pages for yourself. You can then block the website by customising the settings of your Internet browser.

An alternative method is to click on the Start button and select Run. Type c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in the Run box. Choose to open the link in Notepad. It will display some cryptic information. Just go to the last line of the file, hit the Enter key and type the name of the website with the number 127.0.0.1.

For example, if you wish to block the networking site www.facebook.com, your last line should read 127.0.0.1 facebook.com. Save the file and exit. Likewise, you can block as many websites as you like with the above technique. If you want to remove the ban later, repeat the process and delete the name of the website from the last line.

Ask your children to help you with operating the machine and search engines and try working together. If you still feel your child is getting addicted to Internet, move the computer out of the kid’s bedroom to a more visible location, assign reasonable time limits, and encourage more real-life activities with family and friends. There is also no harm in taking professional help for your child’s Internet addiction.

It is easy to attribute the mistakes of a child to bad parenting but you need to realise that there is no better way to protect your child than being vigilant. Teach them the rules of computer safety and leave it to them to decide right and wrong. Take interest in what they are doing for it will not only help them be an open book, you will also be able to satiate their curiosity without letting them misusing the Internet.

But you can understand your children better by being a friend first and a guardian later. It becomes even more essential for parents to maintain close relationship and open communication to ensure they stay connected through all stages of their upbringing.

BTW, February 4, 2008