Sudeep D'Souza

Mona has worked with dental hospitals over the past 3 years helping them with their social media strategy and IT related strategic plans. You can read more about her experiences in her blog on dental hospitals . Given below is an extract of an article she has written about dental hospitals There are more than 1500+ dental hospitals in Hyderabad. Consultations cost anywhere between Rs. 100/- to Rs. 300/-. It is a business that functions a lot on word of mouth and references. However, if you are someone like me who came to Hyderabad and don't have anyone to point you in the right direction, then this is the dental review blog for you.If you call up JustDial, they will redirect you to the one that is paying them the most and who is in your area, ofcourse. However, for me, teeth are personal and sensitive and after horrible experiences, i decided to come up with this blog - To share information on good dental hospitals and in my own way give back to society.  If you refer to...

It was great to be back at the Indiblogger meet after more than 2 years. The meet was held at the Fortune Select Manohar hotel near the Begumpet Airport and it was great to meet some old friends that i got acquainted with in the last meet and it was nice catching up with them after so long. I also got to meet a lot of new friends and learnt about their interesting blogs that I am sure to be busy reading over the next few days. The meet started off on time with some entertaining videos on a mystery blogger who wanted to come all the way from Germany to attend the blogger meet - the Indiblogger ice breaker spoof is always very entertaining. After that it was the 30 seconds of fame where each participant in the bloggers meet could introduce themselves and their blog. There were a lot of interesting bloggers with a mixture of the young and the old, the quirky funny bloggers to the serious bloggers. There were bloggers who blog about stories, dreams, inner voices and a...

I was reading a very interesting post by Seth Godin which I am going to quote below A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.  Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person's name.  The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, "binge drinking."  The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, "I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I'm annoyed by it. I'll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings."  And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier. Three for three.  Google never forgets.  This vindicates my earlier article on why every one needs a personal website or blog. I hope this spurs o...

I was reading an interesting post today written by Steve Yegge titled - You Should Write Blogs  . In this post Steve talks about the common reasons people give when you ask them why they don't blog Reason #1: I'm too busy. Reason #2: I'm afraid to put my true thoughts on public record. Reason #3: Nobody will read my blog. Reason #4: Blogging is narcissistic. narcissistic meaning : [adjective] characteristic of those having an inflated idea of their own importance And when I ask a lot of very intelligent people around me the same question I get the very same reasons that Steve covered in his blog post. All very valid reasons, but let me give you reasons as to why you should blog. Project the right information about yourself In this connected world a lot of information is being put on the internet by a lot of sources. A lot of it is good and a lot more than that is bad. If for some reason someone searched for your information online, you do not want them to find i...

The Olympics is over and I guess the dust is slowly settling on the euphoria surrounding the so called stupendous show India put on this time (1 to 3 medals is a 200% improvement). I just found out that IBM gave Ideapad laptops and video cameras to some of the athletes and got them to cover the Olympics with pictures, blogs, tweets, etc. IBM them aggregated all of those entries in a website called Voices of the Olympic Games . Be sure to visit it and get an insiders view of the olympics. Abhinav Bindra is one of the atheletes who is part of this initiative and you can read his blog by visiting http://abhinavbindra.blogspot.com . Rajyavardhan Rathore is the other Indian athelete who is part of this program http://chillyrathore.blogspot.com/ .

Firefox 3.0 has set the Guinness world record for the largest number of downloads in a 24 hour period. And for the record I was part of it :-). To get your own certificate visit http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/certificate_form . What I find weird is that all you have to do is go and give your name and you get a certificate. So even if you did not download it, you can get a certificate stating that you did. Not good :-(. If they were planning to give these certificates I am sure they could have put some thought into only giving it to people who genuinely did download the browser and thus giving some amount of credibility to the certificate.

I am sure a lot of you must be reading about Open ID and are wondering what it is and how is it useful. I did not care much about it till I read that blogspot was supporting Open ID and so I got curious. What is Open ID ? Let me give you my understanding of Open ID. Everyone has a profile page on yahoo, AOL, Flickr and so on or a blog or a website. All these are represented by a unique URL that will give a user more information about ther real you (unless you only exist on that profile in cyberspace). The idea of open id is that instead of using a userid and password everywhere to identify yourself and setting up your profile each time you can use this URL to identify yourself and that way if anyone wants to know more about you they can visit the URL. When you use the open ID if you are logged into your site then there is no authentication required but if you are not logged in then it takes you to the webpage to be authenticated. To get a geek view of what open ID is you can go to http...

Its been a while since I blogged having not got the time and the inspiration for something different to write about. Yesterday wanting to be part of the world record for the largest number of downloads in a single day I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 and then I heard so much about ScribeFire and so I decided to download and install that add-in for Firefox. From what I have experienced so far with ScribeFire it is quite wonderful. The biggest advantage of it is that it sits directly in your firefox browser and so when ever you feel like blogging you just press F8 and it displays a nice rich text area to write your thoughts in and click on the publish button and you are done. You do not need to log into your blogger account or you don't need to open another application just to say something. Since it makes it easy to blog you just feel like blogging when ever you get a thought. It has a ton of other features that I have not yet explored. For all those that use Firefox go ahead ...

Dear readers, Thank you for posting questions that you would like to ask me. I will try and answer them as and when there are 2 or more questions. Please continue using the skribit widget to interact with me and I would love to hear from you. What is your most challenging aspect of blogging ? My most challenging aspect of blogging is trying to find content that would engage my readers and that I enjoy writing about. Informational articles tend to do very well and are always among the top 10 articles on my blog. But it is not always easy to write informational articles as there is only so much information that you can give that is not already there online. I usually try writing informational articles from what happens in my real life that I think others can benefit from but then it is not everyday that I do something new and exciting to write about. So that's where my challenge lies in generating blog content. The upside to this is that it forces me to do new things in life so th...

I have added a new skribit widget to my blog on the right sidebar. The reason I have added this widget is so that I can hear about any of your queries/ideas that you have when you read an article. Please feel free to post your ideas and suggestions. It is very easy to use this widget, in order to post a query/idea just click on "What should I write about" and it will give you a small text field to post your query/idea and you are done. If you see someone else's comment already covering the query/idea you want to put then you can vote on it to show that there are multiple people interested in the same query/idea.

I came across a very interesting blog today. It has pictures of what can happen when things fail in real life. I am not sure if all the images are real as a lot of them look like they have been doctored, but anyways, it sets you up for an amusing ride. The only issue is that you take pleasure in these pictures at the expense of someone else's pain - but then we tend to do that often in real life too - so what the heck. Anyway here is the blog - Fail Blog

When I started blogging I used to only write what I liked writing about, wrote articles when I had the time and then once in a while checked how many visitors I had on Google Analytics. Then I started writing a little more frequently and since I had a lot of content initially the posts came thick and fast. Along with the posts came some amount of fame (with no fortune :( unfortunately) which brought the traffic then I started getting obsessed about the number of visitors that came (checking atleast once a day), what were they reading, where did they come from, how long did they spend on my site. I then started worrying about the numbers and with that I started to wonder how do I keep the visitors longer on my site, how do I keep them engaged, how do I show them my really good posts, how do I get them new content day after day, what is it that brings them to my site and so on. As you can see it can so easily turn from a harmless fun activity to something very obsessive bordering on addi...

Having been seriously blogging for about 3 months now that is at least one post a day I have realised that there are limitations to the 2 column layout that most blogger blogs have. Some of the limitations of two column layouts are You have only limited space to tell the reader everything you want to tell. For example if you put labels and archive you don't have very much more prime real estate on top of the screen to put anything else. You have limited space to put ads on your blog. You have to either put it in your post or you need your ad to occupy the prime real estate on top of the screen making it look like all you are interested in is advertising. I am not sure why blogger has only 2 column layouts as default layouts. They are not really providing variety to the blogger out there other than in colors and styles. If you look at all the bloggers who are serious bloggers like Amit , Darren and Abhinav all have 3 column or more layouts. What I have realised is that readers bas...

In an earlier post " Advertising my blog " I was cribbing about listing my blog in blog directories and how even though I listed on them for quite some time I did not manage to get any traffic and got frustrated. Things suddenly changed after a post written by me listed on problogger.net . Suddenly I had visitors in the hundreds visit my blog and that automatically pushed up my blog in all the blog catalogues and immediately my blog started getting traffic from all the blog catalogues. Suddenly I have had a spurt of visitors from an average of about 30 per day to now a number that is closer to 100. So listing on blog catalogues does pay off if you can manage to get noticed by one of the bigger sites which can drive traffic to your blog. Increasing traffic to your blog is all about patience and perseverance. If you keep giving quality content and list on the catalogues and one day of fame will push you up in all the catalogues and you will be suddenly recognised.

I have been getting quite a few requests asking whether I would be interested in teaming up in order to write a blog. In this article I would like to write about what I consider a blog to be and the reasons as to why I will not do team blogs. I consider a blog to be a personal expression of ones ideas and views. It has a style and a view that is very individualistic. It is a diary that is public. It gives you an insight into the ideas and thoughts of a person. What I have realised over time is that when you read a blog you either love a blog or you hate a blog. There is no middle ground. I have also realised that there are blogs where there is a lot of information but you just don't like the blog because of the style in which the post is written. So writing blogs is very individualistic and on the other hand reading blogs is also very individualistic. Coming to team blogs I wanted to do one too just like everyone else and the reason I wanted to do it is for the selfish reason that ...

The Indiblogger meet sure seemed to have upped my popularity. It all started with a phone call from Ishita from Deccan Chronicle about my views on blogging and why I blog and after a 5 minute conversation with Mona and myself she seemed satisfied with the information that she had and before we could ask her anything more she hung up. On opening today mornings paper I was surprised to find this Then there are blogs that will guide you about the basic things like how to apply for a passport, create a website, good places to hang out in a city, as CTO of Infornia.com, Sudeep D’Souza does. Sudeep’s wife, Mona, is also a serious blogger. “I have a baby product company and though we don’t use my blog to promote the company as yet, we give reviews on different baby products available in the market. We make independent comments and also invite parents to give their feedback.” On closer examination they got my organization wrong - it should have been inforica.com and I have been told tha...

After a 15 KM drive to the Microsoft Campus in Gachbowli and then t he half-a-kilometer trek uphill in the hot afternoon sun from Gate 5 to Gate 3 of the Microsoft Campus on the road which has tons of construction trucks plying (there is no side walk on the road) and after negotiating all the security formalities to enter the campus we finally arrived at the hall. There were only about 10 of us even though 75 or so registered on the website but in the next 30 min or so the hall was packed with more than a 100 blogger/wannabe bloggers. Having never been to a blogging meet and it was the same for many of those that came the introverted nature of Indians came out and everyone stuck to their own groups. The meet started with introductions from Balaji who organized the meet and Renie from Indiblogger about Indiblogger and then they had the "1 min of fame" ice-breaking session where each one had to introduce themselves and their blog and we quickly realized that there was a good...

Today my guest post appeared on problogger.net . I wrote about 9 Tips to Start Blogging Successfully . Let me give you a bit of a background about where this article originated from. I have been blogging for close to 3 years now but I have been doing it seriously only for the last 2 months. I then analysed what were the things that I should have done in order to have become a successful blogger based on what I have noticed on the ones that have become successful. The final analysis of my study is what I put into that article and it is what I am trying to implement since the last 2 months. Reading the comments it was exhilarating to notice that some of the readers actually thought Darren was writing the post :-). It was also nice to notice that many readers agreed with my analysis and that strengthened my belief that what I have written if followed will work. How did I get to do a guest post on problogger.net ? A little more than a week ago Darren invited bloggers to do guest posts . I...

I was using Office 2003 to write a post and I noticed that all the wor ds starting with blog were marked as spelling mistakes. This kind of irratated me as my post was about blogging and my whole article was painted in red. I was curious why I had not noticed this before and when I opened the same article in Office 2007 it was all fine. This shows how the Microsoft dictionary is changing with the times. You can also publish to your blog directly from Office 2007. The only issue is that you will need to use an image provider such as Flickr, Picassa, etc to hold your pictures. Office 2007 currently does not upload pictures into blogger as you do when you publish from www.blogger.com .

I have had close to a 1000 unique visitors on my blog in the last 3 months but I have had less than 10 comments being put on the blog. It would be really nice to get some comments on the blog so that I can Improve their experience on the blog Write content that they would like to read Answer any questions that they might have Elaborate on parts of the topic that are vague On the other hand it would be nice if the readers can Point to additional content that may supplement the information that is already in a post Give their point of view on the topic they are reading Add information that they may have about the topic they are reading I would love to hear from all of you so this is an appeal to all my readers to help make this blog more interactive, fun and informative.