Eminem Relapse 2009 Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Eminem Relapse is Marshall Mather's recent Rap album produced by Dr. Dre. Emimen is no stranger to being on top music. Sold 650,000 in first week, its big hit this year. Relapse is Marshall's reflection on his recent past four years, a skit in this album where emimen says about where he had gone in the last years and his drug problems, addiction and a song following it.

One reason why relapse is a hit is that, he's got a story to tell. His own story which adds a human touch to the album, unlike other staged music albums listening to this one feels like Eminem. I like the Beautiful song. Never let anyone say you aint beautiful is the message, where how being a celebrity feels like and how he wants to be a normal person is spoken about. Its my favourite one too.

Rap has a lot of critics and controversy, but it continues to grow in popularity. Young souls like it a lot.

How Google detects invalid clicks Monday, June 22, 2009

If you had landed on this page venturing how google detects invalid clicks, you are at the right place. The mechanism Google uses is as good and efficient as its search and its well mature at this point of time I would say. Because a lot of people tried to make more money by cheating Google, they took all this input to formulate their secret formula to detect invalid clicks. Adsense is one program which earns google a lot of revenue. Here are some things that I think they would take into account to detect invalid clicks. If you are a web master or a user of Google analytics, you'll know this better.

IP Address - If you are connected to Internet you are assigned an individual ip address and if you've noticed carefully and most consumer Internet connections are assigned dynamic ip address and each time you connect to the Internet you have a different ip address based on a scheduling by your isp. If Google can track you by ip address one might think why not disconnect and connect again to get a different ip address. Clever boy! but never forget, its the same isp and you are given ip within a range allotted to your isp. No matter how many times you disconnect and connect to the Internet you will remain in the same range which lets google know that the click is coming from the same range. Now they raise their eye brows and the following factors will let them detect that it is the same user.

Cookies - If you enter any web site with Google ads, they put a cookie into your browser and if it expires only after a year or so. Unless you delete it, its got an unique identifier to identify when was the cookie planted and that's how they identify you uniquely. Repeated clicks from the user having same cookie is just the most dumb way of getting caught. If you delete the cookie from browse each time before browsing, Google knows the click is coming from a new user all the time, when it detects invalid clicks. Got it? There is no way to cheat Google, unless you are a Internet expert or junkie who cheated for a long time, or possibly got caught many times.

Click Patterns - When one does click on own ads, they tend to click only theirs not other ads or not on other sites. which is a really different behaviour from ordinary. When one intends to make invalid clicks they click and try to run away from the site. Moving on to click on another ad. This behaviour could be tracked. Google knows how much of time a genuine visitor spends on a target site linked from ad. Technically this is called bounce rate.

CTR - Google has the statistics of how much CTR does a visitor from search engine would produce.

CTR from Google side - A well performing ad will have good CTR. If one tries to cheat Google, its for sure they might click a non performing ads in a row. which alerts them.

Mac addr - This is the hardware address of your Ethernet card. I'm sure packets flowing a network use this for a lot of purposes including authentication to enter a network in case of corporations. In other case, it may not be the case, stuff like dial up does not have a Ethernet mac address.

Traffic sources - If a site is new or a site penalized by google for illegal content, it probably does not have traffic from search results. When such sites have high traffic, this is something that they might count on.

Location Geo Tracking - With your ip address, Google can target ads to a particular city or even a small town. The same is used to detect invalid clicks. They can easily know where you are located. Its also easy to use proxy site, unfortunately proxy sites are a outdated way of making such invalid clicks, one could easily get caught. The next dumb way of getting caught is using proxy. They have a list of all proxy servers across the world. I need not give a reason for you to believe that.

There are a lot of other factors that Google knows about a particular user like

1. Network speed and latency
2. Your screen resolution
3. Google user's web history
4. Surfing patterns
5. A site's user patterns
6. Points where one user clicks on screen
7. Points on site where a normal user clicks

Possibly a hybrid artificial intelligence algorithm learning and predicting about users and traffic behaviour on web. We'll never know it. We'll never know if Google uses it for invalid click detection or not. It is impossible to cheat Google's systems. Also, any violation of adsense TOS will also be detected easily.

Here are ten reasons why you shouldn't cheat Google.

Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions about the subject.

Personal Brand - Strategy on Search Engines Thursday, June 11, 2009

I'm sure anyone using the Internet must have done a search for their name on Google or any search. Not only you, some of your friends and potential employers might also have done the same. May be you did not know it. But if you do not show up on Google, you don't exist, you could lose a business deal or you may turn off your friend. May be that is why I write this post on how to optimize search results for your name as a query. Check this out, Google for nivash kumar, 9/10 results are pages that I've created for myself (as on 12th June). Here are ten steps that I would suggest to build your personal brand.

10. Buy a domain name which is exactly your name - If its already used, get a closer one which contains your full name and create few pages, to include information about you, display your portfolio or write your missions statement, who you are. Set up a blog at yourname.com/blog

follow the step 9 also in setting up the same. This could be your best personal brand strategy.

9. Create your own blog - Have a title which is more unique or that suits you. Like what I have is "curious mind" and put your name in the blog's title. This is very important for search engines to pick up. If you have a popular nick name, include that also in your blog's title.

8. Linkedin Profile - Linkedin.com is world's top social network for professionals. You just need a free account for displaying your profile. I found linkedin very well organized for a personal profile.

7. Twitter profile - If' you've read this post till this, you must be having a twitter account and create an account with your own name. Like what I did, my public twitter page is

twitter.com/nivashkumar , you can be certain that this page will show up on top ten results of a search for your name on Google, so on other searches also. If you are accessing twitter from desktop clients or mobile, both twitter.com/yourname and m.twitter.com/yourname will be created and may turn up on search results.

8. Create your Google Profile - google.com/profiles This can be your profile across all google services like Google groups and so on. This could also be made public for search engines to pick up.

7. Facebook profile - Make your facebook profile public so that it is visible to search engines. Facebook has got a good page rank, so facebook.com/people/yourname is likely to hit the top ten search results of your name.

6. Xing.com - You can also add one more result to top ten of your name by creating a profile at xing.com and making it public.

5. Online forums - Fill the page for your profile with relevant information on any online forum that you use. Make sure you link the pages you created above with it. At least two of the pages created above.

4. Do comment on popluar blogs with your name - This will also get listed on search results, include your blog url for the web site in the comment form.

3. Join a wiki site like wikihow.com where you will get a user page and this is yet another page for yourself on search results. Note: Trying this on wikipedia does not work because the user pages of wikipedia are not indexed by search engines. Possibly due to the high page rank of wikipedia not to be taken advantage by spammers.

2. Most importantly, if you are filling a form of your profile on a site mentioned above link your other pages with it. E.g link your web site and blog on linkedin profile and xing profile.

1. Get Creative. This is where its open ended. You can try a lot of options, there are plenty of sites on the Internet. Include important information like your photograph, location and stuff that can identify you uniquely.

By doing the steps above, you are almost certain that 2 or 3 pages of what show above will turn up on the search results on a search for your name. If your name is more unique, then possibly all the pages will show up on search results like what happened for me.

I found a new site recently called yasni.com which is effective to look up people on web. It is a vertical search for people I would say.

Also read Personal Branding Blog, by Dan

Twitter - Adding followers of a person to your friends list and follow all of them Friday, June 5, 2009

I've been playing around with one of Twitter API implemetation Twitter4j which is awesome and I could do a lot of things with it. Here is one of my implementation to automate adding friends to yourself with a Java program. Make sure you have twitter4j in your build path before trying this program.

Here is how it works,

1. Select a twitter user

2. Fetch the list of his followers

3. Add them as your friends

4. Follow all of them

Java source

package com.twittervis.core;

import java.util.List;

import twitter4j.Twitter;

import twitter4j.User;

class GetFollowers {

public static void main(String[] args) {

//Create twitter object with user name

Twitter twitter = new Twitter("your-twitter-user-name", "password");

try {

//Get the list of the person wh

ose friends you want to add as your friend

List friends = twitter.getFollowers("selected-twitter-user");

for (int j = 0; j &gt friends.size();j++){

//convert twitter user id from int to String

String myString = Integer.toString(friends.get(j).getId());

//make each user of the list as your friend

//true is to follow the person, else only he is made friend

twitter.createFriendship(myString, true);

}

} catch (Exception e) {

e.printStackTrace();

}

}

}

Now, This program adds the followers of a particular user as your friends, and you'll be following them. I'm working on creating mashups with Twitter + Google App Engine(GAE)

Follow me on twitter @nivashkumar