I think the Social Media Optimization strategies are a bit overdone these days. Honestly, I don’t enjoy the typical “24 steps to make you famous” articles at all. They lack the quality factor in them. Everybody is too focused on numbers and the overall quality of your work is just ripped off for the sake of getting a stumble or that pinch effect on your traffic.

My favorite tool in Social Media is undoubtedly Stumble Upon. I just love the tool and is quite an experience using it.
I started using the tool earlier this year and it’s been a very enjoyable experience overall. I normally stumble blogs and articles along with interesting funny photos etc. The beauty about the tool is that it gives you surprises, all the time!

You get so absorbed with the tool that your number of stumbles automatically goes up and you never keep track of it until one fine day someone alerts you about it. You go on adding friends and one day you reach the 200 friends limit.

When do I use Stumble Upon?

Normally, I use stumbleupon when I want to get surprised! I know that there are lot of information available on the Internet about anything and everything, but where is all this catalogued? A directory? Come on, scrolling through a directory and finding content is the last thing I’d do to get surprised! LOL

Stumble Upon comes in handy at these times. I think it is the most disciplined human edited database of ONLY the most interesting webpages on the internet everyone has access to.

It also comes in handy when I’m running out of ideas. When I’m using it I’m pretty sure that the next stumble that I’d have is going to be better than the one I’m on right now. It takes me to the best pages every single time.

Why do I use Stumble Upon?

I prefer Stumble Upon to any other social bookmarking sites because of it’s quality. I think the SU community is very quick to respond to junk, than in any other social bookmarking site, so finding unworthy information is a rare possibility. The SU community itself is a factor that makes SU a great place to be.

Tips to make your Stumble Upon experience pleasurable

So, have you been using SU recently? If not, I strongly recommend you to go about it right now. You can find my profile here, don’t forget to add me as your friend.

If you have been using SU, I have the following tips to you to making it a pleasurable experience.

- Don’t do it for numbers please
One grave mistake we all tend to do (especially marketers out there) is to use SU for generating traffic alone.
Agreed, that SU is a great place to get traffic but please understand that it’s quality first. If you focus only on numbers, the SU experience is going to be painful for you. Instead, use the tool in it’s true sense. To share and to enjoy the internet.

- Network widely
Stumble Upon is a social networking tool combined with social bookmarking, so the more the networking the more pleasurable the experience! From my experience I understood that being an island on SU is like being a dumbass, it works well only if you network well. So appreciate others talk to them and review their stumbles. It’s fun believe me!

- Don’t self promote
Never ever do this. Well, I don’t think it’s against the TOS, but it definitely does not give a good picture about you to others. It’s other’s job to decide if you are good. You cannot self proclaim it can you? I’ve seen quite some webmasters do this for the sake of getting popularity, and sometimes if it’s a real good article the SU community will forgive you, but it’s really stupid for someone to ONLY submit his content. This normally happens wit marketers who use SU for only marketing purposes. You can easily make out these guys from their profile. They’d probably have 5 stumbles out of which 4 will be theirs and they’d only have joined a few months back, plus no reviews, no fans what so ever.

- Promote quality, avoid junk
Being a SU user, it’s your duty to promote quality by “thumbing up” a good article and it’s equally important to thumbs down a bad article. Because you don’t want your friends to see terrible webpages, but interesting ones. SO use the tool sensibly, thumbs down what you don’t like. There’s nothing wrong in it, it’s for the good of the community.

- Share and review
The most interesting factor about SU is that it helps you to share and review right within the tool. It may be available on other tools too, but I don’t think people get involved with it as on SU. So do share your thoughts on the stumbles, say your mind in the profile page about a stumbler or his stumbles, review people, it all helps in the betterment of the community.

- Stumble daily, make it a routine
Beginners would find it bizzare. But at least a month old stumbler would agree wit me on this that the more the stumbles the better the experience. So stumble daily and uniformly, make it a routine. It helps you in the long run. 

- Enjoy the small things in life like funny pictures
SU is a great place to find funny pictures on the internet. I mean, we all get those email forwards that we never really check, but imaging when you have an entire list of those pictures and you find it yourself? Interesting isn’t it? SU helps you to enjoy the small things like this, a picture, a video that will make your day.

- Stumble through your friends
This is a personal favorite of mine. I have a group of friends who are probably the best I found on SU. And there’s an option on SU to stumble only through your friends stumble. It’s highly possible that whatever they have stumbled would be of interest to me. So rather than doing a general stumble, do a stumble through your friends (or anyone of them) and it helps you to share things.

- Explore all categories and types
There are some interesting categories on SU like videos,pics,blogs etc that will help you to stumble pages by category. Rather than doing a general stumble, do stumbles in categories for example, stumble pics only. This will enrich your SU overall experience.

What you should not do at SU

- Never self promote
- Never spam
- Use pseudo ID’s

That’s about it. Have a great Stumble Upon experience !

Gokul Rajaram, was the Product Manager at Google handling a number of it’s advertising products. At this role, Mr. Rajaram’s duties included defining new features and enhancements to Google’s advertising programs and working with engineering on implementation. So, many of the features you see on the Google AdSense is the result of this man’s brainwork.

Earlier in his career, Mr. Rajaram was a Technical Lead at Juno Online, an early internet service provider that is now part of United Online, the second largest ISP in the US. At Juno, he was part of the team that developed Juno’s online advertising platform. Mr. Rajaram has also worked as a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and as a Product Manager at Onetta, a telecom hardware company.

Mr. Rajaram earned his M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management, his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and his B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he was awarded the President of India’s Gold Medal for being class valedictorian.

He is believed to be one of the “Godfather’s of AdSense”, one of the most successful products at Google.

Now the sad news is that Gokul is leaving Google (he has already) to be on his own. He has not revealed what his future plans are but it’s believed that he’s going to start on his own. Would that be a competitor to Google’s AdSense? No idea.But to us bloggers, that would be music to ears, wouldn’t it ?

It is a trend now that many Googlers are leaving company either to start up companies of their own or to join smaller but upcoming and fast growing companies like Facebook. 

Resources: 1, 2, 3, 4 Photo Courtesy: Webguild

Running out of space on your PC or lappy? Worry not. There is a cool service that offers you to store your audio files, videos, office documents or just about anything online, at your personal space and use them online as well, from anywhere in the world (sounds too big eh?).

You can stream the audio and video files, online and the speed and consistency is really good. I also love the drag and drop feature, it’s just like transferring the file to any other storage media on your PC. It’s a very reliable service from my experience. At a standard free registration you get 1GB of storage space, where you can store all your mp3’s, movies and stuff. Another good feature is that you can send the files to your friends, by sending them a download link. They don’t have to register at Steekr to listen to the audio or see the video. So, you no longer have to carry them around on your thumbdrive. That’s too old fashion man!

The service is Steekr and you can register here for a free 1GB storage space, and yes its personal, “The Internet too is personal again”!

Update - I just found another cool service that let’s you upload files and even allow others to have a look at it. I’m unsure if it allows you to stream, but the catch is that the service is quick to register, you don’t have to give even your email id. Just give a name, select the file and select the other users permission settings. Presto! Very good if you are in a hurry and want to share a file with your buddy. Check it out here.

I agree that the Internet is an enormous ocean of knowledge and any information is just a click away. But even with such a potential sometime you end up being nothing at one point of time or the other. Have you felt like that? Like having nothing to talk about, nothing to share and nothing to blog. Difficult situation eh?

I’m sure that you’d get over the block one way or the other in no time. But, that triggers one question. How do you manage to write a post? Or what makes you to? I believe it would different for everyone, and it would be interesting to know.

For me, everything happens instantaneously. I mean, I am not the kind who plan about something that I should write the next month and create a draft for it. It never happens for me even if I try. I like being impulsive. But I know there are disadvantages to it. Sometimes you run out of topic and there’s nothing anyone can do to help me. Not even me.In that case the “planners” are at an advantage, even if they have nothing to write about on one day, they would still be publishing what they planned last month. Hmm, pretty smart eh?

Well guess what? I’ve got news for the  “planners”.

- You guys can’t write on a current issue.
- Or even when you plan to, I’d (or some other impulsive blogger) have already blogged about it.
- You guys aren’t up to date, you are one month (or whatever old date you saved the draft) old.
- You miss the “spice” in your articles. I’d gather it form the latest post I read on the RSS reader.

Well, obviously I wouldn’t be talking about the negatives of impulsive blogging here.

But I think, bloggers should be a mix of both. Sometimes impulsive and sometimes planned. The planned ones can be articles like  a “top 10 list of the most infamous seo blogs” while you can be impulsive with the current trends and happenings. What is your opinion? Do you write articles impulsively or plan them well in advance?

UPDATE—-
This article got a thumbs down from one of the very senior SU members. Reason - The article is more focused on getting the numbers and does not really throw light on ensuring quality in your stumbles.
I agree on that , but I’ve taken care to ensure that the tips should not be mis interpreted for evil purposes. Readers, please note that SU is a place where quality weighs over quantity, and do not use any method that you think will corrupt the system. The blog deals with search engine marketing so naturally, I’m inclined towards the numbers part. But that is not an excuse to cut down on quality while stumbling pages.

Taken aback by the title? Well, I mean it. (And mind you, this is not the usual s**** where you get to read what you already knew. This is the untold stuff!)

Stumble Upon is the new social media bug that bit me recently! Ouch! That did hurt but seems like I’m enjoying every bit(e) of it.

Stumble Upon is a great way to boost traffic to your site,in fact, I prefer it to any other social media site.

 The reason - it gets me on a high when I receive 1000plus visitors to my site overnight.

Well, the relevancy of this enormous traffic is doubtful. Out of the 1000 odd visitors, probably only a few of them would actually subscribe to your feed or show interest in visiting your blog the next time. But it’ a good amount of traffic however.

Now, how can you make it to the top on SU? Is it really possible?
Indeed yes. If you see the top stumblers list on SU, each of them have some unique features that will give you some pointers.

(Update- I found out that this page is a mere listing of who stumbled the most on SU, it does not give you an idea of who are the real passionate stumblers who live the SU experience. Here is a better ranking based on the number of stumbles/thumbs, combined with the number of reviews , pics and videos. I think this makes more sense.)

And this is not the “usual stuff” article where you get to read the very same things again and again. Things that everyone knew. No this is not it.
If you do a googling on “How to get to the top of stumble upon”, you’ll probably get a couple of site that will give you ideas like, keep stumbling more pages, get reviewed by people, get connected with all, and stuff like that.

But hey, didn’t you already know it? All of us know that if you stumble maximum number of pages, under various categories, you probably will end up the top list of stumblers.

But is there a shortcut way? You came late to SU. Now, is there something you can do about it?

Let’s see. I’ll take my example.
Three weeks earlier, I was not using SU that frequently and I had stumbles less than 10 sites. Today I have stumbled 1,368 pages, 350 videos, 203 photos and 46 fans. See the difference? Huge isn’t it?

Now, I’m not trying to say that I’ve got into the top 50 stumbler’s list on SU. But it’s an example, to show that even if you came late to stumble, you can still make it big. Provided you know some tips and tricks. Let’s see what they are.

To increase the number of stumbles.

Stumbling is more a enjoyable experience to me and I enjoy every bit of it. It’s the perfect exercise if you are running out of ideas. So rather than seeing this as a method to just increase your number of stumbles, take this as a method to enjoy stumbling more than you ever did.

1. So enjoy stumbling, get into it deep and you’ll never regret it. 
2. Stumble using every possible channel like videos, blogs and news. It values more.
3. Rather than just stumbling, write reviews about sites that you stumbled.

Those were anybody’s guesses. Let me discuss with you some of my personal tips and tricks.

How to make it to the top on Stumble Upon in less than a week

1. Short cuts

In the stumble upon toolbar, you have the option to use short cuts to stumble and do the thumbs up.(See screenshot)

Change the shortcut to an easily accessible one, like 1 for stumbling and 2 for thumbs up. By default this is ALT+’ and ALT+1 respectively.

Now with the new short cut, you can quickly stumble a page and thumbs up or thumbs down a page. Earlier you had to do it manually and it becomes a lot easier now. Please don’t mis-use this option.

2. Reviews

Another way to get popular on Stumble upon is to write reviews. Actually, in order to rank high on Stumble upon you have to get reviewed by others. I’ve noticed that many of the top stumblers do have lot of reviews from other stumblers. And the only way to get people review is to review them first. It doesn’t mean that all of the people you have reviewed will review you back, but the more reviews you have the better.

3. Stumble more videos

Another point I noted among top stumblers is that they have lot of videos stumbled. There may not be any thumb rule to it, but yes, I think it makes more sense if you’d stumble more content, like say videos and photos, rather than just use the default option of stumbling whatever comes your way. This way you look more focussed and organized.

4.  Stumble frequently

Stumbling needs to be your daily routine. Just like you’d open your google reader, the first time you logon to the internet, make it a habit to stumble a few pages every day and write honest reviews about it.

5. Connect with the upcoming stumblers

Now, I could’ve easily said - connect with the top stumblers who have a very high stumble rate. But this is not going to help you in anyway. Because, all stumblers have a limit to add friends. After 200 friends (or so I think), you cannot add friends, but they can become your fans. In order to develop your network, you need to add friends. Top stumblers cannot add you as friend so there is no use in you adding them, instead hunt for the upcoming ones.

The upcoming ones are the guys with a good stumble ratio, and who have a good frequency of stumbles. They are most likely looking for friends who are interested in making it to the top, just like you.

6. Third party help

I really am doubtful about this point, but since it makes some sense, I thought I’ll mention it here.

There are third party stumbling helpers like SUexchange.com, which is a service that will list you guys who are interested in exchanging stumble. That is more like a link exchange, if you stumble them, they’ll stumble you.

Now, I am unaware if this is against the SU terms and service, if it is, you know what to do. Get the hell out of there.

I tried it a few times and the sites that are listed there weren’t genuine all the time. But if you need some initial help, this is the place to be.

So there you go. All the tips and tricks you need to make it to the top of stumble list. If you’d like to add me to your network, you can do it here.

The last two people I met on the internet, asked me this very same question, which got me thinking.

They were curious and one asked me,

Mani,how did you manage to write up all these content?

Other guy told me that he was curious to know if I copied the content from any other site.

Both very interesting questions. I believe I have a duty to clear these doubts to my readers.

Well, to be honest, very honest - I haven’t copied content from any source (website,newspaper,magazine,) at all. In fact, had it been that way, you would’ve seen at least a few hundred more pages on the site. :) 

All the articles you read here are all written by me and are original in thoughts. Well, on the blogosphere, everybody has their own platform and their own voice. So it’s just about how well you raise it. I have been inspired by many, and I think I’ve expressed my gratitude to all of them in the respective posts.

To be frank, writing articles daily isn’t easy at all. But there are a few things that I learned from my experience that help me make it, even today. I’d like to share it with you.

1 - Consistency
Every blogger who is serious about impressing others should be consistent. Consistency should be maintained in the frequency of posts and the quality of articles. You can take deviations once in a while, like writing a steroid article, like a 101 websites list, that is likely to make it to to Digg pages, but that is just garnishing. The basic course is your articles (whatever your niche is) and the quality of them.

To me, SEO writing SEO articles was more like maintaining a journal entry. I was lucky that I never ran out of topic to write an article. In the old times, while I was an SEO learner, I use to experiment with stuff and whatever the result was, I used to write it all down on the blog. That was a neat trick right? You study and you let others show your work at the same time.

2- Personal style
Even though this is something that I am still confused about, many of my readers tell me that they like the articles because they like the style and the way things are rolled out. So I guess, that forms my personal style.
I always assume that I’m talking to a normal person, who is not keen to  listen to the technical jargons, and write the articles catering to him. This works both for me and the reader. I talk to clients daily and this “jargon less” style is much appreciated by many of them. I adopt the same policy here on the blog.

3- Knowing your audience
Well, honestly, if there is anything that I’ve deliberately done to help me make a better blog, then this is it. There are numerous ways to get this done. You can assume things, try out a trial and error method, ask questions to your readers, and most importantly study from your stats. Use any method, but knowing who your real audience is really important as it lets you know what you should deliver. I get many clues from my organic referrals as to what are the contents that are missing in the blog. So I make it a point to write them up if it’s possible.

3- Communicating with readers
First off, let me say that this isn’t something that’s easy, but I love doing it. I’m not keen to talk to each and every reader at the same time, but may be one at a time. It’s not possible to make all of them happy as well. But what’s important is that you communicate to them. Many people ask me questions on email, and this itself gives me clues on what to write on the blog. People are reading your blog to learn something, so deliver it at the shortest time, in the right manner. It’s a simple concept I follow. To help this, talk to the readers.

5- I’m not a preacher I’m a learner like you
I don’t think that if you believe you are a guru or whatever, (giving advice to everybody), is a good idea. I cannot set myself in that frame of mind, it simply doesn’t work out. I prefer to be working along with my clients or the reader, and sit with them to find a solution, rather than sit on the other side spitting out “gyan”.

This is very much effective, as it helps you and the person you are helping. If it was otherwise, only the person I’m helping would benefit. Which is good, but if you have a better way why not try it?

So everyday, when I face roadblocks and bottlenecks during my work, I research on the topic myself, and record all what I’ve learned. Many of the posts that I’ve featured here are my research topics.

6- Forget who’s listening to you, talk to yourself
Now, this is a worst case scenario, I must admit that when I started off blogging there weren’t too many readers at the blog. Just like any other blogger,  I too struggled to get an audience. But at one point of time, I found that instead of wasting time in looking for readers, it’s better to focus my time in writing good articles. So that if at all someone visited your blog, there was enough content for him to browse. So whenever there was no reader at the blog, I’d talk to myself and write up a post. Adding a little bit of decoration to it, the very same post becomes enjoyable to a reader as well.

So those were some crude tips on how you can write articles on your blog too,and pile them up! Keep in mind, it’s all about quality not quantity, which is why I don’t agree with anyone who’ll say that there are lot of articles on this site and I did a good job in that. It’s a process and it’s going on, it’s  just about making sure that the process is enjoyable, not the final product.

Hope it helped you.

Last day, at a seminar,  I was about to give a presentation on SEO, and to break the ice, I asked a question - “Which is the one website that you can’t afford to visit a day.” As obvious, I was expecting someone to answer - Google. But he came up with an answer that stunned me. I’ll never ask that question again. :D

What happens when you overdo things? You reach the dead end. Sometimes you get stuck just because you have too many ideas in your head, sometimes because you just had too much of what you were doing. All of us need a break at times, from blogging, from researching, from calculating and coding. Luckily, there are lot of junk sites available on the net, that will help you wile away your time, just like the guy who answered me.

Just managed to create a list of those sites which will help you get a break from your chores and at the same time give you that extra juice to be more productive at work. Whenever I face a readers block, I visit these sites and all the time, I manage to get an idea or two to blog from each of them.

	Windows Live Search Now this could come as a surprise right? The reason why I select Windows live search is that it throws up weird results unlike Google, so it’s kind of fun to play around with it. Type in whatever comes to your mind, hit search and it will give you the weirdest results.
	Digg It’s interesting to see the top stories on Digg. What I personally like is to study the pattern of the top dugg stories. Doing a search to find the top stories dugg, and the top stories buried itself will give you great insights on how to create popular articles on your blog.
	Go Daddy This guy is my favorite. When I search for a particular domain, it throws me the synonyms, the antonyms and everything in between. Most of the times, just to see the results, I do a interesting domain name search.
	Seth Godin Of course you know what the man is all about. But what I admire at his blog is his writing style and how he manages to inspire you with his outstanding persona. Read a few posts from his yester years and you’ll get some awesome ideas to blog.
	Smashing Magazine These guys rock! If you ever wanted to learn what “Digg oriented stories” are, you better learn from them. They have enormous list of the coolest stuff on the internet, that you can’t deny bookmarking them. A reference point anytime.
	Mashable Pete Cashmore, does it best! One of the top websites in the world, with a traffic any website will envy for. They have all the upcoming web 2.0 stuff with them and no one misses their radar. One stop shop for all the trendy and coolest stuff online.
	ProBlogger Everybody knows him. What I’m more interested in the site is it’s archives. A read at the archives provides you with insights on how to write articles the popular way! Reading the archives is like taking a tonic !
	Gizmodo Ever felt guilty of not being able to track the latest arrivals in the technology front? Just visit gizmodo and the next day you’ll be the winner at office chats and discussion boards. Valuable information, every first time. all the time!
	Stumble Upon Another favorite of mine,perfect to wile away your time, if you are running out of creative juices. One look and a few stumbles can rejuvenate you just like an ayurvedic massage !
	Flickr We all know this guys cool ! What I’m personally interested in is browsing the flickr collection through the flock browser. If possible I favorite a couple of pictures that I could use on the blog. Good one to wile away time, productively!
	Blogging pro Everything for wordpress is here, widgets,themes,plugins,tweaks,hacks and what not? Blogging pro has links to all the resources here, perfect for bloggers, who want to spice up their template every single day.
	Lifehacker Tips, tweaks and news on technology. Gina manages to put in every information possible, on the above updated daily. Perfect if you’d like to learn how to write a technology blog.
	Digital Point forums Got a domain to sell? Have doubt on installing a software, Got Adsense doubts? There are guys here waiting to answer you. It’s like the song by scorpions - You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!
	Yahoo Answers A great place to check your proficiency in any selected category. People ask questions there, if you take the role of an advisor, people rank you for the quality of answers you provide. A great place for knowledge sharing!
	Deviant Art Great place to rejuvenate yourselves with some art. Got loads and loads of stuff you can stare at and feel the awe! If you had enough reading text stuff, this is the place to be. A visual treat for your eyes.
	Ouch My Toe Another personal favorite of mine. This guy knows what’s comedy to you and what’s not. I can bet that he’ll make you laugh in the very first read. A good place to start your day or  escape from that stressful day.
	Google Blog Search Another great place to find interesting blogs. If you’d like to read a bit more on your niche topic and see what the competition is like, you better go here and search for related stuff. No no technorati here!
	Wordpress plugins database If you are on wordpress, you’d want to visit this place too often. Because this is the official place for all the plugins and latest arrivals. If you love to tweak your template too often and play around installing new plugins, go for it!
	A list apart No idea what’s CSS? Bad design skills? Then it’s high time you visited this site. You don’t need to know CSS deeply, but this guy will help you get a taste about it the standard way. Can get a bit boring after a few visits, but worth a visit in a while.
	Web master world One of the oldest forums around. They have both amateurs and professionals as members so you might want to indulge in. What I like personally is the conflicts and debates there. You gain yourself some knowledge being involved in it.
	Lorelle on Wordpress If you are looking for quality articles on blogging then this is the place to be for some inspiration. There could be some repetition here and there, but overall a great place to be when running out of ideas to blog.
	Facebook My favorite social networking site. With it’s rich applications and great network of members, it’s a great place to network with professionals. Yes, there are lot of junk applications available but if you know how to maintain a professional and serious profile, this is the place to be.
	Top youtube videos If you’re looking for some fun, this site is the best choice. It lists the top videos on Youtube, under various categories and it’s updated regularly.
	Download Squad This is a blog about computer related stuff. There are lot of software review and download sites available but this one stands out because of it’s quality. A visit will give you access to some cool softwares and tools which you will miss otherwise.
	Webware This is a great site for updating yourself on web 2.0 application and it’s tweaks. If you don’t want to be lost out on the web 2.0 front, you better grab these guys feed. If you are running out of ideas to do review applications, this guy can help you.

There are a lot of blogging talents around, that we often over look just because we are so used to think about our own blog only. Nirmal TV is an active blogger in the blogosphere here in India. His blog Life Rocks 2.0 features articles on technology, tips and tricks, blogging, tutorials and the internet ! I’ve been very impressed with his socializing skills in the Indian Arena of blogs. His blog receives on an average 20 comments on every article. Pretty cool that is!
I’m still unsure how he’s able to make others comment on his articles. However one thing that I noticed is that Nirmal himself makes it a point on other blogs too. And most of the commenters on his blog are reciprocal commenters. Which is not bad at all.

When a first time visitor comes to his blog, they’ll see a lot of comments and gets a good impression about him. And he’s likely to grab his feed. This is a great lesson to learn from Nirmal.

Nirmal is up-to-date on technology within his reach, and often strikes a point blogging about it prior to anybody else. Clever! Something to be noted about Nirmal’s articles is that he churns out lot of “Numbered lists”. Like Top 10 themes, Top 10 plugins and the like which gets dugged and stumbled upon by his readers which in turn gives him lot of traffic. Interestingly, Nirmal prefers lists with odd numbers like 7 and 9 rather than 5 and 10, which are very common on the internet.

Apart from all these stunts, Nirmal is out to grab more organic traffic online by harnessing the power of SEO. He’s approached me for a quote too. Too clever!

Yahoo audio search is another favorite Non-Google application of mine, second to Live image search application. Now it’s got even better.

You can now search for audio files (MP3, WAV, MIDI, WMA or AAC)  on the Internet (Online music stores, the web or Podcasts), play the sample from within the search results and if satisfied with the quality and clarity, go ahead to download/buy the song.

In the more options menu, there are even more options to refine your search by selecting the file types you want (MP3, WAV, MIDI, WMA or AAC), the duration fo the song etc. Pretty handy options there!

Small hint here for music lovers: In case you are looking to buy tracks, select the “Online music Stores” option (default), but if you are looking for free downloading of MP3 music, select the “Search web” option.

Indeed a great piece of technology from Yahoo. Google has yet to catch up with it. Googlers..you there ?

Get the whole story here.

There are millions of options and you have only seconds to make a decision. Every internet surfer has a time bomb attached to his head while surfing.
You waste your time on a slow website, and you are missing valuable information on another website.

So nobody wants to wait for information, if you don’t provide it, there are other better sites that will provide the same or better information.
This makes it crucial for every blogger to optimize his pages, so that the information a surfer is searching is delivered within no time.

- Images.
Images are crucial. You can’t take them off completely.Ensuring that the images that appear on your page are of low file size and is optimized for web, will bring down the page load time drastically. You can make sure that your images are optimized using photoshop.
Open the image in photoshop and select Save> Save as optimized and it will give the best option to save the image suitable for web.

Replacing CSS with images images with CSS, is a better option to bring down your page load time. many of the tabs, buttons etc can be easily replaced in a more professional and clean looking way using CSS.

- Tables.
Many Wordpress templates uses tables in it’s code. nothing wrong but too many tables can increase your page load time and increase the size of your code.Try to code without tables and replacing them with CSS.It helps in bringing down the page load time.

- Scripts.
Scripts from other sources are a major factor in increasing page load time for blogs. Since all of us use lot of third party addons like Mybloglog, Directory buttons, Technorati buttons, Widgets etc - all of these widgets call javascript from their own websites which increase the page load time drastically. If possible, cut down on the number of widgets, and keep only the essential ones. Otherwise, don’t put all of them on the index page at least.

- Video Ads.
Vide ads are a hot favorite these days.There are many video ads available, but unfortunately, they increase the page load time very much.
To beat it - try to place the ads in the lower end section of the template. please don’t place them at the header or top part of the template.In such a case, the content will display only after the video is loaded - on dial up connections. This will screw up the user-experience.

- Youtube videos.
Another element what’s very commonly used among bloggers. Though YouTube videos are optimized for quick loading, placing one video each in every post is a big mistake. If you post one youtube video on each post(at various times) then it all ends up on the index home page, on all the posts.This will make things horrible, forget about page load time, it gives more than one option to the user and it will confuse them.So make sure that out of all the posts that appear on the index page,only one video appears.If you have set 4 posts to appear on the home page, let there be one youtube video in every 4 posts - not more than that.

- Flash Content.
Flash is becoming less popular these days but, there are blogs that use small flash elements on the header and side templates. Very bad.As an SEO, i hate flash elements, because they only present visually appealing elements which does not work for visitors(though they are appealing to you).They are not SEO friendly and should be avoided from the template if possible.Worse, they increase the page load time by double.So cut them off your template and keep it minimal.

So, keep these elements on your template to a minimum and rely more on CSS where ever possible, so that your visitors find it easy and a pleasant experience to navigate/use the site.

If you are wondering how to find the page load time of your site or blog, here is a cool tool that will help you find it element by element.It shows how each element of your page template affects your page load time on each internet connection speeds. If you are using a T1 connection, then this post may not look useful for you but before deciding, try accessing your blog on a dial up connection. Because that is the real testing ground.If the blog takes time on a dial up connection - you need to use this tool and trim down those frills.