The tech-driven age demands parents to create a virtual identity for our tiny tots and train them to use the social media safely but the ill effects of this rising trend cannot be ignored all together. In present day nuclear set up, parents often expose their kids to the virtual world at a very young age. Earlier children were hooked on to TV and now it is networking sites like Face book and My Space. One of my daughter’s friends is  now addicted to Farmville game and which can be played only if you join the Face book.

For many parents, including we, it’s a matter of pride knowing that their little ones are in sync with the e-world. A desire to archive for our daughter’s childhood memories, prompted my husband to design a blog for our daughter, ichu, and i started posting ichu’s photos, videos, apart from jotting down her interests, favourite foods, special events and some memorable episodes of her life and she enjoys sharing her photos with the rest of the world. Now she is 6 years old and never posted any blog herself yet. Now i am her mouthpiece.

These days, she chats online with her dad using Skype, browsing www.starfall.com , etc.. I am really scared because she is getting hooked on to something which is not real. These days how many kids say they love kickboxing, playing football, or cricket with their dads. The world is changing so is the younger generation. They cannot imagine a world without internet.

Experts say that too early an exposure to the internet can blunt a child’s social and emotional intelligence. On the other hand, parents sit satisfied thinking that their kids are by no means technologically deprived and ignoring the long-term implication of indulging in such behaviour. My daughter prefer to use internet or watch TV rather than playing with her friends. But i am managing somehow to make her to gel with her friends in the evenings rather than spending time in front of the TV or internet.

Even though i am scared, i want my kid to know how to use social media safely under my supervision. This is part of my job, just like i train her to cross the busy road safely.

Social Networking sites like Facebook, Orkut and many others where you find people from different parts of world, different age. You can meet new people who could be of your interest, discuss on topics which are of common interest. You can also meet your old lost friends after long time and refresh your golden memories.
Here comes an unique Social Networking site called Verdurez, which is not for people like me, but for Indian aged above 55. You can register at this site for free and start making friends. You may be able to meet your old friends with whom you are not in touch or you don’t know where he or she is. This reminds me of meeting my classmates whom I was not in touch for more than 20 years through classmates.com.
This site is promoted by Ishita Sukhadwala, who has dedicated this site to her parents.

The name Verdurez  has been chosen from the noun verdure which means greenness, especially of fresh, flourishing vegetation, freshness in general; flourishing condition; vigour. We passionately believe that life doesn’t come to a slow grinding halt as you get older. Au contraire, a new phase in life begins which can flourish with vigour and freshness.

The concept looks good, but my worry is how many Indians at this age group in India use computers and Internet. There are many literate people in this age group (above 55) but they do not use computers as during their college time or when they were at job, there were no computers used.
I feel the concept is very good and it should be promoted. We need our elder generation to sit at home and know and enjoy the advantages of getting connected online through such social networking sites. They can get into group discussions, debates, share their knowledge and get to know more and more people of their age.

I found a great post here about creating the Facebook Profile photo. Facebook is very popular these days. Hope this post will be interesting to you all.

5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo

Twitter is a very popular tool. Here you can find 100 tools related to twitter. I am sure he has spend some time compiling this useful list for twitter users.

Ok, so the title is a little sensationalist, but I had to get you here somehow so you could see the most bookmarked web-based Twitter applications of the moment!! Note that these has been put together on the basis of the number of saved bookmarks on delicious and clearly not THE definitive list based on registered users or traffic.

The 100 Most Popular Twitter applications | blending the mix

If you have a blog or a website, the biggest concern should be about the traffic to your blog or website after having impressive posts. Getting traffic is  not that easy, but with good content, it becomes achievable. You need to do some work to get your blog traffic growing and with time it will happen. I have my blog with most of the traffic coming from Google, to be frank, I have never tried much to get more traffic or buying backlinks or any blackhat SEO methods. I have been following some SEO Tips which has resulted good for me. Your blog earning will always depend on the traffic of your blog, just not traffic but the quality of the traffic.

There are different ways a visitor may come to your blog or website like

1. Search engines : Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live are the best source of traffic for free. You need to rank well for potential keywords to get consistent traffic from search engines.
2. Social media networking sites : Social Media Sites like Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, FaceBook are sources which can shoot up your traffic.
3. Email link : A visitor can send your blog post URL to his friend to visit or read your post if its  impressive.
4. Direct traffic : Some loyal visitors who already know your blog URL may come to your blog by keying in your blog URL.
5. News letters : Your news letter subscribers will come to your blog reading your newsletters
6. Other blogs or website linked to your blog or we can call backlinks
7. Banners or Advertisements : You can get traffic from different advertisements or banners.
8. RSS Feeds : Feeds are very popular these days. Many read news or blog posts using different feed aggregators which are very easy to manage and read

As far as a webmaster or a blogger is concerned, the best traffic source is which gives some benefit to the blog or website. The quality of traffic can be determined by the following factors

1. Time spent on the website
2. Bounce rate
3. Repeated visiting
4. Bookmarking
5. Subscribing to newsletters
6. Subscribing to RSS feeds
7. Post a backlink to the webpage or the blog
8. Submitting the post to Social Media Sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, etc
9. Sales or conversion if you have some products to be sold
10. Ad revenue

Now coming to the topic of this post, the best source of traffic should be a source which gives you conversions, subscribers, loyal readers, backlinks, sales, Ad revenue etc.

In my opinion the best source of traffic should be Search engines for the following reasons

Consistent Traffic – If you have posts which lists on top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) then you will surely get tons of traffic if the key phrase or the keywords are popular or if its up in trends.

Less Bounce Rate – The bounce rate for the traffic coming from search engines are very low, reason being the visitor comes to your blog or web page searching for something through a search engine and gets what he was looking for.

Length or Depth of a visit – Usually traffic coming from search engines do spend lot of time on your blog visiting related posts or posts from the same category.

New Visitors – Usually the traffic from search engines will be new visitors and if you have a good blog or impressive posts, you get new visitors converted to loyal visitors or subscribers

Back Links- New visitors or search engine visitors could generate more back links or social media bookmarking. If you blog has your social networking links like Twitter, Digg, facebook or stumbleupon, you have high chances to get more followers or friends which can improve your presence on the World Wide Web.

My first post for this year, first of all wishing you all a very happy and a prosperous new year and wish you do much better than what you had done in the year 2008. I just came across a new social networking site, and though of letting you all know about it and if you are interested, you can join. You are well aware of social networking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook and many, but none of them share their profits with the members who actually runs the site. One new site Social networking site I came across today, called Frenszone, just register and start uploading your pictures, recommend this to your friends and build your social network. You will get paid for all the actions.

With social networking you can make new friends, get more traffic to your blog or promote your products and increase your traffic and sales.

Join for Free

Much awaited Google Friend Connect has be launched. I am sure that every blogger who is active in social networking will surely use this service. I just installed this on one of my blog and its really great.

Google Friend connect is a tool to get your friends together from all the social networking sites, share your friends, and invite your friends. It can used for sites like facebook, orkut, stumbleupon, digg and more.

Setting up your blog with Google Friend Connect

Its very simple, just like inserting any widget, generating the code according to your needs and pasting it to your blog template. There are lots of customisation features available to match your blog theme. There are different widgets available which can be used according to your need and taste.

Advantages of using Google Friend Connect

Increase your blog traffic, in simple words, go viral using Google Friend Connect. You can find Google Friend Connect working live at Latest Blog Posts . You can promote yourself at different blogs by creating a great profile and show your comments on different blogs which use this feature. You can get connected from popular blogs where you are active as you will have your profile displayed on the blogs where you are active. You can administer the posted comments, block users, moderate comments and many more features available in the admin panel. You can add multiple blogs in your admin panel.

Will Google Friends Connect Replace the Comment Box – The Google friend connect review and commenting gadget is excellent and is more effective than the traditional comment box. You have an universal identity and if all the blogs are using this feature, then surely it will replace the existing commenting form. My worry is what will happen to the blogs who have tons of comments with old posts in case we try to replace the existing comment box. Yes we can remove the comment submission form and just print the existing comments and for new comments Google Friends Connect can be used.

Threats – What will happen to various plugins, services like Gravatar and open ID, will all these be replaced by Google Friends Connect?

I am sure that Google Friends Connect will be the most used Widget in future and is the future of the Social Media connectivity. Lots of new gadget will be coming soon.

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I was just Googling and got through a site which gives all the information related to twitter accounts. The site is called tweetrush. I was  really surprised to see the top tweeter who does an average tweet of 1349 tweet a day and has done 129,474 tweets since July 19th 2008.

I guess this user does nothing other than tweeting or has some automated system to do it. How many tweets do you do a day? You can also check your stats by visiting http://tweetrush.com/Yourusername

The stats includes information like the last 7 days usage, total number of tweets, and your average use per day.

Follow me on Twitter

Twitter is the latest boom in Social Networking. I created an account on twitter some time back and just tried, but did not use for a week also. I was hearing a lot about twitter by different bloggers and how they use to increase their traffic, sales and revenue.

If you are not using twitter, then you are missing something which you should not. You might be using sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Myspace and more, but this is something which is totally different. For selling a product, you have a write a big sales page, testimonial and more, but with twitter, you can send your followers to these pages, build relation with fellow bloggers and like minded people.

Let me explain how things go different with twitter. Its very simple to create an account, but the real task is to get followers. Its very easy for popular branded bloggers or celebrities to get followers, but for normal internet user, its very difficult to get followers, but still you can get going.

First sign-up for a Twitter Account.

Invite your friends and tell them about Twitter and ask them to create an account as you did and make sure that they follow you.

Another way to increase the number of your followers is put a link on your blog to your twitter account like  Follow Me on Twitter. You can add this like to your emails as signature.

You should follow people who work in the same industry or have same interests like you have. You should be active on twitter by posting updates. You can reply to twits by others and get noticed and you get a new follower. You should not feel shy to follow people who may share interesting information through updates.

Once you keep building your followers, you need to use twitter to communicate with the twittering world. You can update your twitter status in different ways and that’s the reason I feel that twitter is very much different from other social networking sites. Recently I was reading a post related to twitter traffic written by Shoemoney where he was showing the screen shot of his Google Analytics reports where his twitter referrals were about 16,000 and many were new visits.

You can integrate twitter in many ways. If you are using Wordpress, you should use Twitter Wordpress plugin which can be used to update status, view public timelines from your Wordpress blog. There is a Windows Live Writer Plugin for Twitter which will add an update to your timeline in twitter regarding your new post. Now Aweber, has the ability to twit when you send a new message. You can update your twitter status from your mobile phone or if you are using PDA, just visit Mobile Twitter and keep updating your status while you are moving. You can also enjoy reading the updates on the move. You can enable device updates for the twitters whom you follow and you feel that you should not miss any updates by that person and should get the update as soon as its posted. You can disable this feature any time. You can even reply to particular tweets.

Finally Twitter is the Web 2.0 Traffic Generator for marketers and using it in the right way can really increase your traffic, network credibility, brand building and finally revenue. You should use Twitter and if you are interested in getting my updates, please don’t hesitate to Follow Me on Twitter

Twellow is a new Twitter search engine which grabs public messages from Twitter, analyze and categorize every user who posts those messages. By categorizing the users, twellow enables to provide better searches according to the categories.

You can get listed in Twellow by filling up this form. You can also change your category by editing your profile using the profile editor. You should have a twitter account and you should disable your update protection for Twellow to add you and categorize. Twellow is not a property of twitter, they use either using the API or public feeds.