Lasting Rose

More than a decade ago, when I wanted to register my first domain, I didn't know what to call it. But I was excited at the feeling and fun of registering and becoming the proud owner of a domain when no one had heard of Google, Yahoo or Facebook and the web was still in its infancy. Frankly driving a Ferrari on to your porch couldn't match it then!

So I couldn't wait and care then for all the search, thought and fieldwork you have to put in for choosing a name for my domain. When I started to fill in the on line form, I looked out of the window and noticed that little street name plaque around the corner, which was always there but had never caught my attention before. It read Forge Valley Way. For some reason, quite unaware of what I was in to, I typed in my first domain name, forgevalley.com.

Little did I realise then that I had inadvertently chosen a great domain name and also learned the secret of choosing great names and titles for your domains and Blogs!

What I didn't realise at the time was Valley Forge was a great name in American History, well known in the US and close to many American hearts.

I didn't also realise that the street name was chosen, due to its proximity to the OldestIron Bridge, which is equally famous and close to the herts of many Britishers and History lovers, being a symbol of the Industrial Revolution pioneered in England. Perhaps a Forge existed here four hundred years ago when the bridge was built.

Forgevalley also turned out to be home to the best bread dogs in the world, 'Forgevalley Sherpei' turning out much ahead in Google search every time I tried to search for forgevalley.com.

Simply put, forgevalley. com rang a bell to millions around the world even before I decided what to do with it. It was already famous because it associated with something connected to history, human emotion and animal love, people always remembered.

It even came in handy for the grandiose and commercial venture I had envisaged for the domain, which I named Forgevalley Corporation, hoping to grow big like Microsoft Corporation. It still might become great one day, who knows?

Though creation of forgevalley.com was quite accidental, it has revealed the secret of great benefits of choosing any name somehow connected with great names which are already famous and to which people emotionally connect and remember easily!

How To Decide What Will Be a Great Name For Your Blog Title?
When I decided to base my blog on celebrities and stories of love and romance and their relevance to the social web, I did a lot of search for a Blog Title which will reflect that, yet will meet the above described criteria of being already famous and associated with people's lives.

After a lot of search I came up with Lasting Rose, an easy to remember name which is also well associated with love and romance and Valentine's Day, the softer aspects of lives of celebrities and also ordinary folks.

I was very glad when my search showed 'Lasting Rose' also is a famous antique brand of chinaware everyone loves to possess for its beauty and delicate properties, which reflected the central theme of my blog.
Once you decide and have an idea of the central theme of your Blog, it is easier to look for great and famous names associated with the idea.

Where to Find Great And Famous Names and Ideas Associated With Your Blog Topic?

Finding famous names and ideas for your Blog Title is easier than you think because they are all around you. Look out and Find:

• List of 100 Greatest Novels of All Times
• List of 100 Greatest Movies of All Times
• List of 100 Greatest Songs of All Times 
• List of 100 Greatest Battles of All Times 

These are only some examples. Generally speaking any list or collection of old and famous things will be a good place to start searching

How to Get People To Read Below Your Title and Take A Peek Of Your Blog?

Now that you have got the attention of your potential visitor and a bit of his emotional urge to find what you are offering, it is time to reveal a bit more of what you intent to communicate.

Usually scanning of the Title of your post or a listing of your recent post will expose the nature of the content of your blog. But there is one place you can show off your intentions more easily, it is the description of your Blog under its Title. It is also one place you can borrow from others liberally and be creative.

Like your title which associates through peoples memory of something, you description also can lean on stuff people have learned and remember for a life time. What we learn as children will somehow stick with us though as adults we live our lives far away from those. We may get attached to different ideas and values.

But the best thing is expressions of such things are all around us by way of quotes, tweets, hidden in literature and various forms of media, verse and prose. Thankfully the web makes it a lot easier to search them out using your key words.

Annotating a famous quote and adapting it for your description can be even a bit of fun.

For example, I had started with a simple straight forward description for my Blog Lasting Rose:
"Shred Pillai's Blog On Celebs and Social Web". However as time passed and posts piled up, I realised that the nature of Lasting Rose has indeed changed quite a bit. It looked like the Wonder Land Alice had wandered about. So I have changed it a bit suit.

" The time has come to talk of many things, of shoes and ships and social web, of cabbages and celebrities."

Finding a good Title and description for your Blog need not be a stressful part of your life. It can be fun and creative experience with a bit of reading and search. You could even change it around to suit the evolution of the social web and the change in the perception of your visitors.

If you are one of those who keep staring at your desktop and flipping through the tabs for hours, even days, wondering how to write your next blog post, you are not alone! The web is full of tips and advice for bloggers like you on how to write smashing posts that will go viral, bringing you zillions of hits and thousands of dollars in your account.

If you are not an expert blogger who blogs for a living, on your own expertise, have tried out all of the advice and still wonder how some people like Andrew Sullivan consistently post pieces the rest of the world go gaga about, this may be for you.

The truth is, writing a good and interesting post is not all that difficult, if you don't worry too much about it.

Chances are you may be already doing most of the work as a matter of routine.

Unlike all those numbered instructions and steps from the tipsters and experts, which sound like a chore and a pain in the butt you would rather put off, writing good blog posts can be real fun. You may think this is a The Onion post, but it isn't.

The trick is to keep constructing your article or blog post as you keep spending your time browsing. Unless you are an expert on something you blog about, that is when you really get the seeds of your post.

You are likely to spend most of your browsing time on topics, events, people, objects, places and sites of interest to you, on things closer to your heart or something you are passionate about. You may even be a practitioner or dream to achieve great things in whatever that may be. So there you are, you already have the most important ingredient for a great post -- your own emotional involvement and commitment!

No doubt, you get hooked on to the screen when you feel very strongly about something, most probably something just happening and catching big headlines. You may be subjected to a strong positive emotion, like joy, like when your favorite team won a game or negative one like in the aftermath of a tragic event. You want to shout out and get it out of your chest. Your headline!

Now is the time to open your favorite word processor, unless it is already open, and just type in what you wanted to get out of your chest and save the document. You see, your blog post is nearly ready because all gurus on blogging will tell you that the headline is the most important part of your post.

If you are really perturbed by the subject matter, you are likely to persist and read more either immediately or over a period of a few days and follow up on the event to satisfy your own information crunch and driven by your own emotion. You may even save an article or picture or video for a future look if you don't have time. Actually you are unknowingly preparing great content for your blog post.

All you have to do is to keep adding all that on the document you have saved, under the headline you just typed in. The best thing is to copy and paste the URLs from the address bar under your headline so that you can reopen the page at a later time with all its content. It will be a good idea to copy any vital quotes, opinions or tweets that you agree with or that upset you, as you continue to read so you don't have to go all over again.

Of course you can keep adding on bits and pieces you feel like blurting out from time to time to all those stuff you are adding while browsing. Very soon, you will see you have already a great part of it your post.

If you are someone who likes to dig deeper, you are likely to do some search as you go along. Those might exactly be the stuff anyone who reads your articles may be searching for. So you have also your keywords for your SEO. Just keep adding all those links to the bottom of your post.

So you see, you now have not only the skeleton but also some body for a emotionally driven, compelling content you want to share with your readers. The best thing to do now is put it away and forget it till you are ready to spend that one hour adding more and refining what you have to say, annotating and referencing with the links you have collected and embellishing with the quotes and tweets you have copied.

Now that you have your post in front of you, it is time to apply all those check lists the experts have recommended, to refine and fine tune your article. Almost certainly you will find that your post already takes care of most of them and "improving" further might destroy the natural flow and readability of your content.

If you are looking to get your post published elsewhere, chances are your post will be accepted by any sensible editor, as it will have great content supported by relevant references as well as interesting and current information everyone is talking about.

If you are aiming to get your post go viral, a check with the following checklist and guidelines of Carson Ward from SEOMOZ, detailed in his brilliant article can help.

A viral checklist

Two months from now it's going to be easy to sit down and create content in the same habits we always have. Not all content needs to be viral, but when that's the goal, make sure that you accomplish all of the following.

Did you sufficiently cover the topic? Is it long enough? (24)
Does the content inspire a high-energy emotion like awe (16), anger(18), or anxiety (18)?
Did your tone convey emotion? (12)
Is it practically useful? (16)
Is it interesting? (14)
Is it surprising? (8)
Does the author have fame/credibility? (8)
If it's supposed to be funny, is it actually funny? Are you sure your friends aren't just being nice? (∞)

You can't always have all of these factors, so I've added a maximum score in parenthesis to help prioritize those factors that research has shown to be most important to sharing. If you rate your content at or near 100, it's likely that it has a far greater chance of going viral.

You will be surprised to see that the post you just put together has a lot of the essential ingredients listed above as it will have an emotionally charged Headline with relevant key words and content which your readers will find interesting.

Like the rest of the industrial sectors which see a future in the huge untapped Indian Market, the Western Media has also partnered with Indian upstarts. However, unlike in other industries, the lack of substance and quality in the daily output of the Indian brands, which carry names like CNN-IBNcan actually dent the credibility of the western Media very quickly.
Though in a country of 1.3 Billion people, the direct influence of these channels remain restricted to the urban elite and is minuscule, their viewership and influence now stretch globally thanks to the internet. Besides what they show on a daily basis becomes the fodder for a huge number of local channels and printed media the next day, often adding more colour and crazy interpretation when translated in to local languages, as can be seen from some weird postings on facebook.

The Indian Supreme Court and The Caged Parrot.

During a hearing last week on the progress of investigation by CBI (Indian equivalent of the FBI) the Supreme court of India made a few euphemistic references to assert that the CBI should operate independently, comparing it to a caged parrot which merely repeats the voices of its different masters, the supreme court itself also being one of them.
The Indian media at large latched on to the 'Caged Parrot' euphemism, for its dramatic and mass consumption effect, merely repeating it like a parrot though the reference itself doesn't mean anything in itself without the reference to the masters or the events leading up to it.
Though agencies like Reuters reported factually, no one in the Media had shown any understanding of the deeper and under lying checks and balances of the Indian constitution which squarely place the agency under a government of elected representatives, to ensure its power is limited and subject to control.
In fact only a few months back, the independence of the CBI was the bone of contention of the anti graft agitators and the opposition who wanted to place it under the Lokpal, a new constructional body with unlimited powers, clearly removing all powers to control it from the elected representative of the people and subverting the essence of Indian democracy.
Though the current government led by Sonia Gandhi's UPA and Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh has adopted a ' laissez-faire ' policy with the agency, overseeing the work of CBI is clearly the prerogative of the government despite instances of nepotism, which the CBI is investigating. Its director had asserted that neither the central theme of status reports got changed after meetings nor any deletion of any evidence against any suspect or accused took place.
The Media has failed to impartially report the whole issue, which has relevance to the so called Coalgate scam and loss to the government, which in itself is wrong interpretation by the CAG of government policy of allocating coal resources without auction, which began way back in 1993.
The government actually has every right to see that the investigating agency take cognisance of these facts in its reports and has only ensured that as was done in all previous cases before the supreme court.
The fact that the CBI is investigating execution of a government policy for incidence of corruption can't take its democratic duties away as being demanded by the judiciary.
As the fourth pillar of democracy, it is the duty of the Media to expose and bring such anomalies for public scrutiny and debate and there is no sign of such mature conduct other than blatant sensationalism.

White Goat which has gone viral!

No one knows if a goat which was noticed in the compound of the Indian Railway Minister Bansal only a few hours before he was sacked has anything to do with Goat sacrificed for Chicago Cubs curse.It probably had more to do with Hindu astrology and its remedial measures of donating animals to ward off evils. But this goat whether it knew or not, soon became not only a 'scape goat' for the minister's sins to be fed first and then to be sacrificed by him but also internationally famous!
The sensation hungry India media, showed live coverage of the goat and the video reporting by leading channels, who had no clue of what was going on but chose to assume and report it as some sort of animal sacrifice went viral.
Such reporting, which was clearly intrusion of privacy of the minister, without permission and devoid of facts was clearly unprofessional, even if such acts are part of a culturally diverse Indian life.
http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/390829/railway-bribery-case-pawan-bansal-feeds-goat-to-ward-off-bad-luck.html

Timing and political intrigue of last week's events.

While drawing conclusions, the channels have clearly failed to analyse the week's events in context and look deeper in to why they happened, choosing for wild guesses instead.

IBN18 Editor-in-Chief Rajdeep Sardesai says that by sacking Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Kumar Bansal, the government has made a last ditch attempt to restore its fading credibility. Clearly serious questions will be asked as to just why the Prime Minister took so long to take this decision to sack his ministers. "Clearly there will also be questions as to whether the Prime Minister can completely insulate himself after the sacking of Ashwani Kumar,"

A deeper analysis would have proved that , the government action was a well derived strategy in the wake of the regional elections in the state of Karnataka. which took place in the week.

The fact that the opposition which lost the state election had every reason to draw political punches to upset the Government on the eve of the elections and the UPA government managed to successfully thwart the opposition ploy and win the election can explain last week's events more logically.

The media would have done much better by digging in to those questions of why the CBI chose to bring out the Bansal case which they had been investigating for long just on the eve of the election rather than surmising on the plight of a Prime Minister who had no compunctions to resign from his post for lesser things like getting his way on the Nuclear Pact with the USA against stringent parliamentary opposition.

Amidst a raging debate, stemming from a recent PEW report on the state of News Media, whether it is theGolden Age of journalism or it is barely breathing its last, the journalistic world is keenly watching Andrew Sullivan's recent 'pay wall' experiment with his famous blog, 'The Dish'.

CSN Chicago, a part of NBC Sports Regional Networks, is changing the meaning of sports forever!

Sports used to be something a few celebrities engaged in for the rest of us to watch and the press used to have a field day about.

However, a new feature introduced by CSN called Team pulse is on its way to transform how games are played out, enjoyed and reported, with active participation of everyone and with greater and unprecedented mass intellectual and emotional involvement. Can we call that sports anymore?

The nature of sports and its explosive emotional upheaval has changed a long time ago by the infusion of music which has immense mass appeal. The emotional swaying power of music and its celebrity creators have blended well with the turmoil of sports, taking it to exhilarating heights in the past.

The Three Tenors Concert of Los angel Super bowl remains a musical moment etched in the history of sports. Numbers like We will Rock you by Queen still reverberate in stadiums around the world. The bears have even turned music celebrities in the past by performing Super bowl Shuffle for charity.

It is the genius of music celebrities like Lady Gaga in turning technology and the immense influential power of the ever expanding social web, to pamper and keep hold on their fan base, which the giants of sports have borrowed this time.

#Kobe Bryant: Heart of a lion.Derrick Rose: Heart of a shivering chihuahua.notsportscenter.com/koberosefacebo…
— Haceb Ehcen (@Possessed_OG) April 14, 2013

The interactive social experiences technology CSN Chicago sought out for their new social engaging feature Team Pulse is the same as the one which Lady Gaga employed with great success to engage with her fans in real time through her website, provided by ARKTAN, specialised in creating engaging user experiences on the social web and TV.

However, unlike the massive benefits such interactive features bring to celebrities like Lady Gaga in the entertainment field, the Team plus feature of CSN has far deeper and wide reaching power to convert all sports to mass sports.

For example, real time interactive facilities provided for the 'Bulls Pulse', the official site of BULLS, include real time curated time lines of Bulls Talk for fans, Press Box, Player Tweets, Official Bulls & NBA and Instagram photos. The feature also includes a Trending list of players with mentions each get during the event.

What this means is that everyone involved and watching a game live and all those away from the venue but engaged through TV or other media can express their views, opinions and criticisms, which everyone else can see and react to, anywhere around the world.

The revolution in smart phones and tablets, which has rendered such interaction easy and enjoyable and platforms on the social web like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and numerous Blogs and forums take the game to the level of a global event.

What does this mean in reality? Spectators can now influence players during the game. Someone can pass a valuable tip or advice the coach is missing. The commentator can see the trend and focus on a player if he is doing well or making mistakes because the tweets are benign or nasty. Everyone can see how much attention the game is catching so everything including the live ads can be changed. See where this is going ?

In fact the Instagram stream brings much fun to the experience by letting everyone express their feelings of the 'moment' before, during and after the event in an unprecedented and unique way, giving a sense of one to one community participation in the event.

Adding short video streams like 'vine' can add depth to this experience if added to the page, leveraging on the immense addictive power of this new social media platform, something CSN and the technology provider need to consider.

Further making the streams scrollable can enhance participants experience by being able to revisit and 'miss' nothing, especially if they want to share at a later time.

It is only just the beginning of a trend how the sporting world is going to change. Pretty soon, such features can become standard for several other games like football and cricket, basket ball and hockey popular in other parts of the world.

The impact of interactive features like Team pulse can be much far reaching changing the laws of the games, their engagement, betting industry, entertainment and TV and even the popularity.
Pretty soon, like Psy of South Korea who has taken the world by storm with his 'Gagnam Style' and now his follow on 'Gentleman' which had over 10 million Youtube hits under 24 Hrs, locales and national boundaries will disappear for sporting events.

One thing is sure. The way people will live and relax during weekends will certainly change. There may be nothing of interest about a game you watched over the weekend to talk about aound the Monday morning coffee in the office!

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