Hey Guys (not sure if I have any more readers left on this blog)!! Just wanted to let you all know that I am still alive and been around. Blogging less lately but I do blog more on Softwareandtools.com then here ;).

This time I won’t promise that I will start blogging here too, but I will at least try to make an effort at it. Work and other commitments have swallowed me completely lately. Rest assured I am still watching the blogging world from a distance and so have not lost the touch completely.

Talk to you soon.

Woooo Hooooo, Google Calendar is finally here. As of 2:00 PM Australian time I logged onto Google Calendar site and I can now login. Haven’t checked much of it. Thought will share this news with you guys too.

OK, now back to Google Calendar.

I just read the article WTF 2.0 written by Russel Beattie. I would agree to his points. We see so many new services on a daily basis where sometimes it’s hard to conclude what the viable business model is. Above all quite a lot of times it is hard to find what more value is the service providing to the customers. To take a small example, Dashboard pages is the buzzword these days, there is a flock of dashboards on the Internet. How many of them provide some real value and uniqueness to it’s customers? I don’t think making it more dynamic and AJAX based says it all!

Read the article, it definately provides some breakfast to the brain!.

One more service offered by Google called Google Pages. I have written a blurb about this on Software And Tools, check it out.

Technorati has added a new fantastic feature today called Favorites. The idea seems that people can add their favorite feeds and they will be aggregated there. It seems that the maximum favorites one can add is 50 (which makes sense, one has to now prioritise between which bloggers are his favorites!). Also there is a RSS of the Favorites as well (mine is here). This feature can again used to increase the credibility of bloggers and blogs/sites. I am sure there will be feature later down the track which will show that which blog has to added to Favorites how many times.

So from adding the favorite bloggers, what else would you use this feature for? Well you can use this feature if you are really short on time and just want to read the main blogs and their headlines. Favorites page and it’s RSS is a partial feed only,so it would not really interest me a lot. This reminds me that I should add a new Label in Google Reader for all the blogs which are my Favorites and call it “Favorites” and it will can solve one purpose for me.

By the way I think it can be really handy if readers have the power of exporting a readers Favorites as an OPML file.

Add Software And Tools to your favorites.

Add IT Digest to your favorites.

I read Steve Rubel’s post as to how he uses Google Personlised page as a dashboard along with his favourite news aggregator to read the feeds. Well I have been using Google Personlised page as my dashboard as well for a long time now (since Google Personalised page was released).

I although don’t use it completely for my geeky needs (although most of the feeds are geeky 🙂 ). I have configured dashboard so I read something else other then Technical blogs, liked “quote of the day”, “Indian News”, “Email” etc. Atleast this way I read something else other then geek stuff. I wish Google Dashboard start supporting a feature where I can listen to the podcasts directly from the desktop, something like what is available in Netvibes (let me know if this is possible already. I use Google Reader as my main feed aggregator these days and am quite happy with it’s features.

So what do you use as your dashboard these days and what feeds do you have there? And ofcourse, the dashboard is my home page!

Chris Garrett writes a post on 10 tips on attracting more comments on your blog. My favorite are no. 5 and 6.

# Hint – Open questions are the best to get great quality answers, ie. “What do you think?”, but they can be intimidating. If you struggle to get comments it might be easier to give simple leading ideas for what people should say, eg. “Do you agree?”, “Are you for or against?”. “Yes, no, me too” are not great responses but at least they are a sign of life!
# Restraint – Resist the urge to make your posts too complete if you want to receive community input. That’s one of the great things about top ten lists, you have to stop at 10! Don’t put everything into the post, especially if you know your audience has certain expertise they are bursting to share!

While watching Channel 7 (Local TV Channel) I realised that now they give out their site address as Yahoo7.com.au. I quickly checked to find out that Yahoo Australia and Channel 7 are in deal with each other. Now Channel 7’s website gets redirected to Yahoo Australia’s site. Ofcourse, this makes sense as Channel 9 (another local TV Channel) has parterned with MSN Australian site called Ninemsn.com.au. I like the interface and how things are all linked up now. Well done!

This message is for Godaddy.com. I have been registering new domain names and using their services for domain name maintenance for nearly a year now. I have been with them since I found Bob Parson’s blog and since I saw the Super Bowl Ad ( ya, well the advertising still works). Although I don’t have a complain with the services that they are providing I have a complain and suggestion to make with the offers that they are providing.

The story goes like this, yesterday I got an email from Godaddy.com about an offer that they are running. The offer said that I could reister .name domain paying only $5.95 instead of $9.95 which is standard. It had some bells and whistles attached. I got lured and headed to their website to register a domain name for my Brother (http://www.bhavinpatel.name ). As I checked out and applied the discount code that they provided, I noticed that the price was still $9.95. Getting desperate I decided to call them and sort this out (Total call time 26.20 seconds and mind you that I was calling a US number from Australian phone, not sure how much I saved over all!). So after talking to the girl and forwarding her a copy of the email that I have received she concluded that the code did not work and she will have to charge me the full price and then later send me the refund. Not so happy, I agreed ( I did not have any other option to get the domain registered). I asked the girl on the phone why are they sending email messages if the code does not work and the girl simply said that she don’t know and it does not work for her either.

Meanwhile I forwarded the email that I recieved to other not so geek friends of mine seeing that it was a good deal and that they could benefit from it. Two of them said that they headed to the website and applied the code but they were shocked that the price came upto $9.95 instead of $5.95 and resisted to register.

I got the refund this morning of $4.00 which is fine. I checked in again this morning if the code was working and looks like it’s still not fixed.

Now my complain to Godaddy is, why send such email offers if they cannot comply with it? They are wasting their customers time. Overall I would have wasted 30 more minutes then needed. How hard is it to check for them to check if a discount code works or not? And even after they knew that it does not work, why can’t they fix the problem so other customers like me don’t have the face the same problem. With incidents like this, customers loose faith and think that you are trying to rip them off (Ok, I might be going to far now, may be). So the solution that I am giving you is if you are over charging your customers then the marked price, then give the product for free. Ever went to super market, that is what the policy is at some of the super markets that I visit in Australia. This way you won’t loose the customers and will remember to check out the things before you send the email content out.

So been using Mystickies.com for last two days now using different test accounts and it’s fun so far with few minor glithces. I have written a somewhat detailed review at Software And Tools. Try it out and let me know if you like it and will use it in the future.