Once in a while you come across something extra-ordinary that will make you open your mouth and say WAAAW!. Nature is full of that WAW and many such things are captured in Full HD in the BBC Documentary Series called “Life“. Produced by the BBC Natural History Unit using state of the art filming technology. For nature lovers, this is bigger than James Cameron’s Avatar 3D.

Narrated by none other than David Attenborough – the series is spectacular in showing the goodness of nature as well as telling the story in a way that you will forget yourself and wont realise your mouth is open since a loong time.

Had been to our native place last weekend and with a brand new HD camcorder (Canon Vixia HF20), I was desperate to film something or rather everything. Luck was in pocket that day and My Grand Father said he has read in newspaper that today we can see the brightest and biggest full moon in 2010 (at 8PM on January 30th, 2010 – read article below). And why would I leave such opportunity to test the Zoom and Hi-Definition in camcorder. I had my Photo tripod positioned by evening and was ready to go. Captured a loooot of Full Moon around 8PM.  This is known as Wolf Moon in the West. This being the second Full moon in the same month, it is also a Blue Moon. It sure appeared to be bigger than normal. Happy Moon and Happy Me.

Here is one of several clips of that day:

If you received an email saying “Your AdWords Account has stopped running today” or “One of your Google AdWords Customer’s account has stopped running this morning” and if it is not addressed to you directly using your name or email or customer account number, its 100% a phishing scam email.

These emails wont have your email address in the “to” field, they are sent to undisclosed recipients and the email also wont have your account number.

They might have content something like this:

Your Google Adwords Account has stopped running this morning.
Some of the ads have stopped running today (Thursday, 4 February 2010, 04:34:08). We had encountered a number of problems with some of our servers that crashed this morning and at this time we cannot check to see what customer accounts are now running 100%.

For those who don’t know me: I’m writing this as an Indian First, then an Andhra Pradesh Native and then an Hyderabadi.
 
This part of the post is to all the Telengana agitators and supporters – NOTHING is going to change people. It is you who should change. All you will be left with is dirty politics, corruption and naxalism. TRS or Congress or any other party is doing what ever you think ‘they are doing for good’ is NOT for your good but for the temporary power and to make something out of your sentiment. They are going to LOOT you. Everyone has a regional sentiment. That doesn’t mean you should go on the roads, protest and pelt stones at whatever you can when some selfish man says we need a separate state so that he too can be in power, don’t you think of how is it going to benefit you? How is it going to be different? Unless you are planning to send out all Andhra people out of Hyderabad and occupy their homes and properties. Is that your plan? Because I remember very well KCR saying this a few days back "Andhrawala Bhagoo, Telenganawala Jaago". Is that what you are up to? If that’s the case, then bring it on. We are all used to fighting for everything right? Fight with other states, fight with other religions, fight with other castes, fight with everyone you can whenever you get a chance. That is how we are always in India right? Bring It On!!!

Being a Big Fan of Channels like Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, The Animal Planet and The Travel and Living, there is no day that I watch TV without seeing what’s running on these channels. Yesterday was just one of those days when I was watching NGC’s Most Amazing Moments and I soon realized I was watching one of the best wildlife video footage ever caught on tape.

Well, It was an 1hr30min episode on NGC. Normally any episode lasts for only 30 or 60min right? Well, this was special, very special. We are talking about a holiday video which was set to be one of the best wildlife video ever shot. It is now the most watched wild life video on YouTube. The video tops all other wildlife videos posted by BBC, NGC, Animal Planet that were shot by full time professional wildlife photographers.

The NGC’s documentary mentioned the video on YouTube, no of views it got and highlighted at least 2 dozen good comments among some 30K comments at the time of creation of the NGC documentary, I’m guessing that was in 2008. The video was shot in September 2004 according to Wikipedia.

Battle at Kruger is an eight-minute amateur wildlife video that depicts an unfolding confrontation between a herd of Cape Buffalo, a small pride of lions, and one or two crocodiles. The video was shot in September 2004 at the Transport Dam watering hole in Kruger National Park, South Africa, during a Safari guided by Frank Watts. It was filmed by videographer David Budzinski and photographer Jason Schlosberg.

The Video on YouTube now has close to a 50 million views and 60K comments. The video was all over the press, both News Papers and News Channels. Check out the press section on this site.

In one line, this is one such footage, that professional wildlife photographers with all those top quality equipment and by spending all their life in the wild will die to capture at least 1/4th of it. And when some guy on a holiday gets it just like that, you can only imagine how it feels for a Pro.

Dereck Joubert, a photographer and writer for National Geographic says in the NGC documentary:     "There is no doubt at all that the tourist who shot that scene was unbelievably lucky. I mean, we would’ve considered ourselves lucky to have had that whole scene happen in front of us."

Watch it and I am sure you will learn something and will never forget it.

Global Voices (Globalvoicesonline.org) has an interactive map “Threatened Voices” showing bloggers who have been threatened, arrested, or killed for speaking out online. China has the most with 33 on record; Egypt is a close second with 29. India has none? I love my country! checkout the map here.

Here is a beautiful case study of a taxi driver who is winning customers from a simple video on YouTube.

It was Devesh Mishra’s friend from Singapore who shot the video and uploaded it on YouTube. “I know a little bit of English as I am intermediate (10+2) educated. However, in the video, I was helped by my friend as he told me what exactly to speak in front of the camera,” the taxi driver reveals. Mishra further informs that eight foreign travellers have so far contacted him and five of them have turned out to be good business.

According to Mishra it was amazing to get such response and this made him understand the power of internet. “It was a wise decision as I eventually understood that I could not have reached those consumers if I had advertised on some other media. Internet helped me to reach out to foreign customers,” he said.

Internet has now become an important part of Mishra’s life. “I created my email id on Yahoo and now I religiously surf the internet at least twice a week. I get hundreds of emails every week. Most of the mails are from foreign travellers looking for my services. I also visit Yahoo and Google to be always updated about latest happenings,” he said.

Get the full story here.

See? Now that’s a good case study of how the Internet can be put into use.

But, well if you think what kind of accent this man has,.. He is an ordinary Local Taxi Driver, You are not looking at a pilot. Are you?

I Wish Good Luck and Success to this man who is for sure going to be a role model for several others.

Observed this just a little while ago.
Not sure if I am the first one to spot this, but this is sure an interesting development for Bloggers and WordPress users.

We already know that Google shows the Video Thumbnails beside the search results from top video sites like YouTube and Metacafe. We also know that Google shows the Picture of a news article from news sites if there is a picture in the news post. But this is new: (The search result which has the image is a WordPress.com Blog)

The search on google.
The blog with an in image in the post.

Have you spotted this before or is this a new feature that Google is testing? Does this also work on Self hosted WordPress blogs and other Blogging Platforms othet than WordPress? I didn’t spot any other occurance yet.

Ever wondered what sells and what doesn’t during the recession?
Here is a list: (not in any order)
1. Candy, Cosmetics and Contraceptives
2. Luxury Retail
3: Reposessions
4: The Government
5: Education
6: Vices
7: Discount Retail
8: Information Technology
9: Health Care
10: Non-cyclical Businesses

Read more on How Stuff Works.

Came across this article at DailySEOblog.com by Mani Karthik, it is one good list put together in terms of what is true and what is not in the SEO world.

People have their own theories on what works and what doesn’t. While some things are never revealed officially by search giants, SEOs figureout by practice. This is one such list you should have a look before you start optimizing your website.  I don’t have second opinions on any of the points listed by Mani.

Quoting a few points from Mani’s list of 25:

3. Changing the crawl rate settings in Webmasters tools console will change the Google crawl rate once and for all.
Apparently not. Google will also check your posting/publishing frequency and set an appropriate crawling frequency based on it, despite your manual setting.
10. A flash page means bad SEO.
Not at all. Using flash will definitely give you less options for SEO compared to a content rich page, but that doesn’t mean bad SEO. You can focus on other SEO factors and get equally good if not better results.
11. Adding a WordPress blog will automatically fix your site’s SEO.
WordPress is a great tool. But just adding one to your site/replacing with it will not give you any edge. You have to use it wisely to get the results.
14. Sitelinks appear only for websites who have high PR.
Sitelinks are auto generated for websites with high traffic. There is nothing you can do control them except to block some of the links from appearing using WebMaster tools
22. SEO is a one month process. Do it and get it done !
SEO is not a quick fix. It requires regular check ups and updates. Nothing can be achieved in short term.

Read the full article here: Top 25 commonly believed SEO myths.