Archive for April, 2007

Indian presence in the blogsphere is very strong, thanks to better broadband connectivity. Also like in Information Technology sector, Indians are pretty good in blogging simply because english is the second language for most of them.

But it is not easy to find out top 10 Indian blogs. One way is to use Alexa, but it may not give a true picture. For blogs, another metric that can be used to judge traffic is the FeedBurner subscriber count. Of course not all blogs display it, but many top Indian blogs do display FeedBurner subscriber count chicklet.

Without further “blah, blah”, here are the top 10 Indian blogs when it comes to FeedBurner feed count. This may not be perfect and if you know a blog I missed, I am only too happy to modify the list

1. Quick Online Tips by PCHere
10200+ subscribers

2. Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal
9800+ subscribers

3. JohnTp.com by John TP
1100+ subscribers

4. Tech Buzz by Thilak Raj
1000+ subscribers

5. Brajeshwar.com by Brajeshwar
700+ subscribers

6. India Uncut by Amit Varma
540+ subscribers

7. Domain Maximus by Sidin
400+ subscribers

8. Sree’s Tech Notes by Sreekandakumar
340+ subscribers

9. Ajay - on the road called life! by Ajay Dsouza
260+ subscribers

10. A Management Consultant’s Blog by Gautam Ghosh
250+ subscribers

As you can see almost all the top blogs are technology related. Also even the top blogs are way down when compared to blogs such as TechCrunch (369,000) or BoingBoing. But again almost all top Indian blogs are run by individuals not by companies!

Some of the blogs which would have appeared here if there was a subscriber count on them are gigaOM, desipundit, kiruba.com, indianpad, Emergic and many many more! It is surprising that most of these blogs are yet to use FeedBurner!

Here is a happy news for Adsense publishers in India. Google Adsense recently started operations in Hyderabad, India. Hopefully this will mean better support for Indian Adsense publishers.

Now the only thing Google Adsense need to do in India is to enable direct bank payments. This will be a boon for Indian Adsense publishers since current courier fee of $25 is too much in Indian context. Especially when your Adsense income hovers around the $100 mark!

It was not long ago that major internet players Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! agreed on a common sitemap protocol. This allowed webmasters to provide an XML file indicating the structure of the Website.

One of the problems with sitemaps was that you needed to submit it to each search engine separately. For Google, this meant creating your own Webmaster tools account and then adding your sitemap XML there. With so many search engines out there it was a chore.

But not anymore! Google, Microsoft, Ask and Yahoo! again joined hands to enable something called auto discovery of sitemaps. You just need to add a reference to the sitemap in robots.txt and all the search engines will automatically pick that up! Now that is what I call a cool idea!

In your robots.txt file, just add
Sitemap: http://www.yousitedomainname.com/sitemap.xml

Is your Wireless network secure? If your answer is “Yes, I use WEP encryption”, then probably you need to think again. I have been using WEP encryption for sometime and hence was not amused when I saw this news!

Code breakers have discovered a technique for extracting a 104-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) key in under a minute.

Under a minute? Basically RC4 stream cipher used by WEP(Wired Equivalent Privacy) has cryptographic weakness which is exploited by WiFi crackers. You can checkout more details of the WiFi exploit here.

We were able to extend Klein’s attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets. For 60,000 available data packets, the success probability is about 80% and for 85,000 data packets about 95%. Using active techniques like deauth and ARP re-injection, 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good condition.

It is time for me to switch to WPA which is supposed to be much more secure. I mean, till it is cracked by somebody else!

But in a world where there are so many insecure WiFi networks, WEP weakness is probably the last thing you worry about!

Today (April 05) is the official CSS naked day. Don’t be confused, you are not getting naked. Instead you need to remove all of your CSS files (design) in your blog/website and leave just the content in place.

The idea is to promote Web standards. If your site conforms to Web standards, things should look just fine. You can check out more details here. More than 1500 Websites are taking part in this “prank”.

No, I have no plans of getting naked. Frankly I don’t know how it will look (It will not be pretty for sure!). Do you have any plans for getting naked?