You Tube!

So when u say "Google" what comes first to your mind..

• Yet another dot com
• Biggest website and search engine in the world
• Two innocent people harnessing technology and saying Don't be Evil

or may be something else, but the matter of fact is that this Don't be Evil enterprise may not be a true angel.

It was an October evening when Google decided to take over YouTube with $1.65 billion, which is the talk of the town today. Though I accept that it was a fair deal, to fill up the pockets from this successfully running dot com, but still do you really think that buying YouTube was that much justified for a company like Google?

Viacom on Tuesday slapped YouTube and parent company Google with a lawsuit, accusing the wildly popular video-sharing site of "massive intentional copyright infringement" and seeking more than $1 billion in damages. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that nearly 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's entertainment programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.YouTube has deliberately withheld the application of available copyright protection measures in order to coerce rights holders to grant it licenses on favorable terms," according to the complaint.
-March 13, 07

the News Corp. unit subpoenaed YouTube for the identities of two users who had allegedly posted as-yet-unaired episodes of the popular show 24 because it was "interested in protecting full episodes of our series that we have yet to monetize

And the list goes on.. CBS, Fox News, the National Basketball Association, Sony Pictures Classics, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group and recently the BBC. Although Google has negotiated with these entertainment companies to close the matter. I think probably those two innocent youngsters (Larry and Brin) have grown up into the professionals. All they want is to make Google the most successful enterprise of all times. "YouTube has deliberately chosen not to take reasonable precautions to deter the rampant infringement on its site," Viacom said in its complaint. "Because YouTube directly profits from the availability of popular infringing works on its site, it has decided to shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners to monitor the YouTube site on a daily or hourly basis to detect infringing videos."

If you don't know YouTube is a video sharing website that is based on an antique law written long before video-sharing Web sites were envisioned. The law is, of course, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which made its appearance in the U.S. Congress in July 1997.

So what do u think of Google now. What does it want to prove from running YouTube under the
aim of developing the videos sharing market online. Despite of all these controversies against YouTube, it is still running at its full strength, maybe because it is filling up the pockets of Google by handsome advertisement revenue it makes. And this in turn is because of the availability of the popular (legal n illegal) videos which attract most of its visitors. I see no reason for it to continue with YouTube except for the sake of revenue. May be the upcoming JV among two leading media companies, NBC Universal and News Corp along with the support from Yahoo, AOL and MSN, would bring up something better and enhanced tha YouTube. But for that we will have to wait atleast till this summer.

So probably it is right to say that Google needs to change its motto to "Do no Evil until you are earning a lot".

SEO with Google!

So here I am with my favorite company Google. This is the company that gives me inspiration to excel in the web technologies and other stuff. Although they have a lot of features currently present in the market (on the web), but the best one and the most beautiful one so far is their search engine. Hats off to Larry and Sergey, who have done such an outstanding piece of work.

But atleast I should be the person who should curse Google for making my life miserable. Its not only me, but all those web developer's who are fighting to stay alive, fighting to get a good PageRank in Google. Well i have read a lot of articles about it and have selected 10 basic points to keep in mind to get a good pagerank in google. Here I've listed these points briefly:

1. Do visit Webmaster help center and read all the points given there before even starting off with your website. This will give you an insight into what Google is looking for and specially "What all should never be done". Click Here to go to Help center.
   
2. Never ever hire a Search Engine Optimizer, of whom u r not sure of. Generally search engine optimizers take advantage of ignorance of other people in this matter. So be very cautious before selecting your Search Engine Optimizer.
3. The site should be crawler friendly. So what does that mean. It means that all the pages should be linked properly and try not to make your major pages (with good content) login restricted. Web crawlers cannot pass through restricted login.
4. Create a sitemap for your site. All the details to create a sitemap successfully are provided on the Help Center mentioned above.
5. Google works checks on your backlinks. So try to make a long list of sites with link pointing to your site. To see all the links pointing to your site, type "link:http://my-site.com" without quotes and search on Google with my-site.com replaced my your site name.
6. Remember, the popularity of site where you put your link also counts. So try to put links on popular sites, like wikipedia. Also keep in mind that backlinks should always be one way, i.e., Google doesn't take into consideration the links which point to each other. So lnik exchanging may not be a good option when you are looking for a good pagerank.
7. Some basic tags also need to be checked while creating the page. Check for Keyword Tag: it should have all the relevant keywords that describe your site, separated by commas; Description Tag: it should give a decent description of your site (though Google doesn't lay much emphasis on these two tags anymore); Title Tag: this is your ket tag, ur title tag should be 5-8 words long and should give a brief description about ur company; ALT tag: A proper ALT tag goes after the file name, and before the Align indicator. This is also not much important these days, but that might help in Google's Image search when you are using it with img tag.Header Tag:The text of each page is given more weight by the search engines if you make use of header tags and then use descriptive body text below those headers. Bullet points work well too. It is not enough to merely BOLD or enlarge your text headlines.
8. Don't add much graphics and images into your site. Instead make all your links Text based, because crawlers cannot read images, but they can easily scan the text links. S use as many text links as possible ( but be sure not to add to many links on a single page to get blacklisted).
   
9. The size, font and color of foreground and background is also accounted to give a Pagerank. The better the difference between foreground and background, better is the pagerank. So try to avoid colors of similar nature for both and don't try to write any hidden text on the page.
10. Last but not the least, write good quality content. The content should properly describe your site. A rich content site is always prioritized over a low content site.Try to write a content appropriate enough for crawlers not to miss it and don't forget to follow the guidelines mentioned by Google at the Help center.
    

So that's all about getting started with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). And the last advice for now, Never Try To Cheat. The people who are behind Google are not fools. In fact, it can penalize you, and get your website banned from certain search engines for a long time. So follow my advices if u want a good search engine ranking. Sometime later, I'll share some advanced optimization techniques. For now, good bye and happy Googling!

A Beginning

First a little introduction bout me:
Well I am Ankit Jain, student of Delhi College of Engineering, Computer Engg Deptt. . I am here to share some of my thoughts and knowledge about day today Technology. I am also a chief developer of a #1 rated student community portal DCEtech.com (rated by Google). I have also bagged some of interesting works like online Stock Market Simulation, online Programming Challenge and a dynamic database driven quizzing competition. So basically I have tried a lot of Web Technologies and I am passionate about Web 2.0 and related applications.

My blog, Tech Out Of The Box, is devoted to the development of new technologies and I would share some tips and tricks to test and hack basic systems and resources. So keep checking it out and don't forget to THINK OUT OF THE BOX!!

Okay, so enough of the crap, all i wanted to say in my first blog entry is that i will try my best to bring out the hidden facts about some of the most famous software companies (specially the web based) brought out by my experiments (that's the most interesting part) and from journals and e-magazines around the world. But be sure, almost all the things will be correct as per my knowledge. So now here I take the privilege to lay the foundation of this Blog: Tech Out Of the Box