Countries Where Web 2.0 and Blogging Craze is Popular

Wondering which countries in the world have the largest number of people following the Web 2.0 and blogging phenomenon. We can get some good pointers indirectly by looking at the traffic of TechCrunch, CNET (for tech, Web 2.0) and ProBlogger (for Blogging).

People who enjoy the latest innovations in the world of web 2.0, tech start-ups and blogging are very likely to be following these sites.

Recently, this widely-read trio embedded the new maps.amung.us mapping widget that displays, in real time, their recent site traffic on a World Map. It was used only on one of their pages but still, it's a fairly good indicator of their traffic per country.

Here's a recent snapshot from each of their widgets suggesting the bulk of tech & blogging crazy users is concentrated in North America, Europe, Australia and South / South-East Asia. Russia, China and Africa are not active in these maps probably because these sites primarily cater to English speaking audiences.

TechCrunch Visitors:

CNET Visitors:

Problogger Visitors:

Rafe Needleman adds: I have a love/hate relationship with widgets like whos.amung.us, Feedjit and MyBlogLog. Site managers who are thinking of adding these need to be aware that they can expose information about traffic and users to the general public.

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Download Individual Installers for Windows Live Programs

Some people are not too happy with the new Windows Live Suite that packs every software under a single installer and suggests changing your browser homepage / default search engine at the time of installation.

If you also prefer to download standalone MSI installers for different Windows Live products separately rather than the common installer, here are the links for all WL software:

Download Windows Live Writer wlwriter.exe

Download Windows Live Messenger wlmessenger.exe

Download Windows Live Toolbar wltoolbar.exe

Download Windows Live Photo Gallery wlphotogallery.exe

Download Windows Live Mail Desktop wlmail.exe

Disclaimer: I haven't tried running the standalone Windows Live installers myself. The above download links were found in the WindowsUpdate.log file that exists in the default Windows Installation folder. Use at your own risk.

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Find Any Email in GMail With Simple Search Commands

While some GMail users download email locally to Outlook or Thunderbird and then use desktop search programs like Copernic or Windows Desktop Search to find emails, GMail itself has some powerful search capabilities.

Let's look at some common search scenarios and possible solutions:

Q: I have hundreds of unread emails in my Gmail Inbox but not all of them show up on the main page. Can I bring up view in GMail containing only unread messages.

A: label:inbox is:unread

Q: My boss sent me a PDF document last month that I can no longer locate in the Inbox. Can you help me find it.

A: from:Name_Of_Boss filename:pdf after:2007/07/01 [yyyy/mm/dd]

Q: I received an email from Paypal support last week. I am not sure if I deleted the message, archived it or marked it as Spam.

A: from:Paypal in:anywhere

Q: I have dozens of unread email messages in the Inbox but I am in a hurry to check them all. Show me just the messages that are for me.

A: is:unread after:2007/09/03 to:your.email@address.com

Q: Ryan is a good friend who send me pretty interesting PowerPoint / Word files that often have inspirational quotes, beautiful natural landscapes and funny slide shows of Cats. I love it all but they take too much space.

A: from:Ryan has:attachment [Select all and then delete]

Q. I accidentally deleted an important email message from a colleague. My GMail trash is already overflowing. How do I retrieve that particular message.

A: label:trash Name_Of_Your_Colleague

Q: I use GMail to automatically backup my WordPress blog. The database backup are stored via email attachments as Zips. Since I am running short on GMail storage, I would like to delete all backups that are older than two weeks.

A: filename:.zip before:2007/08/15 wordpress

Q: While chatting over Google Talk, Veronica sent me a link to her Flickr pictures.

A: in:chat from:veronica flickr.com

Q: Show me all emails from my Boss that he marked Urgent or Important in the subject.

A: from:Boss_Name subject:(Urgent OR Important)

Q. I have two contacts in GMail with similar names - Peter King and Peter King Junior. Can I see emails the received from the former contact.

A: from:Peter King -Junior

Related: Prevent GMail False Positives, Reduce GMail Inbox Size

Search Shortcuts: Instead of typing label:unread, you can simply type l:^u

Important: Unlike Google web search, GMail won't suggest search results that contain plurals or misspellings of your search query. For instance, a search for "computer" will only show email with that exact word - you won't see messages containing the word "computers".

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CNN Breaking News E-Mail Alerts and Advertising Dollars

[Click on the CNN Breaking News email alert screenshot for large preview]

Like Google News Alerts, CNN too offers an email alert service to help readers track news topics of their interest - they get an instant email each time a story is published on CNN that matches some pre-defined keywords.

But there's a small problem with the CNN implementation - the email message has no links where the subscriber can click to visit either the CNN homepage or the story page that's mentioned in the alert message.

If you're reading the email alert in GMail, you are likely to see an ad on the right that points to CNN.com. (see screenshot)

GMail users, who may be feeling a bit lazy to type the CNN URL in their web browsers, are extremely likely to take a shortcut - they'll click that convenient Google ad to visit the CNN website for reading the full story content online.

And for CNN, that's equivalent to wasting ad dollars. They are buying traffic through online ads which could have easily come to them for free had they put a simple link in their breaking news email alert messages.

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Should You Enable Adsense Whitelist (Allowed Sites Option) ?

Google has recently introduced an Allowed Sites feature which can be accessed from the Adsense Setup tab of your Adsense dashboard. See screenshot. (google.com/adsense/publisher-whitelist-view).

Adsense publishers can now specify a Whitelist or website URLs where the Google Ads should be displayed. For instance, if you enabled Allowed Site only for abc.com and use your Adsense Publisher ID to display ads on xyz.com, the Google ads will still display though you won't generate any revenue from the clicks or impressions.

Google probably introduced this setting to prevent cases of Adsense Theft where someone takes your Adsense ID (google_ad_client) and uses it on another inappropriate site. This has happened with us as well when a porn website was displaying Google ads using our publisher ID - Google quickly sent a warning email but the matter was resolved in few hours.

Are you planning to turn on the Allowed Sites option? As an Adsense Publisher myself, I'll probably leave that untouched mainly because a part of traffic coming to this site originates from Google/Yahoo cache (when the main site is inaccessible), online translation services like Babelfish (for non-English visitors) and from proxy servers (where the site may be banned). And some social sites / web directories display external content inside frames.

With Adsense Whitelist in place, you miss an opportunity to monetize this indirect traffic though the visitors will still see Google ads on your web pages, advertisers will be charged by Google but the Adsense revenue won't be shared with you.

If you are really worried that other illegal sites are using your Adsense publisher ID, you can easily detect that using Adsense channels.

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How to Find Email Addresses of People Who Plagiarize Content

Content plagiarism is a serious concern on the Internet. You spent an entire day writing that comprehensive review of the Nikon D80 DSLR camera only to realize that hour later, some lesser-known websites and blogs have reprinted your article word-by-word without giving you any credit.

To get your content removed from the another website, the first step (that works in 99% of the cases) is to send a friendly email to the owner of that site.

But sometimes finding the email address of the person, who ripped off your content, may be the toughest part. Here are some indirect tricks to help you locate email addresses of offenders.

Step 1. If the offending site is self hosted, you are very likely to find the email address of the website owner through the public whois database. I prefer DomJax (review) for quick retrieval of website registry information.

Step 1(a). If the website is self hosted but the whois information is private, try the following query on Google (replace xyz with the actual site address)

xyz.com -inurl:xyz.com - This might show up some real email addresses for that domain.

Step 2. If the site is hosted on Blogger, WordPress or other blogging platforms, leave a comment in any of the blog posts. Most bloggers generally read and respond to user comments.

Related: Plagiarism on Blogspot Hosted Blogs

Step 3. Now the trickiest part - there's no "Contact Us" form on the website and there's place for you to write comments. Well, don't give up yet because you still have good options:

3(a). Use Technorati or Google Blog search to find other sites / blogs linking to that offending site. It's quite possible that the offender may be maintaining multiple websites that are cross-linked for maximum Google Juice. There are chances that contact information is available on one of his/her legit sites.

3(b). If the person is blogging under an alias (say "PeterCool008") - search for that term on Google. It's very likely that he has used the same alias when registering on other web forums and social networking websites.

When you get hold of his public profile on some site like Digg, MyBlogLog or say DigitalPoint forums, look for the IM aliases. If his YIM! is xyz, you know that an email addressed to xyz@yahoo.com will, very likely, land in his inbox.

Alternatively, most web forums allow Private Messaging. Sign up for that forum yourself and send a private message / email. That may be the last resort.

Never quit - I know it takes some effort to track down the plagiarists but that should not deter you from actively pursuing your case. Remember that search engines, including Google, still have issues figuring out the original source of web documents.

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Overcome Email Overload with the 2-Minute Rule and more

The two-minute rule: "Anything you can finish in two minutes you should do right then."

Andrea Coombes of Marketwatch offers three tips in this video for dealing with email overload inspired by productivity gurus - David Allen of Getting Things Done and Merlin Mann of 43 Folders.

Related: Inbox Zero Presentation

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