Tag: words

5 Reasons GreenWhite.org is a Success

Sohaib Athar11 Comments

A guru blogger once shared the following piece of wisdom with me:

Posts with lists are more ‘successful’.

Here is a list of reasons why I think GreenWhite is a successful blog. I have to write this post as a lot of people have approached me this week and asked what GreenWhite.org ( GnW) is all about and whether it actually is a successful blog or not. Among the people who have asked this question are:

GnW, for those who don’t know, is a technology blog focusing on the news, innovations and emerging trends in the Pakistani IT industry. I am no blog analyst, but I would call GreenWhite a big success because:

  1. GreenWhite has built a community – In the two years of its existence, GnW has managed to gather and engage a strong bunch of IT professionals around itself – people who are writing and participate in valuable discussions on the Pakistani IT industry. As a Pakistani IT professional who follows 400+ Pakistani blogs semi-regularly, I do not know of any other IT blog focused on the Pakistani IT industry that comes close in this regard. Do share the address in the URL if you know of one.
  2. GreenWhite serves a small niche successfully – This post is intended to be read by a dozen or so people – it does not matter if 50 or 5000 people read it, as long as the intended target audience gets the message. Similarly, if we stop fooling ourselves, the Pakistani IT industry is TINY – GnW aims to serve this small niche, and if you will go through any 10 random posts on GnW, you will agree that it does the job well, which is another measure of success.
  3. GreenWhite has original content – Since our tiny IT industry does not generate hundreds of news items every hour, so GnW authors have no option but to write original content. The posts on GnW are not ‘originalized’, which is my term for picking up a few dozen ‘blogworthy’ hot news items from a few hundred (preferably before the competition does it, so that your post gets listed for a few Google keywords) and quickly remixing and rewording the resultant body of text before pressing the publish button. To use a hackneyed expression, GnW usually has something to say, while most local blogs have to say something.
  4. GreenWhite has been a catalyst – My first introduction to GnW was through the Startup Insider sessions, which was a commendable series of informal sessions between the wannabe entrepreneurs and the veterans, held in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad in collaboration with P@SHA. Dozens of CEOs and IT professionals were speakers / panelists, and hundreds of people participated in the series, but apparently that endeavor did not get the projection that it deserved, as many IT bloggers say they have heard the GnW name for the first time only recently. Just as the Bloggers’ Meetups are attempting to bring the wannabe bloggers together, the Startup Insiders brought people interested in IT startups together and gave many of them the push needed to ‘do their own thing’. Not many other blogs can claim to ‘walk the walk’. GnW can.
  5. GreenWhite has decent statistics – I think many of the worlds’ best blogs are undiscovered, and usually have less than 100 regular visitors, and yet there are many people just want safety in numbers, so they go by analytics figures, don’t waste time on any blog that doesn’t get trackbacked by a million other blogs and dont read a book until it is a bestseller or a movie based on the book is in production. For people measure success in percentages and clickthroughs, GnW has around 1000 subscribers, is usually in the top 100K blogs on Alexa (and has #666 rank in – though I am not a stats freak, but achieving a sub-100K Alexa rank with 90% audience coming from Pakistan and a few hundred thousand visitors a month, all without explicit SEO might mean something to the statistician sort.

So there you have it, for what ever it is worth, GreenWhite is a successful blog IMHO.

Before I go, here is a bulleted list of pointers:

  • I was approached by strangers (now friends) during the LBM08 event, and then on Skype during the KBM08 event – they wanted to meet and congratulate GnW representatives, and I had to tell them that the blog was based in ISB. I wish GnW was represented in the meetup, but regardless of whether GnW attends any meetings or not, this is the only measure of success that I would aim for if I owned GnW – actually no further justification of success should be required.
  • Hot Chick - reallyI read some twitter friend LOLing and saying that people believe that the success of a blog is limited to those who aim to create a difference in their society. That would be wrong, though I don’t know any blogger who would generalize success like that. I believe that boobie blogs may have their need in the world, just like gadget blogs, social welfare blogs or porn. The measure of a blog’s success is whatever its owner and readers want it to be – sometimes it is thoughts and dreams, sometimes it is rants, sometimes it is monetization by prolific content generation, and sometimes it is pics of hot chicks – but that is just my simplistic view of things, and you are welcome to disagree.
  • To answer another (very enthusiastic, judging from the !!!s) friend who said “… success story? honestly, this is the FIRST time I read this blog or even heard about it!!!” – it is simply because you belong to a different segment. You are facing the west, GnW is facing the east. In the blaagosphere fruit market, you are an apple, GnW is an orange, and there are melons and mangos and hundreds of vegetables, fruits and nuts like me around. Sorry to burst your bubble, but your knowledge of a blog’s existance is not a measure of success – after all, ten years ago, you didn’t know where babies come from!!! (I kid).

Disclaimer/Disclosure:

I have written 3 odd posts on GreenWhite.org so far. They are:

http://greenwhite.org/2008/10/24/rentacoder-says-stay-away-from-pakistanis/

http://greenwhite.org/2008/10/29/rentacoder-removes-offensive-message-and-applogizes/

http://greenwhite.org/2008/09/23/the-evolution-of-begging/

Bored?

Sohaib Athar2 Comments

Are you bored? Do you have ٰnothing to doٰ? I salute you!
You, my friend, are a buddha-in-the-making.
Actually, you are better than Buddha. Buddha he did not have instantaneous access to the all the information in the world in the form of Internet, he did not have a phone to call friends, or a TV to watch the sufferings of the world. He did not have a few thousand mp3s to listen to, no million blogs to read and certainly did not have a billion webpages available for him no billion topics to learn about or a gazillion topics. He had no Youtube, no Facebook, no Twitter, no live cameras, no online discussions. All he had was a tree to sit under and mediate, and yet he had difficulty emptying his mind of all thoughts.

A bored Buddha
A bored Buddha

You, on the other hand, have access to all of the above worldly distractions, and then some. This is why your boredom is an absolutely amazing feat in self-control and concentration – something to be really proud of!
More and more people are seeing the light and converting into boredom monks like you. You should get in touch with them and start a group blog, and if you can share the secret of achieving that zero-hour-workday state of mind, please do share, I can use some tips. Thank you for your time.

Pakistan Problems Propaganda and Prejudice

ReallyVirtual6 Comments

Two months ago, this Urdu + English “sponsored link” ad for a website worstnation.com started showing up in my Gmail every day. I will not link to it for obvious reasons, but here’s what is says:

دنیا کی سب سے بدترین قوم

www.WorstNation.com

پاکستان سے زندہ بھاگ آپ یقیناً اتفاق کریں گے۔

The Urdu text translates roughly to “World’s Worst Nation“, “You will surely agree” and “Get out of Pakistan Alive” – the later is a wordplay on “Pakistan Zindabad“, which means “Long Live Pakistan“, and has been in use to ridicule Pakistan for atleast a decade. On the site, there is an almost exhaustive list of the many things wrong with Pakistan, in Urdu.

The first time I saw the ad, I checked the whois information out of curiosity and found out that the domain was registered to some guy in Faisalabad. I assumed that the owner was just another Pakistani frustrated at being born with brown skin, and that he was just utilizing the free adword credit that some hosts offer. The ad and the website were mildly irritating, but so is 90% 99% of the world, so I moved on.

Two months have passed since I first saw this ad – many bombs have exploded and hundreds of people have been killed in all four of our provinces – by terrorists, by our army, by the Americans and recently – by our ordinary(?) citizens – in the name of nationalism, peace, honor, ethnic cleansing, and various variants of God as well. The killings are still going on in Karachi as I write this.

The worstnation.com website, meanwhile, is still advertising relentlessly – I see its targeted message more than a dozen times a day, with its cryptic “About us” page that says “our identities really don’t matter, just listen to our message or go do something else”, and the owners of the website are still spending money to make their voices heard. A Google search tells me that atleast one other person noticed this last month and rightly recognized the demoralizing effect of such propaganda material, but blamed it on “international efforts to demoralize our nation”. He also mentioned seeing an indian flag favicon on the domain, a domain that is registered under a false name – after all, Indians are the real enemy, right?

After two months, the owners of worstnation have learnt from their mistakes, there is no indian flag and the whois information has disappeared from the database behind a privacy protection service though the clocktowercity website is still alive and clicking.

If you check the server for worstnation.com on http://www.myipneighbors.com/ , you will notice half a dozen websites that can have a relationship with Pakistan and are hosted on the same server – a few of them are:

http://oururdu.com/forums/index.php

http://irfan-ul-quran.com/quran/index.php?tid=12

http://www.minhajforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29

The irfan-ul-quran website has this favicon that was mistaken for an Indian flag. The forums page on the last link lists 40 websites that they run, and mentions with a smile that they have (created and are running)

..and a lot more that cannot be listed here smile.gif

So, My dear brethren in Islam (who are stuck-in-the-worst-nation-of-the-world through no fault of your own), I respect your opinions regarding the state of our nation and even agree with many of the points on your website, but hiding behind private websites and talking about revolutions is no way to start a revolution!

When you say we are the worst nation, please speak for yourself, not me – and please publish your identities on your website, don’t just hit and hide… who knows, you might get lucky and start a revolution by mistake – or you might get lucky and get the death penalty (read ‘heaven’) for disrupting national harmony in cyberspace – at least that is what the new cybercrime law asks for. Either way, it is a win-win situation for you, you lucky guys! So please don’t be shy and reveal yourselves to the public. You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

I love your bitterness and sarcasm, but after identifying all the problems of this nation in a couple of months, I was expecting to hear the solution to those problems from your own anonymous-yet-expert beaks. If getting out of Pakistan alive (Hijrat to Canada perhaps?) is your thing, then let me know if I can help you in any way. But whatever you do, for Allah’s sake, please stop the frigging advertising on GMail – it is irritating!

PS. and change your flag – it does resemble the indian flag.

Hope is a Pain-Killer

Sohaib Athar2 Comments

Osama of GreenWhite.org tagged me on FaceBook to describe a metaphor that I would use for ‘hope’. I would have shied away from such an invitation, but since Osama’s objective is to “get people talking” (and hopefully, thinking and doing as a consequence), so I’ll bite and dump my thoughts on ‘hope’ here, but first, the disclaimer.

Disclaimer: These are my own raw and twisted ideas – unresearched, unrefined and uninfluenced by anything Obama (or Osama). I know Obama’s campaign revolves around Hope, but I have deliberately missed his speeches, though his book is in my reading queue.

My personal metaphor for hope:

Hope is a Pain-Killer

At its most basic level, I think hope serves as a harmless ‘filler’ between an action and its consequence. A pool player shoots and hopes that he makes the shot and wins the game. A poker player bluffs and hopes his bluff is not called. A professor teaches and hopes that his students change the world for the better. People doing their thing and then hoping their efforts are fruitful. This is what I call ‘positive hope‘ – a positive force and a good thing in any shape and size. It is still present and available around us in small doses, though very rare.

The rest of this post is about a couple of other flavors, shades and variants that hope comes in, variants that we sometimes mistake for this ‘positive hope’.

Opposite to the ‘positive hope’ is the ‘fantastic hope‘, which is actually a wish in disguise. It is the hope of a negligent student to get an A in the final exam, or the hope of an obese person to look slimmer without exercise. This kind of hope is responsible for selling miracle cures and forms the basis of many marketing campaigns. It is still hope, but the important thing missing is ‘action’, and that lack is something to watch out for.

There are millions of people in the world who have not touched a cricket (or baseball) bat or kicked a football in years, and yet they sit hypnotized in front of their large screen plasma TVs for hours to watch a match, or even go abroad to watch a whole game series if they can afford it. They root for their favorite teams (or their home country), wear the merchandise, talk for hours about the permutations and combinations, and passionately argue, fight or kill to defend the honor of “their” team… and to let corporations sell them “stuff”. They do it every other day, and they do it most of their lives. This is the most abundant form of hope that I see all around me, every day. I call it ‘cotton-candy hope‘.

We read about about how Romans used theater, arenas and gladiators as an energy outlet for their warriors in times of peace – I think that somehow, over the centuries, arts, games and sports have all devolved from a useful tool to keep the “warriors” alert and healthy into factories for hope-generating scenarios, and even though the “war” has changed its form, we have degenerated into hope-addicts. We hope our team wins, we hope the hero of the movie breaks out of the prison, we hope team X beats team Y and changes the standings table so that our team gets to play in the finals. We hope, and we hope because it feels good and because it generates a warm and fuzzy feeling in primitive parts of our brain, especially when our hopes are fulfilled.

Painkillers

Sometimes we amplify the effect of our hopes by putting up personal bets on ‘our’ teams, and experience small hits of joy when we win those bets. Some of us get so addicted that they start hitting casinos in the pursuit of hope – hope that starts from the time we insert a coin into the slot machine and lasts until the time the symbols come to a stop. This is the kind of hope that conditions us until we become the experts of ‘fantastic hope‘ – whenever things go wrong, we start ‘hoping’ them to get fixed by a miracle or some divine intervention, without any action to back it up. As we sink deeper, we wonder about all that is wrong with the world that we live in, and that gives us a reason for further hope.

Just like heroine, a painkiller that has turned into an illegal drug due to abuse, we get addicted to hope to the point where we start hoping that our hopes will materialize into solutions. Instead of using it as a relief from a headache, we start taking the hope painkiller as a panacea to all our problems, and instead of thinking of hope as an after-effect of action, we start idolizing it as the action itself.

Some people may define ‘hope’ as the opposite of fear, despair or a defeatist attitude, which is true too, but just as fear is the mind-killer, hope for its own sake is usually a progress-killer, almost as counterproductive as these negative emotions.

If we really need to select an emotional response to our circumstances and situation, we should try a bit of rage – there is a higher probability of (controlled) rage breaking the inertia and inciting us into action. Once we gain enough momentum through our actions, perhaps we will be able to switch to autopilot and let hope guide us from the backseat.

Bomb Blast in Lahore Targets Jews and Barbarians

Sohaib Athar10 Comments

Last night, some terrorists succeeded in planting three time-bombs in the Garhi Shahu area in Lahore, an area that is 4-5 kilometers away from my house. Thankfully, nobody had died until the last update.

I  had to turn on the idiot box (after many months) to catch the live report, and was lucky enough to witness the uber-intelligent reporters standing inside the shop that was destroyed. Using their extremely intelligent brains, and standing on top of the scene of the blast without caring about forensic evidence, they decreed that “The bombs were planted to create panic in the common citizens”.

I think they are wrong, and I have an alternate theory. It involves the terrorists’ big boss telling them to Read more “Bomb Blast in Lahore Targets Jews and Barbarians”