Long live MJ.

Its been three weeks that I got a cycle for myself. Unfortunately I couldn’t cycle much the first two weeks. I live beyond electronics city on Hosur road. I have done couple of trips to Koramanagala to meet my friends. Its about 15 kms one way from Koramangala to my home. Other than that I cycle to office on Fridays which is about 4.5km one way. Those were the only chances I got in last two/three weeks. I have done close to 50kms.

With the above experience of cycling in Bangalore, Here I am sharing my experiences this blog post. I am also trying to address some of the questions raised by my friends. I hope it helps.

I got my bicycle from track n trails store at Koramangala. So my first ride was to ride from the store to home for about 15kms. I started to ride with the helmet and I was wearing formals. The ride was pretty smooth until I got to know that I am center of attraction for other motorists on the road.There were at least two BMTC buses which came close to me near silk board flyover. But then both the bus drivers and others had a smile on their face and in fact the BMTC guy almost stopped his bus to allow me to climb the flyover. The point I wanted to make is people love cyclists more than others. May be the helmet made a difference.
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According to this post by TechCrunch about 9.7% of traffic is driven to TechCrunch is by twitter. This makes a twitter third biggest traffic source. After reading that post, I started wondering about my own blog.

In last few months I had not digged much into analytics. Today I logged into account to check the traffic sources to my site.

No wonder Google stands in the first position. Direct visitors take the second position. Surprise, Surprise Twitter takes the third position. It proves how big twitter has grown as a traffic driver. No wonder everybody is on twitter from NYtimes to bangaloremirror. My guess is very soon it will surpass digg and stumbleupon. So if you are a blogger, twitter can become prime source of traffic. Go create an account and don’t forget to follow me @thej :)

Amongst just the referral sites Twitter stands first.
Though I am not sure how Google Images is sending users to my site. (Who the heck is searching for my pictures?)

Of course the other biggest source of traffic is through feedreaders. It looks like Google Reader is the most famous feed reader. Another surprising factor here is the rise of Outlook 2007 as feed reader.

I have been using Outlook 2007 to read feed for some time now. I must say I am happy with it. You should use it only to subscribe to the most important blogs/newsites. For the rest continue using GReader.

In all I must concentrate on twitter and outlook readers in future to get more traffic.

BTW how did you arrive here?

Online identity is becoming as important as your offline identity. If you are not living in stone age you will be on one of those social networks which mainly forms your identity. All those user names become part of your digital identity.

As of today, You meet most of your online business partners on Facebook¹.  You share the stuff with your friends and family. Your friends or partners search on Facebook to get your mobile number. Even Google (or any) search for you leads to your Facebook profile².  What does that mean to you and me? Facebook will own all your digital identity.With 250 million profiles online, Facebook is on its way to become online identity hub.

What happens if you are removed from their network all of a sudden? You are lost. Your friends, family and business partners are lost. A place where you were supposed to hang out fun has become your main identity. Now you are not allowed enter that place.

So what do I do?
Simple. Own a domain. Develop your domain as your identity. A domain can take various forms in various kinds of online transaction, but it will remain your center of identity. With your own domain name, YOU own your online Identity. Its worth spending $10/year.

Use social networks only for networking and meeting friends. Bring your friends from social networks to your site. I would like to be known as thejeshgn.com online than @thej on twitter. ²

1. I have taken Facebook as an example because it is the biggest social network today. It can apply to any online social network.Last few days there has been a buzz about vanity urls on Facebook. Some are happy and some arent that happy. All these buzz forced me to write this post.

2. Now you know why I am so serious about ego searches.

I met both Tara and Chris @ BarcampBangalore 1 (yeah the first one to happen in Bangalore, in fact in India and the venue was Y!). Both of them were very friendly.They were very passionate about their work and their life. I still remember having a long conversation with Chris about microformats.

Few months back they ended their relationship. Both were very bold, open and very graceful about ending their romantic relationship. Both Chris and Tara blogged about their relationship and the transition happening in their life.

All I could do was to offer hugs to them on their blogs. And be surprised how open and graceful they were.

Why now?
Two of my friends almost reached the edge of their relationship and they weren’t that graceful. They removed each other from friends list, gtalk and what not..before coming back again.

Questions:
1. Should we be really open about our life and relationship online?
2. Why cant everybody be like Chris and Tara ( I mean be as graceful as them)?