As a marketer we were always taught that ladies talk more and should be targeted for major viral marketing campaigns. According to the stats: “A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000“.

Mark Liberman strongly disagrees with the stats. (It also contains the snippet of the above referred book which talks a lot about (fe)male brain, like fight-talks-look-sex-phone-etc, you may need it anytime.)

Do ladies talk more?

What do you say?

As someone (it has to be one and only one, Sidhu) rightly said, “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital“. Here is a conversation between a husband and his own wife.

Let’s take it A husband looking through the paper came upon a study that said women use more words than men.
Excited to prove to his wife that he had been right all along when he accused her of talking too much, he showed her the study results. It read “Men use about 15,000 words per day, but women use 30,000″.
The wife thought for a while, then finally she said to her husband “It’s because we have to repeat everything we say.”
The husband said “What?”

More funny (and good) topics can be found at my other blog. (1. How do you guess the sex of a bird? 2. What a woman really wants????, enjoy 3. Do You Have Male Or Female Mind? Easy find)

According to latest research, During a 17-hour day Men speak just as many words (about 15,669) as the women do (16,215).

Can orkut scrapbooks be used for some more research?

What is your opinion about it?

Like me if you have interest in watching Indian Internet market and web user behavior then this post is certainly for you. I see all positive signs now, be it community building or my neighbor/student pressing more and more of Google search button for homeworks.

Here are some of the stats for a world-wide comparison:
(Subscribers per 100 inhabitants)

More details at http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Broadband%20Commentary.pdf

India is somewhere 0.19. For more of Indian stats click here. Expecting 9 million broadband users by the end of 2007, from 2 million to 9 million in one year, not bad at all.

One stat that really motivated(also surprised) me to think sleep over my old ideas, “13% of American adults report they have downloaded or watched video ads“. Video is happening big time, I too watch ping pong videos on youtube to improve my game at office.

I am off again, 2 offs in 3 days, very unusual but a welcome change, compensating for not attending the family gathering on Saturday and for being a mere lodger for last few weeks. What am I doing? I prepared Alu parathas (which tasted more atta than paratha but everyone managed to find some appreciation alphabets) for the breakfast. An entrepreneur can learn few things from Mom, she had managed the risk well by having some backup breakfast ready.

To digest such a heavy breakfast, here are some crowdsourcing sites:

1. Complexity and Social Networks Blog - Complexity and Social Networks Blog of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance, Harvard University.
2. crowdsourcing.typepad.com by Jeff Howe. He is a wired guy and his article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” is considered among the alphas in this rack.
3. creating passionate users - One of my fav. I refer these articles to new recruits. You might have heard of Kathy Sierra. Even Indian news had covered the death threats to her.
4. freakonomics, good to see that they have moved to NYT. I liked the post, “Who comment on blogs and why?”.
5. futureofcommunities.com

Will I be reading this today?
Na, I will be reading http://www.37signals.com/svn/ and about hylafax.

Now, will I get a chance to mess up lunch as well? Yes off-course, this time it will be a special vegetable packed omelet and chicken salad :). So cool … enjoy life!

I was listening to MTV during morning workouts and here is a great health tip to start your tiring day. Remove your shoes whenever possible. Keeping your shoes on makes you more tired. Wow, I do it most of the time :).

3 more (unwanted) tips:

1. Use workrave.
2. Don’t chat while working. It takes you only 3 secs to get disturbed but almost a couple of minutes for restoration. Take breaks to chat but don’t mix work with chat.
3. Walk the talk :), I sometimes walk while on phone (Generally I am on phone for almost 2 to 3 hours).

Enjoy the work that you don’t have to work!

I am finding it extremely difficult to find time for blogging. These days I am working with a CA based startup Law firm, a great learning experience but very hectic schedule with no offs :). Sorry if some of your mails are unanswered (unread mail count is 500 now) or some comments are in moderation. I will be taking an off this Friday to finish off the pending tasks. I will be changing my writing style to conversational way for quick blogging.

• What is this about?
  Instead of writing a long post I will write it in a conversational way. This makes my life easier as at work this is what I do most of the time.
• Won’t it make the post boring?
  I don’t think so. I think, it will make my posts rather more interesting. Anyway as usual I am going to give it a try :).
• How will it save you time?
  I used to spend (a lot of) time in organizing my thoughts in paragraphs and headings. Now I can just ask some questions and answer it myself, this will (might) make it faster for me.
• Good, when are you going to blog next time :)? Any thought for the day?
  I will try to blog as soon as I find some free time. I have 6 to 7 posts under draft. My next post will be about “Right approach can make wrong right” followed by a post on “Secrets to blog magic“.
• Looking forward for the posts, what about the thought of the day?
  Hmm.. here we go, “If I am defeated by myself then I am the winner” (hey thats my copyright ). Keep defeating yourself, be it your work, be it TT or be it impressing your friend. If my today is better than yesterday, I am sure my tomorrow will be better than today. Keep fighting with a smile. Happy new week!

Thanks to all who responded to my post “Girl: Aji, you are hot“. Finally the romantic fever is over and some uh ah ouch is still there. WOW, My romantic fever is the most commented post so far on this blog with over 25 comments.

I took a complete rest on Sunday as well, no work at all :), taking medicine for body pain. Thanks to all for the wishes and prayer. A new week, new challenge - appraisal system.

This Tuesday was just another day but wore formals (not jeans) after really long. With a light blue shirt and a black trouser I left the office, for a change without spending one hour at TT court. Even after having a class on debt, credit, insurance, mortgage and other financial topics for over 6 hrs I was feeing ok.

While back home a beautiful girl (her eyes had it all) sitting next to me started talking to me. Here is a part of the conversation :-

• Girl: Are you on orkut?
• Me: Yes, how did you guess?
• Girl: You holding few online articles and I am smart at guessing (inside: almost everyone is on orkut ha ha).
• Me: You are very smart (did I do a course on featherbedding)
• Girl: For sometime I was experiencing a special feeling sitting next to you (Her eyes were as innocent as one can get)
• Me: (me blushing, wanted to say, “This generally happens”) oh really!
• Girl: You are hot!
• Me: (blushing to the skies) hmm … (falling short of words, wanted to do an instant neologism)
• Girl: Looks like you have fever, your body temperature is quite high.
• Me: (Fallen off world trade center) Yes generally I have, I mean, I think I developing, I am developing a good fever, thanks.

Oh sorry for this bad way (was it creative?) of telling you that “I AM HAVING HIGH FEVER FOR LAST 2 DAYS” (this is a repercussion of high fever and no tasks, suffer with me, he he) . Sorry, if I am not replying all the mails, if I have canceled the interviews and rescheduled tasks. Doctor recommended a complete 4 days of REST (by charging a 1k fees for one approved/tested sentence, “You are OK”). According to Maslow’s REST is a basic need but surely much forgotten one. Hoping to join back tomorrow.

Do comment if you have read till the end. I will appreciate your creative comments for this not so uncreative post.

Update: Also read the comments they are quite interesting, I never expected such a response.

I am off today. Monday and off? Yes, we had interviews and server audits for last 4 weeks so could not get an off. Taking a full time off, Watching videos (I just downloaded a 1 Giga of video today from ted.com), listening songs but sorry no eating (taking and giving rest). What do you do to the sites you don’t like? Ignore? Here is another option.

Here is what you can do to the sites you don’t like [Click here to do it to My Blog]. May be the political parties can do the same to Orkut.

Enjoy Monday, I am going for another sleep (already had 8 hrs of sleep today, 1:30 am to 9:30 am), you can feel jealous I am generally gifted (thats what people say), I can sleep for hours and hours. God bless.

This is a very simple task to do but still sometimes you need a guide for smooth sailing. Instead of mailing the same content again and again I decided to delegate the work to blog. I am covering the htaccess method for password protection.

Make sure you have access to use htaccess (Check your apache config or ask your hosting company). In order to protect a folder, you need to have two files inside the folder,

• .htaccess:
  AuthType Basic
AuthName "By Invitation Only"
AuthUserFile (Path to the passwd file)
Require user (username)


  Example
  AuthType Basic
AuthName "By Invitation Only"
AuthUserFile /home/www/secret/passwd
Require user ajinimc


• passwd: Go to http://spectrum.troy.edu/password/ and type the username and choose a password, lets take an example (username: ajinimc, password: 1234). The website created the encrypted password ajinimc:C6DneUKC5gSG2. Now add this to passwd file.

Now the folder is password protected. Try http://www.idealwebtools.com/secret/ . Hope it helps.

I am not sure what I am doing wrong but as a user I am getting an error with Alexa when running on FF but not while running it using IE. I am not able to compare two sites using FF but with IE I face no problem. Here is a snapshot for alexa homepage which offers a default comparison.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

Is this happening because of some FF extension or settings, I need to debug it further.

Update
I was not aware of following issues (I discovered it while searching google news)

• Alexa sued the original comparison site alexaholic.
• Click here for an elaborated discussion on the issue. It says everyone looses here.

After reading this what I can understand there stand on third party websites using alexa comparison data. Looks like they have introduced a bug on their own system. I have enabled the referral tracking on FF but still it doesn’t work.

Further update
See the site carefully, FF and IE has two different versions (may be IE the latest). IE doesn’t allow the sharing of graphs. “Put this graph on your site!” and “Permalink” links are missing.

Update 9th June 2007
Finally I got an email from Alexa team after almost 20 days. It says

Thank you for contacting Alexa Internet.

We thank you for bringing the matter to our attention. We made a number
of changes to the design of our website recently, and had some bugs. WE
believe these issues have been resolved.

Thank you for your interest in Alexa.

Best Regards,
Alexa Internet Customer Service

Sad that it is not fixed yet, I wonder whether they have checked it. I replied them too

I am afraid it is not fixed yet, look at the http://www.alexa.com/ using firefox and Internet Explorer (IE), see the comparison chart. IE shows all 3 graphs but FF shows only one line graph.