THE DIARY OF Z

Valentine’s is a funny day. People, who are normally sane, staid and composed behave strangely. Grown men are reduced to tears. Mature women become crooning babies. The very mention of a saint called Valentine causes wobbly knees and an expectant sparkle in the eye. If you are the sort who wants to honour the saint anyway, here are a few gifts that could knock the stockings off your Valentine.

•    Gift her a Valentine kit that will make the art of seduction easy. Costing $275 on RedEnvelope.com, it features a Kiki Motif Instrument of Pleasure, an ergonomic, multispeed vibrator adorned with the Kiki motif, handcuff-pattern silk restraints, a massage candle, personal lubricant, Kiki Select Kimono condoms, and before-and-after mints. This gift will set a precedent for fun. It is a gift the two of you can share. It is romantic and adventurous without being scary.

•    If you have money to burn and don’t want to buy islands for her like the other business magnates, buy her a plot on the moon instead. Yes, you can do such a thing in this time of space age technology. Just the way a female fan has been gifting Shah Rukh Khan every year on his birthday.

•    Arrange for a 1-carat solitaire to be delivered to her along with red roses declaring permanent love for her from an admirer. When she gets the little box, the courier boy would declare that the little box comes with a free gift and present a big carton with the label ‘Love Inside’. When she opens it, you’d pop out and plant a kiss on her cheeks she wouldn’t forget.

•    You could get sentimental and walk down memory lane by gifting your love a beautifully decorated frame containing the photo of the place where you proposed to her. Or better still, you could video record your personal thoughts and remembrances about her and play it on V Day by candle light.

•    If you want something small but thoughtful all the way, you could gift her a personalised flower pot with a message that says, “Our love grows”. Or a love letter in a bottle with the message: “Our love is unsinkable”. Or a personalised diamond keepsake that says: “Like a diamond, our love is forever”. Or all of these things to make it a themed gesture.

•    Gift a custom-made book to her, containing all your letters, emails, sms-es until the time you got married. Print them all out and have them bound into a book, with the final page saying that it is NOT the end of your love story, but ONLY the beginning…

•    Go the DIY way. Make a memory box. Glue photos or pictures to the outside of a wooden box. Use Hodge Podge glue to create a sealed glaze over the pictures. Fill the box with tokens and mementos of your time together. Write memories you share on small slips of paper to fill the box. A thoughtful gesture that will last a lifetime.

•    Get a packet of balloons. Fill a few with little things — a cute key chain, a pair of earrings, candies, a little message on paper — anything at all but not too big. Blow up the balloon and write your own personalised romantic message on it and then deflate it and present it to her. She has to blow up the balloon to see what you have written and then pop it to get the stuff inside.

•    How about an aphrodisiac love potion and a Beating Heart Pillow? Yes, UniqueValentineGift.com sells this for $20 and $150 respectively. Organically designed to have the same effect as Spanish Fly, the elixir of love claims to increase the inner sexual conscience of the mind to achieve various sexual advances. Only 20 drops of the love potion in any drink is all that is required. Both males and females can expect increased sexual stimulation, propensity towards sexual activity and improved overall mood. If that doesn’t set her heart racing, there is the Beating Heart Pillow. Hold the heart a moment and you’ll begin to sense your own heartbeat slowly syncing with the pillow’s carefully designed rhythm. It is designed to help you relax, daydream, meditate, and nap. Perfect for Valentine’s.

•    Create your own raffle/coupon book using hand made paper or even coloured drawing sheet paper that has irresistible offers on every leaf of the coupon:
#1. A long lasting kiss with eyes wide open, offer available for 15 mins from receipt of voucher.
#2. Avail a bear hug within 24 hours after Feb 14, 2010.
#3. Luxurious foot massage after 7 days from receipt of voucher.
#4. A sweet honest smile when I am most angry.
#5. Steaming cup of tea within 10 days even when I am dead tired.
#6. A seven-course meal on your birthday with special friends at home.
#7. Looking for car keys (3 times ONLY) even if I am most busy.
#8. Allowing you in the loo even if I woke up first in the morning. Offer valid only for Feb 2010.
#9. Watch Sex & The City (5 times ONLY) when my favourite serial is on; offer valid for the whole of 2010.
#10. Free facial at my home spa after a day out with friends.

Here is my suggested wish list for celebrities stepping into 2010…

Madonna: Stop giving young boyfriend Jesus a $10,000 monthly allowance and adopt a dozen more babies instead.

Rakhi Sawant: Find a maid (male) in Mumbai on reality TV.

Kareena Kapoor: Ditch ‘size zero’, so Saif has more surface area of his beloved to explore.

Sachin Tendulkar: Organise more auction workshops for charity than play the actual game. Keeps him ‘fit’ that way.

Shashi Tharoor: Stop being a ‘Twitter minister’ and start being out and about.

Nicole Richie: Three resolutions - eat something, eat something, eat something.

Mukesh and Anil Ambani: Smoke the peace pipe even if it contains the harmful petrol fumes.

Jude Law: Not to get back together with Sienna Miller for the fifth time and instead find a woman to date with less of a penchant for shacking up with co-stars.

Shah Rukh Khan: Stop making news based on caste, creed or colour.

Paris Hilton: To get a real job other than just being a party girl and lose the catch phrase, “That’s Hot” because everyone is sick of hearing it now.

Ashutosh Gowariker: Start cracking jokes at himself, so others don’t.

Paul McCartney: Perform thorough background checks on all future girlfriends and start work on new album to increase cash flow.

Salman Khan: Find a surrogate mother and end all speculation regarding Katrina Kaif. He is no Salman Rushdie.

Kevin Federline: Buy condoms in bulk and actually use them, and also get a real job other than just being Britney’s ex-husband.

Britney Spears: Wear underwear on a daily basis, especially underneath dresses in public.

Gul Panag:  Replace frequent tweeting with regular conversations and stop calling up friends from an unknown number and offer them loans.

Amitabh Bachchan:  Stop blogging, because the more he blogs, the more enemies he makes.

Cameron Diaz: Continue with the same New Year resolution of last year: stop smoking, stop shopping and start wearing a bra.

After blogging directly from the Wordpress account on the web and only recently from my smartphone, I am now blogging from my desktop blogging application, Windows Live Writer.

The best part of this is that you can write offline and post it by setting a publishing date. What’s more, you can add pictures, maps, videos, and tags in one seamlessly integrated tool.

Will let you more about this as I continue to blog from this platform. If you have something to share, feel free to leave your comments.

All this while, I thought Cellspin was my solo Symbian plug-in for E71 to blog.

But I was wrong.

Here comes a freeware called WordMobi that allows you to blog on Wordpress, including self-hosted sites like mine, using the Wordpress platform.

Not only is the upload quick, you can also add tags, photos, videos and personalise. You can make certain words in bold and italics for instance.

Just Google it and you shall get the download link. If you find a better app for Symbian, feel free to share.

Okay. Okay. The topic is instant eye-grab material. You will be salivating to read the next few sentences on how to monetise your blog. I have read tons of stuff on how to monetise your blog and here is what I have found out…

1. First and foremost, get your own domain name. Many affiliate marketing firms and even text link ads don’t work on platforms like WordPress. (I am soon going to start my own blog where I own the domain name).

2. Write content that’s genuine, honest, insightful and original. In the beginning, just keep at gaining a steady readership through your content.

3. Once you gain a critical mass of readers (both through RSS feed subscribers and site visitors), that’s when you should begin to monetise your blog.

4. Many sites like reviewme.com and kontera.com will not even accept you if your traffic rank is below 500,000 hits a month. Therefore, it’s important to get there with great content.

5. Promote your blog on social networking sites, emails, messengers, chat status messages, and through other blogs and websites… it could even be stuff like leaving an insightful comment on other blog posts.

6. Linking to other popular blogs and asking them to reciprocate the gesture works wonders.

7. Make the most of link festivals like April Fools Day to make unrealistic announcements that you made an X amount of money through your blog and so on. This will let many people forward your blog post and you will get so many more new visitors to your site. After that, it all depends on whether your site has enough engaging content to keep them hooked and they don’t mind the con game.

8. Read. Study. Assimilate from the success stories of other bloggers, most notably John Chow dot Com. Last heard, this guy made a cool $31,000 (Rs 12 lakh) from his blog in March 2008. This is how he made his moolah…
* Private Ad Sales: $15,230.00
* Affiliate Commissions: $7,729.37
* ReviewMe: $5,000.00
* Text Link Ads: $2,031.90
* Kontera: $1,000.00
* TTZ Media: $384.24
* FeedBurner: $45.73
* Subscription: $20.00
* Grand Total: $31,441.24

Here’s a detailed report on how he managed it ( Blog income report March 2008). I highly recommend his blog. Not only will his reports inspire you, but subscribing to his blog posts should give you enough dope on how to go about making your blog more profitable.

Lots of us are now getting into blogging. But not many know that blogging is more than just maintaining a gripe diary. If it’s a way to show off your writing skills to many, it’s a way to earn some extra cash as well. In fact, some people are earning their monies by indulging in this full time. It’s the latter part of the blogging feature that’s creating many dotcompreneurs. And there’s money to be made through Text Link Ads, affiliate programmes, Google Adsense, selling products and so on. From my experience of the different blogging platforms available (xanga, typepad, blog.com, blogsome, tblog.com, blogspirit, blogger), I prefer WordPress the most. It’s easy, has a lot of customisable features and brings out the joy in blogging like nobody else.

My friend Jason Pereira has painstakingly done a lot of research on how to set up a blog, generate traffic and even monetise it. You could read his long post here… HOW TO CREATE A BLOG

It’s amazing! In just three days, my new technology and digital photography blog Tech 5.0 is going great guns. Though the number of visitors aren’t much, what excites me is the amount of time spent by each visitor. It’s averaging at 30 minutes per person. Which is 30 times better than this blog which scores high on the number of visitors, but has an average visitor time of 1.15 mins only.

So do take a look. It’s not meant for the techies. It’s meant for you and me, the layman. Once you get to grips with technology, life becomes so much more easier. And my blog entries are a testimony to that. Read it (Tech 5.0) to believe it.

Happy reading!

PS: I have also got the same blog on the Word Press platform for a larger readership. You can check that out here - Tech 100

Bloggers, beware. After the inheritance scam perpetrated by Nigerian sources, it’s now the text link scam that’s hammering the blogosphere. Apparently, the scamsters get in touch with bloggers, asking for advertising rates for text link ads. And then, they do an electronic bank transfer of a lot more money, and send u another mail saying, it was a mistake and can they get the extra money sent back to them. If you do so, you could become a statistic, too! Coz what happens later is this: the original bank transfer turns out to be fraudulent, and what you sent  becomes the only genuine bank transfer but it’s the other party who tends to benefit from it.

Here’s a link  that puts things in perspective!

Nigerian Text Link Scam