by Arun Prabhudesai
So how was October for trak.in ?
Hmmm…I’d call it a decent month, considering that most of the month was full of festivities and people wanted to enjoy rather than read about grim business and economy rants !
Honestly, apart from Diwali there was nothing really to cheer about this October. My startup was in middle of discussions with number of VCs for funding, however, everything has suddenly come to standstill.
I am digressing here…back to how trak.in fared in terms of traffic and subscribers.
October 2008 saw 333,741 pageviews from 123,101 visits, marginally more compared to September. This is off course in addition to roughly 25,000 post views that I get from regular feed subscribers (based on feedburner stats). Pageviews per visit stands at healthy 2.71. As it usually is, most of my traffic comes from Google – nearly 80%.
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by Arun Prabhudesai
I read this really disturbing news. Companies are employing agencies to clean-up negative feedback online. Their target is “crazy blogs”. The definition of crazy is at best undefined. Who will be defining crazy? If I narrate my experiences about some product or service which I bought or experienced and if that helps someone to make a better decision, what’s wrong with that.
This is a direct stab at our democracy and freedom of speech. India is more becoming like China. A police state. Through official and sometimes not so official channels, India slowly but surely is becoming a police state. Yesterday was the ban on smoking in public places where the definition of public place is debatable.
Now this is underground Internet Mafia Style Company !
Companies who are offering these services are eBrandz, Communicate2, Value Pitch, and Id8lab.
Their main targets are the websites like mouthshut, complaintboard and customercomplaint.
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Trak.in Blog celebrates its First Anniversary
by Arun PrabhudesaiWOW ! Today Trak.in blog is One year old. It was officially launched on 1st May, 2007 (although a few posts were published in April end).
Looking back, it has been one of the best years of my life and lot of the decisions I have made were influenced by this blog. Two most important things have happened – I moved back to India and have taken a plunge into entrepreneurship.
One of the biggest accomplishment for me is that this blog has enabled me to network with hundreds of new people over last one year. Something that would have been nearly impossible for me otherwise.
Having said that, I have also had my share of ups and downs. Blogging is tough, especially when you have regular readers coming to your blog with expectations of finding something useful. There have been numerous occasions when I just could not write for days together and ended up writing some really poor quality posts. But positive comments and mails from my regular readers have kept me going through all these tough moments.