• What are you going to write about ?

• What is that you are going to concentrate on ?

There are two ways of going about this process –

One is to write down all your ideas on a topic that occur to you in any order then work on what you want to include. The other way is to make a plan. This way could be in the form of a table or a graphic representation with your topic in the center. All your ideas or points must be around it.

a) You can sort out the ideas you want to use in your paragraph.

b) If you are writing in the form of paragraphs then see that it has focus.
This helps you to plan what you want to put into it.

For example if you are writing a paragraph about why you chose to study in a particular college then be general in the beginning. Write about teachers, college and its advantages etc.

Here are few steps you need to follow –

STEP 1-

Collect the information –

When writing a paragraph you might need to gather information by asking questions about or filling information along with ideas that you have set down. Expand your ideas, work out how they are connected to the main idea.

You might find that other related ideas occur to you when you do this.

STEP -2 -

Connecting the collected information –

Once you are done with collection now start organizing it so that ideas proceed logically. Give your content a logical structure as a flow of events.

The lead sentence must clearly state the main idea, The other points can say about rest of the things.

Link them together in a sequence using connecting words.

STEP -3-

Correcting your paragraph –

Once you have organized your information review what you have written and correct it so that you have no mistakes in your work. You must check for grammatical errors as well as those of spelling and punctuation.

These things will make your work simple to understand for the readers.

Basic rules of writing are –

1. Begin sentences with Capital Letters.

2. Put a full stop after each statement.

3. Construct each sentence with subject , verb and some addition information that flowed from the subject.

4. Tenses of the verbs must be correct.

5. Begin with facts then to general statements such as beliefs, values, truths etc.

6. Make appropriate use of question marks, apostrophes, commas, exclamation wherever needed.

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Do you feel difficult to master words ? If you have a zeal to learn then it is not so difficult as you imagine in fact. Words are smallest units of a language that make sense. You are using them all the time while speaking or while writing.

The English language has largest number of words in a language. You should take the advantage of its variety of words to express yourself effectively. Do you wish you could do this with ease ? Yes you always can do it. So here are few easy techniques to pick up new words. It will also be helpful to you in competitive exams like GMAT,GRE or TOEFL. In addition you will increase your scope of getting attention of listeners.

• One way is to understand the word by analyzing it. If you can understand the root words which will give you the indication of the meaning, this will make your process easy.
For example, luminous, non luminous and illumination all come from the same
root. The Latin word lumen is its root in this case. It means light so you can figure
out all these words have something to do with light.

• We come across new words all the time while reading. Most of us unknowingly try and understand words grasp their meaning in context.

• Take help from the situation or context of the sentence to get the meaning of the word in it.

• Guess that each word shows better than something else. Most of the times new words you found are adjectives.

• A good way to understand a word is making the use of dictionary so have one.

• Make the list of new words with meaning and write 10 of them on your reading cards. The word and its respective meaning must be on opposite sides. It is really worthy to give a try. Many found that it really works and does wonders.

Now you know how to learn new words that you come across anytime. But this will be not enough. Make use of online dictionaries like http://m-w.com if you are at work too.

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1. Find a PhD

FindaPhd is the lucky place where you find fellow geeks and nerds, a pretty busy Postgraduate Forum provides advices and opinions on your queries about research life and how to find funds, scholarships. Upon the success of this site, two new sites FindaMasters and FindaPostDoc have been started and serving the student researchers actively busy exchange of advice and opinion on PhD life.

2. Google Book Search

You know Google book search exists, but have you tried citing from those books. Often, I had to produce a write-up, essay or the last-minute paper for a conference. When I dotn have enough time to pull out a strong reference from books, I issue a Google book search, up comes the results from book with snippets view showing paragraphs and texts that I were exactly looking for. I paraphrase them and correctly reference them. Neat hack.

3. Book Finder

If you are looking for any kind of book, whether it is rare or out-of-print, specific edition – You will find it at Bookfinder. Over 125 millions book titles to search, you can actually buy new and old-books from this site. They achieve by doing a search through every major catalog available online.

4. Free Note-taking

Mynoteit is a web service that you need to manage all writing works at uni. With mynoteit, you can upload office documents, scanned notes and audio lectures at one place. Yuo can access them at will with even with your mobile.You can join groups of students who are taking the similar subject all over the world. You can bookmark your assignment dates, deadlines at one place.

5. Re”Search Engine”

Scirus is a popular search engine among research community. Scirus searches for scientific information with its comprehensive trusted network of article bases like Science Direct, PubMed and other journal databases. The results are highly relevant and you can choose the keywords used by authors to search for relevant scientific domain. You get the results in three categories, journal results, preferred web results and web results. If you try Scirus once, you will stick to it. It saved me lot of my research time.

6. Digital Theses Networks

Australia is probably, the only country where every research student is asked to deposit a digital copy of their theses to a national database for a common cause. The Australasian Digital Theses Program is very popular among the researchers as every university in Australia is participating in it. A similar initiative is being carried out at the international level, which is PhDData.org – a 5 year old program which aims to collect the research theses from the universities around the world. There is also another initiative named “Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations” that looks promising as well.

7. Bibliography made easy

It’s a pain to follow the style guide of various journal styles when you are writing a paper. Tools such as EndNote help in maintaining your database of references. If you are looking for an online tool, then Ottobib is a really useful. You can store, organize your references, and Ottobib will format it to a style when you need. There is another web service that does a similar job , which is Easybib.

8. Job portals for researchers

Monster has a special site Phd jobs that lists research oriented jobs. There are sites where you can find Policy jobs, Political jobs, Ethical jobs, Market Research jobs, Museum jobs, PostDoc jobs, Law jobs and Human Rights jobs. All these sites provide world-wide listings of opportunities specific to researchers.

9. Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations

The benefits of Google Docs are obvious, you can maintain your documents and edit on the run. Particularly useful when you are traveling for field visits and you do not have access to your favourite Desktop Office applications. I used to upload a copy of my thesis chapters in Google Docs and share it with my supervisor. He would comment and add suggestions. If you are thinking of developing a document with your peer researchers – across boundaries, you have to use this. No more copying drafts, final versions and confusions on which one is what. With the added spreadsheets and presentations, it is a cool collection of tools for storing documents on the move.

10. List Sharing

Tadalist is about having a to-do list on the web. You can share between your supervisors to track your progress and communicate with your fellow researchers to meet the research deadlines or to organise a holiday.

11. Phd Comics

We are researchers, so what. We need fun, right? I have seen no other humour site that caters exclusive to researchers and PhD students life. PhDComics is awesome because, the site was started by a student and has plenty of cartoon strips on any conceivable aspect of Phd life.

12. Tracks almost everything

An easy way to track all the favourite blogs / research web sites in my subject is to use Google Reader. I use the ‘Star’ function to mark the essential posts, and use them later. A thousand eyes are looking for me and blogging things that are important and I follow them at one place with my reader. Great help – is it not?

13. Research Channel

Research channel is a site that offers videos on various research topics. Research Channel functions as a nonprofit media company with a mission to connect the world research community with latest developments, insights and discoveries across the globe. Anyone can watch the videos for free. But, if you are a researcher or research organisation who wish to contribute video content, you have to apply for a membership to the research channel. All the video submissions are strictly moderated.

14. Wikipedia

Often, the power of Wikipedia is grossly under-rated by the research people, who dismiss it based on the credibility. Well, that is an acceptable fact but from Wikipedia, you will get to know about a human view of a topic. You may get to know the latest happenings or the first hand information on a cutting-edge technology in your field (equivalent of gossips in the film industry).

15. MIT Web

Massachusetts institute of technology maintains a comprehensive web portal on the current research happenings at MIT and covers news and research events that affect humanity. The research covers any conceivable topic under various categories .

16. Eduforge – Free software for education

Just what Sourcefourge did for a programming and application development, eduforge does it for research community. It provides a free, open access to share ideas, form collaborative research groups, content and software development to solve specific research problems.

17. SuTree – Watch and learn

SuTree is a YouTube stye video site for Do-It-Yourself projects. You can watch videos and learn rather than reading plain texts and procedures. You can learn something new, every day. SuTree does not host your videos, users host them on youtube or google videos and provide a link and embed the videos here. These videos are voted by the community and the editors hand-pick them and monitor to keep the scum out of the site.

18. Wridea – Free ideas

Wridea is the place where ideas get into shape. You can record your ideas, browse others’ ideas, rate them, improve them and what not. The design and performance of the site is awesome and you can create unlimited pages for free. Liberate your ideas and watch them grow.

19. World Lecture Hall

World Lecture Hall is the place where you can find course materials developed by the teaching faculty around the world in almost any language. Some courses are only available online, but most of them can be downloaded for offline use. It is a great collection of lectures – a good bookmark.

Academic Materials can also be found at this blog post – 134 free academic podcasts organised by topics.

20. University Channel

University Channel is another directory of lectures (videos, audio and text presentations) developed and hosted by Princeton university. it not only lists the academic lectures and presentations, but also some of the key public affairs lectures, panel discussions and events from the best industrial conferences and academic institutions all over the world.

21. Backpackit- organize your life

You have to experience Backpackit to believe it – this site will be tremendously helpful for keeping track of your research developments. You can track your tasks, references (who said what – over phone / email), appointments, action items etc. If you are looking for an efficient organizing tool, this is the one for you.

22. FreeMind – Free mind maps

If you are looking for a tool to create and organize your thoughts and ideas, mind maps are the best way. With freemind – a java based open source program, you can develop complex yet, easy to organize mindmaps.

23. Free Data and Texts

Freelunch.com – Free economic data for you to download
Geographic Data – Free geographic data (worldwide)
World Bank Economy – Data collected and organised by the World Bank
Project Gutenburg – Free literature (almost any subject)
Bibliomania – free literature online
Literature collection – free literature
Citeseer – Massive resource for papers related to Computer Science.
Algorithms Base – Over 250 algorithms at one place
Tree of Life – Large Biology project that aims to organize the evolution of life.

24. Free Newspaper Archive

Paper of Record is the largest newspaper archive on the web. You can get snapshots of news articles from leading newspapers of the world from pre-1600 era to the current date. You can search through the archive and download the clips as images (gif). You have a quota of 250 mb every day.

25. Citations Database

Refbase is the place where people are sharing their citations and organising them at one place. You can download a copy of the refbase on your PC and connect to the server periodically to update them. Also try CiteSeer for searching through millions of citations.

Bonus Resources:

1. Find quotations

With ThinkExist, you can find a nice quotes for your thesis and papers. The quote is accompanied by the essential information about the author/speaker which will be useful to reference.

2. Research webpages

Research pages at Major companies who likes to share their ongoing developments and trials:

Google Research Blog
Research at Philips
Sun Research
Microsoft Research
IBM Research centre
Yahoo Research Labs
Honda Research
GE Global Research
General Motors Collaborative research centre
Sports Research Centre, Canada

3. All Biographies

Find anyone’s biography here – you can search by a keyword, birth date or place of birth.

Did I miss anything? Which sites are useful for conducting researches?

There are many ways and resources through which one can get information about different online courses. There is lot of material available about 642-503 courses on Google. One can also check Wikipedia for PMI-001 course information. If one is looking for hardcopy or soft copy of 642-825 courses then one can get it on book finder website. Free material of 642-901 courses is also available on free note-taking site. People who are interested in smart business communication systems 650-178 course then they can get interactive test guides on Eduforge – Free software for education site. The world lecture hall site can give free lectures of different course like 70-272 and so on. If you are interested in 70-270 course then its helping guide can easily be searched on yahoo. So there are so any sites from where one can get many helping guide for these courses and thus make exams easy to pass.

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How do you get the perfect job that pays you plenty and has all the right perks and things you always wanted to have? Getting the perfect job is an art, that is why most of us settle in ‘some job’ to pay off our mortgages, constantly whining about our jobs thinking, ‘one day we would land in the perfect job’.

We have to agree that few people are smart enough and good in this art and always seem to land in the perfect job all the time. How do they do it? I have compiled these notes from my own experience of job search in the last few months (I got a job a month ago). These tips are based on my experience with Australian industry, and I am certainly guarantee that this approach will work in any country. If you follow these steps, you too will land in a perfect job.

1. What are the things that matter to you?
Spending time with yourself is the essential because, you need find out (ask yourself) about the things you like, the things you hate, your priorities in life and values that matter to you.

If you understand yourself first, you will find the kind of job that you like and hate. This is one crucial step that will make you a huge difference. Do not go to a job because, you like the salary. If you do not really like the job, after very few months, you will get pissed off by your job.

So, find your values and priorities in life. If you are unsure of what your priorities and values are, then grab this book, “What colour is your Parachute?” from a local library or a shop. The initial chapters of the book will guide you to identify your personality traits and the jobs that most likely will interest you.

2. Do you know which your perfect job is?
To get a perfect job, you need to define the perfect job by your own standards is. A perfect job according to my standards will be a completely boring job for you, because, we are two different, unique individuals. Before you begin your job search, answer the following questions. Write down the answers in a notebook.

- what is the nature of job you would like (independent or team, technical or managerial)
- write an ideal job description of your perfect job (look for some job advertisements in your own field – pick the right things from several ads and compile you own job ad)
- get down to salary, perks and other details
- set your limits (minimum salary, perks, willing to move to another city, working environment)

Also, having a picture of a perfect job, will allow you to check if you are responding to an appropriate job advertisement.

3. Show me your CV/Resume
If you are concerned with the different terms and worry about misusing them, either read the CV, Resume or Biodata definitions or follow the job advertisement you are responding to. Deliver what they need.

Ok, you have found out what you like and ideal job that you want now is the time to write your magical CV. A CV or Curriculum Vitae is the first contact your employer will make with you. You need to put in all your energy to make the document ‘smart’. It is just like a ‘tv commercial’ that draws attention and makes you to act.

Write your CV matching with your ideal job description. We need to check your CV with your friends or job consultants (also supply them the idea job description) that if your CV reflects the qualities and skills needed by the ideal job – they will find out the flaws. We overlook such flaws, since we wrote the CV thinking ‘Isn’t that obvious?’. Nothing is obvious until you explicitly write in your CV.

4. Do you sell apples or oranges?
If you are sending pre-prepared job applications (CV + cover letter) to respond to the job ads, stop doing that. Probably that’s why you are not getting beyond the point in your job search.

Australian employers specifically want you to address how you fit for a job and they need to see your responses in your cover letter or in a separate document. I recommend using a ‘responses to the selection criteria’ document along with your cover letter and CV. Your cover letter should answer why you are applying for the job and include pointers to your CV and the ‘responses to the selection criteria’ document.

a. Start with the job advertisement – study what the employer is looking for.

b. Always respond to the advertisement – Double-check if your CV completely convinces that it fits the job ad, if not add the extra information. Note down the selection criteria and essential qualities that you need to address.

c. Illustrate your qualities with examples – illustrate where you previously used a skill or trait (that is required for the current job). If you are applying for the first job, then feel free to include relevant examples from your family, sports or social achievements.

d. Write your ‘responses to selection criteria’ in STAR style – most employers read your response looking for these details.
- Situation that you encounter e.g. angry customer
- Task assigned e.g. attend to the angry customer’s need
- Action taken e.g. solved the problem / issue
- Results achieved e.g. the angry customer came home happy

I have done this mistake (of sending a common CV and cover letter) in my initial days of job search, when I wanted to respond at least 10 job ads in a day and I didn’t have time to write a different job application to each of them separately. It’s not that difficult to do this at all, if you follow this trick.

I have a master word document, in which I have compiled all my “responses to selection criteria”, and whenever I have to write a job application, I copy and paste ‘the relevant response’ from it. If I need to write a new response to a specific job ad, I write it and then copy it and paste it in the master document of “responses to selection criteria”. As you apply for more and more jobs, the time to prepare the application drastically reduces. You can make a custom-application in few minutes.

When you employers are looking for apples, don’t send the brochures of your oranges, however sweet they might be.

5. Did you get the call for an interview?
This is not an action item for you. This is a check point. If you have done all the above steps fairly well, you must receive a call from your employer. If you have not heard from the employer, there can be two possibilities, either the employer have found better applications or your application is not considered appropriate. But, if you have applied for 10 different jobs (each with a specific, custom-made job application), and never heard from your employers, then seriously some thing is wrong – go back to the drawing board.

Study what could have went wrong; often your job consultant will know the ‘behind-the-scenes story’. Ask your job consultant why your application was not short listed, find the true reason. If the mistake is not in your part (you are not in the right city, your expected salary is too big, better candidates were applied), move on.

Always wait for feedback (even no responses from the employer) such as this. In my initial week of job search, I sent 10 job applications (3 custom-made and 7 common CV + cover letter), out of which I had got only three rejection letters. No phone calls at all. I went and met a career consultant with my CV and cover letters and the job ads that I had applied for. He pointed out my mistakes, and suggested me to improve the layout of my CV (content was good). It didn’t cost me anything, I had sincerely asked him how to improve my next job application and he helped me.

If you continue applying for jobs (and getting no responses), with the same job application, then the job consultants will black list you and may report any email from you as a spam (not kidding).

That’s too much of information on one day. I will take a break here. I will return with tips on attending personal, phone interviews, how to answer questions, what questions you should ask your interviewer and how can you tell if you have got the job or not (before they tell you).

If something is not clear, ask me.

Stay tuned!

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Meg in her Recounting Australian Blogs has posted these questions. I have been thinking to write on these lines for a while. So, Here are my thoughts.

What ideas do you have for promoting Aussie blogs and bloggers?

1. Telly (television) will be my first medium to promote blogs and blogging. Do a special episode (or a series) about Blogging in prime-time shows such as current affairs, today tonight.
2. Running an advert on a newspaper is the next best thing. Even if we put together 50 cents each, we can publish an ad on the Sunday newspaper. The promotion lines could be ..”Start a blog, Change Australia”, “Express yourself with a blog” (dont laugh!).
3. Running a “Great Aussie Blogs” contest and let the readers vote on blogs under different categories.
4. Creating an awareness on different blogging media and platforms – I mean people can microblog with twitter, tumblr . Not only text – audio blogs, photo blogs, video blogs as well, there are plenty of opportunities.
5. Create blogs for your friends, parents and grandparents. We don’t have time, but there are people out there who have plenty of time. Ask them to blog, anything.

Do you think we do enough (considering the above named local blog searches and directories)? What are we lacking?

Blog directories, aggregation, rankings are good (from blogger’s perspective). But, it lacks the interaction from readers. I would like to see a blog posts aggregation page – which shows Most read posts, Most commented posts, Recent posts, Recently updated blogs (the last two things are already done by australian index) and a voting feature for the readers (a thumbs up or thumbs down sign).

How often do we stumble upon to a fresh aussie blog? Not often. We should work on a model where blogs can be discovered by readers – a stumble upon like toolbar (it could be web based as well) for australian bloggers. How about featuring a “Blog of the Day” on the Directory’s home page

There are plenty of such ‘Aussie Blog Directories’ but none of them is complete – all have rss aggregation, rankings and a search. Not enough if you want to develop a blog portal. As a reader, I enjoy reading a regional language (Tamil) portal named Thamizmanam (they have an English portal but – it didn’t go well). Another similar blog portal is Thenkoodu (in the same language). I can list the features they have if anyone wants to develop such a blog portal.

We can have forums – but people never would be the first to start posting in it. So, post a topic and invite people (pro bloggers) to write on a specific topic like this, “What ideas do you have for promoting Aussie blogs and bloggers?“. Everyone will chip in with their ideas.

If you were to set up a new domain for promoting the aussosphere what would you do with it?

I would develop a site from the reader’s perspective. Easy to browse, plenty of things to get lost into – is it a dream?

If you have more ideas, comment here or even better write them in your blog (a blog post gained).

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Ideas. Your Ideas. Opinions. Your Opinions. This is an era where you will be valued on your ideas and thinking. These are the valuables you should develop and preserve. You have to absorb the information and develop your own views / ideas on that. If you write in an exam whatever is given in the textbook, what value YOU are adding. Think, Try to be original.

The popularity of Blogs – such a nice example. Everyone wants to express their own ideas, views, opinions and thoughts. Others just love to read about you, they want to see YOU in your writings!

So, Think on YOUR OWN. Express yourself

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No, they are not the BIG Pro, A-list bloggers. They are like you and me, our nice, friendly next-door-bloggers, they often produce a stunning post that you wish you had written. Here’s a collection of such 25 top blog posts in five categories that are most-read by their readers. We can all learn something from each of these posts.

1. Utility Posts: You post something useful for everyone (blogger), if your post is convincing, readers will celebrate it. Do not think any topic is known to everyone. There are billions of people who still wants to know what a blog is. Keep your language simple, show them in a clear, concise steps.

Top 5 Steps for Choosing a Blog Theme – Meg is renowned for posting such easy-to-understand, jargon-free, illustrative articles at her blog Dipping into the Blog Pond. I would suggest her to make a “popular page” showing such posts.

Reframing: The sweetest idea for content ideas – Andrew addressed a most pressing issue faced by every blogger in this post. How do we develop ideas for blog posts, to create unique yet, special content which no one else can do.

Should you eat that – Tara, a nutrition student publishes the recipes she tries and the tips on our dietary, eating habits. The blog title Should you eat that reflects the utility for you – to help you to choose your food wisely. If you are looking for recipes, you should bookmark the blog Cook almost anything.

How To Replace the Color Wheel in Your Samsung DLP Television and Save $400 – You don’t need to go looking for such Do-IT-Yourself posts somewhere. Write your own experience how you overcome an issue, a tip that you have developed to solve a problem. That’s all the world is looking for – write from your own experience. This post published by Scott received 594 comments and has excellent photographs to illustrate every step he talks about.

How I stopped a bandwidth thief – Swollen pickles wrote a series of excellent posts to stop a person who stole the bandwidth by direct hot-linking of images. It teaches a lesson to the evil-doers and to you on how to handle if you are in such situation.

2. Surprise Posts: Surprise posts grab your attention at once. You know you want to click and see what’s in there (they are referred as click-baits). You can make that happen with catchy, cheeky titles or opening sentences.

Rate My Ass – The title itself surprises you to know the content.

Amazing Upside Down House – The weird stories such as these are powerful crowd pullers.

Avoid Risk, Sure. Then Die! – Richard wrote a book, “Punk Marketing“, which is based on the mantra that, if you are afraid of risks, then you sure, are ready to die.

And now for an important announcement from the Prime Minister – Lizbee’s picture blog post has a real signature of the Prime Minister of Australia in it.

Australia’s Bizarre Sporting Fortunes – Knowing most of Australians love sports and like reading about them, Mark would never need another better topic other than this.

3. Popular-by-Demand Posts: Every one wants to know your success story (even if there is a pun) or a miserable failure and wants to get inspired or get a good laugh. These posts are always popular among readers, if only you do not disappoint them in delivery.

Snoskred made 5 million dollars online – How much money you could have made if the “spam marketers” were really very generous in their dealings? On a serious note, this post is an eye-opener.

How to grow your blog by over 2000 per cent in one month! – If you are a blogger, you know what it means to grow by 200%, let alone adding another 1800%. Alister who calls himself as “Blogologist” (Did I say that correctly?), posts the techniques he used to get more readership, more links and more comments.

13 signs that someone you know may have an eating disorder – A list of any sort is sure enough to attract your readers. Aussie mum posts a list of signs to check if you or any one you know might have an eating disorder.

Vinyl Beauties post series from Vanessa shows the vintage collection of vinyl records (music album) she presents the cover images in the series. Eye-catching.

How to Turn 300 Contacts Into 3.3 Million: My LinkedIn Network – Des at Thinking Home business talked on how you could develop your social network at a phenomenal rate.

4. Breezy Posts: They are lengthier but compelling enough to keep your attention till the very end of the post. A travel diary, a personal experience, book / restaurant review or just tips from your own life would form this category.

Relaxing weekend ingredients – Jaycee lists the essential ingredients for a successful, soothing weekend at her blog Semantically Driven.

How To Do A Mini Debrief With Traumatized Friends – Megan talks about dealing with a tough situation where most of us would keep silent.

Adelaide to Darwin Backpacking Road Trip Overview – Neerav often writes about his trips (backpackers reviews, travel tips) around Australia (I would like to travel around Australia as well). His travel diary is fascinating as well as informative.

B is for Boracay -It’s all about fantastic beach and real good time!

Personal post about Long Distance Relationships – A short post on her thoughts but I liked it instantly.

5. Analytical Posts: Start with a burning question and provide convincing arguments and you get a successful blog post. You can compare two services or even produce a list of ten best things.

Why Do Blogs Fail? – Dan at The Wrong Advices analyses the reasons behind why bloggers loose interest and close their blogs one-fine-day.

Why Most People Fail at AdSense – Lisa tells her ‘Hodgepodge theory’ on Adsense.

Why StumbleUpon is a better than Digg for promoting your blog posts – This is one of my favourite post where I compared at the stickiness of readers visiting from two giant social network sites.

Why Is Firefox Still Way Behind Internet Explorer? – Everyone hates George Bush. Any Australian whom I speak to hates John Howard. But, they get elected all the time. Everyone seems to love Firefox, but? I would recommend a serious discussion such as this one would be open to your readers. You can ask your readers to tell their reasons then, you can write a round-up of posts.

NO WATER, NO FUTURE AUSTRALIA – Jules shares her wise words on the Melbourne Water’s ‘Your water, Your future’ (now changed as Our water, our future) campaign and tips on changing the strategy to voluntarily involve people in environmental activism. Here’s Your water, your say group.

25 posts from 25 bloggers, now you know why the readers liked them all. Now is the time for you to speak, what type of blog posts you enjoy writing and why? Comment on.

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Some wiki articles for samples:

Save Face on Facebook: Facebook Etiquette

• One should not friend another whom they have no association or connection with whatsoever. Doing so makes you what I like to call a ‘creeper’.

• Poke with moderation and caution (I stand firmly by this etiquette principle).

• When speaking with someone whom you have been casually ‘facebook stalking’, try to pretend you do not know everything about them. Avoid comments like: “So, I saw you and Mike broke up on facebook…”

Get Back Into Work Mode After Vacation

1. If possible, take a few afternoons off. Or at least, leave early. Most people, especially after a relatively isolated vacation, find themselves easily distracted and often waste the day away dawdling or worse yet, reminiscing about vacation. After vacations is the best time to exercise your flex time.
2. Take an extra day. Schedule your vacation so that it ends one day before you’re due back into the office. This allows time for you to get back into your regular routine. Pretend it’s Sunday… okay Sunday evening. Unpack, do some laundry, check your email, and rinse that crazy notion of early retirement out of your hair.

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Often writers (now, bloggers) experience a “writer’s block”. A writer experiences a “writer’s block” when he struggles to find a knot or an opening prompt for a story (not knowing what to write next).

It is natural everyone needs a prompt to kickstart our brain. Daily Prompt Generator is a valuable tool that you can bookmark that provides a daily prompt, whenever you ask for it.

The prompt may be something like,

“What are you saying good-bye to right now? Write about something you can safely say good-bye to today.”

“”List all the FAMILY VACATIONS you remember taking when you were younger.”

There we go, now you can write on those ideas for hours and hours. There are plenty of such prompt generators that exist in the website including list generators, prompts for kids and poetry prompts.

There is a similar tool available at WritersDigest website as well (I guess the former is better in my view).

Never run out of ideas for blogging again

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Before we begin some basic video tutorial links. Tips on using Windows Movie Maker for editing movies.

Windows Movie Maker Video Editing Tutorial

How To Make Videos Using MSPaint and Windows Movie Maker

YouTube Video Tutorial #2 – Windows Movie Maker tips

1. Time lapse video
Time lapse videos are easy to make – you keep your camera mounted on a place (a street corner or at your office) and start recording. After certain duration, stop recording and bring to the editing room. In your favourite video editing software, fast-forward the video to at least 100 times fast. Then add a background score, thats it.

How do I make a time lapse video – A good tutorial for starters.

Sample videos:
All 4 seasons of an year at one place – This video is amazing – seasons change right before your eyes within seconds.

Time lapse street race with Toy cars – You can even shoot a video in your bedroom.

2. Interviewing someone
Prepare 10 questions to interview someone (if the person is a girl, you will get lot of views), and do a timed 1-minute interview. You can make the questions such that the respondent can answer with just a “Yes” or “No”. Or ask a question to many people, say, ‘Who would you like to see as the next president of USA?’ – ask people answer this question with videos (video replies).

Sample videos:
Interview with PARIS HILTON (That’s how my friend calls herself)

A student interviews his teacher

3. Provide your own tips
Start recording your camera and go in front and give some tips to the world. Yes, you can provide funny tips on a specific area of your expertise. Choose a wild topic such as, “10 ways to save yourself when a hungry Rhinoceros chases you”, “Things to do when you are stuck in 10,000 BC”, “10 things that you want to know about Australia” or “Tips for organizing a bachelor party”. Be creative and think of some wild topic, it should inspire your viewers to post replies and comments.

Sample videos:
Teen Tips: How To Buy Alcohol – If you are under 18, how do you buy alcohol. Here’s how.

Trick Tips: How to Look Like a Good Skater – when you are, actually, NOT.

4. Playing with texts
Use MS powerpoint slides to make compelling statements. Print them and show them in front of the camera and remove one page at a time (give enough time to readers to read the print), end with a final punch line. Add background music to the video and upload it.

Sample videos:
I’m a PayPerPost Blogger – Simple printed slides make a movie

Playing with texts – A cute, 30 sec animation done by a student

5. Screen capture your Desktop activities
Install good screen capture software, first. Start the screen capture software to record any screen activities you do on your PC. Paint a drawing or doodle in Photoshop. Or just simply browse as you normally do. Or just type something – a letter, or a blog post. Stop the screen capture recording, edit the movie (use fast-forward technique) and add some peppy music as the background score. That’s it you have made a very cool movie for Youtube.

Sample videos:
A month in the life of geek desktop – Just snapshots of desktop for a month, then a creative movie.

Latest Desktop Wars – If you have not heard this animation series, it is worth a watch.

6. Make an Advert
Shoot an advert or a television commercial for McDonalds, KFC or for the poor Microsoft. Write your own script, draw a storyboard – use existing videos and your own voice and music. When you are making and advert on a well-known global brand, you are bound to get lot of viewers (and criticisms). Who knows, the MNCs would make a way to your door to sign you up (ok, I was kidding!).

Sample videos:
McDonalds ad – Done by students as a school project

Coca Cola Commercial – Watch this 30 second animation

7. Dub for someone
Get some videos where political leaders make a speech or famous celebrity giving an interview to someone. Now, strip off the celebrity speaker’s voice (use volume mute in your video editing software) and add your own voice and a funny one-line. Mix different questions and use some funny one-liners from stripped from old James Bond movies.

Sample videos:
LOL Bush & Condi Comedy Spoof - Who is the president of China? Very funny.

Bill Gates is retiring – From a TV show, but it can inspire you.

What are you waiting for? Go out there, shoot some movies and upload them in YouTube.

Got any idea? Share it with us!

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