The amazing Caribbean

If you say "Caribbean", the first thing that comes to mind is Reggae music and Bob Marley in particular. His songs really had a big impact during my younger days. I would definitely love to pay a visit to his hometown in Jamaica.

Many people have the misconception that the Caribbean is a single country. Actually the Caribbean islands are a chain of islands 2,500 miles long enclosing the Caribbean Sea.

I am not really sure, but someone told me that there are 31 countries in the Caribbean and no two islands are quite the same. Each has different historical beginnings with their own culture and speaking diverse languages. Even the geography and climate in the Caribbean region varies from one place to another. Whereas Trinidad, the birthplace of Calypso music has tropical forest and hilly areas, the Island of Aruba has a relatively flat terrain with a dry climate and desert landscapes. You can say that there is something for everyone in the Caribbean .

WWF has an island in Second Life

The environmental conservation group WWF now has a new home at Conservation Island.

However, don't start searching for it on your atlas or even on Google maps. This Island only exists in the virtual World of Second Life. It is located at WWF (138, 196, 41).

In case you are not aware, Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its users, known as Residents. It's totally free to join in. It was developed by Linden Research, Inc and launched in 2003. Residents interact and do business with each other in this World. I was surprised when I learnt that Second Life even has a virtual currency called the Linden Dollar, which is actually traded. Residents can convert Linden Dollars into US Dollars and vice-versa. Despite fluctuating a bit, the value has remained stable at approximately 250 Linden Dollars (L$) to the US Dollar for quite sometime now.

Most of the content in this virtual world are created by the Residents and they retain the copyright over their content. It's amazing to learn that countries have actually opened up embassies in this World. In fact, educational institutions and NGO's (like WWF) are coming in as well.

New Blog Directory

Promote! Promote! Promote!

That's the mantra, if you want more traffic to your blog.

One of the things that you need to do to increase traffic to your blogs is to submit them to as many blog directories as possible. Reaching out to a wider audience may get your blogs searched, browsed, rated and reviewed and hopefully, all these will translate to a higher page rank.

One of the blog directories on the net is Alive blog directory where you have several listing options. For example, you can have your blogs as a "Featured Listing" for a year (by paying annually) or to have a permanent listing by paying a one off payment (naturally costlier). There are also annual and permanent listing options for regular listings as well.

Acer takes over Gateway

Gateway's business model was one of the many case studies we discussed during our MBA classes about 7 years ago. Even during those days, it was facing serious competition from other computer manufacturers, especially Dell which took it's made-to-order philosophy and improved on it. This company was founded in 1985 in an Iowa farmhouse and was famous for it's black and white spotted boxes.

Learnt today that it has been acquired by Acer Inc. for $710 million. This makes the Taiwanese company, the third largest computer company in the World after Hewlett-Packard and Dell Inc., overtaking China's Lenovo Group Ltd.

Read the full press release: Acer to Acquire US-Based Gateway, Inc., Solidifying Acer's Position as the #3 Largest PC Company in the World

Gossip Girl TV premiere coming up

The teenage consumer segment is one of the most important from marketing point of view. In fact, in some houses they decide almost every purchase the family makes. Very often now, my younger relatives are the ones to tell me about the latest gadgets or interesting websites.

Talking about teenagers, I first heard about the Gossip Girl series of novels by Cecily von Ziegesar, from one teenage cousin. She told me that it was about the lives of some teenagers as seen from the perspective of the narrator, "a blogger" she told me excitedly.

It was interesting to learn that they have adapted the best selling series for American television. The teen drama was created by Josh Schwartz, creator of The O.C., and Stephanie Savage. Gossip Girl revolves around the lives of young socialites growing up on New York's Upper East Side who attend elite academic institutions. Like all teenagers, they have to deal with sex, drugs, and other teenage issues. At the centre of the show will be best friends Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) and Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), and their shared romantic interest, Nate Archibald (Chace Crawford). Dan (Penn Badgley) and Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen) are the outsiders. The unseen narrator/ blogger character "Gossip Girl" is voiced by Kristen Bell.

Though it is obviously targeted at teenagers, I won't be surprised if it develops a fan following among older generations as well. Remember Beverly Hills, 90210 during "our time".

The first season of the show will premiere on Wednesday, September 19, 2007, airing on Wednesday nights. Do check out their MySpace Fan Page as well.

A Global Nomad in Thailand

Next on my "to review" blog list is Lillian's "My Thailand Diary". Lillian is another Third Culture Adult, or Global Nomad. Her background is quite interesting: she's Swiss but was born and grew up in Papua New Guinea. Now she resides in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand along with her husband and three children. Her blog records her interesting adventures as well as normal everyday life as an expat living in Thailand.

I have seen her go through a number of blog template changes before she finally settled on the one she has now. I prefer this to the colourful template she had before this - maybe because I have a weakness for simple and neat looking site template. What I would love to see is a list of her most popular posts. I am sure that there's a WP plugin for that.

Apart from one Google adsense unit at the top, you won't find other ads on the entire blog and I find it quite refreshing. I know it sounds strange coming from someone who has ads plastered all around his blog. I guess she not really into making money from her blog.

Go over and say "hi!" to Lillian.

Surf the Internet anonymously

You might be surprised at some of the information your IP address reveals about you. In case you are not aware, the way the whole Internet works is based on IP or Internet Protocol. Without going into the technical details, an IP address is a unique identifier that allows your computer to communicate with others. For example, when you leave a comment on a blog, your IP address is visible (at least to the blog owner).

Using a few freely available tools on the web, it is very easy to instantly trace back to your Internet service provider (ISP). You must also remember that when you signed up for an internet connection, you provided your address to the ISP. Of course, ISPs do not go around giving everybody your personal details but under certain circumstances, they will. It's scary.

Theoretically, by looking at your surfing patterns and the way you behave and express yourself on the net, people can actually profile you.

If you are concerned about Internet privacy, you may be interested to learn that you can hide IP address. The Hide My IP Address software (http://www.hide-my-ip-address.com/) does exactly that by using a specially-modified browser, based on Firefox. They are able to do this by automatically re routing all of your Internet traffic through at least TWO ultra-secure, ultra-fast and anonymous Tor network servers for total privacy. Go over to the site for more details.