World Badminton Championship
26-Aug-10 4 Comments
Saina Nehwal has won her first two matches and plays 6th seed Shixian Wang tomorrow. Shixian Wang comes into the quarter finals beating Jie Yao, the 11th seed in a slightly more emphatic style. So lets see if Saina can enter the semis. The other quarter final to watch tomorrow is between Hongyan Pi (5) and Xin Wang (3). The winner of this match will clash with the winner of Saina vs. Shixian in the semi final.
Meanwhile current world number one, Yihan Wang is out of the tournament. [update 8PM IST, 27Aug: She’s out of the tournament. Toobad – but I think she was outclassed well and truly in 34 minues flat]
BTW, I made one observation about tags and google searches and hits on websites. It’s quite surprising that not a single soul has stumbled upon my website through google using the search phrase “Saina Nehwal”. So I ran a quick analysis on what search topics have been most successful in diverting traffic to my website and the result was quite an eye opener. Other than searching for me, people who spend their time looking for fairness creams and pani puris are more likely to come up to my site as compared to people looking up John Abraham’s butt or Katrina Kaif. Or Saina Nehwal for that matter. I felt quite let down since the whole purpose of writing about that man’s butt was to get more iballs. I thought about it for a couple of minutes and then guessed what must be amiss with my logic.
It’s the thing about statistical long tails and probabilities. Since Saina, Katrina and butts are much written about the chances of my humble ramblings on them getting shown up early enough in Google search rankings is miniscule. But since the likes of pani puris, fairness creams and IFCI sit on the long tail, the chances that my website will get picked up, if someone is looking up on these topics is high. It runs counter to common logic – that write about hot topics and you’ll get noticed more. Niche positioning. I am amazed at the kind of people that my writing resonates with – imagine being patronised by someone who is interested in “fairness creams for Muslim boys”! Or surfers concerned if eating “pani puris will cause blindness”.
Some time back I had read a very insightful book called “The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand” by Chris Anderson. The book talks about the growth of niche markets and specialist sales on the internet. So taking a leaf from this book and applying the conjecture developed above, I guess the key to getting more and different people to look at my website is to use many many tags (Napster, Amazon, eBay use the limitless potential of online store to stock up an enormous array of merchandise) and tags that are off center. If this post sounds like a pathetic lament to increase the traffic on my site as opposed to writing what really interests me and my core group of readers, then you hear right. Screw it. I dont care how many new sets of feet trample my online space. I will write what I want to write.
The Third I 
Man, the badminton feeardtion has gotta start spending money on training decent umpires. Only in freaking badminton do you see umpires over ruling line calls when the bird is in or out by a hair, yet I’ve seen birds go out about 7 inches [ The Korea Open, remember Lin Dan and Hyun il?] and they sit there on their chair and pretend to be blind. Heck we’ve all seen shots that go out about half a foot only to be called in. Just like in this first game, Shixian got one of her points reversed cause the nimrod umpire wanted to be a hero and over rule it.The shuttle was either in or out, by a hair but from his vantage point he should have kept his mouth shut. Because of perspective there’s no way he would have seen the shuttle better than the back linesman.If it’s too close to tell a smart umpire should let the lineman make the call and only over rule if he sees a clear flagrant violation. And yay, my pc didnt crash this time when going on this site for once Spamalicious.LOL
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I have been in this business of blogging for over 5 years now. During this time, I have seen blogs of all kinds by all kinds of people. The ones which have been successfull in ‘eyeballing’ or increasing hits have some common patterns. So I offer my tuppence observations from this rather long journey in blogdom on “How to improve traffic”
1. The golden rule is and is the gospel behind blogging – A captive audience can be achieved only by some personal touch. People will come back not for any superlative analysis on butts but for you. Your style, Your views. Your aura. It is almost entirely about the person behind this post rather than the post per se. Case in point is my blog which never took off the tarmac due to my complete anonymity. Also this points stands QED as per your chart.
2. List down some blogs which you follow which could have a quid pro quo effect and yours get listed on their.
3. Perhaps the single most important factor behind atttracting traffic is comments!. The more you comment on other blogs greater is the chance that people would get impressed kaun-hai-bahut- mast comment-marta-hai
Good Luck
666
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Personally I dont like the mention of Sania Mirza evrimteye when compared to Saina or vice versa. From where we are sitting we can hurl all kind of abuses at Sania Mirza, but the fact remains she was the first Indian tennis player to come in the Top 50 world rankings (I think her best was around 32 or 38). With the kind of following that tennis enjoys, that itself is no small achievement especially for a nation which has traditionally produced only male doubles player.If one of our distant relatives would have achieved even 1% of what Sania has then we would not stop for breath glorifying the achievements As a nation we should give her all the motivation required to help her get better.. For some reason, she is the favorite punching bag for a lot of enthusiasts and sports journalists !! I think though that is true for every sports or sportsperson in our country. They are given godly status in no time and the very next moment they find themselves being subjected to harshest of criticism.Watch out Saina !! You too could be next
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Good lord….bhojpuri songs are contributing as well!
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