Until a few days ago, if you'd Googled for "failure" or "miserable failure", the first result you got would have been the US president's page on the White House website. This was accomplished by a technique called Googlebombing, and was acknowledged by Google as being a vulnerability in their search system. They also did not manually filter these results out in the interest of maintaining the objectivity of their search service.

A few days ago though, Google put in place a change that gets around Googlebombing.

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs

Searching for a Googlebombed term now gets you information about Googlebombing instead. Read this post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog for more details.

Hope you all did something nice today. The only thing I did, was forget that it was my aunt's birthday.

I came across an interesting post from the Telegraph, by a Briton who lives in India, about the difference between the ways India, the US and UK each handle terrorism. Irrespective of whether you agree with the article about whether India's position on terrorism is by design, it should make at least make you think, "Yeah, that's my India".

A quote from the piece -

To my mind, however, the single biggest thing Britain and America could learn from India about terrorism is to be considerably more resilient and defiant about it.

When the bombers strike Bombay or New Delhi or Varanasi - as they have with devastating effect in the last 18 months, killing nearly 300 people - India doesn't flinch.

Jai Hind.

Once more an entire month has gone by without new posts on this blog. To those of you who still read this blog, I apologize for the delay. I'd blame it on lack of time and writer's block, but that won't really make up for the lack of posts, will it?
Anyway. On with the post.

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival is back this year, and Caferati is hosting some contests again, just like last time. I hope to participate in the Flash Fiction contest this year too, though I don't really have any realistic expectation of winning, or even making the shortlist. I want to write at least one story, if not two, if for no other reason than to have something to post on this blog.

The Graphic Flash (flash fiction in a graphic format) and Poetry Slam contests both sound really interesting. Do check them out.

And if you're cell-phone happy, you might want to try SMS Poetry.

The deadline for all the contests, is Feb 4 2007, so get off that block right now. (And if you do, let me know how you did it!)