The users of the immensely popular micro blogging website, twitter had an unpleasant last week. As if the regular tweeters were not frustrated enough with the frequent encounters with the “fail-whale” and delay in getting tweets, they were surprised by a “small setting update” that was done to their account settings which affected the way they will see “@replies” in their twitter time lines.

According to twitter

……we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your time line is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

So according to the new settings, if you are following “X” and “X” tweets, “@Y……………”, and you do not follow “Y”, then you will not be able to see this tweet in your time line! (even though you are following the person who tweeted it). In simpler words, you won’t see tweets beginning with “@username” in your time line if you dont follow that user.

Take this for example:
(more…)

The PageRank update for April 2009 is underway. This is the first major PageRank update of the year (last being towards the end of december in last year). The update started yesterday.
Knayam went from PR of 2 to 3 (some of the internal pages have also got PR’s of 1 or 2.), while my other blog Biotech-geek.com The Everything Blog, still remains penalised. (its been almost an year since the penalty now Google, come one, you can show some love there, are you listening?)

Its been an okay PR update for me as I dint make real efforts and also dint update the blogs regularly, so I am kind of happy.

How did your sites/blogs fare in the PR update?

If you havent checked your PR’s as of yet, you can use this tool to check the PR of any site/blog or webpage.

For Indian bloggers,specially Delhi bloggers, web additcs February 2009 will always be a month to remember, with aquantity and quality of events that kept the community buzzing.

If you dont know, Delhi has this month already hosted Mozilla Camp on 10th Feb for which I was not fortunate enough to be able to attend it though I wanted so badly as I am a Firefox fan.

Then Delhi was host to Twestival too on 12 Feb 2009, which was a global event organised simultaneously in 175 countries to support charity:water.

And now, a real treat for wordpress users,fans,developers in Delhi and all over India: India’s first ever Wordcamp is being organised in Delhi on 21st and 22 Feb!

The mega event is being organised by Delhi Bloggers Bloc.
Now the best part. The highlights/biggies of the event are:
- Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress, will be joining us! Its once in a lifetime opportunity to meet the brain behind the world’s most popular blogging platform.
- Om Malik, named one of the 100 most influential bloggers by cnet.
- Amit Aggarwal, of labnol, the BIG name of Indian blogosphere and the most successful Indian blogger. (more…)

So its time, like I promised, to announce the winners of my first blog contest.

The contest was announced on 1st December on my new blog Knayam in association with wordpressland.

And here are the winners:

1st prize of Content Press – Premium Magazine/News Style Wordpress Theme” woth $75 (sponsored by wordpressland.com): David

2nd prize of Magazine News – Premium Magazine/News Style Wordpress Theme” woth $49 (sponsored by wordpressland.com): Topen

3rd prize: $5 cash via Paypal (sponsored by Knayam) : Rahul (prize given)

4th prize: 1000 EC credits (sponsored by Knayam): Rahul

5th  prize: 500 EC credits (sponsored by Knayam): Sherry (prize given)

Here is the video I made of the draw: For some weird reason,im unable to upload the video on any video sharing site. You can download the video from here and see it.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Winners will be contacted via email (by which they subscribed) soon and they will have 7 days to claim the prizes they have won.

Thank you all for participating.

Google has again changed its favicon. (Favicon is a little icon you see in the address bar of your browser and it helps you identify with the site you are visiting)
When the last time Google changed its favicon,it wasnt liked by many and ill have to admit,this time Google got it even worse. It appears so messy and plastic,like an ugly creation of a child with as bad creativity as mine. Thats just my personal opinion though.

Have a look yourself.
(If the image is not loading,just go to Google.com or any other Google product website and see for yourself)

The lower case “g” seems to be lost somewhere in background and it even looks like the numeral 8.