The Lede - Questioning a Bollywood V.I.P. Named Khan

Questioning a Bollywood V.I.P. Named Khan:

Even if United States officials were simply following procedures when they held Shah Rukh Khan, an Indian actor, at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday evening, they are certainly guilty of bad timing.
For one thing, the Bollywood megastar was on his way to Chicago for a parade celebrating India’s Independence Day on Saturday. But to make matters worse, Mr. Khan is also working on a new film, “My Name Is Khan,” about racial profiling of Indian Muslims living in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Many in India initially reacted to Mr. Khan’s experience at the airport with outrage, but throughout the day on Saturday, a debate among Indians about their own attitudes and security procedures has emerged.
Mr. Khan, 44, told the Indian media that he was detained for two hours (a Customs and Border Patrol official said it was more like one) when his name showed up in a database, prompting headlines like “Shahrukh Khan Detained At US Airport because his name KHAN” on one fansite for the movie.
Indians expressed their indignation on Twitter and to the Indian press,calling for vengeance against the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
“Shocking, disturbing and downright disgraceful,” tweeted Priyanka Chopra, a Bollywood actress. “It’s such behavior that fuels hatred and racism. SRK’s a world figure for God’s sake.” (The Twitter discussion thread is here.)
Shah Rukh KhanEuropean Pressphoto AgencyShah Rukh Khan
Remarks by Ambika Soni, India’s information and broadcasting minister, were especially forceful. “I don’t think that this manner of detaining the name of religion is justified,” she said to Indian reporters.
Mr. Khan said this was not the first time he had been held for questioning — there is a virtual red carpet of Bollywood stars with similar stories — and some Indians are still stung after Continental Airlines employees frisked A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a former president of India, before he boarded a flight to New York.
Chidanand Rajghatta of The Times of India reports that United States officials’ recent criticism of India’s “inadequate protection of religious minorities,” seen by some as gratuitous, is adding to the sensitivity.
Ms. Soni proposed what is being characterized as a “tit for tat” by the Indian press. “I have always felt — even when I was frisked there — that the way they frisk us we should do the same for them here,” she said.
And some are chiming in to agree with her, though out of genuine concern for Indian security, rather than retaliation.
“We are just whimpering over here like hurt puppies because we feel, ‘Oh, but we don’t do it to them.’ Oh no, we don’t. And it’s a scandal. We should,” writes Anand Soondas in his blog at The Times of India (which employs some slang that some might find offensive), noting that there was little uptick in security at the Mumbai airport after the terrorist attacks there on Nov. 26.
“I told them I am a movie star,” Mr. Khan originally told the Indian media, adding that he had “always been worried about traveling to America,” and that he “felt angry.” But in remarks Saturday afternoon to The Associated Press from Illinois, he seemed to dial back: “I think it’s a procedure that needs to be followed, but an unfortunate procedure.”
In an e-mail message to The Times, Kevin Corsaro, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection, declined to discuss the specific reasons for Mr. Khan’s inspection. “C.B.P. strives to treat all travelers with respect and in a professional manner, while maintaining the focus of our mission to protect all citizens and visitors in the United States,” he wrote.
Mr. Corsaro said the inspection lasted “a little more than an hour” and added, “Unfortunately, Mr. Khans’s checked luggage was lost by the airline, which contributed to his delay during C.B.P. processing.”
Asked if Mr. Khan’s name or religion prompted the inspection, Mr. Corsaro said, “C.B.P. conducts name queries of passengers entering the US. utilizing various law enforcement databases. The information in those databases is law enforcement sensitive, which we are not at liberty to discuss.”
Mr. Khan’s more resigned attitude has emerged after a bit of a backlashdeveloped among Indians. Some argued that Mr. Khan’s experience was overblown, and indicted what has been termed India’s “V.I.P. culture.” For example, Sridhar Kondoji at the blog eNewss writes:
All these people demand VIP status wherever they are. This is a virus like symptom only in India and has no cure for it. Shah Rukh Khan has created an embarrassment for Indian and American officials by exaggerating his 2 hour ordeal which is otherwise a routine questioning.
And as some pointed out, Indian celebrities are not being singled out for security checks. Bob Dylan was also quizzed by police in New Jersey on Friday, who demanded his identification following a complaint about someone loitering in Long Branch.
Source : The Lede - New York Times Blog


Gmail - Labels: drag and drop, hiding, and more

Labels: drag and drop, hiding, and more:
"Posted by Damian Gajda, Software Engineer

A few months ago Gmail got some new buttons and keyboard shortcuts to make labeling easier, especially for those of you accustomed to that familiar folder feel. Now we're making some more changes to Gmail's labeling toolkit.


1) New location for labels
You'll notice your labels in a new location on the left of your inbox (or on the right, for those of you using the Arabic, Hebrew, or Urdu versions of Gmail). Instead of having their own section, your labels are now above your chat list, grouped together with Inbox, Drafts, Chats and other system labels.

2) Label hiding and showing
You now have control over which of your labels show. We've done our best to get you started by automatically showing the labels you use most and hiding the rest. Label hiding is my favorite new feature, since it saves me from having to look through labels I rarely use. If I ever need to reach any of my old labels, I just click the 'more' link.


You can show, hide, or delete a label by clicking the down-arrow to the left of that label.


If you want to make a lot of changes at once, go to the Labels tab under Settings where you can edit labels in bulk.

For those of you who created label names like _stuff or ++todo++ to force your most-used labels to the top of the list (come on, you know who you are, I did it too...), you don't have to come up with clever tricks like that anymore ;)

3) Drag and drop
You can now drag messages into labels, just like you can with folders. This does the exact same thing as "Move to" — it labels and archives in one step.


You can drag labels onto messages too. It's the same thing as using the 'Label' button. To label or move many messages at once, first select the messages and then drag and drop the label.


It's also possible to drag labels into the 'more' menu to hide them and vice versa. If you only want to move a couple labels around, I've found it quicker than going to Settings.

All of these changes also mean the end of Right-side Labels, an experimental Gmail Labs feature. This is the first Labs feature we're retiring. (The idea behind Labs was always that things could break or disappear at any time or they might work so well that they become regular features. More on that soon...) Now that labels aren't in their own little box and take up much less space, moving them around the screen didn't seem as important. We realize quite a few of you used and liked Right-side Labels, so if you feel strapped for left nav screen real estate without it, try turning on Right-side Chat in Labs instead.

We hope these new changes make labeling even easier and help you stay organized. We'll be rolling out these labeling features for everyone throughout the day, so if you don't see them right away please check later today.
"

Gmail - Composing a message? Try the contact chooser

Composing a message? Try the contact chooser: "Posted by Benjamin Grol, Product Manager

When composing messages, you probably rely pretty heavily on auto-complete to add recipients. Auto-complete is convenient and fast, and usually does the trick. But sometimes seeing your list of contacts can help you remember all the people you want to include on your email. So, we've added a contact chooser to Gmail. Click the 'To:' link (or Cc:/Bcc:) when composing a message and you'll see something like this:


You can click on the contacts you want to add or search for others.

If you use contact groups, your groups will appear in a drop-down menu in the contact chooser, so you can select contacts from the groups you've already created. And if you happen to use Gmail in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, being able to pick from your list of contacts should be particularly useful since auto-complete doesn't offer the same search as you type experience that it does in other languages.


"

Top 5 Tips to Increase your BlogSpot Blog’s Trafic and Revenue

Top 5 Tips to Increase your BlogSpot Blog’s Trafic and Revenue: "
by

bloggerlogo.jpgOK! Let me clarify right at the beginning, as the title quite clearly states, these tips are centered around blogs based on Google’s blogger.com and not ones based on the wordpress platform (although I’m planning one for it soon).


So what does it take to bring people to your blog and turn them into regular visitors? Of course content is king, but when it comes to blogger many background tips are equally important to increase views and your money!



Many of us just create blogs, with the sole intention of only creating money. That’s the greatest mistake that you can ever do! Don’t just think about earning and go about copy-pasting articles. No one wants to read articles that are copied or have no value, blog about something that you are passionate about, things that you know a thing or two about!


OK. Enough of the blabber. Lets come straight to the hacks or tips that can increase your traffic and revenue, although not overnight, but gradually! Let me tell you that some of these tips are a little advanced.


Tip 1: Remove Duplicate Meta Description Tags and page titles


You can easily add meta tags to you blog. However due to a silly and mostly overlooked mistake, these meta tags that are meant to increase your traffic, causes the downfall of your blog!


The error is that the meta tags that you insert are only meant for the homepage of your blog and not the post pages. But due to the code that we insert, all the post appears to have the same meta-tags. This causes Google to think that you have duplicate content all over your blog, and your blog gets marked down for spam.


How to rectify it?


Divya Sai @Bloggerstop.net has published a neat tutorial on how to rectify this problem. You can read it over here.


Tip 2: Submit your blog or its feed to Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites


Whats the use of submitting your blog/feed to blog directories or RSS submission sites? Well, these sites are on the internet for quite some time. So they are well recognized by Google. When you submit your blog url to such directories and google crawls them, your blog’s preference in search results increase. These in turn results in lots of organic traffic!


To get a good many number of sites to submit your blog to, visit Robin Good’s RSSTop55:Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites from here.


Tip 3: Insert an ad below your post title


You can see in this very post, that there is an ad just below the title. According to many experienced campaigners, this is one of the spaces on the blog that is most likely to be clicked on. So go on and insert one ad below the title on your blog and you can earn almost double of what you are currently earning now.


If you don’t know how to implement this tip, visit this well-documented tutorial by Mohamed Rias @techieblogger.com, click here.


Tip 4 : Contradict Others!


Well that doesn’t mean you go on saying that twitter is going to shut down in the next month! If you have a strong view about a particular topic (for eg. you think that test cricket has it, in itself to survive against T20. This is a big contradiction these days!) blog about it. People like to read posts and articles that counter others and contradict the pundits!


Let others know about your views by commenting on the article that you have contradicted against, along with the url of your article. You are bound to get many readers.


Tip 5 : Write a ‘Top 5′ article


What was the main aim of this post. To give blogger’s a list of hacks that they can implement to increase their traffic and revenue, in one place itself. If you would search the blog-sphere you would get all these tips but in various posts and blogs. Here you got all the 5 tips in 1 post, that’s what people like.


Top 5, Top 10, Top 100 lists are very attractive as well as tempting for a person. The reason being that you get many tips in one place itself. So go on and write a ‘Top n’ list on your blog.


Note: Apart from this Alok Chaudhari has given two wonderful posts on hacks that every blogger must implement. They are 5 Best Blogspot Blogger Hacks Everyone Should Use! and and Best Blogger Hacks Collection – Part 2


Hope you liked the post and do comment if you have any doubts or suggestions.


Source:

DEVILS WORKSHOP


"

Add a retweet counter on your website with ReTweet.com

Add a retweet counter on your website with ReTweet.com: "
by

Some time ago I wrote a popular post about how to integrate into your web pages a Tweetmeme button that shows the number of retweets received by a single post or page of your blog or website. In the past days a new service, similar to Tweetmeme, has been launched. This service is ReTweet.com that shows popular links being retweeted across Twitter and provides a simple widget that shows the number of retweets received by your posts.

You can quickly integrate into your site this widget, which shows a button with a counter, just in some seconds using two lines of JavaScript code. There are two versions of the button, big and small:


If you are a Blogger user find this code:

<b:includable id='post' var='post'>
<div class='post hentry'>

...and if you want to add the big button add immediately after the last row this code:

<script type='text/javascript'>
url = '<data:post.url>';
</script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.retweet.com/static/retweets.js'></script>

If you prefer the smaller button use this code:

<script type='text/javascript'>
url = '<data:post.url>';
size = 'small';
</script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.retweet.com/static/retweets.js'></script>

If you use another blogging platform and want to add a ReTweet.com button on your website the only thing you have to change from the previous code is the value of the var url. Take a look at the official page here.

Related Posts
- Add a retweet counter on your posts with Tweetmeme


"
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