(Full pic size on Flickr.)

It has a bit of a web-magazine look about it - with a slick YouTube video in the sidebar,  and post highlights using custom fields. 

I have a few things on the to-do list left - such as a different sidebar for inside pages and a better archive page.   But overall,  I think it’s a nice new look for Mallika’s blog - and I have a feeling that she is going places with her Quick Indian Cooking.

The hotel wifi costs £40 a month, and that’s on top of all the coffees, pots of green tea, and occasional lunches that I need to keep me going. So I don’t pay it .

Instead, I have a mobile USB dongle from 3. It costs me £10 a month for a gig of transfer. The real limitation is that it drains the battery on my laptop. So I just use it for quick forays onto the net. The connection here isn’t quite as stable as a good WiFi signal, but it will do.

And now I see that Mobile Broadband is coming to Russia (Option who make dongles for Vodafone are to provide them to Russian telecom VimpleCom ).   Essentially this means that the internet can now reach into the furthest corners of the earth - even where traditional phone lines are far and few between.

The Free Economy is something that Chris Anderson, the author of the Long Tail, is working on for his next book.

I wasn’t their everyday sort of guest. In the Green Room there was a little box to leave your business card. It was full cards left by analysts, venture capitalist, and economists. I dropped in mine with picture of a story-telling frog on it.

I was supposed to have 5 minutes on the Power Lunch Europe show, but the guy before me over-ran his rant about the NYMEX. So I had 4 minutes to explain the trend to free. The interviewer was great, but there wasn’t time to say a lot of the things I had planned. There’s stuff going on that isn’t just about cash flow, and it’s about a lot more than advertising moving online.

But a good thing about a blog is that you can say what ever you like. Here are some of the points I wanted to make about Free on the Web:

The web is a very idealistic place - and some organisations like the Wikipedia and Mozila give away their products out of sheer altruism. The commercial companies have to contend with this free-for-all ethos. Who cares about Encarta or Encylopedia Britannica any more?

If you want to build a big website, your content has to be free. If your content hides behind a credit card form, the search engines can’t see it. The reason the BBC and the Wiki are big on the web is because they have thousands of high quality pages that come up in searches.

Given the altruistic and cooperative nature of the web, people tend to link to free resources, rather than overtly commercial ones.

In the old days free led to the question “where’s the catch?” but the web is a voting machine that rewards integrity - so free has to really mean free.

Google launches a free product practically every week. Some of these are amazingly high value - take SketchUp the 3D, modeling software, or Google Earth that has detailed satellite pictures of the globe previously available only to defense departments.

Most of Google’s products don’t make them money - but they do earn it love and good will. These are vital to a company that is so dominant because a regulator making his or her career is more likely to start an anti-trust suit against an unpopular company - such as Microsoft. The free products, such as gmail, help Google worm its way into your life and become an essential part of it. They also niggle Microsoft, which it is always happy to do..

Many people build their reputation by giving their time to the web free of charge. Some build software - occasionally with enormous impact - and they do well out of it. Linus Torvalds is hardly unemployable, although he gave his youth to Linux. Others write or record media content. For a professional, a high reputation is the key to their success - so they don’t really need advertising. Quite frankly, most authors and musicians could also benefit from giving away their material. The great majority aren’t making any money from selling their works - only the top few do that. They had better face up to that, and start working on giving away their material, and building a following. It’s a long hard slog, but it’s the way the world works now.

If you are traditional business all the above is annoying. But if your product can be reproduced at minimal marginal cost you had better face up to the facts. Newspaper publishers are now coming round to giving away their content online - and even on the train in the form of free papers. And oddly enough, the ones who have seen that free is the future are doing rather well.

Here’s my firm belief - - and I suppose that it puts me in the goodie camp. It’s my rule of internet.

Most of the sites that come top in searches are are a resource of some kind.

The most visited page on Storynory is the archive. That’s because it is a repository of children’s stories. In other words, it’s a resource. Our most successful blog client - Quick Indian Cooking - is a resource of recipes. (I hope to bring you developments on the home cooking front in the New Year. )

The Wikipedia is huge because it is valuable mine of information. Other Wikis do well, because they cover their niches and serve as information centres for particular groups Some of the most popular podcasts are language courses.

Traditionally blogs present you with their most recent posts. This fine if they are very topical, and publish often. But I detect a shift out there that tries to put more value on the usefulness of the archive.

My prediction for 2008 is that more and more blogs - and later podcasts - will relaunch themselves in a better organised format that makes it easier to mine for information. Currently there are a number of magazine designs out there that are attempting to do this.

The elements of a blog-resource include:

1. Longer posts with more educational content
2. Series of posts on a particular topic - that build up into a step-by step tutorial.
3. A Semi-Static Front page that highlights important categories and best read posts.
4. A really well organised archive that is broken down into categories.
5. Feature pages that highlight certain topics and posts
6. Category Pages that have their own design and sidebar links relevant to that category
7. Posts with “If you found this intersting, you may also like….” in the footer

I would be interested in any more ideas for improved organisation, as this is what I’m thinking about most at the moment. You might even see blog relations re-organised along those lines….

I’ll pick out one quote and some headlines: You can read the original here.

Remember that kid you always used to make fun of in class for asking way too many questions and for sucking up to the teacher for that high grade? That’s what you need to do with the gods of (your niche)…Get out there and suck up to the influencers.

(Well I think that’s why I haven’t made it yet !)

Other tips, slightly adapted to make them more generally applicable

• Overpower the Forums and Make Friends
• Dominate your competitors by becoming the Go-to-Guy for ONE Niche
• Get published
• Create Your Central Site / Blog and just BUILD
• Make friends with your rivals
• Build up High Value Links to your site (by having good content to link to)
• Create Formulas and Simplified Ideas (of your complicated hard to understand subject)
• Start Your Experimentations (original research)
• Passion and Obsession - Go With It

To these excellent tips I would add:

• Meet people in real life. Go to all the networking events. Press the flesh. Hand out cards. Speak at conferences.

I should install it here too….  I know that I neglect Blog Relations, but it’s benefiting indirectly as it’s on a shared server with Storynory. One day soon I’m going to start devoting time to BR here, but at the moment running Storynory and keeping up with my nanny duties for our small son is all that I can manage.

WordPress 3.0 has better enforcement of content generation on the fly, so that you don’t get the same content on numerous different URLs. Some of it, we were doing already, like diverting www.storynory.com to storynory.com. But I also understand that the old WordPress was capable of creating pages with a whole load of different variations in the address. As is well known, Google does not like duplicate content. Eliminating it might have helped our search results.

Something that upgrading WordPress forced me to do, sort of by accident, was to change our archives. Storynory’s Archive Page is the second most visited page after the home page. I was using the very nice looking Ajax archives generated by Extended Live Archive, but because it was in JavaScript, Google couldn’t see the links it generated. ELA doesn’t work in WordPress 3.0, so now I have an HTML page, divided up into categories. This is generated using the WordPress tag ‘get_posts’. Effectively, it’s a site map, and I think that might have cheered up Google too.

I don’t know for sure if upgrading WordPress has helped Storynory’s SEO, but it certainly didn’t do any harm, and it has been a good month for visitor stats.

Hope you had a good Halloween, and weren’t caught by too many spells, or kids pestering you for treats.

Our kids podcast, Storynory, enjoyed a nice treat : a good jump in its visitor stats. A lot of it was search traffic coming into two Halloween stories, last year’s, and one we put out a couple of week’s before Halloween this year. I also added a Halloween tag for good measure, and made sure that the festival was highlighted on the front page.

It’s natural to think around holidays for children, but I would have thought that many blogs and podcasts could also benefit from a quick look in the diary to see what’s coming up. It’s important to be a bit early, so the search engines have time to find you.

Roll on Christmas…