Increasing number of Film related Nepali websites

With increased number of films being made in recent time, film related websites are also in increasing trends. I have reviewed some film related websites.

The first film related magazine in Nepal was ‘Kamana’ but they never made a good enough website to talk about. The group that publishes Kamana is not that interested in website and they are pretty happy with the printed publication. The screenshot on the right speaks volumes on its online presence.

As far as I know, the first dedicated film related website was filmnepal.com. The site is still there but it doesn’t get updated that frequently. The site is full of age-old stories that no one is interested in.

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Do iPhone Apps reviews make sense in Nepal?

I was surprised when a Nepali newspapers published an iPhone apps review. It is not that they can’t do it. But, iPhone Apps doesn’t make sense to majority of the readers of the Nepali newspaper.

The reviewed App, costing $5 (it was marked $0.99, at the time of writing this article), can’t be purchased in Nepal as there is no International Credit Card facility in Nepal.

The V1.0 of the app was released on 26 July, 2009 and is rated 17+. That doesn’t qualify itself to be reviewed in a National newspaper in Nepal.

Many tech review sites had reviewed it long ago and told it to be “completely inaccurate”. The article in Nagariknews is fully biased towards the app and makes it feel like the app is the best prediction of your sexual drive.

It doesn’t make sense to review a year-old app. In a year’s time, there should have been more such applications released in iTunes which, the Nagariknews writer didn’t care to look for.

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Top 50 Websites in Nepal – only 15 are Nepali

We don’t have a system to rank websites in Nepal. The truth is, we don’t have that many quality websites to rank. The only tool I could find was Alexa.com. It gives country rankings of websites.

A very simple analysis of the data shows that all the popular sites in Nepal are foreign sites. Only one Nepali site in the top 10 ranking is ranked 10th.

The analysis showed that:

• Facebook (no. 1) is more popular than Google (2 and 3). Due to the local tdl (com.np and .com) the visitors in Google are divided. When they are combined, Google might still be the most popular website in Nepal.
• The first Nepali website, Nagariknews.com is ranked 10, followed by eKantipur.com in rank 12.
• Out of 50 top websites popular in Nepal, only 30% websites (15 numbers) were Nepali websites.
• Nepali news websites were the most popular in Nepal with, almost half (40%) of the 15 Nepali websites were news websites. Entertainment sites were second with 27% share (4 numbers).
• xnepali.com was ranked 43 and was the 13th most popular website in Nepal.

Ranking tables follow:

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Website analysis – xnepali compared with sajha and mysansar (Part 1)

Owners of xnepali.com asked me to do a comparative analysis of xnepali.com and its competitive position in Nepali website market. It was not an easy task to do the analysis as there are numerous variables to do the analysis of. I asked for the usage statistics of the site and found out that it wasn’t properly kept and it was even more work to extract useful data from the raw data. Even if I get all those data for xnepali I won’t be able to compare with other sites. So, I decided to a bit simpler analysis, that anybody can do.

I decided to compare three sites: xnepali.com, sajha.com, and mysansar.com. Sajha is one of the popular forum, that was in existence for quite some time and mysansar can be considered one of the most popular single handed Nepali website.

1. Domain Age

Age is also a factor to determine the site’s relevancy in search and in people’s perception. Xnepali.com was the youngest (3 and half years old) with sajha.com the oldest site (more than 8 years old). Mysansar was nearly twice the age of xnepali.com.

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Why are Nepali web sites being hackers’ target? – Part 1

By: Kumu Khanal

In recent days there have been a lot of reports of hackers taking control of Nepali websites. I would like to discuss why are they targeting Nepali websites.

Why do hackers hack? Hackers mainly are of three types: hardcore criminal hackers, criminal hackers and non-criminal hackers. Hardcore criminal hackers are after money. They are constantly seeking money and materials that can be sold to a third party. Personal information like identity, credit cards can be sold over internet. Software, documents, movies, music can also be sold offline or online. They can use all kinds of tools like spywares, trojan horse, phishing and so on.   

Other criminal hackers steal materials for their own use or share with their friends like photos, movies, music, and documents. On the other hand, non-criminal hackers might be learning hacking on their way to become criminal hackers or stopping them.

Some do hacking for recognition, fun, show-off their skills, or just to learn how it is done. There are others who hack for vengeance. Some good hackers hack to exploit vulnerability and warn the websites owners (too bad, there are not many good hackers!).

Why Nepali websites? I don’t think Nepali websites attract the hardcore criminal hackers as they have nothing to get from the sites or the visitors to the sites. People in Nepal rarely do financial transactions online. Online banking is also available only on a selected few banks; that too with very limited banking options. Due to unreliable power supply, internet use in our daily needs is still a luxury that we can’t afford. So, the hackers we are facing in Nepali websites should mostly be non-criminal hackers in their learning stage.

Does that mean we don’t need to worry? No, hackers cause financial damage in terms of downtime and loss of data. Sites also loose their credibility. Nobody would like to visit a site that is hacked or has higher potential to be hacked.

Hacker Cost: In 1995, when, we in Nepal didn’t know what internet was (although, first email service in Nepal started in 1994), hacking cost businesses some $800 million around the world. In another report in 2000 the cost was estimated to be $1.6 trillion in 30 countries. I don’t have the latest estimate but you can guess how the hacker cost should have increased in the past 10 years. Apart from financial loss they can cause mental and psychological damage which can’t be quantified.

But, Nepal is a different case. Our sites may not have that much value and hence hacking impact might be less. But, there hasn’t been any study on hacker cost in Nepalese contest so we can’t be too sure. I strongly believe such a study would benefit both the website creators and their website users. It will also encourage webmasters to adopt security measures in the websites, hence creating peace-of-mind in both visitors and the site owners.

In the next part, I will review some of the hacked websites and their user bases in terms of publically available web monitoring tools like Alexa.

To be continued …

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Thank you – Blog statistics

Note: This post was written when I got excited on the popularity of the blog, and when pageview approached 100,000.  After 15 months (on August 1, 201) the site visitors have increased several folds. We had our lows in December when we had to move the webhost (and stats was offline for sometime). This is the last update in this page as nobody (except myself) is interested in such stuffs. It however feels good to expect a million pageviews in a couple of month.

In recent days xnepali blog has seen increased number of visitors. It sure will motivate me to update the blog regularly.

[Update September 15, 2009]Thanks again. I am adding updated chart mid-way September. It is already more than the level of April month’s data. And it is only for blog.xnepali.com (not xnepali.com!)

[Update September 30, 2009] By the end of September total page-views was 260,000, way higher than what I expected. Nepali Movies continue to lead the most visited page in the blog.
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50 Best Websites of 2007 – TIME

TIME magazine has compiled the best websites of 2007.

They have tried to present new and exciting websites with exceptional style, sites that offer new ways to access and share content, and the ones that can enrich your online experience.

You can visit the TIME 50 Best Websites 2007 to see what they think and if you can agree with them. It’s too bad I haven’t heard about many of them. May be I should start visiting them.

They have also compiled the sites under various categories and here is the complete list of best websites.

Well the list continues with 25 Sites We Can’t Live Without and the 5 Worst Websites too. Well, it is another story that I have never bought anything in Amazon (the first site that I can’t live without according to TIME) although I have done ample amount of online shopping.

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Travel Ideas

Traveling in the winter might not be that attractive but this is an ideal time to plan for future vacations. When I get some free time and decide to go for a vacation, it is always a pain to get the best place to go. Then comes the travel arrangements like hotel, tickets, cars. In the last hour I always wish I had started earlier so that I could get better deals and savings. Seeking travel ideas and travel deals sure take time. Last time we went to Niagara Falls and it was a total mess regarding the arrangements but the place was simply great. I am posting a small clip of the journey below.

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Online Drive

Internet and computer is taking over every aspect of our life. My reports, papers, bills, bank account details and transaction, correspondence, phone book, meeting schedules and almost everything I need everyday is saved in my computer. I have books, tools to do my work and output of numerous sleepless nights in the computer. Looks like everything I have is slowly being transferred to the idiot box in front of me!

These are the things that are really precious to me, so I have saved them in external drives, CDs, DVDs. But when I need them, it is always painful to go through the big pile to find the particular material for a particular time. Updating already archived material is also not so easy. So I am looking for something that can be easy to archive and retrieve. One of the best solution to the problem can be online drives. They sure do cost some but the flexibility in using them outwits the cost involved.

If you are looking for free online storage you can try Gmail Drive, a freeware to use on your e-mail account with Google. You can also use Yahoo mail to save files with their unlimited email storage capacity. The only catch is that you have to regularly log in to keep the email account active. I looked around to find free online drives and many of such services have been closed down or they no longer offer free service anymore. Some such sites are ZDisk, NetFloppy, DiskWise, Free Disk Space, iBackup, NBCi, xDrive etc.If you are willing to pay money you can get the premium features like security and reliability, the two most important aspect to consider while choosing online drive. iBackup, that used to provide free storage previously and has discontinued the service, promises to provide secure and reliable data storage by retaining up to 30 previous versions of data. Another positive aspect is that it has also own several awards including PC World (2006) and PC Magazine editor’s choices.

Will write about other nice service too when I come across them.

Alzheimer’s Foundation of America

Alzheimer’s Foundation of America (AFA) was founded by a consortium of organizations to assure quality of care and excellence in service to individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and related illnesses, and to their caregivers and families.

AFA’s mission statement is:

”to provide optimal care and services to individuals confronting dementia, and to their caregivers and families—through member organizations dedicated to improving quality of life.”

Alzheimer’s disease progressively damage brain’s nerve cells to result in loss of memory, thinking and language skills, and behavioral changes. Owing to its commonness Alzheimer’s disease sometimes is considered a normal part of aging which is not true. Alzheimer’s disease is also the most common cause of dementia, defined by loss of intellectual function, in people aged 65 and older.

It is appreciable that Alzheimer’s Foundation of America offers quality care for those who suffer from the disease apart from seeking a cure to Alzheimer’s.

Top Online Casinos

If you like online casinos there are a lot of sites offering different options in bonus, payouts and playing interfaces. Choosing the best casino in itself seems like a bit of gambling.

To make it simple I found a website that offers a comprehensive list of websites to assist US Players find safe and fun online gambling destinations. The http://www.topusaonlinecasinos.com/ ranks online casino sites according to various parameters like bonus size, payout rate, customer support, number of games, deposit options, graphics and ease of use. Best of all it is free site!

The site is easy to use and extremely user friendly although the design and layout could have been made better. The site seems to be in initial stage of design as some of the pages didn’t work. I hope the webmaster will add a phone number and address in the contact page so that the users can feel they are dealing with some person instead of a computer.

It sure is very helpful site for people interested in Online Casinos but never really known where to start from. Are you ready to try your luck?

Blogging, John Chow and Google – Lesson to learn

I heard about John Chow, the most talked about money making blogger, some time back. He started a very aggressive link back campaign in which he gave a link back for every review of his blog when text anchor ‘make money online’ was used. That proved very helpful for him to make him blogging icon and earn score of money. But Google, the big boss in internet search was not happy with these blogging for money strategies. They punished the site by removing from search results.

Chris Hemphill posted this search result from google:
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