After a very long hiatus, I have started blogging on cricket. I am inspired by the third edition of IPL. Check out my cricket blog, Cricz, and let me know what you think.

I started blogging on cricket around 2 years back, and lack of time rendered it impossible for me to continue spinning on it, until now. I can see a path forward for Cricz to move forward, I will put in the hard work until the IPL is over and get a team to take it forward.

Personally, I am from Bangalore and am in love with the Royal Challengers of Bangalore. There are many good things about this team. Firstly, it’s owned by liquor baron Vijay Mallya who lives in grandeur and wants the same for the team. The team is studded with ambassadors such as Bollywood queens Katrina Kaif and Deepika Padukone, and Sandalwood princess Ramya. I have a feeling that Mallya’s son Siddharth is probably getting closer to the Padukone jr, but let’s leave that to the gossip mills.

I like to keep this blog purely professional and will discuss on Project Management, Service Management, GTD Techniques and Success Mantras. I have recently launched a personal blog, christened Abhinav and his Thoughts on which I plan to write on anything and everything that interests me personally.

I am an avid follower of Indian politics and the sport cricket in particular. Also, I usually have sharp opinions on news flashers such as Tiger Woods. I will write about them on my new blog. Anything that falls in between professionalism and personal life will be posted on both blogs.

For starters, we have over a million blogs and users find a new blog for the unique information they may need. So, the question of loyalty withers, and so does the connection between the blogger and the reader. Even some of the top blogs, including social engines such as Digg is losing commentators fairly regularly. I am an avid reader of Digg and there used to be a time, say 4 years back when comments used to run into several hundreds, and today, the case has completely turned around.

Secondly, spamming has taken the sheen out of blog commenting. A lot of spammers, in order to get backlinks back to their site, comment on blog posts, placing links of their staked websites. This spam has brought in control measures, which avoids spammers, and at the same time some of genuine bloggers, who would like to share their websites through your website.

Google and other search engines recognize the tag no-follow, which basically tells the search engine spiders that these links need not be followed. Wordpress, the world’s most popular blogging engine has enabled no-follow tags for all its comments. So, for spammers, blogs that run on Wordpress don’t benefit much. And, as I said earlier, some genuine commentators who would like to have a reciprocate with a comment to a link onto their website are turned away as well.

To encourage blogging, if you are using Wordpress especially, download the do follow plugin and set it up on your installation. At the very least, we can show a candy to those who comment on blogs for their own gain, but, in return, we can get something meaningful out of it. What say?

A portion of this article was originally published on Tech Pedia on the 18th of December.

The goal of this post is to highlight the aspects of Project Management and Blogging and hence, enable readers to build a successful blog using the best practices in the industry.

Before we set afoot, here are some underlying qualities/activities that a prospective blogger must have/follow:

1. Domain Knowledge – Bloggers must have good knowledge in the field that they wish to write on. Without basic domain knowledge, it is practically impossible to impress readers and more importantly, satisfy oneself through writing. For example, if John was to start a blog on semi-conductors, he must have some in-depth knowledge to make a mark in the cyber world.

2. See the Need, Fill the Void – This applies to all business aspects. Bloggers should basically find a niche that is untapped and exploit it to the fullest. For example, Mary is advised by an online consultant that there are a ton of websites on tech gadgets. If she still decides to go ahead with a gadget blog, the chances of her standing a good chance is slim, unless she gets first hand information on the new products. Instead, if she jumps into a field such as reusing old gadgets in coming up with something new, she has a brighter chance.

3. Information Sourcing – It is important where you obtain the information from and when you obtain it. Subscribing to a number of RSS feeds to source your blogs will fetch you eggs, or even omlets if lucky. Try not to carry coal to New Castle. Find something new. Find a fresh source rather than something that is all over the web by the time you get to it.

Well, these are just a few of the many pre-requisites that stand as a foundation to building a successful blog.

At this juncture, let’s suppose we have most of the ducks in a row and we are ready to start our mini project on building a blog. Here are some things to prioritize and work upon:

1. Initialization – Do some basic ground work of your proposed blog such as what you would like to write and which geographies are your targets. Also list down the resources (or identify) you would need like web designers, web hosts, SEO and so on. At the end of this stage, you will have a rough idea on where you stand and how things might look.

2. Planning – This is perhaps the most important stage for any project. An accurate planning will most times than not lead to successful projects and is quite true with blogs as well. Some things that ought to be planned include schedule, cost, stakeholders(project sponsor if any, readers, critics), quality, marketing (communication) amongst others. The amount of planning one must do depends mostly on the scope and breadth of your proposed blog. I would use a project management tool such as MS Project but the simple way out is a spreadsheet.

3. Execution – Planning in one world and executing what has been planned is completely another. Make sure that you stick to the plan wherever possible. Surveys indicate that only 23% of the total projects till date have completed on schedule and as planned. Sticking to the plan develops disciple and keeps a tight leash in ensuring that things don’t go out of hand.

4. Test if Everything is Fine – After every aspect of your blog is built, make sure you check everything is in place and in proper shape. It is best to do it now rather than when you operationalize it. Quality should be given its due place as at the end of the day, it is the quality of your framework, design and related segments that will stabilize your blog on a longer run. Example: If the design on your blog looks really great on Firefox and fails miserably on IE, you should know that the quality has taken a hit. Expect many users to be turned away if your blog does not show up well on their browsers, even though you might have quality content.

5. Close Out – If you are satisfied with all parts of your blog, it’s time to close the project and call it a success.

You start blogging only after your blog-building project is complete. Remember that blogging is not a project, but an operation. I will write on operational part of the blog in a later post.

The Project Management aspects provided above are very brief. Going forward, I will unearth each one of the areas to bring out a clear understanding and relation that exists between building blogs and project management.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.