The MAG Blog

The winners of The MAG T-shirts for the month of November are:

The Most Valuable Contributors for the month:

1. Aniruddha for his review of the movie Inglourious Basterds.

The Top commenter for the month :

1. Aashish

Winner of Caption This:

1. Naveen Methre for his Caption : “Woman, in search of Solace!”.

Congratulations to the winners!

If you didn’t win one this time around, no need to worry, as new contests for the T shirts has begun. Read here and participate!

It’s time to announce the very first winners of the The MAG T-shirts. So, without further ado, here they are:

The Two Most Valuable Contributors for the month:

1. Geetali for her review of the movie Kaminey
2. Aprajita for her article “Its esier 2 comunicte nw, or is it?”

The Top commenter for the month :

1. NSG

Winner of Caption This:

1. Rahul for his comment, ” Save Me From you…For You”

Congratulations to the winners!

If you didn’t win one this time around, no need to worry, as new contests for the T shirts begin today. Read here and participate!

Tags: Results, T shirts

So, the T shirts are finally here. It does feel great to be able to touch something that has existed in your thoughts for quite a while, doesn’t it?

In our last post we talked about how you could get your hands on one of The MAG T-shirts. But at that time, to be honest, I wasn’t very sure how well the T shirts would turn out to be, I was even a bit worried that we had announced the contest without waiting for the T-shirts to actually arrive. What would happen if the T shirts failed to get printed in time?

But all those fears were put to rest as soon as I donned one of the T-shirts. The T shirt looked good, even though the grey shade of the T shirt is a bit lighter than whatwe had originally planned for. But,all said and done, it seems pretty nice. Here, I will refrain from saying anything more about the T-shirt and let you be your own judge.

If you like you can tell us what you think of them. We will be glad to hear from you,and we will be happy to hear your suggestions to make them  better next time.

As to how you can get one of these babies, just read our previous post.

Till next time!

Tags: T shirts

There has been silence on the blog for quite some time. One of the reasons for the silence was the fact that it is better to stay quiet rather than say something just for the sake of saying it.

The time has, however, come to break the silence.

The MAG has always hoped to be as interactive as possible. One of the aims of starting The MAG was to bring out the writer in you, and to have your write-ups showcased on the site. We want as many of our readers to contribute to The MAG as are willing and able.

From August 2009, we have decided to give away three T-shirts every month. These T-shirts will be given to:

1. Two T-shirts will be given to the two most popular articles of the month (The popularity will be decided on the basis of number of views the article receives, number of comments on the article, and some weightage will be give to the editor’s opinion). You can contribute articles on any topic. The only conditions are that your contribution should be original, unpublished( not even on your blog), and interesting.
2. One T-shirt to the person who has the highest number of comments for the month.

We will posting pictures of the T-shirts to be won soon.  So, keep checking the blog, and have a great time writing and commenting on The MAG.

Till next time!

P.S. - If you have any questions, you can send an email to editor@themag.in, or leave a comment here.

Tags: Comment, Contribute, Give away

In 2008, we had hoped for a Google Page rank of 3, or 4, or even 5 for The MAG.  But for some reason, the PR actually fell from 2 to 1, and it had been 1 for the past three months.

Looks like Google today decided to make some changes to the Page Ranks. With these changes The MAG got back its PR of 2. I know it’s nothing spectacular, but celebrating every positive development, however small it is, is an important part of growing. And we do hope to continue growing in the future, with your support, of course.

For quite some time now, we had been using NeverBlueAds affiliate advertsising network for The MAG. But, the results haven not been that good. I am sure it has nothing to do with the quality of the NeverBlueAds site, because I have always been satisfied with whatever services they offered. I think it was a case of mismatch between The MAG’s readership, and the types of ads served by NeverBlueAds.

Today, I decided to take the ads off. In fact,  I have taken almost all kinds of advertising off The MAG, and kept only an ad block by Project Wonderful . This is also on an experimental basis, and if it is also not able to deliver , it will be soon gone too.

The MAG has got off to a slow start in 2009.  One reason was that most people associated with the MAG had things going on in their personal lives, which left little time for working on The MAG. But, all things - good or bad - must come to an end. So, this slow phase of The MAG also comes to an end.

In the new phase we begin with new enthusiasm and vigour to ensure that The MAG achieves the vision it has set out to achieve (In the coming posts, I will be sharing the vision and mission of The MAG ).

For now I would like to invite people to join The MAG, and actively contribute to it. We need your contribution to make The MAG a success.  For now we need people who can help with the following things:

1. Contributors for The MAG blog. I hope to see this blog grow as an important part of The MAG. Therefore, updating it frequently is one of the top most priorities in the times to come. We are looking for people who can write about writing, blogging, and general going-on on the Internet. You don’t have to be very regular , but you have to try and write as often as possible.
2. Tech support. For something like The MAG to stay up and running on a continual basis, we need someone with good technical knowledge of open source systems like Joomla, Wordpress, PHP etc. You need to have a few hours free every week to keep an eye on The MAG, and make some necessary changes when required.
3. Writers. We need people who can contribute relevant, and interesting articles for The MAG.  After all, serving interesting, relevant articles is what The MAG was born for.
4. Lastly, but most importantly, we need you. We need you to tell others about The MAG, to support us, to advice us, to criticise us, to help us become better.

If you are interested in doing any of the above things, or know someone who might be, leave a comment or feel free to drop me a line at editor@themag.in

Happy New Year 2009!

Last six months have been good for The MAG! We have seen an increase in the number of contributors, registered members, as well as readers. But, there is still a long way to go.

In my last post, I had set out a list of targets for The MAG. Unfortunately, The MAG has not been able to meet all of those targets. While Alexa ranking of The MAG has become better, the new year brought with it a fall in Google page rank for The MAG. Though these numbers are not very important, yet, as I said before in an earlier post, the better these numbers get, the better we feel about The MAG.

So, in 2009, we are going to keep up with our efforts to get the numbers to the next level. But, our focus will not change from what it has always been - quality writing!

Targets and goals are wonderful things to have. Without goals and targets, one can keep on working hard but not reach anywhere. Everything natural on this earth has a purpose, so there is no reason why something man-made should not have a target too.

The MAG also has a clear objective, which I hope to share with all of you some day.

But a journey can become tedious if we focus only on the destination. Sometimes the destination can seem so far away, that hope abandons us, and despair sets in. To avoid that, it is important that we break our journey into parts, or, in other words, create smaller objectives and targets which will go a long way in helping us to get where we want to reach.

For The MAG, there are a set of targets that we hope to achieve within the next two months. Some of these targets are :

1. Achieving an Alexa Rank of below 100,000
2. Increasing the Google PR from 2 to 3, or 4
3. Increasing the number of RSS feed subscribers from 50+ to 100+

I have chosen the above as targets, because of one simple reason : these are numbers, and hence can be measured. Increasing them is no guarantee of a site’s quality, yet it will be good to see these numbers increase.

I will deal with the subject of how you can help us in achieving these targets in subsequent posts. Watch this space…

Today is Diwali, and I would like to wish everyone a very happy and a safe Diwali. Diwali is a festival of lights and just like we light the oil lamps to brighten our houses and streets on this day, let us also light up the lamps of knowledge to chase away the darkness of fear and ignorance.

Have a great Diwali this year!

Tags: Festivals

The MAG earlier had a shout box which had to be removed because it did not serve any major purpose, The only thing it did was that it allowed spammers to leave behind URL’s of sites that were by no means worth visiting.

After removing that shout box, I thought that The MAG could perhaps do with a complete chat room, and this chat room would be open only to registered users of The MAG. This idea was debated upon by a few members of The MAG and, like most issues, there was no one final consensus that was arrived upon.

So, we decided to learn by trial and go for it.

One of the purposes of this chat room is to provide The MAG readers and writers a place to interact with each other, and I am sure this will happen in time. But to take a step in this direction it has been decided that from 8 PM to 9 PM, every Saturday, we will try to spend some time in this chat room.

I will be there this Saturday. Will you?

Tags: Chat