Andrey Vystavkin Blog

If you ask what bothers foreigners in Cyprus, most of the people asked will tell you “slow living” and “xenophobia”, and you can easily put these two answers at the first place, cuz it’s truth.

After reading about the case which has been witnessed by Leonid Mamchenkov, I was a little bit shocked, these things became casualty in Cyprus, unfortunately, and it will take ages to get these young Cypriots to respect other people, no matter what nationality they are.

The idea of keeping your identity in the country which got its independency few scores ago played a bad joke with native islanders, let’s count: Byzantium Empire, Venice colony, Ottoman Empire, English colony, not counting the period of crusades. The natives were trying to keep their national identity - they kept it, by the cause of xenophobia, and transforming its economy on parasitizing the “colonizers”.

They got their independency but the things didn’t change: the economy was transformed to tourist service, simplifying the visa entrance for the foreigners. Despite being colonized, the fortune was on the side of the islanders: previous Lebanese conflict moved all off-shore stock to Cyprus, Kosovo conflict in 1998 brought Serbian immigrants and their finances, non-visa regime brought a huge Russian community, big companies.

In this case, mononational country became full of foreigners, which made the competition to the native liveners in all aspects of business, employment etc. The Cypriots couldn’t resist the competition, and as the result, the main problem after “Turkish invasion” for them became the topic where “All the foreigners are guilty in Cyprus problems!”.

Look at this problem from another side: if you talk about foreigner’s problem all the time at home with your wife, your small kid is listening to you, - at this point his vision of the immigrants became the main problem of his home island. He goes to school, they discuss it, and as the result these kids grow with the idea that all the problems are coming from “xeno” [foreigners].

The generation of Cypriots of the age 40-50 still remember the times how it was before the foreigners came, that Limassol was just a small village with a small port and few wine factories, when the bottle of J&B was 50 cents. These people understand from where Cyprus got its money, and the behavior of these people is more kind to foreigners, I had time to notice that for 4 years in Cyprus.

According to the latest article of Techcrunch, YouTube signed the agreement with Warner Music Group Corp. for using their music video production:

We first covered technology capable of detecting copyrighted content in the case of video distribute Guba, who has developed a system code named “Johnny” that detects copyrighted video.

From one side, you better be careful with video upload to YouTube. From another, more video, more good quality video data. It’s a great achievement for YouTube!

For the last few months, I’ve been using Metacafe service, which has better quality video material, even though it’s less then YouTube one, and better moderated. If the content of YouTube will get better [and it definitely will], I’ll think about switching back to it!

How valuable is your information? Does it help your readers?.. Unless you’re blogging without aim - you like to write, share your opinion.

Unfortunately, some people who can share good/interesting information, do not like to blog much, their post look more like a note then a full answer for the stated question of the post.

Will you read the article with the title like “Diary post-number-whatever-it-is” containing few lines? Most probably you do, because it’s short.

In this case we come to the fact: people don’t like to read long posts, it’s boring, unless it’s really something useful for the reader. According to different bloggers’ opinion the best size of the post is around 500 words.

The lack of tags emphasizing the main points of the post make it a plain text which doesn’t attract the reader: more text formatting clarify the idea of the post, brings you closer to the blog audience.

It’s just a prelude of witting, content performance. I’ve been witnessed a lot of interesting blog articles, which do not correspond to the title of it, and aren’t logically designed. It makes me feel that people didn’t study the basic planning of compositions in their schools, or they are so passionate to share the info with the reader so at the end of the article you think: “What was it all about?” - and see the author’s explanation somewhere in the post scriptum place:

• State the correct title of the article
• Try to be logical when you write, don’t make me think.
• Why did you write about this? Why should I need this?
• Don’t be too geeky in your vocabulary usage.
• Did you get to the point you wanted?
• References, what if I want to get more info?!

I won’t go into SEO aspect of this question, if you follow these main steps of witting your articles, you’ll get 50% of success. The rest is just the matter of SEO, SEM and other abbreviations.

Nowadays, with the growth of Google search Engine, Search Engine Optimization became just a dogma of web site creation and its maintenance: it’s just the matter of IT knowledge, how the web master can optimize his project for the Search Engines. Furthermore, the engines provide mostly equal results, unless the project was optimized customly for one SE, but still - getting to the first page of Google will give you particularly the same result in Yahoo, MSN etc.

The popularity of social network resources forced the optimizator to look for alternative ways of increasing the rating of the projects. Lee Odden mentioned it in his last article: “UnGoogle your marketing with Social Media“:

SMO/SMM provides that augmentation. These include MySpace, Digg, YouTube and other viral tactics. For an excellent list of such opportunities

If you look for some kind of specific material in Youtube, you’ll see the ads of the web-sources which provide there videos. Social networks became a great marketing tool - some may say that it’s the next generation of Optimization techniques besides Search Engines, and they will be 100% right, in my opinion!

Everytime I witness the problems with student visas and immigration routine, it recalls an old cartoon “Asterix And Obelix vs. Caesar”, when the Gauls had to take some papers from one officer, bring them to another one, and the other officer is saying that it’s not the right papers etc - typical bureaucratic routine every year. It’s the lot of any foreigner abroad, unfortunately.

It’s good if you have the will to do that - it’s already 50% of success, if not - pack your bags and buy the tickets, you didn’t succeed, farewell!

The article from Businessweek responds that on Wednesday Google plans to give the consumers the possibility of free books download.

Now people from Google Book Search will be able to download PDF files of the books they were seeking. Right now this service will spread for out-of-copyright books, hopefully they’ll offer something more then just checking the bibliographic info from the copyright books.