Krazzy Hrithik

Virgin Mobile to ring in India

Richard Branson’s Virgin Mobile is entering the Indian market through a 50:50 joint venture with the Tatas. The Tata Group’s telecom arm, Tata TeleServices, will form the JV to introduce the Virgin brand in the world’s fastest growing telecom market.

Virgin will exclusively license the Virgin Mobile brand and technology expertise in the area of value-added services (VAS) and handsets to TTSL. This will allow CDMA operator TTSL to use Virgin’s core expertise in marketing and service innovation to create offerings which will be largely targeted at the youth segment, sources told ET.

The two parties are learnt to have started recruitment for the joint venture, expected to be functional this quarter. The UK-based global executive search firm CHR Global is recruiting staff for the new entity, sources added. The search for a CEO for the joint venture is on.

The Tata Indicomm brand will be positioned as the mass market brand while Virgin will be a more youthful brand as it is seen globally. The move is likely to help TTSL expand market share from the current 7.1% as Virgin, one of the most respected service brands in the world, has a global connect with the youth segment. Youth comprise nearly 50% of Indian cellular users.

A TTSL spokesperson refused to comment. Virgin Mobile is present in six countries — the US, the UK, France, South Africa, Australia and Canada. Each of its businesses acts as an independent entity, usually in partnership with another local company which provides the network infrastructure.

The company is the world’s first mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). It does not maintain its own network and instead has contracts to use the existing networks of other providers, on which it offers services under the Virgin brand. In the United States, the Sprint code division multiple access (CDMA) network is the carrier while in France, it uses Orange.

However, MVNOs are not yet permitted in India, though telecom regulator Trai has recommended that they be allowed. As a result, Virgin will not be an MVNO here. Instead, it will be an agent of TTSL and Virgin Mobile-branded services will be available over TTSL’s network. Virgin has a similar non-MVNO arrangement with South Africa’s cellular firm Cell C.

Virgin’s innovative VAS offerings include video calling, where the user can see the person she’s talking to, video clips of celebrity interviews, film snippets, comedy clips besides games and a vast coverage on news and sports. Virgin Mobile USA has partnered with Yahoo to offer Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger preloaded on several of Virgin’s handsets.

Sources said TTSL and Virgin will also jointly explore opportunities to develop and promote newer products and VAS for TTSL subscribers. TTSL currently has over 11 million users.

In India, the Virgin Group has a technical and consultancy services agreement with Essar Telecom Retail, the retail venture of the Ruias. Under this agreement, the Virgin group is providing its expertise in the areas of branding, marketing, customer care, store operations and staff training to Essar stores.

Tendulkar one of most enchanting players of all time

Press Trust Of India

Melbourne, March 05, 2008

Showering encomiums on Sachin Tendulkar for his back-to-back match-winning knocks against Australia in the ODI tri-series' finals, noted cricket writer Peter Roebuck said the little master counts among the most "enchanting and compelling" players the game has seen.

"Over the past 15 years, cricket enthusiasts have enjoyed many delights but two stand out. Anyone able to follow the careers of Tendulkar and Shane Warne at close quarters has been privileged," Roebuck wrote in his column for 'The Sydney Morning Herald'.

"Both were craftsmen of high calibre but also artists of supreme talent. Warne was a mesmerising tweaker with a fiercely competitive streak. The Indian remains a classical batsman unburdened with ego and capable of exquisite stroke-play," he added.

Roebuck was also all praise for the Indian young brigade for putting up a fearless challenge to Ricky Ponting's men in both the Test series and the one-day tri-series.

"India defended their score with spirit and left the country with heads held high. Throughout a contentious trip these tourists played with tenacity and audacity. It has been a colossal struggle between an ageing champion and a bold challenger," he said.

The former county player said the second final in Brisbane that turned out to be a cliffhanger was a fitting finale to the ill-tempered series and singled out Tendulkar's 91-run knock as the best memory that one could take home from the game.

"A match jam-packed with desperate action has brought a pulsating summer to an appropriately dramatic conclusion," he said.
"Apart from the frenzied finish and the curious outbreak of tackles on the field, the abiding memory of the match came from Tendulkar's bat. The first final, in Sydney, had produced one of the game's finest chasing innings.

"Alas, the hullabaloo distracted attention from Tendulkar's hundred. Accordingly, reporters hoped for a second helping from the maestro. Happily he obliged with a superb effort in the second final," he added.

Roebuck said Tendulkar did well to allow his bat do talking when it came to responding to critics who questioned his track record in Australia.

"It is not so long ago that observers wondered whether the time had come for the veteran to slip down the order. He had been losing his wicket to the new ball and seemed to have lost his edge.

"Recently, another critic pointed out that Tendulkar had never scored a one-day hundred in Australia and had a relatively poor record chasing targets. Never awaken the sleeping tiger," he said.

Google's Engineering Philosophy

A slide from a presentation at last year's Google Engineering Open House listed 12 principles that guide programming at Google:

1. All developers work out of a ~single source depot; shared infrastructure!
2. A developer can fix bugs anywhere in the source tree.
3. Building a product takes 3 commands ("get, config, make")
4. Uniform coding style guidelines across company
5. Code reviews mandatory for all checkins
6. Pervasive unit testing, written by developers
7. Unit tests run continuously, email sent on failure
8. Powerful tools, shared company-wide
9. Rapid project cycles; developers change projects often; 20% time
10. Peer-driven review process; flat management structure
11. Transparency into projects, code, process, ideas, etc.
12. Dozens of offices around world => hire best people regardless of location

Keti For Keli

Google Internship

Why sitemaps are important for search engine optimisation

What are Sitemaps?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Sitemaps XML format

Jump to:
XML tag definitions
Entity escaping
Using Sitemap index files
Sitemap file location
Validating your Sitemap
Extending the Sitemaps protocol
Informing search engine crawlers

This document describes the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol.

The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.

The Sitemap must:

• Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing tag.
• Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the tag.
• Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
• Include a <loc> child entry for each parent tag.

All other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines. Refer to each search engine's documentation for details.

Sample XML Sitemap

The following example shows a Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags. The optional tags are in italics.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/
 <lastmod>2005-01-01
 <changefreq>monthly
 <priority>0.8

Also see our example with multiple URLs.

XML tag definitions

The available XML tags are described below.

Attribute		Description
	required	Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.
	required	Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.
	required	URL of the page. This URL must begin with the protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if your web server requires it. This value must be less than 2,048 characters.
	optional	The date of last modification of the file. This date should be in W3C Datetime format. This format allows you to omit the time portion, if desired, and use YYYY-MM-DD. Note that this tag is separate from the If-Modified-Since (304) header the server can return, and search engines may use the information from both sources differently.
	optional	How frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page. Valid values are: always hourly daily weekly monthly yearly never The value "always" should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value "never" should be used to describe archived URLs. Please note that the value of this tag is considered a hint and not a command. Even though search engine crawlers may consider this information when making decisions, they may crawl pages marked "hourly" less frequently than that, and they may crawl pages marked "yearly" more frequently than that. Crawlers may periodically crawl pages marked "never" so that they can handle unexpected changes to those pages.
	optional	The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers. The default priority of a page is 0.5. Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index. Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site.

Back to top

Entity escaping

Your Sitemap file must be UTF-8 encoded (you can generally do this when you save the file). As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the characters listed in the table below.

Character		Escape Code
Ampersand	&	&
Single Quote	'	'
Double Quote	"	"
Greater Than	>	>
Less Than	<	<

In addition, all URLs (including the URL of your Sitemap) must be URL-escaped and encoded for readability by the web server on which they are located. However, if you are using any sort of script, tool, or log file to generate your URLs (anything except typing them in by hand), this is usually already done for you. Please check to make sure that your URLs follow the RFC-3986 standard for URIs, the RFC-3987 standard for IRIs, and the XML standard.

Below is an example of a URL that uses a non-ASCII character (ü), as well as a character that requires entity escaping (&):

http://www.example.com/ümlat.php&q=name

Below is that same URL, ISO-8859-1 encoded (for hosting on a server that uses that encoding) and URL escaped:

http://www.example.com/%FCmlat.php&q=name

Below is that same URL, UTF-8 encoded (for hosting on a server that uses that encoding) and URL escaped:

http://www.example.com/%C3%BCmlat.php&q=name

Below is that same URL, but also entity escaped:

http://www.example.com/%C3%BCmlat.php&q=name

Sample XML Sitemap

The following example shows a Sitemap in XML format. The Sitemap in the example contains a small number of URLs, each using a different set of optional parameters.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/
 <lastmod>2005-01-01
 <changefreq>monthly
 <priority>0.8

<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii
 <changefreq>weekly

<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand
 <lastmod>2004-12-23
 <changefreq>weekly

<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_newfoundland
 <lastmod>2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00
 <priority>0.3

<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usa
 <lastmod>2004-11-23

Back to top

Using Sitemap index files (to group multiple sitemap files)

You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). If you would like, you may compress your Sitemap files using gzip to stay within 10MB and reduce your bandwidth requirement. If you want to list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemap files.

If you do provide multiple Sitemaps, you should then list each Sitemap file in a Sitemap index file. Sitemap index files may not list more than 1,000 Sitemaps and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). The XML format of a Sitemap index file is very similar to the XML format of a Sitemap file.

The Sitemap index file must:

• Begin with an opening <sitemapindex> tag and end with a closing tag.
• Include a <sitemap> entry for each Sitemap as a parent XML tag.
• Include a <loc> child entry for each parent tag.

The optional <lastmod> tag is also available for Sitemap index files.

Note: A Sitemap index file can only specify Sitemaps that are found on the same site as the Sitemap index file. For example, http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml can include Sitemaps on http://www.yoursite.com but not on http://www.example.com or http://yourhost.yoursite.com. As with Sitemaps, your Sitemap index file must be UTF-8 encoded.

Sample XML Sitemap Index

The following example shows a Sitemap index that lists two Sitemaps:

<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz
 <lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00

<sitemap>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz
 <lastmod>2005-01-01

Note: Sitemap URLs, like all values in your XML files, must be entity escaped.

Sitemap Index XML Tag Definitions

Attribute		Description
	required	Encapsulates information about all of the Sitemaps in the file.
	required	Encapsulates information about an individual Sitemap.
	required	Identifies the location of the Sitemap. This location can be a Sitemap, an Atom file, RSS file or a simple text file.
	optional	Identifies the time that the corresponding Sitemap file was modified. It does not correspond to the time that any of the pages listed in that Sitemap were changed. The value for the lastmod tag should be in W3C Datetime format. By providing the last modification timestamp, you enable search engine crawlers to retrieve only a subset of the Sitemaps in the index i.e. a crawler may only retrieve Sitemaps that were modified since a certain date. This incremental Sitemap fetching mechanism allows for the rapid discovery of new URLs on very large sites.

Other Sitemap formats

The Sitemap protocol enables you to provide details about your pages to search engines, and we encourage its use since you can provide additional information about site pages beyond just the URLs. However, in addition to the XML protocol, we support RSS feeds and text files, which provide more limited information.

Syndication feed

You can provide an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) 2.0 or Atom 0.3 or 1.0 feed. Generally, you would use this format only if your site already has a syndication feed. Note that this method may not let search engines know about all the URLs in your site, since the feed may only provide information on recent URLs, although search engines can still use that information to find out about other pages on your site during their normal crawling processes by following links inside pages in the feed. Make sure that the feed is located in the highest-level directory you want search engines to crawl. Search engines extract the information from the feed as follows:

• field - indicates the URL
• modified date field (the field for RSS feeds and the date for Atom feeds) - indicates when each URL was last modified. Use of the modified date field is optional.

Text file

You can provide a simple text file that contains one URL per line. The text file must follow these guidelines:

• The text file must have one URL per line. The URLs cannot contain embedded new lines.
• You must fully specify URLs, including the http.
• Each text file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. If you site includes more than 50,000 URLs, you can separate the list into multiple text files and add each one separately.
• The text file must use UTF-8 encoding. You can specify this when you save the file (for instance, in Notepad, this is listed in the Encoding menu of the Save As dialog box).
• The text file should contain no information other than the list of URLs.
• The text file should contain no header or footer information.
• You can name the text file anything you wish.
• You should upload the text file to the highest-level directory you want search engines to crawl and make sure that you don't list URLs in the text file that are located in a higher-level directory.

Sample text file entries are shown below.

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=1
http://www.example.com/catalog?item=11

Sitemap file location

The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/.

If you have the permission to change http://example.org/path/sitemap.xml, it is assumed that you also have permission to provide information for URLs with the prefix http://example.org/path/. Examples of URLs considered valid in http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml include:

http://example.com/catalog/show?item=23
http://example.com/catalog/show?item=233&user=3453

URLs not considered valid in http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml include:

http://example.com/image/show?item=23
http://example.com/image/show?item=233&user=3453
https://example.com/catalog/page1.php

Note that this means that all URLs listed in the Sitemap must use the same protocol (http, in this example) and reside on the same host as the Sitemap. For instance, if the Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml, it can't include URLs from http://subdomain.example.com.

URLs that are not considered valid are dropped from further consideration. It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root directory of your web server. For example, if your web server is at example.com, then your Sitemap index file would be at http://example.com/sitemap.xml. In certain cases, you may need to produce different Sitemaps for different paths (e.g., if security permissions in your organization compartmentalize write access to different directories).

If you submit a Sitemap using a path with a port number, you must include that port number as part of the path in each URL listed in the Sitemap file. For instance, if your Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com:100/sitemap.xml, then each URL listed in the Sitemap must begin with http://www.example.com:100.

Back to top

Validating your Sitemap

The following XML schemas define the elements and attributes that can appear in your Sitemap file. You can download this schema from the links below:

For Sitemaps: http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd
For Sitemap index files: http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/siteindex.xsd

There are a number of tools available to help you validate the structure of your Sitemap based on this schema. You can find a list of XML-related tools at each of the following locations:

http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#Tools
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/13/schematools.html

In order to validate your Sitemap or Sitemap index file against a schema, the XML file will need additional headers as shown below.

Sitemap:

  
     

         xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
         http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"
         xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   
      ...
   
   

Sitemap index file:

  
     ...
  

Extending the Sitemaps protocol

You can extend the Sitemaps protocol using your own namespace. Simply specify this namespace in the root element. For example:

 

 
  
     
        ...
     
     ...
  

Informing search engine crawlers

Once you have created the Sitemap file and placed it on your webserver, you need to inform the search engines that support this protocol of its location. You can do this by:

• submitting it to them via the search engine's submission interface
• specifying the location in your site's robots.txt file
• sending an HTTP request
  

The search engines can then retrieve your Sitemap and make the URLs available to their crawlers.

Submitting your Sitemap via the search engine's submission interface

To submit your Sitemap directly to a search engine, which will enable you to receive status information and any processing errors, refer to each search engine's documentation.

Specifying the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file

You can specify the location of the Sitemap using a robots.txt file. To do this, simply add the following line:

Sitemap: 

The should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such as: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

This directive is independent of the user-agent line, so it doesn't matter where you place it in your file. If you have a Sitemap index file, you can include the location of just that file. You don't need to list each individual Sitemap listed in the index file.

Submitting your Sitemap via an HTTP request

To submit your Sitemap using an HTTP request (replace with the URL provided by the search engine), iIssue your request to the following URL:

/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

For example, if your Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz, your URL will become:

/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz

URL encode everything after the /ping?sitemap=:

/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.gz

You can issue the HTTP request using wget, curl, or another mechanism of your choosing. A successful request will return an HTTP 200 response code; if you receive a different response, you should resubmit your request. The HTTP 200 response code only indicates that the search engine has received your Sitemap, not that the Sitemap itself or the URLs contained in it were valid. An easy way to do this is to set up an automated job to generate and submit Sitemaps on a regular basis.
Note: If you are providing a Sitemap index file, you only need to issue one HTTP request that includes the location of the Sitemap index file; you do not need to issue individual requests for each Sitemap listed in the index.

sitemap.xml