For the second time yesterday, I awoke to find my Gmail account locked. This is the second time that this has happened.

The only notification is that it is locked for unusual activity. The “help” page states these as:

1. Receiving, deleting, or downloading large amounts of mail via POP or IMAP in a short period of time. If you’re getting the error message, ‘Lockdown in Sector 4,’ you should be able to access Gmail again after waiting 24 hours.
2. Sending a large number of undeliverable messages (messages that bounce back).
3. Using file-sharing or file-storage software, browser extensions, or third party software that automatically logs in to your account.
4. Leaving multiple instances of Gmail open.
5. Browser-related issues. Please note that if you find your browser continually reloading while attempting to access your Inbox, it’s probably a browser issue, and it may be necessary to clear your browser’s cache and cookies.

I’m pretty sure that I have not violated any of these. In fact since the last time it got locked I made sure that I kept Gmail closed as much as possible, since I thought 4 or 5 above could be a possible problem.

Anyway, I’m pretty irritated with the whole deal and am planning to make the move to either Windows Live Mail or Yahoo! Mail. I plan on continuing to use Google Talk to chat with those I know as well as all the other services of Google.

So, what do you suggest I shift to? Windows Live Mail or Yahoo! Mail or should I create yet another Gmail account?

After a quiet two days at home, I finally ventured out on Sunday evening for mass. I?ve realized that I can spend days at home without evening stepping outside and not even think twice about it. Pizzas always get delivered, don?t they?

Anyway, Sunday the 4th also marked the 28th Wedding Anniversary of my parents and since Dad isn?t here I decided to take Mom out for dinner. However, she chose to order home and so be it.

Dinner was Chicken Manchurian, Prawns Masala and Chicken Fried rice. We tried a smaller new restaurant near my place instead of the regular one I ordered. While the chicken was good, the prawns was terrible. Note to myself. ?Do not order sea food from small places?.

Monday and Tuesday were normal days. Aditya was in Mumbai yesterday on placements work and dropped in after that was done. Took him to InOrbit, Malad whose sheer size had him all amazed.

Got back home, bid farewell to him and got ready for Seema?s birthday party. We were at her place gossiping and chatting till post 10.30pm before I drove back home. Had no energy to make any of the blog posts I had originally planned. Had also decided to make my way back to Pune and so needed to get some sleep.

Caught the second Volvo to Pune. The last time I was on my way back the bus tire was punctured and the driver and cleaner spent a good hour fixing that. Fortunately, today I didn?t face any such problem, though the bus that I missed by a minute broke down on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. After our driver lent a hand, we were on our way.

Reached here in the morning, met up with friends and then got down to making those blog posts. The count of unread posts in my RSS reader is slowly mounting. As is the case of my Gmail inbox which seems to be locked due to Google detecting unusual activity. Now, me not checking my email for 20 hours is characterized as unusual Hopefully, this gets unlocked by tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a long day with a lot of lectures scheduled. We also have a so called Finance paper to work on tonight.

In order to tap the potential for Google Adsense for Feeds, I decided to move to Google’s feedproxy service.

As a result, our feed url has changed. The old feed url has been deleted and is currently being redirected. If you are subscribed to my FeedBurner feed, then please update your feed reader.

The URL to subscribe to is http://ajaydsouza.com/feed/. Subscribing to this URL will ensure that any updates at our end will not affect you.

If you prefer to receive feed updates via email then please use the following form:

A PR update was in the works and I guess it has happened. And unfortunately it seems like this blog PR has dropped and dropped straight down to zero from a PR of 5.

I’m totally clueless how this has happened and am hoping this is only a transition.

Or will I have to wait for another three months?

Anybody have a clue on what I should be doing to get this straightened out?

Update: Seems like this is considered to be normal. Atleast according to reports from Blog Herald and zz Online Marketing.
Update 2: Matt Cutts confirms.

Orkut and Google Talk have now been integrated.

Follow these steps to link your Orkut account to Google.

Are you on Orkut? Add me to your list and scrap me.

After having thought about it a while I’ve decided to use Google Apps for Your Domain for AjayDSouza.com.

I have already been using Google Apps to manage WebberZone email for a while now, and now AjayDSouza.com

What this means is now I have a 2Gb Email account, which has all the features of Gmail (which IMO is second only to Yahoo! Mail).
This is very useful because I can take a considerable load of my VPS. I have also found that Gmail’s anti-spam tools are a lot better than SpamAssassin.
I also have complete POP and SMTP access if I need to download any email.

I can also use my email address with Google Talk and Jabber.

Though I doubt I will use this, but I also have my very own Google Calendar for events.

One thing I don’t need is Google Page Creator.

The best thing is:

Organizations accepted by Google during the Google Apps for Your Domain beta period are eligible for free service for their approved beta users even beyond the end of the beta period, as described in the Terms of Service.

I have already added mail checking for my email to Netvibes. This will replace the default POP Mail account I was using.

If you look to using Apps for your domain and want to check email at Netvibes, then use the Gmail Module.

You can now harness the power of Google to build your very own search engine tailored to sites you want to search.

Google has just launched Custom Search Engine. All you have to do is give it a name and select which sites you want it to search from. You have the option of either searching only these sites or emphasizing the results from these sites while searching the web.

You can also embed the search engine on your website via the AdSense for Search program and make some money via the traffic that it generates.

You also have the option of letting users volunteer by submitting their list of sites to be added in the search results.

This helps if you are creating a topic specific search engine, e.g. a search engine that gathers all information about WordPress. It can help if you get visitors to suggest sites to be searched.

I’ve gone ahead and created one search engine which searches through my network of websites.

Search my CSE or create your own.

A few days back Text Link Ads released their Blog Juice Calculator.

It uses number of subscriptions at Bloglines, your Technorati and Alexa rankings and the incoming links from Google to arrive at a figure.

My blog juice as of now is 5.6. I’m sure it will fluctuate a lot as my Alexa rank fluctuates. I noticed a rise in 1 point for a rise in 6000 ranks at Alexa.

What is your Blog Juice?

Comment below and let me know.

Gautam pointed out this article in the Economic Times today about Google’s Social Networking Site, a.k.a. Orkut

In a nutshell, this is because of the “We Hate India” community which has been present on Orkut for a long time now. I’m stunned that Orkut has not done anything about it in so many months of hundreds, maybe thousands of users reporting it.

AURANGABAD: The Aurangabad bench of Bombay High Court has directed the Maharashtra government to issue notice to Google for the alleged spread of hatred about India by its social network service `Orkut’.

The order was issued by Justice A P Deshpande and Justice R M Borde Monday in response to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by local Advocate Yugant R Marlapalle.

Read the rest of the article…

After a great deal of speculation, discussions and debates, Google is finally set to acquire YouTube for $1.65m, a paltry sum indeed.

The official press release says that YouTube will continue to operate independently.

This ofcourse leaves the question of what will happen to Google Video.

Will it continue to run independently? Or will it now search within YouTube’s videos as well?

I guess all this remains to be seen and it is still to early to decide which way Google will go.

What I would like is an integrated Google Account login.