India Blog Watch » Technology

Where have all those products gone?

admin — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 06:53:00 +0000

With the mixing up of technology in our daily life we also are becoming technology adept and are erasing many things out of our life which at one point used to be real moral boost for us. Where have all these things gone and who has erased them. This is new set of aspect that Shivaji has raised with his thought through way of writing in his post ‘where have all those products gone?’Shivaji has tried to remind us of the products which used to be our heartthrobs in 80′s.

Gandhi: a socialist libertarian

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:33:00 +0000

Was Gandhi a Libertarian, a socialist, an objectivist, a libertarian socialist or all in one? blurty made a post on the different dimensions of Gandhian character. In the post, at last it is said that ‘Gandhi was not only a Socialist; he was also a Libertarian and at the Heart of everything he believed, lay his Objectivism.’ Good work done.

Will Shashi Tharoor get the top job in UN

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:32:00 +0000

Shashi Tharoor is working hard to get the support for his candidature for the post of United Nations Secretary-General. He has been with the UN since 1978. He has numerous achievements while working for UN. Manasi has written a brilliant post on the chance of Tharoor to become the UN Secretary-General. She has written in detail about the other Asian leaders in line, Pakistan’s objection on Indian standing for the contest, and the supports coming to Tharoor’s candidature.

Ranking hardly matters

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:31:00 +0000

You may find new rankings everywhere on a daily basis in news reports. As Amit Verma has found the news of ICC ranking of ODI teams. According to the ranking, India has slipped past Pakistan in that ranking. This inspired him to write a wonderful post on the necessity and importance of these kinds of ranking. Performance on demand should be there in the middle. He writes in his post ‘Rankings, ratings, pah!’nobody remembers the ranking of any team; they remember the performance on the big occasion. People will remember that whether we won or not any big finals. It will hardly matter that we defeated no. 1 or no. 2 before get defeated in finals.

John on canvas

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:31:00 +0000

Piyush has made a sketch of bollywood actor John Abraham. He did a fantastic work interestingly (ha ha) with colored pencils on the canvas. Great work done.

Maharashtra on Bihar’s way?

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:30:00 +0000

Rajdeep Sardesai has written about the current social, political and economic situation of Maharashtra and compared it with Bihar in his post Maharashtra: The New Bihar Rajdeep has compared Maharashtra on several points on which the development of any state may decide. The points are such as- Poverty ( several districts in Maharashtra are more poor than districts of BIMARU belt), Unemployment ( the rate of growth of unemployment in Maharashtra has steadily crept up in comparison with Bihar), Agrarian distress ( Farmers are committing suicide in Maharshtra, not in Bihar), Economic mismanagement ( Bihar’s treasury may be empty but Maharashtra also not doing well), Collapsing Infrastructure ( Maharashtra’s roads will ready to resemble with Hema Malini’s cheeks), Crime ( Mumbai’s underworld poses more threat to people than goons in Bihar).

Will Sachin go on Agassi’s way?

admin — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:30:00 +0000

Sanjay Jha, a blogger on IBN Blog has compared well the Genius of Sachin Tendulkar with Tennis champion Andre Agassi. He writes in his blog Will Tendulkar do an Agassi? that Sachin Tendulkar is presently at similar path in his professional journey as Andre was till last year. Both Agassi and Sachin used to play their games in International events when the others were asking their parents for pocket money. Sachin is still younger to Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble, and Sourav Ganguly, but played cricket a lot. Sachin is perhaps the senior most cricketer (in terms of cricketing experience) in the world. Agassi and Sachin, both experienced bad injuries while the game was rest in them. Sanjay says that he is happy that Andre Agassi announced his retirement when he gave the world all an opportunity to watch his passion for the game. He does hope Tendulkar will do the same thing, when still able to pull the punches the ball for six successive boundaries in an over.

Pay taxes and get TV, new mantra for people in India

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 10:13:00 +0000

Why do we need the state? Why do we pay taxes? Simply to strengthen state to take care of its residents. Moreover, what will happen if the state failed to do so, do we really need to pay taxes to state. Ajay Shah has written an article under the title A government that gifts television sets to households? He suggested the state a decent way of returning taxes back to the taxpayers in a redistributive manner like what the Tamilnadu CM is doing. The distribution of TV sets is very good way. A TV set is something that is visible and monitorable. He writes as every household can verify that it gets one TV set and that everyone around them gets exactly one TV set. Once the TV set has been obtained, everyone would turn around, sell off the TV set into the secondary market, and turn it into cash. Wonderful article…

Do not give taxpayers money to celebrities, please

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 10:13:00 +0000

The celebrities in India are very selfish by nature. They earn in crores but hesitate to invest for the cause of country’s development with their own money. They always ask from the government to help them where it needs money. They do need exemption from taxes from the government for their own cause. This time Sania Mirza has applied to the government of Andhra Pradesh to allot a piece of land to start a tennis academy. Although, the government already has given her 500 yards of land and Rs one crore in Jubilee hills, a posh area in the city. Amit Varma has questioned in his article Sania Mirza wants your money that is it right to give the government money, that is our money, to these celebrities to do their work? Why do not they use their own money for the cause of India’s development? He writes as we are effectively working four months of the year for the government: that is what just our income tax comes to’. It repels me that Sania Mirza, who earns in crores from endorsements alone, is asking for land from the government.

Interview with Sridhar from eNewss.com

admin — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 10:12:00 +0000

Sridhar, the man behind eBulawa.com and eNewss.com is here with us today with his views on blogging in India and the phenomenon of blogging and web 2.0 as a whole. His rich experience with Sybase and many other web media companies along with current involvement with eBulawa and eNewss made us invite him and make him share his valuable views. Enough said, now meet the man himself with his deft answers: Sridhar: When I was doing my Masters, I was selected for a research project ‘Siggraph’ in 1999. This was about image search engine. I had to use several web related technologies then to accomplish the tasks and that did help me to venture into web world. My first website was Nayikhabar.com (no longer hosted). This was like samachar.com and did receive decent hits per month. Not knowing the importance of thousands of impressions per month and not able to get the active help from friends, I basically pulled the plug. After that I got a job in Sybase and worked there until last year. Now I am working for startup which develops auditing software for financial companies. For all these years after closing nayikhabar.com, my passion for web never died and started working for ebulawa.com. The inspiration for this was evite and I wanted to bring the same for Indians through ebulawa. eBulawa.com is generating enough money to cover its hosting fee, domain renewals and also for supporting enewss.com. eNewss.com is just my current project. While working, I realized one fact, that people do appreciate newer technologies but never use them until it means anything for them. We created great new features at my work place, but companies don’t buy them because they are able to survive with what they have. Customers do signup for Beta programs and try the new features and send us a positive feedback. When it comes to buying and putting these technologies into production, they just say "No, Thanks". So, I started adapting new technologies and put them to good use only if it means something for my website users. IndiaBlogWatch: As the motto goes, Enewss aims to ‘Bridge Indian bloggers globally’. What exactly does Enewss want to achieve by this and how has it been successful so far? Sridhar: I believe that everything we do should have a direct purpose. Our motto ‘Bridge Indian bloggers globally’ is also designed with a direct purpose in mind. I would like to leverage Indian bloggers to highlight social issues surrounding India, which are obstacles for India’s growth. When a reader visits a particular blog, he is interested in their point of views. Soon, he realizes that this is just one opinion among many and would like to read other opinions from other blogs, as well. Therefore, what I did was to bridge several Indian blogs onto one platform and present it to our readers. Now, readers can easily read and hear the voices and opinions from many of the different voices and insights of Indian bloggers from around the globe all in one location. We would like to highlight several Indian blog posts related to current events helping readers update on blogger’s opinions. By bridging Indian bloggers, we are trying to create a unified force to reckon with. I have received several feedbacks on the motto and people appreciated that. We were associate sponsors of the recently concluded unconference blog camp at Chennai. We would like to sponsor several such blog meets which would bring Indian bloggers together to help themselves and also help community we live in. IndiaBlogWatch: Apart from the fact that ‘content is the king’, what other efforts should a Blog Network consider in order to provide its readers the best? What is your perception of ‘best’? Sridhar: Up until recently, I believed ‘content is the king’. With proliferation of blogs, forums etc there is more content than the powerful search engines like Google and Yahoo can chew. There are several instances where the index servers of these search engines have gone mad dealing with the mammoth loads of content. Coming from a database company like Sybase, I know how hard it is to manage the content and provide it to the user in the way they request. Blog Networks, like yours, should not only invest in producing quality content but also equally invest in making the content meaningful to the end reader. I believe a blog network should provide the best presentation of content and onsite search for all readers. When a user visits a particular site, he always has a predefined set of news items to look for along with any new information including breaking news. If he does not directly find what he wants, he may take an extra step to search and find items of interest. If you as a blog network fail him on these two counts, then you risk the chance of loosing this user forever. Very few readers care about the technology or implementation details. Vast majority of readers just care about getting the information they are looking for out of your service. Google understood this particular aspect of surfers much earlier than Yahoo and Microsoft. Even though Yahoo and Microsoft invested heavily on technology along with opening new adventures in creating technologies and platforms, Google won the race because of its fast and relevant search results from its single page website. Providing what a reader wants is the best a blog network can do. IndiaBlogWatch: Tell us something about Enewss and Ebulawa. Sridhar: I have blogged on India Times and have had some blogs featured on their main page. I also spent 3 years on yahoo message boards, several forums and groups. I always had difficulty in finding other people’s blogs and their opinions. I tried Google, technorati, delicious, digg, etc. Initially I used to get onto one Indian blog and then browsed their blogroll to find other Indian blogs. This is the way I located several Indian blogs. I started adding them to my favorites. The list was going on and on and this method proved too hard to continue. The problem I had locating Indian blogs could very well be the problem of majority of people, so I started thinking like a reader and started working on enewss.com From a reader’s perspective, he is interested in content first. If he likes it, he will then investigate farther into the site. Therefore, I believed a simple interface like samachar.com would best serve the purpose. This is the way enewss.com emerged concentrating mainly on what a reader would like. I really want the reader to access everything possible on one page. Initial efforts of eNewss.com were to aggregate the content from Indian Blogs, Indian forums, Indian groups and mainline media and divide them into meaningful categories. We slowly realized most of the forums and groups only generate small amounts of valid content, so we started concentrating heavily on just Indian Blogs and mainline media from India. Ebulawa was an inspiration of mine to aid individuals with all their event-planning needs by providing them with all the essential tools necessary to hold all their celebrations. Offering tools online such as invitations, announcements, and greeting cards without costing a dime would give them more time and money to spend on other items or gifts for their event. IndiaBlogWatch: The whole Internet, of course, as a media, is moving towards Web 2.0. How far do you think the phenomenon has emerged successfully? Sridhar: In one sentence I would say, people have contributed much to the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 type technologies were always there but people didn’t adopt them for some time and companies didn’t see any incentive in improving them. Had our leaders delivered what people had expected and traditional media had lived up to their intended purpose of being the people’s voice Web 2.0 would have died a long time back. People always felt that their needs were neither represented by media nor addressed by politicians. They started venting their anger in the form of protests, strikes etc. With the emergence of the internet, they started reading information from a wide variety of sources. Even that did not help and people started using available resources like forums, groups etc to put their opinions. Due to moderators on most of these types of applications, people always looked elsewhere to vent their opinions and ideas on issues dearer to them without anybody looking over them. Therefore, the latest technologies (read Web 2.0) have given freedom to people to voice/raise their concerns and has become a democratic tool. Therefore, Web 2.0 has met the aspirations of people and thus I would say companies have expedited the process of refining and creating new technologies. Without people’s participation, there would have been no incentive for companies and Web 2.0 would have died a natural death. Now slowly, the same technology has provided a way for many people to put their talents on the web. There are several instances where people have produced quality video just like a movie production and made their name on the web. There are several instances where bloggers have highlighted discrepancies in traditional media reporting. The list goes on and all the credit goes to Web 2.0. IndiaBlogWatch: What are your future plans with respect to Enewss? Where do you see Enewss in the next five years? Sridhar: In the short term, we would like to add more and more Indian bloggers to enewss and concentrate on adding more hardware and software resources. In the longer term, we have two projects on the table. One is to work exclusively on improving search and the other is to automate the tagging service. Let me go in detail about these two projects. a) Improving search: As of now, we only implement a basic search facility and the striking feature is to display the results with most recent blog on the search term first. Our improvement will be to use Full Text search API and bring more relevance and speed to search results. b) Automatic tags: Tagging has the potential to allow abuse for a variety of reasons. A blogger can add too many tags for each blog, just to make it appear in multiple categories/sections. What I am interested in is to implement a software solution to read the entire blog post and create at most 2 or 3 tags relevant to the content. I have a high-level algorithm to accomplish this task, but it is still in its very basic form. We will not be adapting any new technology, which does not make sense to the reader. We will not do anything which does not bring direct dividends to the reader. In the next five years, we would like to communicate with Indian bloggers and do more direct community services. IndiaBlogWatch: Finally, we would like to have your thoughts on the Instablogs Network and its all related sites. Which one is your favorite? Sridhar: Instablogs is a great resource as it produces a wealth of information on a wide variety of topics like politics, sports, travel etc. I have read some of your blog posts about Instablogs. You have said that Instablogs is a news organization. I would put Instablogs in a different category (I cannot think of a proper name) though, since it can mean so much too many different individuals. You categorize the content at the blog site level (http://www.adpunch.org/, http://www.digimusic.org/, http://www.instatravel.org/, etc.) where as most other networks categorize at the individual post level by using tags or some other technology. Your network has all the ingredients to improve our society, where as other networks does not have that advantage. What I like the most about your network is a dedicated set of sites/bloggers bragging about a particular topic. One such community service will be during Elections. You could pool bloggers from each city and request them to blog about local issues close to them. During election times, bloggers can extensively cover local MLAs, MPs, and local leaders, highlight their credentials providing a great deal of information to the voters, and help them in deciding their next leader. The same bloggers can highlight system in-efficiencies close to them in hospitals, institutions and several government agencies. Such blogs will have more influence on the common man than blogs covering national or international issues. Let your network take blogging to the next level by bringing dynamism to our democracy and increase people’s participation. Our country needs networks like yours covering local and national issues encouraging active discussions. I wish your network good luck for an ever-growing engaging community of bloggers. My favorite is your technology network. Within this category, I can find useful information from other bloggers on such topics as VOIP and Wifi trends. The technology field is a fascinating one and with news, opinions, and reviews there is much to read.