Month: July 2008

  • The 3 Mistakes of my life

    Chetan Bhagat

    Chetan Bhagat is back with another masala entertainer. Set in Gujarat in the early 2000’s, it traces the life of the main characters through the calamities that befall the state – natural and man made. But the story is about the dreams of a young man Govind, and the mistakes he makes while trying to realise them.
    As always, the narrative is fast paced, especially towards the end (which is quite Bollywood), and there is definitely some humour, though the overall theme is quite dark. And while the novel is definitely not preachy, it does give those little nuggets of philosophy like the author’s earlier works, like ‘We can only optimise life, never solve it’.
    Definitely worth a read, it is bound to keep you entertained, so long as you don’t start out with the premise that you’re going to read something that will change life the way you knew it.

  • Marching to different beats

    I read an article today on LiveMint, which deals with creating UGC for TV and Radio. Well, for starters, I think its already being done. The polls, the debates etc on news channels, and more importantly, the reality shows, are all user generated content. Of course, the packaging differs because unlike the net, time is also a factor on these platforms. 24 hours vs what content to put there.

    It also took me back this post, where I’d talked about the relevance of mass media to pure play internet entities. In a warped sense, I’d agree with the article that in a true convergence era, a medium like the internet, which has already absorbed user participation as one of its tenets, would play a larger role in shaping media consumption. So much so, that going forward, I’d bet heavily on an entity like Instablogs, which would find it easier to adopt to platforms like the television or radio. Yes, they got funded too, isn’t that just awesome?

    Which also brings me to another layer of thought, something I’ve touched upon earlier, if mass media entities want to test out the wild wild web and the currently hot social media scene, and what it could do for them, what is the better way of doing it – creating their own scene or leveraging existing popular platforms. I came across examples of both kinds today.

    While NYT is perhaps the best newspaper website in the world, it also plays a bit on social media (check out this facebook app). And today I read about the partnership it had entered into with LinkedIn. LinkedIn users will now get their industry related news from the relevant sections of the NYT site, and these news will have a share option. I think that’s an absolutely great way for LinkedIn to give a good value add to its users, and also stimulate conversations and for NYT, it creates a lot of relevance to the user, and will increase the website’s pull. That’s NYT’s way of leveraging a relevant social business network.

    The other thing that I came across is Radio City’s new website. (thanks to @thej) I haven’t done a complete tour yet, but it seems like they are primarily aiming at build communities there – a section called ‘Friends of Music’ has blogging, groups, finding colleagues(?!) and catching up with others attending gigs. In fact, the profile is also very orkut/facebook, and shows options for picking friends based on geography/music taste/school/workplace. Yes, i cringed at the last two too! It also has a calendar with some events already updated, and even has a karaoke section.  There is also an option to upload videos (upto 20MB) In addition, it attempts a Yahoo Launch by allowing you to create your own station by adding tracks. But I think it is also a way to take ownership of the music space – there is a musicopedia, a lyrics finder, a music news reporter and so on, which aims at making this the one stop resource for music in India. Yes, you can also listen to popular tracks, and stations created by users/ pre packaged ones (eg. KK, Alka Yagnik, though the content in this is limted, as of now). In essence, a decent effort, for trying the music ownership strategy, though from a new media perspective, I’d have liked more focus and efforts on podcasts (like Big FM), a talk show platform, better forums etc, instead of all that work on the orkut style social networking.(classmates and colleagues)

    While I’d usually go with leveraging existing social media, i think  a part of Radio City’s route does have its benefits, given the popularity of music and Bollywood in India, and its potential for creating communities especially with the context that Radio City offers. What they do beyond this would be the really interesting part.

    until next time, tuned in

  • One Stop Shops

    I’ve always had a soft corner for Rediff, perhaps because, once upon a time, it was the site that led me to new things on the internet. First it was email, and though I had the eudora and usa.net and a few other mailboxes too, this was the one most frequented and used. Then it was blogs. My first blog was thanks to Rediff again, they got me curious with the messages on the homepage, more than 5 years back. And though I did sulk with them later for taking away a favourite id of mine in an upgrade that happened a few years back, and switched to blogger because of the code wrestling matches they made me go through, like I said, Rediff is still special, a brand that I hold in high regard.

    So it was wonderful to find that they’d done a :p to the strict media portal outlook and introduced Orkut and Facebook feeds inside their mailbox. Yes, it is a great bit of innovative thinking, but nothing stops it from being copied by others. So they can’t stop there, they have already taken steps to integrate iShare, I wonder if having newsfeeds inside the Inbox area makes sense, like perhaps an iGoogle. Rediff is also active on the mobile scene (they even , so if they can move fast, they can actually do a lot of innovations quickly, thanks to their numerous services, and oodles of content.

    And it looks like they are moving fast – they have already invested in Vakow, an sms sharing site, and one that I know a lot of people are using to update on Twitter. Interesting. A mobile based microblogging platform should be fun. But the big news was at proto.in, when they announced their developer platform. What is great is not just the announcement, but the fact that it was announced at proto and not just as some PR release. Rediff is being sensible, and thats good news for the Indian internet scene. Ouch at this allegation though. (via webyantra)

    Meanwhile, the guys who had massive success when they opened their API, had a surprise for me when I logged in today morning. And that was the new Facebook design. While the Home page is more a design reorganisation than anything conceptual, the Profile page is a totally different story. Well, its actually profile pages. From home, a click on your name (as opposed to profile earlier) takes you to the first of the four pages – Wall, where you can use filters for others’ posts and yours, and has your basic profile and friends as well. The Info page has all the details that used to be Information, Group and Pages. Photos are the next page and the last is ‘Boxes’, all the apps you’ve been adding, though I did see a few apps (common) on all pages. Are they Facebook’s own? I doubt that though.

    The important part is that it looks like a deviation from the earlier social networking promise. Though that remains, this seems increasingly like a Twitter and more possibly Friendfeed like direction. This was something that was visible sometime back when a ‘+’ sign could be seen near all news feeds, encouraging readers to start conversations. That soon became a very conspicuous ‘Comment’ tab.

    While I like all this, since it gives me more chances at conversations with ‘real’ friends, (there is only about a 20% overlap with my Twitter friends) I wonder if this is a regression as far as keeping the conversation within Facebook goes. If Facebook provides all the features that say, a Twitter and Friendfeed does, would you be okay with spending the lion’s share of your virtual time within Facebook?

    until next time, the rise of socialism 🙂

    PS. This is the 100th post on this blog :D. Thanks, all the commenters and the silent types. 🙂

  • Burning Issues

    While checking out the classifieds, he wondered why anyone would apply for a job selling ‘Cease Fire’ to homes. Offices were fine, but would people buy fire extinguishers for home? He was startled out of his reverie by the loud sound of the transformer exploding outside, and the thick smoke coming from his burning adaptor.

    until next time, quickfire answers

  • The Grand

    It’d been quite a while since I’d visited The Grand, so on this trip home – Cochin, I’d decided to give it a try, especially since the food there has always gotten rave reviews, and it was about time I made my own judgment. It is located on MG Road, since 1963,  so its a landmark for most auto/taxi guys.

    We reserved a table for 8pm, and were told that they wouldn’t hold it beyond 8.10. Fair. The crowd actually started coming in after 8.30. The menu is exhaustive with separate sections for Indian, Kerala, Far East, Continental, Chinese and so on.

    We ordered a velvet chicken and corn soup (2/3) and a Talomein Soup. Pappadams on the house while you wait. 🙂  The former is a chinese preparation – chicken broth flavoured with dry sherry, and the latter is a combination of shredded chicken, carrot and celery garnished with spring onion. The (velvet chicken) soup was quite good, thicker than I expected, and quite sufficient in terms of quantity. For the main course, we decided to go all Kerala.. ‘when in kerala….’ , and so ordered a Malabar Kozhi cury, an Erachi Varattiyathu, a Meen pollichathu, and a Tharavu Mappaz. Thats four kinds of living beings – chicken, beef, fish and duck respectively.  🙂

    So, the Malabar Kozhi Curry is a spicy North kerala dish, which turned out to be only moderately spicy, that was a disappointment. The Erachi Varattiyathu is cooked beef,  with onions, but with enough flavours to keep it from being bland. Better. The Meen pollichathu (you have a choice of seer or pearlspot) is fish with (usually) a very spicy paste around it. Its actually the paste that gives this dish its character. However, this time it was just some sort of onion preparation and ended up very average. The saving grace was the Tharavu Mappaz (they have a ‘duck’ festival happening here) which was duck cooked in coconut milk. This one was yummy, and the ‘chatti’ (earthenware) that they brought it in did add to the effect, I think. We ordered appams to go along with all, and though I was tempted to have a Kerala porotta, the appams were tasty enough to discourage any steps in that direction.

    But more than the food, which was reasonably good, though not the spectacular I had hoped for, it was the service that disappointed. They took such a long time bringing the main course that I had to ask them if I should be back the next morning to collect the order. (Yeah, I seem to be a bad service magnet these days) But they were pretty good in a very mercurial way, refilling glasses on time, bringing appams alongwith the additional order (not earlier and letting them get cold) and so on.

    All of the above cost us Rs.1200, which was reasonable that 4 people were quite well fed. When in Cochin, its worth checking out for some authentic Kerala food.