Was inspired by an old newpaper article (ht cafe Aug 8, 2009) on the status of public websites on mumbai. It basically concluded none of them are user friendly but the information exists!

My take on that – forget user friendly, inaccessible is what I would say. I am sure there are lot companies / young college studies who will do a great job on a voluntary basis. Anyway, given the fact that only 50 million indians access internet once a month and possibly 1 million daily, I guess thats not their priority …

Listing the sites

• http://maharashtra.gov.in/ (doesn’t work!) Then tried http://www.maharashtra.gov.in/ Eureka. Guess what has no search box. Seems list a good assortment of websites that are useful.
• http://www.mmrdamumbai.org/ – Pretty informative about the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority. Surprisingly you think you would find some maps and pics of construction project but its just information.
• http://bestundertaking.com/ – good site. Got to know I could hire a BEST bus! pretty affordable rates. Also about Advertisements on Buses and Electricity. Right to Information Act also given.
• http://www.trafficpolicemumbai.org/ – No search here again! The display of data sucks. I check about my area Colaba and the rules. I am immediately given a word document with lots of tables and some 170 traffic regalation with no reference to maps! I think people have kind of lost it. Lots of animated gifs and my eyes are going left, right and center I thought traffic was all about focus and direction! Good look at the traffic offences and fines.
• Momentarily I shifted direction and went to the convential ‘wikipedia’, great information – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai . Makes you wonder why the government cannot make sense by some concerned people are able to bring information together in a simple + effective way.
• Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM)’s website – http://www.mcgm.gov.in/ – again no search but the display is pretty neat and good. Lot to improve
• http://mumbaipolice.org/ – unhappy to say the search doesn’t work. You think phone number and you get lost looking at the list which one to call! Says its designed by http://www.bcwebwise.com/ – very surprised at the crappy work these people are so proud to do. There needs to be a public entity that looks in the quality of these websites if they are outsourced

Anyway, enough of cribbing. Somehow what I noticed was all the websites are caught in the old way of ‘html’ way of designing web content. No one seems to using content management systems like drupal or wordpress. No search boxes. Wish things become better soon!

With technology costs coming down and people becoming more participative, I have always wondering what and how to define what journalism actually entails. Jeff Jarvis quotes in his post on Product vs Process Journalism and I totally endorse Robert’s definition

Robert Picard writes that journalism

is not business model; it is not a job; it is not a company; it is not an industry; it is not a form of media; it is not a distribution platform. Instead, journalism is an activity. It is a body of practices by which information and knowledge is gathered, processed, and conveyed. The practices are influenced by the form of media and distribution platform, of course, as well as by financial arrangements that support the journalism. But one should not equate the two.

Another point, I strongly feel everyone (esp. India Media) should start understanding the implication of what they mean by citizen journalism. Just aggregating tweets or news bits or live reporting on the internet by people is not what I would call journalism. And the word citizen journalism with the general interpretation becomes too overloaded and loose. What is processed and how it is presented in any media at the end is what matters not how fast (not too late !) and how much (esp Indian New TV Channels).

My sister sent a lovely story as a forward and then it made me think about the Seventh Mass Media. This made me think a good way to help people visualize evolution of media is using a family tree analogy. Let me know how you like it. My family tree is different than what the story entails but I hope this make sense.

Grand Pa (Cinema – 1900) married Grand Ma (Radio – 1910) outcame daughter (TV – 1950) with strain of Richness+Mass
Grand Pa (Print – 1400) married Grand Ma (Recording – 1800) outcame son (Internet – 1980) with Curiosity+Interactivity
Pa (Internet – 1980) married Ma (TV – 1950) outcame (Mobile – 2000)!

I would say its a bit too soon to deciding its gender and its characteristics. Lets just wait and watch

The story my sister sent The Stranger

A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small Texas town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.

As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger…he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies.
If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn’t seem to mind.

Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet. (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)
Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home… Not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush. My Dad didn’t permit the liberal use of alcohol. But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular
Basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished.
He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.

I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked… And NEVER asked to leave.

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you could walk into my parents’ den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.

His name?…. .. .

We just call him ‘TV.’

(Note: This should be required reading for every household in America !)

He has a wife now….We call her ‘Computer.’

Their first child is “Cell Phone“.

The Seven Mass Media

1. Print (books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, etc) from the late 1400s
2. Recordings (records, tapes, cassettes, cartridges, CDs, DVDs) from the late 1800s
3. Cinema from about 1900
4. Radio from about 1910
5. Television from about 1950
6. Internet from about 1990
7. Mobile phones from about 2000

Some awesome use of Social Media by Skittles. Will be writing something here with these things (will make a good blog pos) – no time nowadays! uff!

Where does twitter go from here?

Skittles’ twitermania!

Twitter as a search engine?

Home Page

GobbledyGook

Twitter Chatter

Integrating Facebook

If you are born in 2002

TwitPoll

Updating my movie count and quick thoughts (will come to re-edit this post again with imdb links and inline reviews)

• Luck By Chance – 3/5
• Dev D – 4.5/5
• War Inc – 2.5/5
• Saw IV – 3.5/5
• Saw V – 4/5
• Married Life – 3/5
• Subramaniam – 4/5
• SlumDog Millionaire – 3.5/5
• Changlings – 4/5
• Curious case of Benjamin Button – 4/5
• Burn after Reading – 4/5
• Rescue Dawn – 4/5
• Dostana – 3.5/5
• Pink Panther 2 – 2/5
• Valkyrie – 3/5
• Delhi-6 – 4/5
• Seven Pounds – 4/5

I have been in the number mood this week. I guess primarily because of the operations jaunt I am having at office. As they say devil is in the details – I think once you break the barrier numbers are cool to swim at. So, today I decided to de-stress from excessive work by looking at my flickr numbers

Another reason I thought it would be good to blog and reflect at the numbers today is because Feb 27th i.e. today happens to be the last day for the gifted pro account by the Flickr Staffer on Nov 26th 2008 when he saw me telling not much bandwidth to upload snaps on the stream! Also, the before I hit another milestone – I have now uploaded my 12,000th snap on flickr. Its a self potrait taken when I was in a reflective mood at Panchgani couple of weekends back de-stressing!

As it stands currently I have uploaded 12,151 photos and my profile i.e http://flickr.com/people/vinu/ has been viewed 1,184,075 times! Total view count of all snaps stands at an amazing 3.3 million+!!

If you examine the breakup the facts are even more amazing – only some 1500 are public.  Rest are private. I pressed the privacy button a year back when my camera became defunct a year back as I was very upset. Then changed certain snaps into public. The fact comes out when you see than 11,000+ snaps have been viewed atleast once Out of everything – one fact I really value a lot – close to 2,000 snaps have been commented at!

In terms of the top 10 of views – the 26/11 snaps are up there. Infact the first 70+ snaps are from this only! I am sure close the 2.5 million views are from the Mumbai terror attacks incident!

In terms of referrers – 82% of all traffic is from flickr itself! the 80-20 rule playing itself! news.yahoo.com – from the mumbai terror attacks incident seems to have contributed 12%!!

Anyway, wrapping it up – it would been nice (more statisfying) to have genuinely got sooo much views i.e. attention for have good quality visual snaps rather than because of news material. Somehow I feel more satisfied and thence happy from genuine appreciation, snaps that convey beauty & feeling. Pictures that are ‘Fluid Frames‘ rather than just news material. But hey, who would not want a supernova moment I was there and I did that! and the Indian Express has called me the real cool dude (newspaper cutting)! he he and I ain’t complaining

SHANTANU GUHA RAY’s (Tehelka) article – The Philanthropy Conundrun – has an amazing take!:

The fab four are part of the Forbes top 10 list. Forbes notes that Ambani produces oil, gas, petrochemicals and textiles; younger sibling Anil runs a clutch of companies in sectors as diverse as telecom, power and financial services; Mittal owns the largest steel conglomerate in the world, Sunil Mittal controls India’s largest telecom company.

Philanthropy doesn’t exist in India. The IPL showed that Indian companies have the money (look at the amounts the Ambanis or liquor baron Vijay Mallya spent in acquiring stars for their respective teams) but would not spent on malnourished children,” says social commentator and author Jerry Pinto, who expects the divide between the rich and poor to grow manifold in India. “The poor have lived with it for long and do not expect anything. Perhaps that’s the reason why I do not see any resentment among the poor, no class wars,” he says.

Time magazine’s Africa bureau chief Alex Perry talks of the unjust distribution of wealth all over the world in Falling Off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization. The author finds out that while 1.63 million have found outsourcing jobs in India, there were 40 million unemployed, 900 million earned less than $2 a day and 380 million earned less than a dollar. This is the world without a middle class, says Perry, in which — he has 2006- 07 statistics to back him up — one percent of the world’s adults own 40 percent of all global assets. And those figures get even more rarefied as you climb the money pyramid: the richest 10 percent own 85 percent of the assets, while the poorest half own less than one percent.

But then, perhaps for the uber rich, charity really begins at home.

Three minds explores being digitally native in this four part series:

• The Definition, what makes a “digital native” different
• Play Time, technology is changing relationships
• Work Time, technology is changing learning
• The Trade-Off, technology is changing human beings

Penned this last night

Pointless being the point
Boredom the only challenge
Greener than grass

Lookin’ within
Look in without
Through the glass

Chaos Cleansing
Butterfly fluterring!
Creative Silence

Saw a good bunch of movies over the last month. My reviews in line

• The Counterfeiters – 4 /5 German Movie.
• One Missed Call – 3.5 /5
• X-Files – 3.5 /5
• King of California – 4 /5
• Traitor – 3.5 /5
• Flashbacks of Fool – 4 /5
• Death at a Funeral – 4.5/5
• Hunting Party – 4 /5
• Yes Man – 3.5 /5
• Rab Ne Bana De Jodi – 3 /5
• Madagascar 2 – 3 /5
• Gone Baby Gone – 4 /5
• Manorama Six Feet Under 3.5 /5
• Dasvidaniya 4.5 /5
• Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 /5
• Pineapple Express 4 /5

I think I have never elaborated on what rating means. On a scale of 5 this is what they would mean:

• 1 : I think i would have done a better job!
• 2 : Only if you are jobless and mindless
• 3 : Watch once
• 4 : Must Watch
• 5 : Watch it before you die!