Plantations

Every morning one scans the papers to see what is going on in the world - for example what Rahul Gandhi said today and how many people did he cuddle with (south of the Equator - maybe he will solve the non-racial racial issue in where the world is upside down by cuddling with racists). Also, we read of other interesting facts such as how a man with obvious signs of dementia is taken seriously by a media-whore. But then again the papers are full of media-whores or whores being media-whores (the supplements). So it has come to a point where I read agency news on the mobile web while on the pot. I actually took a MacBook with me into the loo the other day. I think that was a tad sad though, but at least I can filter the internet, most of the papers make no sense. Sainath says this better than me.
Then of course, one might read the financial papers and one in particular. Sorry to be such a skeptic, but some stories seem horribly inspired by one corporate group - you look at the byline and promptly understand whose PR is being done. I should keep a list now of aforementioned people - which byline means which corporate identity. I won't name names, lest I'm accused of being an 'agent' for a multitude of corporates, after all, I have drunk everyone's coffee and in some cases Diet Coke as well (try a Mentos with your Diet Coke the next time). Pity. the mainline papers talk about stuff I really don't want to know and the business papers talk about things that I ought not to know because they may not be true (but are occasionally). And if you put on the TV channels you get to see Tigerthons (there is one coming soon we hear - Greenathons promoted by car companies that can't make cars incidentally) and how blogging about Tiger conservation is going to help save the tiger.
I don't think that will stop the Chinese from eating fewer tigers though. The best solution would be for Indian conservationists buying Indian Viagra substitutes and sending them to China. After all, ground tiger bones are consumed because the Chinese want boners right? Don't they get them when they see Ziyi Zhang? But, you get my point I hope. Maybe.
Anyway, as my brains ooze out through my nose,a victim of global warming I'm sure, I will take your leave for now.

Follow Friday

Small-ish admission, I've become addicted to twitter - not to read the pointless mutterings of Twatteroor (though he has 600x the number of followers I do and he is really India's answer to Ashton Kutcher) but Twitter is an amazing content discovery mechanism and you can follow some really cool people - intellectual porn stars for example. I know that an army of social media experts will tell companies what they can and cannot do on Twitter - and even though they sometimes make me cringe - they are marketers after all, not much different from the guy trying to sell you an Insurance policy. Listen, I don't want to extol the virtues of tweeting or blogging - I've been blogging (here and elsewhere) for over eight years and I've been on Twitter before it was cool and when it was about to become cool - I did the first cover story on social media by an Indian magazine, cautiously avoiding social media 'experts'. Anyway, enough trumpet blowing. I just wanted to share a couple of the sites I've become used to reading a lot lately that I didn't know existed a few weeks ago. All thanks to Twitter. Yes, yes, this is all before I update this place!
- The Oatmeal
- This Isn't Happiness
- 9 Gag
Actually, there are a myriad more, but I don't have the patience (it is a production day, so...) to go through Chrome's history and if you've never checked these sites out, they'll keep you entertained for a while. While I slink off to a corner to hide hiding from my iPod which is trying to blast my ears with cringe-worthy music that I didn't know I actually had on my iPod.

Accha...

Work never ebbs and flows, it comes in deluges and drowns you or you get singed by the drought. The former is usually when your boss loves you and the latter is usually due to a lack of love, or because you are a blithering idiot. Sometimes I think I fall into the latter part of the latter category, but then again sometimes I wonder if the Polar ice-caps have already melted and India is inundated with Bangladeshis and me by work.
We all know how ‘internet’ friendly our government has been of late, you know thanks to Minister de l’Twitter and all. But then you come across this flaming piece of internet junk. And realize to your horror that you’re not on the Wayback Machine. Sometimes I wonder if 'e-governance' has become just another buzzword that management consultants have taught our bereaucrats and politicians. talking about politicians, I vote to start a movement against 'vulgar bribes' and let us start with Desh Ka Jamaai. And then bureaucrats too, and even soft bribes like paying for the rent for a house in Mumbai. Stuff like that.
Anyway have a ton of stuff to work on, but in case you didn't know there are major changes afoot at Undie Profit, which hopefully will mean that they might actually start to reduce their 'paid content' percentage to under two-thirds. Or maybe not. Or they'll get Rakhi Sawant as their new lead anchor. Maybe that will lead to an asset bubble? Who knows, anything (even babies, and Undie TV knows a few things about sourcing babies) that would help Undie Profit will work. But in a weird sort of way, I'm glad they removed the cause of the rot, and it wasn't a guy.

Internet Shinternet

Don’t get too excited about the internet in India. Looking at current numbers, and I think the 60 million ‘regular’ users figure is bunkum, there are only six million broadband connections in this country, of which I guess only a million or so are with connected ‘digital natives’ such as myself who shamelessly hog bandwidth. Yes, and I also consume a lot of my media needs online, but I still take a newspaper with me to the bog. I still manage (somehow) to read ET’s shameless flogging of their TV channel every morning.
And I still manage to read a few magazines every week. The only tragedy in my multimedia life is that I have really cut back on my book consumption, though I recently finished off Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Bad Girl and will reaffirm that Llosa is the best contemporary Latin American writer (if you haven’t read The War at the End of the World or The Feast of the Goat you are missing out on something). That is the tragedy of following cricket games with ball-by-ball online commentary, reading over 200 feeds everyday ranging from the innocuous to the humourous to the downright salacious. Hey, one has to follow the underbelly of the internet – and my god, Indians love posting videos of themselves having sex online, really bizarre some of the stuff you come across.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is simple. In the west, the internet is killing the media. Well, not the internet per se, but the fact that the net has made it possible to read news not on dead trees but of a multitude of devices. News that can now technically geo-locate you (on your mobile) and deliver news customized to your exact location. Next time you’re stuck in a lift, you will get a news alert of being stuck on a lift thanks to your phone (the fact that GPS signals aren’t available on an elevator is a ‘minor’ technical issue which I will, like most journalists disregard). When it comes to TV, what better way than have a ‘Create Your Own Anchor’ sort of app, that will save us from phenomena such as Super-Anchor-Man on Times Now and Weepy Wonder Woman on UndieTV.
Technically all this is possible, but the connectivity numbers just do not add up. I am a big fan of social media and use it aggressively, but hearing some numbers make me wonder, Rs 75 crore industry, for christs sake. And some so-called evangelists talking stuff on how citizen journalism is the future. I am not a cynical journalist bemoaning the rise of the internet, far from it. This blog has been around for six years almost and in the four years since I installed Statcounter, it has over 500,000 views. Big deal! The thing is that a lot of online ‘citizen news’ sites in India tread dangerously on copyright laws, and are little more than rehashes of what is said in the Times of India. As for Twitter and 26/11, I was using it (Yes, I tweet too but not as K), and most of it were either ultra-nationalistic opinions by foreign desis or paraphrases of what was being said by Barkha or Arnab, along with a lot of bitching about Barkha.
The internet is still a medium of the elite in India, many people might have occasional access to it but unless and until the auctions for new spectrum happen, nothing is going to change. Even if that comes through, the government’s greed, rather its potential to spend will mean that the prices demanded at the auction will be so high so as to keep internet access a privilege of the rich. This might have some of us worried, but not all of us and might actually pose bigger problems for television rather than print. Some people are talking about e-readers being used in India – a $249 product to read news. You kidding me? An annual subscription to paper will not cross Rs 1000 in India. A bunch of premium news channels will set you back barely Rs 20 a month.
You get the news you pay for, and frankly we pay next to nothing for news in India. Raise prices and the busybodies who complain about quality get righteous. The last time the news magazines raised cover prices Rs 5, a mail went around accusing them of taking advantage of the reader (though I suspect this came from Ponytail’s magazine). And circulation dropped. If a news channel went from ‘free’ to ‘pay’ viewership drops. People have spoken about micropayments, and how they work in India, but you expect me to believe that someone will pay Rs 2 for a story even though he or she doesn’t care about spending that kind of money on every Vodafone spam message contest which the company kindly texts you five times a day. Nope.
That said, the newspaper ain’t dying anytime soon in India. Nor is the news channel, even though their profligate ways might mean that some die. The magazine on the other hand…


PS: If you folks have been wondering why the radio silence, I am not under gag orders (from either my dad, my step-dad, my boss, my big boss or my ex-boss), it has just been that my new boss has just piled me under with work. I guess idle thumbs make for an active blogger, and I can write this post only because I’ve got down time between my story and reading the proof while waiting to leave and go watch HP6, even though the NYT review wasn’t encouraging. I will also go watch the news Transformers movie, but that is because of Megan Fox and the FX.

PPS: A little birdie informs me that one big-time (ex maybe) journo on Twitter, an avowed Luddite dicates his Tweets to someone who Tweets them. Somehow that is just so cool…

Interwebs, media and such…

Horrible load-balancing problems struck every large Indian media site on counting day, one even boasted that their ‘servers went down’. Doh! The biggest and most dramatic failure was Election Commissions own site – http://eciresults.nic.in – and I wondered why on earth NIC can’t set up a load-balancing server set-up for themselves. Try accessing the budget site on budget day, impossible. But NIC knows that there are occasional spikes and really should gear up for it.

Media companies on the other hand don’t. And this led to serious issues during the MumbaiAttacks in November where several sites collapsed under the stress. But is changing and spending massive sums of money for the internet worth it? That question is being answered in very strange ways by different organizations and a couple of them are saying, ‘You know what, it isn’t!’

What does not help is that traditional reporters, including yours truly, don’t really want to contribute over and above for online editions. The argument being that our jobs are stressful enough before you add the web to the mix. The honest reason being that most reporters are seriously lazy, heck you see that in the rampant ‘stealing’ that takes place every day, so much so that using the internet to find a story and then rewriting it has become par for the course. Attribution and acknowledgement have become dirty words. I’m a features writer, so believe me I know the pain of seeing data and facts you dig up stolen by imbeciles. But like Indian highways, all you can do is shrug your shoulders and move on and hope that sooner or later things change.

So, back to my point, there is still a severe shortage of genuine and good online content in India. Most news sites carry the same Press Trust of India rehash, and some sites prioritize story A over story B. Which, given PTI’s habit to hyperbole and claiming things that might or might not have happened is usually entertaining. Blogs are just blogs, opinionated examples of bad writing, and I would put myself in that bracket as well. I don’t really think too hard when stringing together paragraphs here, and only do so when I have the time away from talking about technology.

But technology is moving towards more and more access devices but access to what is the question? There ain’t that much to see online in India. Yes, there are some really cool blogs and sites, but nowhere enough content to satisfy a content whore such as me. And then again, far too many of them are discussing the rights and wrongs of what was discussed in India, so you have a situation where people are stringing together half-truths to debate the half-truths broadcast and printed in the mainstream.

The mainstream, where if reporters wanted, genuinely good web content can be created doesn’t really give a shit. Heck, on counting day both HT’s and ToI’s websites were far, far behind the channels. Updates from reporters were slow in coming and there was still far too much of sameness, too much PTI.

And then you have the features magazines, where there is decent content but no clear direction on ‘how to’ monetize that content. Putting everything up on the internet really doesn’t seem to solve the problems, instead it creates some that didn’t exist before. But, I do believe that features writers can take a lead on news writers when it comes to the web, because so much more work is going into the story. There are so many pictures that are not used, so many quotes not used and so much more than the 4,000 words that were written. Heck, equip everyone with a Nseries phone or suchlike and put A/V content based around the story. Think out of the box, Fortune is.

You know the biggest problem with the media internet in India. A lack of people. It is the same group of idiots who hop, skip and jump from one group to another. There has been little in the way of fresh thinking or communicating to the core assets. Internet newsrooms don’t work, your core assets are still the main reporters – get them to contribute – make web reportage part of the job.

News from America and other stuff

And it doesn't look so good - any one of ten papers or even all ten could be shut down soon. But even in those that are surviving, the new brain trust (with Indian connections, mind you) in some cases is not getting through to the staff? Is the new Blackberry Storm really that good? I found it irritating very honestly, though I really do like the Curve 8900.
And if the BJP wants my vote, please, please tell Arti Mehra to take down her pictures that have been plastered on my morning commute. I've lived in India long enough to be able to tune out of most things, but somehow 'her' face still manages to give me daymares. And if she stands for New Delhi, I'm seriously going to vote for whoever the Congress puts up, most probably Ajay Maken. Heck, I might vote for Maken even if Vijay Goel stands. Plastering adverts and starting blogs won't make me blindly vote, if the BJP wants to be seen as the party of change it cannot be achieved by taking out ads for Advani on The Guardian's website (served up by Google to Indian IP's - though the irony is delicious) but by putting up candidates who truly signify change. Anyway, I know that it all comes down to the guys who put up the best 'Get Out The Vote' campaign fuelled by cheap country liquor on Election day and that casteism, despite everything still dominates our elections. But I'm impressed at the Times Of India's Lead India campaign this year, but lets see what the voting numbers are?
Happy Holi to everyone out there, have a blast and don't get too stoned on Bhang. I'll see you all soon enough though I might disappear for a day or two on work!

A lesson from history.

This is a story, maybe it is not, maybe it is a work of fiction. Or it is a true story embellished with incidents that might or might not have happened sometimetime in the past or bits from other stories that have been internalised by me. Anyway, I have seen a downturn before, many, many years ago and I've survived lay-offs before. This story is from that distant past, a time before the 'War on Terror' and when everybody was more innocent. Again, to send tales of virtue and vice over to the debauch writer of this blog you can either leave a comment (not everything will pass through the filter) or email to presstalk (at) gmail (dot) com. By the way before that, please take some time to appreciate this picture, I'm still ROFL.
In 2000 after graduating from college, my mother who was genuinely sick and tired of finding my stash every second day insisted I get a job. I ended up at a large dot-com that for reasons best understood to me must remain un-named (they still survive and still are run by a bunch of idjits). It was a job. A good job at that! I was a twenty-year old who although he had been using the internet for four years only understood the true meaning of high-speed internet at my place of employment. This was 2000, well before Torrents but we had Napster, and my god, after the sex and the drugs, Napster gave me all the Rock n’ Roll (and weird Japanese porn/anime) I could ever want.
The pity was that the HP CD-R’s (the old 16x blue and white ones, remember those young ‘uns?) cost Rs 40 a piece and when you earned Rs 5K a month, and even accounting for the fact that Malana cost a hell of a lot less those days, that very fact meant that even buying a few blanks every month was a strain on my resources. Anyway, I won’t carry on about how I got addicted to internet porn and every evening after 6, we used to plan eight player racing on NFS: Porsche Unlimited. That remains the only NFS I have ever finished.
Anyway, the afore-mentioned dot-com had an insane hiring policy. They hired and hired madly. New project needing a new engineer, so what if we have one lying around doing nothing, we’ll hire a new one. Better still, the place had a legion of vapid pretty girls entering data, maybe once a week. Not that it mattered, lots of cute girls are better than none. And they had me who understood just about passable amounts of code and could bedazzle most people with stoned philosophy. In an aside, the recent events surrounding Michael Phelps prove that potheads can do whatever they want to – from extreme athletic achievement to becoming President of the US. I get the munchies just saying that!
Anyway, to repeat this was 2000, well it was 2001 by then. There must have been around one million internet subscribers in India and my organisation had over 500 employees or one for every 2000 internet users in India and trust me that job made me an aggressive, rather a maniacal internet user, which I am to this date.
Anyway back to the story, dang, I can’t maintain a straight thread. Suddenly in the middle of the year, just as summer started, a rumour about layoffs began to spread. The dot-com bust had happened in the US and its effects were being felt in India. The Internet was not this magic rainbow with a pot of gold at the end of it and well, the price had to be paid. We were all summoned in batches where the girls got really teary eyed on being told that there would be layoffs. The guys were not stoic at all there was all-round panic, especially the potheads worried about how the next run to Kasaul would get funded. We were told to wait for emails announcing the cuts.
I began burning tons of CD’s, started to wipe the servers clean where I had hosted random stuff and in the process I wiped out the homepage for one hour or something – no access logs were kept those days, but not out of malice. Unlike one guy who removed all the RAM modules from about 50 computers. Someone else put a logic bomb in the server which disabled the site for a day, other guys defaced the home page. I said something about panic and anger earlier, methinks?
I didn’t get an email. Many people I know did. I am not saying I deserved one, I did do my job well and was definitely more productive than 90 per cent of the office, and I’m pretty sure I was smarter than 99 per cent of the office, but still… I mean I didn’t exactly hide and smoke, heck I didn’t hide and roll. Then again, despite my abysmal attendance in third year I never got held back. I just rode my luck very well, but what do they say of making your own luck.
Anyway, over half the people were laid off. It was very awkward being a survivor. I’m not saying (well I just did but, you know what I mean) that I was much better than the rest, but the guys who were laid off felt a resentment. Upset that most potheads had retained their jobs (again refer above to M.Phelps and B.H.Obama) while the good boys and girls had been asked to move on. It was an Internet company after all – there is no place for ‘clean’ people but many of the cute girls also lost their jobs. That was quite sad, really sad.
I don’t think there are any lessons to be learnt in this tale. Well, other than the fact that potheads are achievers, but that is a moot point in Indian journalism. At least in some of the more responsible parts of the English media in India today. Anyway, jobs are being cut, protests are happening screens are being smashed – though LCD’s don’t exactly smash as well as good ol’ CRT’s. There is no proper way to fire people but rational hiring practices could help. By the way, the organisation I spoke of laid off people again! So much for learning about layoffs.
Anyway, the organisation I work for currently has been shedding ad-sales strength rapidly. Mind you, these were the ad-sales people going for south-east Asian tours every few months when the times were good. There have been a lot of tears shed, but the end result is that there is a lot of space that has suddenly opened up in the parking lot. How much longer before editorial gets hit?

Awards, a bit more for now...

GBO sent me an email with teh following list of awards 'audited' by PwC
Car India & Bike India Awards - NDTV
Infraline Energy Awards - CBNC TV18
Samsung IIFA Awards - Sony Enetertainment TV
and I'm pretty sure the list might go on and on...
But here is the strange thing, 'Awards' until and unless they're given by an independent body are always open to manipulation, and even that is suspect. Look at any automotive award show, invariably every manufacturer gets a cheaply made gong, which sometimes looks like a cheap dildo to put on display in their lobby. Well, at least some manufacturers are so embarrased they don't send out 5-megabyte mails (I will will personally slaughter the next PR flack who sends me a multi-megabyte mail with a silly picture of some corporate twat attached) and don't put up said dildo's in their lobbies.
Now, back to the mail which has been generating quite a few comments - one underlying thread of late is quite simple. Shouting 'ethics' so late in the day is akin to screaming wolf - if ethics were an issue (and believe me, it is an issue in every media house) then a stand should have been made earlier. There are always two sides to every story - we haven't heard Outlook's side, though I'm pretty sure it will not be pretty.
Back to the world of the media - the logo for ET Now could have been more well, exciting. There are also changes afoot at ET with verticals being formed and responsibilities divvied up - someone from ET please clarify in a comment. Also, and this is interesting, every large media group is indulging in mass-scale lay-offs in their online divisions and rumours are swirling that with their results a publicly traded newspaper company might shut down their online ventures division. Keep in mind that many major media organisations are in the business side of the internet as well, this is not just about maintaining websites. More later.

What I've been watching...

Thanks to the power of the internet coupled with a decently fast connection from Airtel (after three weeks of wrangling with their call centre) and a brand-new Western Digital MyBook with what was once a lot of storage (scary how fast I'm managing to fill it up) has meant I'm watching a lot of random stuff on the computer nowadays. I'm becoming the TV newscaster's nightmare audience, the guy who needs an ethernet cable plugged into his vein. A couple of things I have to reccommend, the first is the rather funny movie 'Walk Hard' which generally makes fun of musical biopics.

And the second is the absolutely mind-blowing 2007 six-part BBC series called 'The Story of India'. I'm surprised no-one has picked this up in India so far, but I have been fascinated watching Michael Wood travel across the world telling his story.

I know that torrents are illegal and all, and the excuse that I live in a country starved for content (despite having 427 TV channels according to LV Krishnan of TAM, whom I met recently), but my god you can find some fascinating things there. I'm currently downloading a five-part series on the Wehrmacht.

Hey...

Despite the wishes of some readers who read this blog, I was sadly not blown to bits by the blasts in bangalore or Ahmedabad. Instead I was up in the hills of Himachal, near Kasauli to be precise, enjoying a short break from work. I must admit, the NHAI has done a fantastic job on some stretches of NH-1, the new panipat over-pass is brilliant. Well, that could be because it is only two weeks old, but passing through panipat was a mess, and now one just breezes through.
Interesting weekend to be away from a television beaming in news, I was depending pretty much exclusively on the mobile news sites of various news organisations - HT, ToI, NDTV and CNN-IBN, as well as the agencies and I must admit they were all fairly good though you did end up reading the same PTI copy in quite a few places (much like the web then). But when I did manage to watch some news on Sunday night, I realised that no major news organisation, possibly with the sole exception of CNN-IBN has managed to 'integrate' its regular newsroom with its web/mobile newsroom, and CNN-IBN hasn't quite perfected it either.
While I appreciated the availibility of XHTML sites on my mobile, particularly since I was rather far from a computer as well (hence no posts) there is still quite a difference between the news I see on most online sites and the news you read or view online or on your mobile. I know that networks are a major limiting factor for mobiles today, but with the government desperate to raise cash (and now firmly in the saddle, though I'm not so sure about the telecom minister keeping his post), I assume 3G auctions will happen rather shortly and that we should see the first 3G network deployments by sometime next year. I also know that the telecom companies will all say that 3G will primarily be used to 'enhance' voice, but the massive amounts of bandwidth available of HSDPA networks will allow for hardcore data-streaming. I seriously doubt that networks would implement a data-intensive mobile-TV platform, but YouTube clips on the go, or maybe more salicious stuff might become more popular. It will also mean that larger numbers of Indians will start seriously consuming media on the small screen.
And that is a huge opportunity for media companies. In fact, Indian media companies are not blind to the net. Most of them have decent websites. But the lack of integrated newsrooms leads to all sorts of issues. On TimesGroup sites for example it sometimes is impossible to find a link to an article, even if it was the flyer for the day - either on ToI or ET. Now, ET wants to build an integrated TV and print newsroom with rahul Joshi firmly in charge. Somehow, according to several ET print veterans, he is powerless about the web.Which might be the case, but I still feel ET can do so much better online. I mean, it is a leading brand, and it is very frustrating that sometimes when I read a story on the paper and want to send a link to a friend, I can't find it, forcing me to check out the 'epaper', find the edition and relevant page and then email the story. Five minutes instead of 30 seconds. And it is the same case with ToI. Oh yes, and then there are the page layouts online, but that is something several other sites are guilty of as well.
I must admit that for a fairly simple site and despite the often bewildering results a site search shows up, HT's basic site is rather simple and fairly easy. OK, so you have to increase the font size, but then I'm quibbling over minute things. It isn't a paragon of simple design such as the Guardian Online or The Economist online, which allow you to get pretty much zip-zap-zoom to a story.
Now, the problem according to some people on the technology front is not the lack of technology or that of money, but the desire of journalists working the newsroom. Almost everybody wants to be on the 'big' news team, not the step-sisterly 'web' team. But other than some people to maybe format the stories and sometimes enter links, a sort of 'web desk' why should there be two separate teams? The future is coming fast guys, and I don't get why so many of you don't want to accept that reality. I've thought very often of killing K off, because he is increasingly becoming a liability rather than an asset, but K gives me some sort of a pulse of what is going on on the interweb, I've learnt a lot from K. I've made friends, and more than my fair share of enemies and to some of them, I'm not against any media group in particular and big deal if my political opinions piss you off, this is a democracy right? That said, I seriously hope that V.K Malhotra stands from the new Central Delhi constituency, because leanings aside, it is very difficult to vote for the man if he was to stand from my 'new' constituency.
About the BRT story, it is the headline I had an issue with. I live near the BRT and I commute, or rather used to commute down that stretch everyday, now I route myself around it. Human blood vessels also route themselves around a benign tumour. I do not disagree in principle with public transport, because I've used buses and had the BRT been made when I was in college, I would have been a big votary for A/C buses, but the implementation of certain public projects. On NH-1 near the border, there are public works projects delayed for years, but the government wanted to force a BRT down our throat. If planned properly, which included the banning of all commercial vehicles on that stretch - that road is particularly dangerous and narrow at night when trucks laden with bits of the Aravali's are racing down - including all three-wheeled commercial vehicles, a slight widening of roads, better planning basically it could have so much smoother. I don't see why anybody should wait for 10 minutes to take a right turn at Chirag Dilli flyover. It is hot, petrol is expensive, and tempers will fray. And by the way, the AC buses don't take right turns at the flyover. I'm no city planning expert, but I can see the BRT every day and if you think that is a success, man you're smoking much better shit than I am.
Anyway, going through the last few days papers it seems that political adverts are getting whackier and whackier. Seriously, those guys should hire copywriters!

Great post on the internet in India

My F1-and-Beer friend, Shyam has a fantastic and extremely well argued post on the state of the internet in India. The title is weird though, but then again...

Firefox 3

The guys at Mozilla have some pretty awesome servers, they're trying to set a World Record tomorrow for downloads of Firefox 3. I've been a Firefox user since the 0.8 Beta release, that is over three years. While this post is being composed in IE (since I run multiple browsers to get multiple logins, I'm sure there is an easier way, but I don't care) I am a big Firefox fan, and I've pledged to download Firefox 3 tomorrow. If you use Firefox you know what to do and if you don't - Duh!
Here is a handy field guide to Firefox 3.
In completely unrelated, though media related news, Triveni has supposedly hired yet another Aaj Tak hand (DC) for their upcoming Hindi news channel. In fact, Triveni's OB vans have been seen in the wild, but their massive plans - which call for a network of ten channels and some print publications do sound a bit bombastic. I still have my doubts, but then again...

Steve Ballmer

I've interviewed a fair few Fortune 100 CEO's over the past half-decade with my current employers, but my most entertaining interviewee has to Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, not including the time when thanks to over-reliance on technology I discovered to my horror that my office's digital transcriber was full (and thus learnt never to trust office equipment, unless they were in your own possession) . However, I will hark back to my first interview with the man that Fake Steve Jobs politely refers to as Monkey Boy back in November 2004.
I will try and find the transcript in the archives, but I remember asking him about Google and he dismissed the threat of the Mountain View company, calling them just the 'current hot thing' of the internet (this made for an interesting second interview two and a bit years later). Anyway, since I am generally feeling unemployed today and was surfing all over the interwebs, I came across this interesting conversation that Ballmer has with the editors of the Washington Post.
"...there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form..."
Now, while this obviously means the US and other developed economies, this is an interesting statement and unlike his rather crazy dismissal of Google back in 2004, this is rather more serious. I do believe that things will not be so dramatic in India, but lets be honest, I am very sure that over 99 per cent of the readers of my publication have access to the internet, and sooner or later will find consuming information from the internet a far easier proposition than spending money and buying the 'offline' magazine.
I have said time and again, the main reason I hopped onto the blogging bandwagon, what some 300,000 pageviews and 700 posts ago was because I had to be online. I realise that the future is not in paper. Ballmer is right, you know, he might have no clue how Microsoft will leverage this paperless world, and the newspaper may take longer than 10 years to die out in India, but we're in for interesting times over the next few years.
Oh, and if you want to know why fake Steve calls ballmer 'Money Boy', you have never seen this YouTube classic.


EDIT: Microsoft India seems to be in serious crisis.

Coldplay

This is not a music blog, and will never pretend to be, but Coldplay's Viva La Vida or Death and all his Friends is possibly the biggest album release of 2008 so far. And will in all probability be discovered by 95FM in Delhi sometime in 2010. No insults to 95FM, but for god's sake, Mika is over, done and dusted. everything you guys play is at least a year old, your hip-hop is jaded and you play the same classics over and over. You don't want me to call you guys up, because I am going to rant!

As usual, I digress. Coming back to my point...

Well, they got U2's long-time producer Brian Eno to produce their fourth studio album, and after getting my hands on it yesterday and promptly having loaded it onto my iPod, I'm trying to get to grips with the album. Coldplay inspired a whole generation of imitators, some pretty good, some ordinary, but this album is quite different. And the reviews also have that ambivalent feeling. Read them here - The Guardian, The Times, NYT. Maybe this album will grow on me, as will Coldplay's new sound, but I don't know if this will be Coldplay's 'Achtung Baby!' moment.

Plus, Vanity Fair has done a fantastic piece on the history of the internet - remarkable what the American Industrial-Militray complex can create.

Digital...

The World Association of Newspapers is having their annual summit meeting out in Gotenburg, and one of the major topics of discussion is the emergence of the 'digital form'. As I wrote, many media organisations are having a huge problem coming to terms with the internet, some don't even have a proper strategy going forward prefering to stick their head in the sand and hoping it will go away. Anyway, I was just reading this recent report by the Associated Press, which reveals that young people are suffering from news fatigue thanks to the sudden explosion in information.
Many of us who have had to deal with the Arushi case being given wall-to-wall coverage over the past three weeks can relate to that (click the link for the latest Google News coverage, and I doubt any parents will be calling their kids Arushi for a while) it is as if the desi media latches onto something and refuses to move on until the next big story, milking it for everything it has got. I wonder if such a case had happened in a city other than one bordering Delhi if the coverage would have been so widespread. Don't get me wrong, I believe this was a horrific incident and the perpetrators should be brought to justice, and the media should put pressure on the authorities to resolve the case, but for god's sake, isn't there any other news. And now that the IPL is over, you don't even have 'buffer' news.
Oh wait, other than the fact that the economy is tanking and fuel prices are going up, or might go up when the government realises that 'off-balance sheet' expenses (oil bonds) can be rather destructive. After all, that is what brought Enron down. I don't believe the country will collapse, but it is in a rather dire state. Heck, if mis-governance has made cheerboy's like Vinod Mehta change their spots, I wonder what will be next. Will 'The V' dare criticise Manmohan and Madam in his column? Has hell really frozen over?
Anyway, if you haven't read Jug's brilliant article attacking The People's Daily of Chennai, you must!

Media and the Internet Ep. XXXIX

media companies don't have choice but to be online nowadays, how much money you pour in to your online venture however is a question companies are finding increasingly difficult to answer. Sure, you will have some Adsense revenues, but technology costs a bomb, and who on earth will write content? In several places, many journalists, particularly 'brand-name' find it beneath their dignity to file copy for online ventures of their employers. I guess until one large media house decides to bite the bullet and make filing online exclusives/features a part of every (or most) journalists KRA's, most media houses will continue to see this dichotomy. Trust me, hiring an online desk/reporting staff will not really redress this problem, you need to have the same eyes and ears that you already have reporting.
But all of this is just a moot point, from recent experience I have a feeling that it isn't senior journalists who are scared of the internet. Most journalists in India will die without Google, heck, thousands would die without their daily Facebook fix and you can't really use Facebook to get a story, unless you're Outlook and make Facebook a story. (A quick aside: Why is Vinod Mehta sucking up to the BJP all of a sudden, has he also realised that the UPA is the worst government we've had since 1977?) The problem I believe comes in management. Now, I have to admit not all media company managers are paranoid about the Internet, though almost all of them are paranoid about the bills for the hardware and bandwidth. But there are several managers working in fairly senior positions in India who are extremely obstinate about the internet. Primarily I guess because they see the internet as a 'thing' that will erode their power. In fact, the strength of opinion generated is quite scary at times.
Now coming back to journalists, I don't understand why it is so difficult to sell the internet proposition to so many journalists. I don't believe that my peers should see the internet as a threat, and most don't, but a significant number do, dismissing the internet as a collection of half-facts. Others of course, see the internet as a great place to lift stories from thanks to the power of Google (which also sees them get caught) but I don't want to re-enter that argument all over again. The thing is this, people do Google you, and filing a ton of work on the internet, on either your site or elsewhere is a great way of building your online brand. Google works everywhere, I use a heap of Google services on my Nokia smartphone and throughly enjoy it.
Because in ten years time, no-body will give a shit about the body of work that you might have done in a heap of old, faded magazines or newspapers or no matter how many exclusives you broke while loitering outside some ministry or another. What is the body of work you have on the internet? And does your employer have a clear and defined internet strategy. If you work for a manager who thinks the internet is the coming of the anti-Christ, it would be advisable to quit. No really!

Going online...

Every once in a while we get a disgruntled subscriber call up the editorial office and because the receptionist loves me, or possible because I'm the most patient person I get these calls on my extension. So interestingly, I had this one call a few days ago, where during the course of the conversation I mentioned to the guy that we were revamping our online site, and opening up our archives (eventually) online as well as putting in a e-magazine, a full copy of the magazine online down to the adverts. Now, this is actually live right now and it is a lot better than any e-paper there is and none of the competition has a clue. But then again, our real-life competition barely has a clue anyway.
Now, back to the story, this guy then tells me 'Why should I buy the magazine then?', and honestly other than mumbling something to the effect, 'Well, it feels nicer in your hand and the e-magazine needs a good internet connection to work.' Now, this conversation actually got more interesting, 'But am I not subsidising the people who read it online?' this guy asked me, and that weirdly enough is a terribly valid question. Though I did tell him that the amount he pays for the magazine barely covers the costs of raw paper, let alone printing, distribution and the cost of maintaining an editorial and sales staff and this magazine like many others was ad-supported, but his point was well-taken.
The internet is going to change the way we will consume media, now as long as the current minister is in charge and busy raising funds for the DMK's electoral kitty by making bizarre decisions, there will not be proper broadband in this country, because I pay equivalent to $20 a month for shitty speed, albeit unlimited data from Airtel, and in the US with Fibre into the home, people can get 10mbips speeds for not much more. But, we will get those speeds one day, at ridiculously cheap rates, and just like the internet has changed the music and movie business (though the music industry refuses to change) we will have to change as well. 'Performance' media? Or will we all be slaves to Adsense revenues? You can't even say, let's wait and watch, because change will happen so fast that you'll be too far back if you wait.
That said, why are the sites of all of India's major newspapers so awful - ToI and HT both suck and are far too heavy and cluttered and their e-Papers are both rather shady, but Times' in problem requires a colour change on the e-Paper background page before anything else.

The V can't search Google?

The headline for the story in today's Papermint reads "Google search: Vir Sanghvi. Results: 42,300". So a colleague actually went ahead and performed a search, quite a simple one, no 'AND' operators and guess what? There are only 34,800 results (search conducted 1722 IST 03.03.07) I know Google re-indexes its pages quite often, but a 20 percent downside? Hmm, seems a bit much, wouldn't you say? Of course, the search led me to his HT bio, which would make even the most idolising PR bio-writer cringe!
Anyway, I actually hadn't discovered this because Vir's column isn't about Google, but about copyright. While Vir makes some interesting noises on copyright issues, the noises are fairly old noises. The copyright battle in media has become far more interesting in the West. Look at the world now, digital media, DRM and the pros and cons of DRM (can't really see too many upsides, but anyway!) and Creative Commons. In fact, Creative Commons (under which I plan to move this blog fairly soon) has recently moved to Version 3.0. You cannot do an article on copyright without understanding the complexities of the digital medium. lame, decade-old answers are not the solution. I realise that we work in an industry that has to face the issue of online content-distribution and how best to deal with copyright in the age of the internet.
Though, I am pretty surprised that Vir mentioned the VN Narayanan incident - wherein Vir's predecessor at HT actually lifted an entire article (this is pre-Google mind you!) and passed it off as his own. Anyway, don't read too much into this post, I am just a mischief-monger! Plus, I reckon I have a lot of readers through feeds - and I know a lot of people have started writing in through email lately, and I'll like to thank all of you folks for writing in, but the slow-comment conundrum is something still baffles me!

Sit back and say... Hah!

There are people who are just made for the internet, and Bossman is one of them. Though he has discontinued blogging (or so he claims) he still surfs some of the weirdest sites, and twice or thrice a day he sends me links. Here are some of them. OK, some of them might be old, but what the heck!
Searching for sex - the world over!
Blufr - whats the 'r' thing all about anyway!
Japanese commercials - or least the best of them. Don't blame me for brain disintegration!
Helping you discover music!
101 versions of Stairway to Heaven!
Online TV - channels from everywhere.
Have fun, courtesy Bossman.