Of Orkut, of Big Adda and of ego

When I first came across Big Adda, I said to myself, hey, I've heard about this earlier...

Then I remembered, hey, I've written about this earlier...

And here's a part of a post written in October 2006 likening Orkut to addas.

I am on no Orkut group. I once got onto a Ryze group, but did nothing with it other than post a rudimentary profile.Orkut means nothing to me.

But it means a lot to my daughter.She’s part of a number of groups on Orkut, including one that discusses Osho chappals. I swear that’s true.

And she Orkuts (no reason why it shouldn’t be a capitalized verb, if one can be Bangalored) for an hour or so each evening.What she’s doing on the Internet is what another generation did outside of it. She’s catching up with like-minded people – not all of them anonymous and unknown. As time goes on, the group shrinks into grouplings and grouplets, tighter and tighter as the Orkuters find more and more common ground.

Objectors to Orkut should take a look at the Orkuts that we have had for years in the real world. Like the adda in Kolkata. Like the kitty parties anywhere in India. Like the Lion’s Club, like the Rotary, like chess clubs and carom clubs. Like the Laughter Clubs, like jazz societies and poetry readings and drama groups.

Schizophrenia at ibnlive

This is getting ridiculous.
Three senior staffers at CNN-IBN blog on Rajnikant and Sivaji on ibnlive. First off, it was Anuradha Sengupta, who called the film crap – and Rajni fans came down on her like a tonne of bricks.
Next it was the sports correspondent, Sanjeeb Mukherjee, with a poorly written piece that borders on the irresponsible and the inflammatory by making the whole Sivaji phenomenon an Aryan-Dravidian polarisation. The post drips with thinly veiled sarcasm and a childish attempt at transliterating the Tamilian’s English accent, and ibnlive visitors came down on him like another tonne of bricks.
Finally, it’s Jhoomur Bose, Features Editor, who writes a blog in praise of the superstar. To prove her sincerity, she takes a cheap dig at the Big B, and underlines that she believes Rajni is a national, and not just a south Indian, superstar.

And none of the three bloggers knows Tamil. One claims openly that she knows but a few words. Despite reading Jhoomur’s post twice, I can’t be sure that she has even seen the movie.
This is madness.

Is there a method to the madness, Rajdeep?

QOTD: Can polls get stupider than this?

CNN-IBN is conducting a poll (here we go again, back to my pet peeve), that will identify India’s sports icon.
And I wanted to vote for Vijay Amritraj, but he wasn’t on the list of nominees. Neither was his brother Anand.
And I wanted to vote for Sania Mirza, but she wasn’t on the list of nominees.
No sign of Wilson Jones or Michael Fereira, though Geet Sethi is there.
Three cricketers are nominated, but not Bedi, Prasanna, Venkat or Chandra.
No Ramesh Krishnan, nor his father.

And get this one: Not a single hockey player. Zilch.

And the poll is completely ridiculous at the moment of writing (click here to see current status), with Sachin Tendulkar a runaway leader, with 84% of the votes cast. Currently Gavaskar brings up the rear, with a mind-boggling 0.29% (yes, that’s zero point two nine per cent) of ibnlive’s visitors opting for him.

Here’s my Question of the Day: Can polls get stupider than this?

The reader as judge, jury and executioner

CNBC TV18’s Anuradha Sengupta blogs about Rajanikanth’s Sivaji and calls it crap. The blog is inundated with comments (the last time I visited it, the count stood at 1250+), most of them from irate Rajni fans. Anuradha posts a reply, and the reply is bombarded by comments. More of them supportive and understanding her stand that the original post was a personal comment on the film, not a professional review, but a number still vitriolic.

I read and re-read her original post to try and understand what it is that Rajni fans were so upset about. It’s like people being upset if I said that I didn’t like the food at Bade Miya’s (I don’t; I think it’s overhyped crap).

If I did say, and I do, that the food at Bade Miya is crap, it does not
a) stop those who think Bade Miya rocks from going there
b) make Bade Miya go out of business

Just as those who think Sivaji is a great movie have a right to their opinions, so does Anuradha who thinks differently.

The worry, and the reason for the post, is the mob mentality that took over – some going so far as to threaten Anuradha with bodily harm. Increasingly, aided and abetted by live news television, the mob is becoming judge, jury and executioner.

And it’s bad enough that the media is becoming judge, jury and executioner too.

Yesterday I borrowed liberally from a post by Jamie Lee Curtis for mine; today, I link to a terrific piece in the Onion on trials by media. Does the spoof entertain me? No.

Does it frighten me? Yes. As do the reactions to Anuradha’s post.

Indian ad agencies: fear of the web

We’ve given rise to the phrase “Bangalored”, thanks to the skills and abilities of India’s IT professionals. The IT sector probably does business with over 80% of the companies on the Fortune 500 list. A number of IT companies are listed on Nasdaq. Silicon Valley has any number of dollar millionaires with their roots (and parents and grandparents) in India.

And at Cannes, only one Indian entry makes it to the Cyber Lions shortlist.

With an explosion in the number of Internet users, why is it that Indian advertising agencies are so incredibly unenthusiastic when it comes to designing communication targeting the webizens?
Fear? Fear caused by the losses of those advertising agencies that dabbled in Web 1.0? If the fear is not overcome, India will continue to be a laggard when it comes to Cyber Lions.

And there’s a parallel somewhere in history. When every agency worth talking about launched an events division. And lost money. And the failure froze their brains. Instead of figuring out what went wrong and correcting mistakes, they threw the baby out with the bathwater – and got out of the events area. Today, Omnicom and WPP are talking to all major event management companies in attempts to buy them out – at valuations that will make many an event management entrepreneur take up golf.

Watch this space two years from now. When every small Internet design shop gets an offer from the biggest advertising agencies in the world. And many a web designer will consider golf, too.

When the scissors and glue go wrong

It’s happened, at some time or the other, to all of us: a disaster caused by cut-and-paste.

This one, on ibnlive.com, is a howler beyond the normal.
One of the 1993 blasts accused dies in hospital, and ibnlive duly reports on the incident. I reproduce two paragraphs from the story:

"Gangster Ejaz Pathan, prime accused in 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case Ejaz Pathan died at J J hospital in Mumbai on Friday.
One-time associate of fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim, Pathan died of a clot in his brain."

That’s obviously new copy, and forget the erroneous and redundant insertion of Ejaz Pathan before the word “died”. That’s a howler, too, but not too bad.

At the bottom of the SAME story, a cut-and-paste job:

"Pathan, extradited from Dubai four years ago, suffered from a blood clot in his brain and will undergo surgery on June 26. The government has sanctioned Rs 2.5 lakh for the operation, the court was informed on Thursday."

So, according to the cut-and-paste devil, the unfortunate dead man will undergo surgery ten days from now.

Black is beautiful – and saves energy

Simple idea. Brilliant timing. The next time you need to undertake some “research”, avoid going to Google. Go, instead, to Google’s environment conscious sibling, Blackle.

Google stymied by India

How do I search for the Gurjar demonstrations in Rajasthan when various media products spell the tribe Gurjar, Gurjjar and Gujjar?
I need three searches to get all the references.
Similarly, we have Kolkata and Calcutta, Bangalore , Bengaluru and Bengalooru. And so on.
What I would love is for Google to prompt me when I search for, say, Gurjar: “Would you like a simultaneous search for Gurjjar and Gujjar as well?”
The problem is that this can be done only by a human intervention, and not by some algorithm.
Any ideas, anyone?

Web 18's gang of girls...

... www.indiwo.com, is now larger than Lever's www.sunsilkgangofgirls.com.

Web 18's strategy of focusing on communities (investors, cricket fans, commodity brokers, jobseekers and women, so far) through targeted verticals is obviously working well, if alexa ratings are anything to go by.

In the graph above, the blue worm is indiwo, and the brown one gangofgirls.

One day I'll figure out how to copy the alexa graphs with the legends.

WWWhere are you, Times Now?

The three home-grown English news channels, NDTV, CNN IBN and Times Now, according to various interpretations of the very same third party TAM data, are virtually neck and neck in the TRP stakes.

Why is it, then, that timesnow.tv is such a laggard when it comes to the Internet offering?

In the graph above, (measured by Alexa) the brown worm is ndtv.com, the green one ibnlive.com and the blue one timesnow.tv.

Considering the fact that The Times of India group owns indiatimes.com, and that Reuters has considerable web experience to call upon, it shouldn't be too difficult to improve the Internet product significantly, should it?

India Today: keeping up with the Joneses

In today's media environment the competition is not limited to other titles in your defined and narrow space; you have to consider titles in other media as well.

Therefore, India Today, the weekly, competes not just with Outlook, but has to consider newspapers, the Internet, and news television as well.

So it is interesting that while India Today normally hits the stands on Friday, the weekly delayed this week's edition to Saturday -- which enabled them to cover the Mayawati victory on the same day as the newspapers and Internet portals did.

Outlook, India Today's "nearest" competitor, will cover Mayawati on the issue hitting the stands on the coming Friday -- a full SIX days behind.

Cool, India Today.

New, improved agencyfaqs

If you haven’t been to www.agencyfaqs.com today, click on the link now!
It’s new and improved, with far greater readability. It’s refreshingly quick despite all the ads and has loads of interactivity including user ratings and comments.

The ICC World Cup, Commercials, the Internet and call to action

Interesting, the number of commercials which highlighted a web address or had a call to action. The ones listed are those which aired in the first half of the game, when the West Indies batted. I guess it’s enough to call it a trend.
Commercials include: Nokia (http://www.nokia.co.in/), Candyman (http://www.mycandymanclub.com/), The Mobile Store (http://www.themobilestore.in/), Maruti Zen (http://www.marutizen.com/), Hyundai (http://www.hyundai.co.in/), Motorola (http://www.hellomoto.com/), Mountain Dew (http://www.dewdares.com/) and TVS Apache (http://www.nowornever.in/) .

http://www.monster.com/, http://www.licindia.com/, http://www.bharatmatrimony.com/, http://www.99acres.com/ and http://www.clickjobs.com/ ran no spots but bought supers and interstitials.
The blue billion contest, where there was a call to action to http://www.bluebillion.com/ or an SMS to 2525 just disappeared off the screen.

Other decent Call-to-action efforts included Kotak’s 8558 insurance super and Luminous 6161 highlight. Hutch exhorted viewers to dial 123 to receive their horoscopes. Cool. Not.
Thomas Cook asked me to SMS "Europe" to a number I couldn’t catch. BSNL had a toll free number that viewers could contact.

Those who didn’t attempt to send traffic to their websites include Gilette, Thomas Cook, BSNL,Airtel, Mayur, Luminous, NECC, VIP (innerwear), Sony, Sprite, Pepsi, Kingfisher (water, dummy), McDowell (soda, dummy), Hero Honda and Videocon. And the one that surprised me the most? Aditya Birla Group.

Debating regulation in print

Amit Varma was at the Kitab Festival, catching up with friends, as he writes on his blog – and “also part of a session on journalism in India, and found some eminent people expressing the view that journalism needs to be regulated in India. The logic: The Times of India is indulging in monopolistic practices, and, in Delhi, forming a cartel with the Hindustan Times. To ensure competition, there should be government regulation.
I couldn’t think of a worse solution to the problem. (Leave aside the issue of whether there really is a monopoly emerging; Mumbai alone has HT, DNA and IE on the stands, among daily broadsheets.) The industry actually needs fewer controls, not more.”

I couldn’t agree more – and have more reasons to agree with Amit that more regulation and controls is asinine.
Firstly, the dominance of major English newspapers (including the Times of India) is now less marked, as is proven by the preponderance of the vernacular press in the top newspapers of the country when measured by IRS and NRS. And in print media, one has to bear in mind the influence of major news magazines in English, India Today, Outlook and Week, which each have their own constituencies. Alliances such as the Hindustan Times – Times of India agreement for the Delhi market are not new – one forgets the alliance between STAR TV and the Ananda Bazar Patrika Group for STAR News, for example, or the various loose and case-by-case agreements inked between, say, The Hindu and CNN-IBN or NDTV and Business Standard.
Secondly, the increasing role and influence wielded by other media – television and the Internet. Where, too, the dominant products are vernacular products, not those in English.
Interestingly, while we have controls in place for print and TV, there is none and can be none for the Internet insofar as anyone could start an India-focused news product while being based anywhere in the world, including Tuvari.
There is no greater measure of dominance than the advertising rate card of various media products – and all media sales heads of the most “monopolistic” products -- including the Times of India -- will attest to the fact that effective rates are today under pressure more than ever before.
There is no argument about whether or not the consumer needs to be protected against monopolistic media – but that is far from the case today. If a half decent media planner were to do a run on the total circulation of any large publication house vis-a-vis the entire circulation today and compared it with the same figures 15 years ago, I would be shocked if the numbers showed more rather than less dominance.
Again, if one measured the influence of newspapers vis-à-vis all news products today as opposed to 15 years ago, I am certain the numbers will be significantly against newspapers, and not for them.

What confuses me is that this debate still rages. When, in every newsstand in every city and town in India, it is the choice that confuses the reader, not the lack of it.

Where is India on the global map?

This is what you would have seen this morning if you had logged on to cnn.com. No mention of the blast on the Samjhauta Express.

66 people die in a terrorist act, and a leading media product of the country that has appointed itself the champion of the global war against terrorism sees no merit in carrying the story prominently.

The international edition does have it on the home page, but tucked away in the headlines, not as the lead story.

Worth a thought: how important is India to the average American?

Nautanki.tv: worth a watch

Sunil Nair walks into EMDI, an institute I’m involved with, to teach students of the Public Relations batch.
He’s been there and done that – and now he, along with some like minded professionals, has launched http://www.nautanki.tv/, a 24 hour online TV channel which he tells me about. I log on, and decide to tell you about it.
The business model? They run commercials on the content -- which they own.
Interesting.

The Internet is in the heartland

Thanks to the weightage accorded to the eight top Indian cities by TAM and by NRS and IRS, a lot of us in the media space fail to see a world beyond these eight cities.
In the case of the Internet, considering the fact that “technology” plays such a big role, the presumption of dominance of usage in these eight cities continued.
Of course there are users beyond these eight. We all know that.
So what is Webdunia saying that’s new? Nothing.
But a picture says it better than a thousand words or spreadsheets.
59% of Internet users are from towns and cities that are just dots on the map.
And the 59% will grow.
Chew on that.

And why am I surprised? Take a look at the Clustrmaps on this page, and there are readers from dots across the world. Dots I can't name.

Gotcha!

I have been tagged by Dina Mehta in a Blog tag game where you tag 5 people whose blog you enjoy and ask them to tell the world about 5 things that most people may not know of you (this entire sentence cut and paste from Dina’s intro).
Both difficult tasks. Limiting the number of tags to five, and thinking about five things that most people don’t know about me.
The first is easy; it’s the blog that got me blogging. My brother JP’s blog, www.confusedofcalcutta.com
The second is Amit Varma’s Indiauncut.
The third, Shane Richmond in The Telegraph.
The fourth, Deborah Schulz.
And finally, Georgia Patrick.
I figured out what makes me visit these sites so regularly. It’s easy: they all blog regularly.

Now for the harder part: five things about myself that most people don’t know.
1. I have more than 1000 published crosswords to my credit
2. My annual beer consumption is about 850 litres
3. That I actually like reading The Times of India
4. The only instances that I’ve had car accidents are when I’ve been absolutely sober
5. That I once owned a bookshop called Bookends

Media in 2007: Through the looking glass

It’s now that time of year when most professionals in media are trying to figure out what the next year holds for them.
I wrote a rambling piece for Hindustan Times, Mumbai on my take on the immediate future.
I’ll be posting in-depth pieces on what I believe 2007 holds for print, TV, radio and the Internet.
Watch this space.

And I found the awesome image courtesy this site, which has some terrific learnings if you want to understand the online newspaper biz.

Bollywood over news on the net

Why am I surprised?

I had done a dipstick on the rankings of Indian news websites and it threw up a number of learnings -- the most significant being that the vernacular sites ruled the Internet news space when it came to Indian audiences.

So I thought it would interesting to see how the "influential" Indian news sites did when compared to sports and bollywood sites. Not on ranking, but on a more qualitative aspect -- page views.

IndiaFM, which is the one stop shop for news and gossip on bollywood, is head and shoulders above the news portals ibnlive.com and ndtv.com.

It is reasonable to presume that most visitors to indiafm.com are Indians, but the same presumption may not be made for espnstar.com, but, considering the footprint of the TV channels ESPN and Star Sports, a significant chunk would be from India. With this assumption (I'll do a post on India figures of sports sites next week), espnstar gets interesting, too.