MediaVidea

How to improve education in India: a proposal

2009-10-16T14:19:00.016+05:30

1. Making Internet Access a Legal Right in India
This week, Finland passed a law that made 1Mb Broadband Access a legal right. In the United Kingdom, Martha Lane Fox, a successful Internet entrepreneur of Lastminute.com fame has been chosen to head a 'Digital Inclusion' project of the U.K. government. Her mandate is to make
sure that the 4 million "socially excluded" UK citizens falling behind in areas such as health, education, income and housing get help to use the Internet to improve their lives.

They want to enable the socially excluded people make informed decisions using the Internet - help them use comparison shopping online for "energy [purchases], insurance, clothing and package holidays".

Miss Fox estimates that through comparison shopping on the internet, each household might save £560, the lowest-income household saving £300 annually.

Now you might ask whether internet access is only about internet shopping and saving money, and you are right.

In a developing country, Internet access is about access to two extremely important things,

A. Quality Education: (more on that below.)
B. Quality news: access to more news means access to more sides of every story and figuring out the spin put out by government, big business and vested interests.

By some estimates, the government spends Rs. 4500 per children per year on education. Out of that we can allot Rs. 1200 (@100/month) for Internet access.

We can't match the Scandinavian countries for the quality of mobile and internet reach. A 1 mb/month connection costs Rs. 1200 in Delhi. A commercial 256 kbps connection costs Rs. 500 in the cities [with download caps] Considering the number of students in this country of 1 billion +, we can do some workaround the maths, add some government help, and make sure we are able to connect every school and library in this country. You can also cut down on internet costs by capping downloads, synchronizing off line content with cloud etc.

2. Solve the education quality problem
I think that in India Universal internet access is more important that universal primary education. By law, we might have made Universal education up till 14 years a right but we have not made the conditions for quality education services.

Until we have made service quality a right, this law is good on paper and for providing lifelong employment to the untrained, undisciplined people in name of education.

Once we have internet access for everyone, we can get educators of repute, along with subject matter experts to set up a curated portal of quality educational content, across all disciplines and grades, sourcing content and links from, and not limited to Wikipedia, MIT OCW, and the Educational Channel on Youtube. Just Google and Curate, dammit.

On the device front, we can make sure the educational content is available, for example, battery of quizzes on mobile devices and low cost computing devices, such as the OLPC.

While we are discussing law making the issue of 'service quality', why don't we make it a legal requirement that all government-funded educational institutions video record all their lectures and post them online, on the above mentioned curated website, or to any of the big web 2.o services such as Youtube.com, along with lectures notes and study material - this includes the IIM, IIT too.

I want the caste system in India's education system to end. If a privately funded MIT can put all its content online, free for all, why can't our IITs and IIMs?

By making some useful tinkering with the law, through some generous and creative use of public moneys, and by combining low cost technologies with quality (and free) information, we might be able to improve the educational level of India.

Why Digg needs editors - Part 2

2009-10-16T13:02:00.008+05:30

I still think Digg would be a better resource for all of us who are looking for 'news with the context'/the big picture.

I found the above image 'If Digg were a newspaper' on the Shortformblog blog.

Yes, Digg needs editors. Editors to curate what goes on to topic-specific front pages. The traffic is huge, the comments are getting better and at times they inform me on issues I previously knew little about.

In case of some topics, Digg is approaching Slashdot like quality, but then we have to remember that Slashdot has moderation, while Digg has stupid bury brigades. If you want to deal with spammers, trolls, duplicate content, do it properly and openly, not firing from free-ranging cabals.

BTW, did you know the New York Times has a whole department moderating the comments?

Related stories about Digg on this blog

Digg in print?
Creating a Digg about Diggs
Loving Digg, why?
Getting on top of Digg is out, becoming a top digger is in

UGC 1 Politicians 0: The unstoppable rise of the citizen's voice

2009-10-16T12:53:00.002+05:30

Everyone a reporter now. The rise of user-generated content on the internet and mobiles is forcing politicians to the proverbial wall, making them do more stupid things, as in the case of African countries of Namibia and Botswana where politicians are hitting back at citizen reporters with Medieval/Soviet tactics.

Rattled by the loss of control over information (actually, the flow of it), politicians have reduced to leveling charges of racism in case of an editor in Namibia, and in Botswana they have passed laws making it mandatory for journalists and bloggers to register themselves with the government.

In this mighty age of user-generated content, will they require the whole country to register themselves?

Khabar Lahariya: How a local print newspaper still makes a difference

2009-10-16T12:17:00.006+05:30

The Columbia Journalism Review has this beautiful, inspiring story about a local print, biweekly newspaper called 'Khabar Lahariya' ('The Wave of News' in English) in the local bundeli language, staffed by 20 local women, who are either high school or college grads and freshers.

Started some seven years ago, Khabar Lehariya has a circulation of 35,000 and sells for two rupees (four cents, roughly the cost of a cup of tea in Bundelkhand, a hot and dry region in central India, famous for its bandits, harsh landscapes (think of Robert Rodriguez's Mexico movies), the place where Lord Rama lived and most importantly, for rains that almost always disappoint.

Focus of coverage: To cover all "local issues", all that the main press ignores - untouchability, dominance of upper castes, banditry, women's rights education, governance (rather, the lack of it)...it is an endless list of problems in India's heartlands, mercifully untouched by the malls.

A paper like this might do great with help of cheap technology like mobiles, for example, for filing voice and SMS-based reports.

How much will take for similar local village journalism initiatives to bloom in 600-odd districts throughout India?
At 20 reporters per district, Rs. 5000 ($100) per month, that comes to $24,000/year per district and $14,4000,00/year ($14.4 million) for whole of India. That is what I have in mind. At the current budget for the completely unnecessary Commonwealth Games, we could have funded this 'non-profit local news across India' initiative for 50 years, at least, give or take another 50 years.

The best SEO/SMM tip ever

2009-10-13T22:46:00.004+05:30

"Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again."
Nothing can be more simple (and demanding).

So, why pay for SEO when you can get it for free?

In an article titled 'Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists', Derek Powazek zips through the SEO industry and offers the aforementioned piece of priceless online marketing wisdom.

Why pay for common and obvious pieces of SEO advice?

Derek says,

Look under the hood of any SEO plan and you'll find advice like this: make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information. All of this is a good idea, and none of it is a secret. It's so obvious, anyone who pays for it is a fool.

Google is actually waiting for you to find loopholes in the search algorithm

Derek:

Occasionally a darkside SEO master may find some loophole in the Google algorithm to exploit, which might actually lead to an increase in traffic. But that ill-gotten traffic gain won't last long. Google changes the way it ranks its index monthly (if not more), so even if some SEO technique worked, and usually they don't, it'll last for a couple weeks, tops.

Folks, isn't that also the best SMM tip ever?

Where do Indian bloggers go from here?

2009-08-11T20:42:00.016+05:30

So, we are in the 10th year of the blog. The Mint business newspaper has done a couple of nice stories on blogging in India and concludes "A decade on, Indian blogs remain mostly urban, niche". That is to say 9 out of 10 Indian users are not interested in blogging. The Mint story quotes the India Online 2008 report and I am using data from the comments:

Interactive blogging is the least popular social interactivity activity online with only 10% internet users commenting on blogs and only 8% internet users owning a blog site.

Where is my revolution that I was promised?

Yes, some people are blogging, but as the Mint article says and my experiences suggest the same, most of the top bloggers have writing/reporting backgrounds or they have paying gigs that doesn't involve writing.

What do these people write on? - Cricket, movies, humor, if it is not their latest culinary or travel adventure. Barring a few, a pretty mundane and bland offering.

I like to compare Indian blogging to the wave of 'Me, My family, My Ancestors and my Hometown' kind of books that Indian authors have grown famous for in the past 10 years.

Sure, there have been some fine momonts as well - the IIPM scandal, the Tsunami reportage... sadly, nothing like a disaster to wake the Indian blogging lion.

Blogging has given voice to the marginalized but by and large, the masses have yet to use its power to raise voices, channelize their collective force and bring much-needed change in their lives.

In the 5 years that I have been blogging, almost all of the people I knew who blogged have sort of given up on it and taken to other jobs.

Some Indian bloggers have had success in using blogging as a tool for getting better jobs. But, one can count these successes on one's fingers.

Not surprisingly, most Indian bloggers want to make money from blogging. So far, Amit Agarwal, who studied at the IIT and blogs about tips and tools, towers over everyone in minting money from digital words, but I am not sure how much IIT has got to do with it.

However, I am most disappointed by the approach of influential and powerful Indians. Barring your average bollywood type, who mostly writes for self-promotion purposes, most Indian teacher & professors, top lawyers, doctors, bureaucrats, cops and people in other responsible positions do not blog.

Which is a pity. One of the most popular blogs in the United States, Marginal Revolution is written by an Economist, Tyler Cowen.

I wish if we had blogs by good doctors. That would help demystify the Swine flu pandemic. Besides, blogging might help bring trasparency in the Indian government system, at the Center as well as at the local level.

Indian that I am, I could go on and on about where do Indian bloggers go from here - suffice to say I wish 'roti (food), kapdaa (clothing), makaan (house) and blogging' becomes a universal necessity.

Related Must Reads on the State of Indian Blogging

The top Indian bloggers across various categories - a subjective but useful list
A simple guide to the best moments in Indian Blogging History - the best and the worst moments in these 10 years
A simple guide to the satte of Indian blogosphere - about vested interests among bloggers
The State of Citizen Journalism in India - a story in three parts
The Indian Elections and the reality of India Online - On lack of quality inputs by digital citizens

Ending it with the legal fineprint
A simple guide to legal issues for Indian Journalist
A simple guide to the Internet and cyber laws in India

An age of hobbyists journalists?

2009-07-29T21:29:00.004+05:30

Explorations into the changing landscape of 21st century journalism continue to bring in new themes - citizen journalism; everyone is a journalist, two-way conversation, web filters, web curators, the people formerly known as the audience, twitter reporting, and of course bloggers. Add 'hobbyist journalist' to the mix.

In an interview, Wired editor Chris Anderson, of the Long Tail fame says :

"Maybe the media is going to be a part-time job..."Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby,"

A let down or a leg up?

Blogger 1 Twitter 0

2009-06-20T20:18:00.004+05:30

Touted as the 'first draft of history', Twitter is also a tower of babel built on 140 characters at a time. Twitter might be a useful tool to break stories, it is useless to make sense as the story develops, because the activity on Twitter deteriorates into tweets, retweets, rants and it becomes a virtual dust-storm of sorts.

It takes human intervention to guide users through that storm of data, through careful curation. In context of the election controversy in Iran, The Economist magazine praises the work of select bloggers who monitored the internet and helped readers make sense of what is happening in Iran.

The Economist writes,

Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English.

So much so for the demise of blogging, we were being forced to believe.

How to improve quality of online comments

2009-04-27T20:20:00.003+05:30

At best, comments are distractions or ego-boosts , depending on the bloggers personality. Once you read the first 5-10 comments below a highly commented-upon post, you know you have read all the comments - it is rambling echo chamber, if not a free-for-all self-promotion pulpit.

Writing about the disappointing quality of online comments, Virginia Heffernan writes in The New York Times,

Commenters, in short, rarely really sock it to a columnist. They also too often go automatic, churning out 100-word synopses of one stock ideological position after another.

But most disappointing of all, for readers, is that commenters don’t, as literary critics say, read an article against itself to show how, for example, an argument framed as incendiary is in fact banal, or one that’s meant to be feminist is retrogressive, or one that touts its originality is a knockoff.

How do we fix online commenting? Virginia offers her solution, citing the example of Slate.com:

Creating registration standards, inventive means of moderating and displaying comments, membership benefits for regular posters and ratings systems for useful comments are just some of the ways that other news outlets like Slate have improved the quality of reader responses.

The coming age of booklogs

2009-04-27T20:07:00.004+05:30

In short, booklogs are excerpts from books posted as blog articles and readers rate them, add comments a nd so on, sort of Youtube for books. Again, copyright issues will be sent for a toss but I think writers of controversial and racy paragraphs will find it easy to develop a following.

Booklogs will be fueled by Amazon's e-book reader Kindle, which is still in its early days. Steven Johnson writes about booklogs in the Wall Street Journal:

As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages."

Swine flu and the uselessness of Twitter during emergencies

2009-04-27T15:22:00.001+05:30

Mathew Ingram once said "Twitter is the first draft of history." Sadly, this first draft is taken for truth on Twitter, multiplied with each Re-tweet.

What is more, in case of emergencies, Tweets become 'the first draft of fear'
- with little or no context, Retweeted over and over, until only nonsense remains.

The Foreign Policy blog explains the uselessness of Twitter during emergencies:

Unlike basic internet search – which has been already been nicely used by Google to track emerging flu epidemics – Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: as opposed to search requests which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one's friends do (i.e. tweet about it) or simply gain more popularity.

It is Paid Media, not Social Media

2009-04-26T15:11:00.008+05:30

For every success like Obama, Susan Boyle or the Battle at Kruger, there are millions of tonnes of social media spam. Social media experts have taken over social media from genuine social media users.

The abundance of cheap server space and mass availability of bandwidth has made sure that advertising remains as pervasive and sometimes deceptive as before.

In the Old Media Age, we all could identify advertising.
In the New Media Age, everything is promotion - Including the medium.

For every genuine Fan page on social networking sites, there are 100 Fan Pages created by overpaid so-called social media experts , populated by fake fans bribed with freebies, if not money.

For every genuine link posted on Twitter, there are services like Twtad.com that pay users to put links in their accounts.

For every tweet from genuine experts (like Jay Rosen or Dave Winer) or a passenger on a plane that has just crashed, paid hacks at PR firms are tweeting for their celebrity clients. Celebrity Tweeting is worse than Celebrity Blogging.

For every genuine complaint on consumer sites like Mouthshut.com, there are fake reviews on especially created blogs and fake forum accounts by people from so-called Digital Ad Agencies. There are Ad Agencies in India who are experts at pushing down negative reviews.

For every genuine link for tag such as 'bike' there are 100 repeated links to empty pages for the same tag.

For every genuine consumer review at sites like Yelp.com, companies are being pressured to pay for positive reviews.

For every forum post by a genuine young gamer, overpaid interns are posting fake praises for dumb-ass games.

Related:
The Confused Person's Guide to Web 2.0
Social Media is dead in 2009

Economic Times Journalist barred by SEBI for forging letters to rig stock prices

2009-04-24T15:02:00.002+05:30

As it is, Financial Journalism is not a high point in the annals of Indian Journalism. In its interim order, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) barred two promoters of Pyramid Saimira Theatre Ltd, and 228 others, including Rajesh Unnikrishnan, Assistant Editor, The Economic Time.

The Economic Times, India's largest selling business daily, is part of the Bennett Coleman Group. Flushed with cash from its print media operations, the group created Times Private Treaty, an investment group that does dubious 'stock for ads and editorial coverage' deals with companies.

Pyramid Saimira Theatre Ltd was a client of the said Treaty Operations. The Times Group has special editorial people to deal exclusively with Times Private Treaty clients in all of its major editorial offices.

Result: Hapless journalists who are forced to do what the master says - forget investigative reporting, work on his master's share market earnings.

In the Pyramid Saimira case, the journalist has been accused of forging a letter so that it appears to be a SEBI letter. Not surprisingly, this story has been largely ignored by the business press in India. Among the mainstream newspapers, only the Indian Express and DNA carry it.

Related:
What we must learn from India's largest Newspaper
The sorry state of Financial Journalism in India
The Indian Media would like us believe there is no recession

The only course in Online Writing that you must take (sort of)

2009-04-23T20:42:00.002+05:30

There are no clear cut solutions for people to money in a Google-ruled world but check this (non)course in online writing titled 'Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era' on Mcsweeney's, the list-making site for the smart set. Check out the prerequisites for the course:

Students must have completed at least two of the following.

ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

Will somebody do a real study of blogging, please?

2009-04-22T18:45:00.003+05:30

There is absolutely no useful study on blogging. The ones that we do have are from people who have vested interests. We are well past all those studies about what software people use to blog. People blog, period.

For example, Blog search Engine Technorati says there are many bloggers with 100,000 + monthly pageviews making $75,000/year. What kind of blogger would be making that money on that small a traffic other than affiliate spammer or the gadget blog rewriter?

Scott Rosenberg picks apart, one by one, all the wrong facts cited in an unusually bad and totally incorrect Wall Street Journal article by Mark Penn about the rise of blogging as a prominent profession in America.

The quality of bloggers/online journalists may be suspect in many cases but I reckon we have entered the Iron age equivalent for blogging as serious journalism.

Cases in example, Pulitzers for online journalism, public funding for online journalism and successful blog-based opinion networks.

1. We need serious studies of blogging to learn about skill sets, skill deficiencies, revenue models; and to look into new regulations for online journalists.

2. We need to how much of blogging is reportage, opinion, analysis, rewrite, investigation, unique comparison, spam, cross-post, pr-blog/fluff-blog, ghostblog and so on.

3. We need to know the inner-workings of blog networks [I was the founding managing editor of one]

I tend to think that a blogger does not only deal with words. She posts videos. She networks on social sites. Most of all, she is a starter of conversations.

Blogging is no more a fashion. We need actionable data to help us take blogging onto the next level - as a serious replacement of all overpaid, under-performing, lazy reporters.

That is why we must not let its study fester in hands of sundry marketers.

Why Economist must be the role model for Online Journalists

2009-04-22T15:43:00.005+05:30

Comparing struggling newsweeklies Time and Newsweek to the thriving Economist, Matt Pressman points out the difference between being yourself and trying to please somebody:

...instead of filling their articles with self-serving quotes from government ministers you’ve never heard of, The Economist’s correspondents just give you the essential facts and a meaningful takeaway, whether the information came from their own reporting, the local press, or some obscure think tank.

The Economist was one Western Product even Mahatma Gandhi liked.

Time and Newsweek magazines are 'Readers' Digest meets People' for the kind of people who are now getting their time-pass fix from online sources.

What makes The Economist different and successful?

1. It is about saying the truth as it is. Do more than original reporting and analysis. Blunt is good.
2. Fluff is bad. Worse is fluff disguised in useless, fawning interviews. The Economist is sparse with praise and full of constructive criticism.
3 Do not listen to customers. Despite what you may have heard about Americans ignoring global news, The Economist will cover news from Bangladesh if it is important enough.
4. Be useful: Give actionable intelligence rather some self-serving interview with some corporate 'hero'.
5. Bylines do not matter if the words and ideas are too good to gloss over.

How Online Journalism fared in the Pulitzers

2009-04-22T15:34:00.001+05:30

2009 was the first time the Pulitzer awards considered Online-only news organizations. Sadly, no awards were given out 'to' or 'for' online journalism this time. Highlights about Online Journalism in the Pulitzers:

1. The Pulitzer Awards received 65 entries from 37 different online-only organizations.

2. Out of 65, 21 entries were rejected because the sites don't primarily do original reporting.

3. Only one primarily online organization, Politico.com, a Washington-based politics news site, was a finalist - that too, in Cartooning. [Lesson: Politics and Cartooning are made for each other.]

4. Increasing role: Almost One in Four of all Journalism entries had Online news component.

5. Topics related to Online News content that were considered: Public Service News, Breaking News Reporting, Investigative Reporting, Local Reporting, National Reporting, Breaking News Photography and Feature Photography.

How much does it take to support investigative blogging?

2009-04-22T15:06:00.003+05:30

The Firedoglake blog is on a mission to raise $150,000 to fund a full-time, three-person team headed by Marcy Wheeler, who made her name with her scoop about Khalid Sheik Mohammed being waterboarded 183 times in one month. Marcy Wheeler also liveblogged the Libby trial, which is considered a breakthrough in online journalism.

On day 1 of the fund-raising campaign, they were able to raise $10,000.

For Bighow, I hope to have a 10-person reporting/blogging team. With average salaries of Rs. 300,000 per annum, I am looking at Rs. 3 million, or $60,000 approximately. Soon, I will be crowd-sourcing for a list of things to investigate.

Indian Bloggers getting into power lists

2009-04-19T13:00:00.003+05:30

I am against people lists, especially the ones brought by foreign publications, which are mostly banal media branding/ego-boosting exercises. Having said that, it gives me pleasure this time around that an Indian Blogger is being considered on the same level as media magnates. Blogging in India may still be an Urban phenomenon, numbering in five figures, part-timers mostly, but the ground is changing fast.

Blogger Amit Verma at Indiauncut is listed as one of the 4 media-related entries in Businessweek Magazine's list of 50 most powerful people in India. I mentioned Amit in my story about biggest moments in Indian blogging history. He has a book coming up and has won the 2007 Bastiat Prize for his columns in Indian business paper Mint.

What do we learn from Amit's example?
Focus on some issues, write well.

Most importantly, start early.
Remember, Amit started blogging 5 years back.

Congratulations, Amit.
I sincerely hope to see more Indian bloggers working for change and using their power for good.

Related: The Biggest moments in Indian Blogging History

Where the Daily Kos Group Blog gets its information

2009-04-17T23:55:00.002+05:30

Kos, founder of the leading liberal Group Blog in The United States did a study of all sources used by writers for the blog over last year. Results show an eclectic variety of sources and newspapers are not as dominant as they were thought to be:

Newspapers: 102 primary, 21 secondary
Blogs: 83 primary, 19 secondary
Advocacy organizations: 77 primary, 9 secondary
Television network: 69 primary, 14 secondary
Online news organizations: 54 primary, 5 secondary
Magazines and journals: 36 primary
Political trade press: 28 primary
Research/polling: 20 primary
Wikipedia: 21 primary, 8 secondary
Educational (.edu): 15 primary
Government: 14 primary, 5 secondary
Campaigns: 13 primary
Books: 6 primary
AP and other Wire: 5 secondary
Radio: 4 primary

The Elections show the reality about Indian Digital Media

2009-04-17T15:50:00.006+05:30

I was one of those who had hoped that during this election season, which many marketers are touting as India's first digital elections, we would get to see some exciting coverage from bloggers. That sadly is not the case.

99% Indian bloggers are city people. They have an urban outlook and like the best of bloggers, are prone to navel gazing [aka adventures into self-importance] I understand the pains of living in small boxes when the brain is bursting with information.

Jaago Re campaign excites these people, because talking about digital things makes them feel good about themselves. More people are active on Facebook and Orkut groups than people who would actually vote or better, stand in elections. An echo chamber of people taking time off from their main jobs.

Some bloggers, like Rajesh Jain are active and interested in politics but there are so very few of them. Most Indian political blogging I have found so far are nothing but rants.

Last year, some people had talked to me about starting something like DailyKos type of group blog. These people were interested to put their views forward in no certain terms. These people were talking about hundreds of contributors. If these guys could have started it in time, it would have meant for some interesting online conversations, for sure.

Some Indians are blogging from other countries. These people have no idea about what is happening on the ground. Mostly, they can aggregate posts from other media sources and that is. Some of my friends, who were avid bloggers have moved to the United States. I do not expect them to write about who is winning from their constituency in Bihar.

For example, look at the Global Voices Election Coverage. This is superficial aggregation - useful for foreigners and lazy foreign reporters eager for easy sound bites - useless for Indian reader. Read Wikipedia coverage of elections instead.

I know Ethan Zuckermann, the man behind Global Voices advocates something called Bridge-blogging, which means making one culture easy for others to understand. This is a noble idea.

But, India is not Africa and I am not denigrating the Africans. Indian Politics is messy at the best of times but that is what makes it so interesting. I am sure Global Voices would have put someone in the country in charge of aggregating voices and analysis rather than publishing the latest from Google. I am guessing that the bloggers Global Voices used to depend on earlier are busy writing for their traditional news organizations.

The Global Voices coverage is a collection of who is doing what. There is no context. This is 1/4 of proper link curation. I am guessing the writer is in the United States or someplace outside and is using the net [Google ] to build links.

When someone said that there were just 50,000 active Indian bloggers, he was far, far off from the mark. I think there are fewer than 1000 Indian bloggers writing to be read. If you were looking for coverage of the quality in display during the U.S. Presidential Elections, you must wait at least 5 more years when some of our young people learn to write with perspective.

Much is being made about the Mumbai Terror Attacks being covered on Twitter. It was just coincidental that the attacks took place in India's most prosperous place. If you had checked Twitter or Twitter's Indian equivalent SMSGupshup.com during that time as I had done, you would have seen yourself how little original reporting actually happened.

There are no bloggers in the Indian hinterland, where all the election stories are. Those who are there in the field cannot write to save their lives. Those who want to report do not have the resources to do so.

When I approached Venture Capitalists in 2007 seeking for some funds to support a network of reporters [national, international] for Bighow.com, most refused. Many simply did not get the idea of a platform for local news on a global scale. Many still do not.

I was about to (still want to) make an announcement on Bighow that we are looking for people to cover the elections. Coming from a state (Bihar) where electioneering is at its worst, or the best, depends on who is seeing, and from where, I know that without some money to travel, without mobile devices that could send pictures, video or audio, there is no point shouting from the roofs that we have done the 'first' Indian this or that.

False hope and over-hype are two luxuries Indians can do without. I still have the announcement saved as a draft.

A couple of days ago, some people launched a site that let voters report from polling booths. They called it, yes you guess it right, India's first citizen-powered so-and-so. As an entrepreneur who has seen reality, I can tell you the people behind the good idea were not bright enough. Maybe they do not even live in India. If they were serious or had the resources, they should have launched it in advance at least. Check out this page and see for yourself what (little) useful reporting citizens have done after the first phase of polling is over.

The reality of online media in India is not as rosy as what people say it is.

Related in Mediavidea:
Indian Blogger as Journalist
Simple Guide to the Biggest moments in the Indian Blogosphere
Simpleguide to the state of the Indian Blogosphere
Simplegudie to Internet and Cyber Laws in India

What is good journalism?

2009-04-12T01:58:00.004+05:30

I did not go to any journalism school. I have never worked for a newspaper or a magazine. As the founding Managing Editor of a Blog Network, a blogger and as the founder of a platform for Local Journalism, this is what I have learned so far:

What Is Good Journalism?

View more presentations from Pramit Singh.

What is Wrong With Media?

2009-04-12T01:55:00.002+05:30

This is the wrong question to ask to those from the media. Fear, worry, confusion, orthodoxy are no breeding grounds for imagination and introspection.

What is Wrong With Media?

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The Nine Rules of Online Journalism

2009-04-12T01:52:00.003+05:30

As some of you know, I have been working on a series of guides on Online Journalism on Bighow. This presentation is a part of the exercise. Apologies for the sparse look.

Nine Rules For Online Journalism

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The problem with Blogging: how do you link out?

2009-04-10T18:37:00.005+05:30

The problem with blogging is bloggers have no certain understanding of what are the dimensions for fair aggregation or curation. Let us look at this problem in three parts:

1. What is the ideal way of linking out?
I think when you summarize someone else's post in a couple of lines and giving a link in between is the ideal way of linking out.

Some bloggers who are enthusiastic about certain topics, may summarize big blog posts using bullet lists or, as Valleywag did it with its "100 word versions". This is okay too.

However, there are bloggers and websites who go to the extreme.

2. Can sites that send traffic excerpt whatever they want?
Big sites like BoingBoing, AllthingsDigital or most prominently, Huffington Post excerpt huge amounts from a post. The underlying implication behind these is we are doing you a favor by sending you traffic". This idea of self-importance is a big problem and many bloggers are unhappy with the rampant scraping.

When big name bloggers pick up big parts of your post, an example here, so much so that their readers think the big name blogger has written that, this becomes a problem. Jason Kottke has written about this in detail here.

3. What are other aggregators doing?
Sites like Google News, Slashdot, Digg or Fark take a news item, and other than Google News, which is automated, put up a nice headline, add a one/two line summary and in case of Slashdot, a short juicy excerpt.

All the new media gurus are singing praises of curation as being the future of online news and I think these aggregators are showing us the way to link out.

What do you think? How do you link out?