In my inbox today - a peculiar mail. An excerpt from it:

Dear Sir/Madam,

We request you to take some time off your busy schedule to fill in this questionnaire about “Blogging”. The survey is aimed at finding out what does/could drive Blogging and how can people be made more aware about it. Your feedback would help us a great deal in serving you better. Your response is valuable for us even if you do not Blog or are unaware of Blogging.
.

if so then click here WTF?

Today, came into my inbox a mail from Business World - “Publishing Industry’s moment of Reckoning” it screamed. So obviously i clicked on it. The story was about Dainik Bhaskar and Zee’s proposed English newspaper, HT coming into mumbai, and ToI moving into Chennai.

What was amusing was the disclaimer at the bottom:

Since India has no anti-spamming law, we follow the US directive passed in Bill.1618 Title III by the 105th US Congress, which states that mail cannot be considered spam if it contains contact information, which this mail does. If you want to be removed from the mailing list click on UNSUBSCRIBE link above

Cute or what!!

When I started the Media Musings blog - one of the first things that i wrote a couple of lines on was the number of TV shows that were being made on foreign formats. So we have an Indian Idol, a Crorepati, A Jassi, A Hum 2 Hain Na, A remix and so on. That particular entry was a couple of lines long on the Sony Show Ayushman based on Doogie Howser MD - the adventures of a 17 year old doctor. The post bemoaned the loss of creativity in Indian Television. IT has got 28 odd comments (odd being the key word) and rising. Fans looking for a website for the show, getting onto the blog - and leaving a message for Ayushman.

I kind of found this entire behaviour pattern rather strange. Going on to a website and leaving love notes for fictional characters seems like being out of touch with reality.

And, then last week I discovered a phenomenon called Fan Fiction which takes this entire obsession one step further.. It is what it sounds like. Fans writing fiction about revolving around their favourite characters from their favourite films, books and TV shows.

Wow

Someone, somewhere must tell them that these characters are fictitious!

Someone in Google has a great sense of creativity, empathy and humour. And all this while unobtrusively getting their logo to reflect current events. This blog is a tribute to someone, somewhere in Google who brings a smile to all our lips when we wander on to their page, in a rush, to find something.

Venus Transit

Leap Year

2000 Olympics

2004 Olympics

Today while travellig around the WWW, I came across a link that got my attention - Microsoft has put up a newsbot or a newsrobot - rather like Google News.

The newsbot scans the net every so many minutes and updates the site with the latest news. Also it tends to monitor your clicks and filters the news as per your clicks.

All that sounds good, but given Microsofts’ previous track recrod - especially for non tech users like me - i am truly scared of clicking anything on the siet, in case my computer comes down with some virus or spyware or something equally terrible

In other very funny MS news - i read a report ( i have lost the link) on a new set of security upgrades for exploer. The last time I installed service pack 1, i lost the ability to use explorer for the only thing that i used it for - blogging. I wonder what would happen if i install the new upgrades?

Dear Blog,

Today I dumped IE for the final time. there will be no going back to it…..

…..Many moons ago, when the net first came into India (1996) - I wrote and directed the country’s first Internet popularisation TV show. Called Grand Tour of the Internet - the 13 part series was sponsored by Intel and ran on Zee TV. At that time I had at my disposal a Mac - which i always found ironic, given that my series was sponosred by Intel - a 28.8 kb dial up modem and a limited amount of on line time. And the browser I used was Netscape Navigator - a nifty litlle browser that game me stability, multiple windows and a mail client. I can’t remember if IE had been launched or whether i used it, it crashed on me, and I gave up.

A year later our company - Zee Education - came into some money and all of us got standard PC’s, with its standard IE and Outlook. Needless to say I hated it. But, Navigator was going through too many problems, and besides with business going at a breakneck pace there wasn’t much time for on-line R&D.

A couple of years ago, when I got into my own business and had a bit of spare time, I discovered the joys of Opera. A great browser, that was a zillion times more stable than IE, allowed me multiple popups within the same window and had a great integrated mail client. So IE was left to idle in the Programme Files folder and i switched to Opera. But, Opera had some issues - you couldn’t use it too well on blog sites. I am sure that there is a technical reason and a technical solution for it, but I am not a technical person.

So I used Opera for everything except blogging and dowloading Microsoft Updates for its various screwups.

Today, my gasket finally blew on IE. i think that IE is going through one of its numerous teething pains. It simply refused to let me open any sites or post anything. So off i went to download.com to download Mozilla.Friends have been saying nice things about it so let’s see. I guess I have to tweek it around a bit, before it works as well as Opera does for me.For me it is now full circle. When i see the little golden navigator icon - the Netscape icon - on the corner of my browser screen, there is a sense of Deja Vu.

The funniest thing in the entire browser changing story is that the report that i wanted to blog about - when IE finally died on me - was from the The Guardian. Called the Second Browser War - it was about how IE has lost a bit of market share. Its share of the browser market is down - from 95.7 % to 94.73%:). While I wont’ push the panic button if I was Uncle Gates, i should definitely be keeping a watchful eye on other browsers, and an even more watchful eye on IE.

In an attempt to rein in filesharing, the US sentate has introduced a bill to bring heavy penalties, including upto 10 year jail sentances. In an attempt to stifle p2p, they plan also to impose penalties on devices that enable filesharing. This could include devices like ipod.

Wired reports

Technologists and copyright activists were most alarmed by the Induce Act, backed by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who in the past five years has received $158,000 in campaign contributions from the television, movie and music industries, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Critics say the bills would make computer and electronic companies think twice before introducing any device that could conceivably distribute copyright works. Even existing devices and software — like iPods and FTP servers — could run afoul of the law.

“The reality of this is that you’re going to have a world where Hollywood controls technology,” said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If you don’t get Hollywood’s approval, no one will fund your project out of fear of the lawsuits.”

At a very fundamental level, the legislators have lost it. Unless you monitor every computer, every electronic device - including the mobile - you are not going to get rid of file sharing. If you introduce that level of monitoring, then there are major privacy infringement concerns. Placing a blanket ban on the development of technology - harks back to the dark ages.

The really serious file sharers seem to be in Europe - Germans, Russians, The Brits, The Dutch , Spainish. There seems to be a growing trend in Asia with Koreans and Taiwanese being fairly active. Most of the stuff on these sites are verified links that let you download films, music, anime, porn, comics, books, programmes, and games. Most of these sites are built around fairly tight knit communities. Extremely active social groups. These are the guys who rip, verify and upload hole chunks of matter.

The way most P2P works today is files shared on 1000’s of hard disks across the world. Each file has an identifier. You click on it and your P2P client starts simultaneously downloading it from other machines sitting in other parts of the world.

How does the US plan to prosecute someone sitting in Australia who downloads a German film - whose rights lie with a US studio - from hundreds of different hard disks across the world? How is the piracy going to stop

Remember the stupid foreign currency and taxation regulations most nations had a few decades ago. Well, the way people used to subvert it was a numbered account in Switzerland or Cayman islands. These nations offered extremely secretive banking arrangements.

Soon, we probably would have a whole bunch of P2Pers’ booking ‘numbered ’space on servers in similar countries - where cyber privacy is maintained

India’s newest media darling - http://www.mahamaza.com

A system to reach the best brands to the back of beyond. While other web sites - used up crores on hype, this one put its distribution in place. As Rediff reports:

Why has Mahamaza clicked when so many other Internet ventures have fallen by the dusty wayside? The answer is because it has found ways to get an extraordinary range of products from motorcycles to Atlas cycles and Nokia cellphones to rural or small town customers. Equally importantly, he has worked out failsafe ways of collecting cash from them.

With 70% of India residing in villages, and disposable income gradually increasing - Mahamaza seems to have gained advantage in a key segment. Traditionally the cost of reaching these audiences have been so high, and the audiences themselves so disparate and scatterered -that apart from the large FMCG’s no one really made an all India attempt.

The genius of Mahamaza is that it is a B2B site with a B2C flavour. The company is not selling to Mr..Reddy the consumer who lives in Medak, Andhra Pradesh - but Mr.Reddy the distributor who lives there, can consolidate a few dozen orders and push the aggregation back to Mahamaza. Such a simple and elegent solution.

In the founder, Vishal Anand’s own words

aped the referral program of Amazon and translated it to my concept of the webstore, and combined it with the direct selling model of Amway to provide buyers an opportunity to become entrepreneurs

Multi Level Marketing - oops should that read relationship marketing - meets e-tailing. And the moolah flows in.

In one of the most chilling articles, that I have read in recent times, author Steven E. Landsburg advocates the death penalty for computer hackers. He presents an extremely calculated basis for his recommdation. It is all in economics.

The computer hacker costs the wold US$ 50 billion per annum. If executing one of them could deter 0.05% of all virus writers or “vermiscripters” in the world the savings to the world economy would be to the tune of US $ 100 million. Any more deterance achieved beyond that is a bonus. In fact, the author believes that it is far more profitable to execute a virus writer than a killer

Maybe they celebrate April 1st on June 1st in the USA