Book in your emails

Books I am reading right now –

  1. 3 mistakes of my life – Chetan Bhagat
  2. Sybil – Flora Rheta Schreiber
  3. Adrian Mole: The Cappucino years – Sue Townsend
  4. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
  5. Wessex Poems and Other verses – Thomas Hardy

The last two of these books I am reading via email!! In one of my feeds, I came across this new service DailyLit which sends you a small section of your chosen book a day. Its upto you when you want to read it.

The perfect service those busy people who do not get enough time on their hands to sit and read a book. How much time does it take to read an email!!

Go check your mail!!

IPE taking on Ibibo!

I was just checking out the alexa rankings of this new site I read about in Deccan Chronicle (yeah! sometimes I do read newspapers … no, I actually dont!!). Its apparently the firstIndian pr0n toon star (the IPE in the title stands for Indian Porn Empire)!! Her name is Savita Bhabhi, and the site is a daily comic strip of her shall we say “exploits”.

I compared the pageviews of savitabhabhi dot com to ibibo dot com (no links, I do not wish to link myself to these sites), and lo behold! check out for yourself …

sbib-1

Just an interesting piece of stats and comparison, if nothing else. But, isnt it interesting to note that the same time the traffic stats on ibibo went down, those on savitabhabhi went up.

Sidenote – What do you think would be ibibo’s target market?

PS – This post in no ways is an attempt to offend any of the owners of the sites mentioned.

Ringo goes down the drain

Got this mail today. Another one bites the dust!! I think its good for social networking as a phenomenon that the redundant networks are consolidating.

May 31, 2008

Dear Ringo member,
After much consideration we have decided to end the Ringo service.
As of June 30, 2008 the Ringo service is ending and you will no longer have access to your Ringo account.

How do I get my photos?
We created a new feature that will allow you to download your photos to your computer. Click here to download your photos.

You may also order a CD of your photos. Just sign in to your Ringo account, click on the “You” tab, click” Order prints” and then “Photo Disks”.

How do I get my videos?
Videos uploaded to Ringo were hosted for us by a partner. This partner has decided to end this service and after June 30 videos uploaded to Ringo will no longer be available.

Thank you for being part of the Ringo community.
The Ringo Team

Server outages

With the recent outages of the online service Twitter. Many have started asking the question, how good is a service really without the people who drive that service?

And another thought that comes to mind is – have they done that great a work if that service goes down without them? When do you call your work complete … when it is sustainable without you or when its completely and utterly dependent on you.

Thoughts welcome.

7C Model

When I was doing my PGDM at IIM-I, I had taken one course known as IT Enabled Marketing (ITEM). The crux of that course was a simple model known as the 7C model. The point I am rekindling this knowledge is because I aim to use it in real life business for a change. The theory that was taught two years back is finally going through chrysalis and culminating (in what I hope) to reality. Any web portal should have as many of the 7C’s as possible, they would be –

  1. Context
  2. Content
  3. Community
  4. Customization
  5. Communication
  6. Connection
  7. Commerce

The latest web portal that I was working on had just 4C’s … we are currently working on the 5th one. Will keep you posted on this.

Indian SEO

We are in the process of releasing a website targeting SME’s. The portal is aimed at collecting orders from enterprises for customized corporate merchandise. You select the product, you upload your design, you put in your logo, we will deliver the product to you.

As part of our online marketing plan, we decided to go hire on search engine optimizer. This entire process of hiring an SEO was certainly an eye-opener. To understand this, you have to be an Indian … the way an Indian thinks is slightly different. The exact term I am referring to is jugaad … this very characteristic of an Indian to get things done … by hook or by crook.

So, how do you increase the page ranking of your website the jugaad way? Simple, you become a link-whore, or a forum spammer, or someone who keeps on flooding the open directories of the web.

What happened to the fine art of online PR? Is it alive or do I have to hire on these? Somehow it does not feel right. What will happen later on when the Semantic web revolution begins?

As I edit this piece after 5 years, it’s good to know that I was right (hah!! high-five former self!). There was a spam comment lying on this very post which I have deleted, and we are very much in the midst of semantic and structured SEO.

Online PR these days has become a paid service very akin (and oft confused) to/with SEO.

Hardy Heron

I have decided to make the leap from Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10) to Hardy Heron (8.04). First impressions are great, deciding to upgrade the operating system online … so the download of the entire online update took a mammoth 12 hours to complete. The unpacking of 1.4 GB of upgrades should take me another hour or so.

Finally it’s done! Some of the issues that came up are –

  1. The grub entry has been reset – so my Windows is lost again. No big deal, I had written about it earlier on my blog, made the changes and we are good to go.
  2. Ubuntu has become sluggish during booting, but once it starts, then we can roll along
  3. My earlier stint had left some confusion with kdm and gdm … that is still there

All in all, the upgrade was nice. The OS is hardy, gnome is updated and so is kde.

Whew!! and a big Yaay!!