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GOOGLE EARTH. What is that?

PTI | ByDeepak Mankar
Jul 16, 2005 12:26 PM IST

The CBR staff writer ecstatically calls Google Earth the first new source of revenue the company has introduced since it got into advertising, writes Deepak Mankar.

Friday night, I finished, somewhat reluctantly I confess (I didn’t want it to end), what I consider as one of the finest novels I’ve read in a long, long time. I was enjoying I Allen Sealy’s comical tour de force (I’m nearly tempted to say ‘tour de farce’), The Trotternama (Alford A Knopf, New York, 1988, $19.95), so much that I totally forgot to congratulate myself on the fact that I had bought it for just Rs.125/- from Strand Book Stall a couple of years back. Imagine owning and reading a hardbound First Edition of a world-renowned book!

HT Image
HT Image

The Trotternama also rekindled my dormant and, at best, intermittent interest in the Anglo-Indian tribe. I’ve always felt that history, the British and we Indians have treated these gentle, harmless folks pretty shabbily, turning them into the invisible untouchables. I suspect I’ve known at fairly close quarters at least one, if not two, individuals belonging to that magical monadic and nomadic flock. In retrospect, I realize that my friends never identified themselves as Anglo-Indians to me. The omission, however, could be attributed to the stigma such an admission would attach to them, given the Indian mindset – even though they were aware of my utterly un-Indian indifference to caste and creed.

The reason for my earlier-mentioned suspicion is that both these putative Anglo-Indians showed more or less all the psychological and behavioural traits — even trends in their lifestyles — I noticed in Sealy’s cast of characters. They had ‘Anglo-Indian’ written all over them. There’s an interesting website of these fascinating folks at alphalink.com.au

GOOGLE EARTH. What on earth is that?

The CBR (Computer Business Review) staff writer ecstatically calls Google Earth “the first new source of revenue the company has introduced since it got into advertising and arguably the coolest technology it has launched since the original web search service”. Coming back to earth, he continues: “Users are presented with a view of the Earth, and given the ability to zoom in to pretty much any location on the planet, with the closest zoom sufficient to make out individual cars or boats, but not individual people. The images, patched together from satellite photos taken at various times over the last few years, offer various levels of detail depending on the location. San Francisco and New York are better covered than Havana and Tehran, for example.” Currently, there’s a free version available for download with a priced Plus version with extra features (GPS compatibility and better resolution, for instance) coming soon. computer-business-review.com.

THINK LOCAL. Search classifieds.

Oodle.com has started collecting and classifying online classified ads from New York area newspapers, message boards, job sites and Craigslist.org. "Too many things that could be helpful to local charities and community organizations end up sitting in closets and garages. We wanted to promote these 'listings' and help direct more resources back to our community," CEO Craig Donato clarified on the on the company's Web site. Hence: "We bring together loads of listings from hundreds of local and national sources and help you find exactly what you're looking for.” oodle.com. The 24 April 2005 post on the Oodle blog typepad.com (‘Why did we create Oodle? To give buyers (like ourselves) a break.’) explains the basic thinking behind the classifieds search engine.

PSSSST! DIRTY PIX ANYONE? On LA Times Edit page?

Once upon a time (and, this ain’t no fairy tale, folks!), a metropolitan daily in the US of A called the LA Times latimes.com decided to open up its edit page to online readers for two whole days in a bid to make its editorial content – in fact, what was termed “its first experimental wikitorial” – more interactive. But it had to be taken off in a hurry “because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material” (read profanity and pornographic pictures in response to an LA Times editorial about the Iraq war, called ‘War and Consequences’. Please see the 20 June 2005 post (‘Times wikitorial goes dark’) as well as the 17 June post (‘The Wikitorial era begins’). laobserved.com.

GOING MAINSTREAM? Podcasting’s future perfect.

In his 1 July 2005 post, Steve Outing poynter.org claims that “podcasting has taken a big step toward being mainstream” with Apple Computer having added podcast features to its iTunes music software apple.com, the free application that everyone owning an iPod uses for downloading podcasts. apple.com. To know more about what the podcast features are, please go here:
wikipedia.org. “What this means for news organizations, I think, is that it's time to jump on the podcasting bandwagon. As reported in this blog, a number of news websites have begun offering podcasts; there's lots of experimentation going on. Apple's moves confirms that that's the right path,” he argues. “Every public radio station probably should be offering podcasts by now (but they're not all doing it yet). Newspapers should certainly be figuring out their podcasting strategies.” The previous QuiteATake.com coverage of podcasting is here: hindustantimes.com (‘BRIGHT FUTURE. Podcasting’s going places.’)

OUT WITH THE BEGGING BOWL. Lebanon's Daily Star.

Here’s a hard luck story with a journalistic twist. The Daily Star of Lebanon dailystar.com has been having a tough time making ends meet even after several valiant attempts. Now it has posted an appeal donations from online readers between $25 and $500 at the top of the exchange as well as in pop-ups (in response to a click-through for a single article) and inserted within text of articles linked to dailystar.com. ‘Support Free Press in Lebanon’ is the apparent pitch. Steve Outing’s worry is if the US National Public Radio ‘model’ of begging for money from listeners can work halfway across the globe. Seth Godin puts it more directly: “The problem with the NPR model is that … there's no way to turn you off if you don't pay.” sethgodin.typepad.com.

ANSWERS, NOT LINKS. Gate’s road ahead for the Internet.

The other day, Bill Gates was talking to an august gathering in Singapore of more than 7,000 IT pros, government officials and students. Bill’s theme was how to make the Internet and search engines work better. He predicted a highly 'always-on' society – with more compact portable devices, very high level TCP (transmission control protocol) “containing data like healthcare, supply chain and e-government records, and letting those be exchanged between systems of all types”, and so forth. In search, he predicted a future where search yielded “an answer and not just a bunch of links that starts a treasure hunt that now takes about 11 minutes”. networks.silicon.com.

GETTING WEB-MINDED. Are magazines really getting there?

In his 30 June post poynter.org Rich Gordon points to a survey of 71 consumer magazines by the International Federation of the Periodical Press to identify success factors for magazine websites.

The methodology is far from scientific, “relying on self-reporting by publishers who consider their sites to be ‘successful’ by whatever standards they wish”. Creating new online audiences and attracting new readers for the print editions are the publishers' top goals. As for money, building revenues and profits for the long term is deemed twice as important as building the business in the short term. More than 8 in 10 publishers expect to expand their Web efforts within the next year. More than half the publishers say their site has expanded the magazine's audience by more than 20 percent. Most of these self-described successful sites – whose print counterparts typically publish monthly – update their online content once or more a day. Six in 10 sites offer chat or online discussion. Two-thirds have attracted new, online-only advertisers. Pdf download: fipp.com.

That's all for now though there's plenty more out there. Join me again next week, same place.

Copyright (c) 2001- 2005 by Deepak Mankar. All rights reserved. Deepak Mankar, an advertising practitioner on the creative side since 1965, is also intensely passionate about the web and web content creation. Read his online articles athttp://www.asiaondemand.com/.  Website:http://www.addgandhi.com/original/. You may e-mail him at dmankar@bom8.vsnl.net.in

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