Category: Uncategorized

Personal management is an art that is as highly specialised and complicated as personnel management. While the latter involves finding common grounds and meeting targets within a group of people, the former involves finding common grounds and meeting targets within your own group of necessities and limitations. A post today by Jace on ‘Moving up in life’ pretty much summed up the way I have been feeling for close to the past year now.

As you might have guessed by now, this post has nothing to with the personnel part of it. It just made for a nice compare and contrast situation and nothing more. And coming back to the topic, I can’t agree more with the fact that finally, when it all becomes a bit easier and achievable, you can’t help but wonder if it was you or the target that ended up being too ordinary, that now keeps you wondering constantly about the next impossible that you should chase after.

But it sure does feel to be taken seriously when you say something, mostly shorn of the ‘too-young’ cliche and to have things to worry beyond where and what to eat any given day and also not have to keep a constant eye on the expenses just because you splurged a bit on yourself on the odd day. Somewhere along the way you start to believe that you can actually get things done and that good things eventually do happen, even when you are going through a really bad patch.

Help! Both The Hindustan Times (in the delicious Brunch) and The Times of India have declared that the Internet is the new happening social scene in India. While HT takes a look at it from the point of view that it has not done a great deal of good to the singles (welcome to my world, thank you) in the city, ToI does a ‘what-the-hell-is-it-all-about?’ story on the same, with a new mental health therapist (Samir Parekh is on vacation?) also thrown in for good measure. And to add to the mix, we have K’s post on the struggle within traditional print houses on how to deal with the whole internet juggernaut, which I could not respond to because of a lack of time and the office firewall barfing on the infamous media blog he’d linked to from his pages.

Internet and social networking is hardly anything new in India. Just because Fropper spends a great deal of money on advertising, it does not mean that social networking, blogging and other ‘community’ oriented stuff has taken off in India. One of the best kept secrets of the online industry is that you don’t necessarily diversify into other areas because there is essentially a market available for your wares, or even that you can do it better than anyone else out there. You often do it out a sheer lack of advertising inventory to pitch new clients with.

For most online properties, organic growth flattens out after a point (with the notable exceptions of Youtube and Myspace) and with that comes stagnation in your numbers related to your most visible property – the hallowed homepage. Almost every top website in India struggles with overbooked homepage advertising slots that are not available for any rates or for anyone for months to come. Thus you end up doing the predatory act, of moving into areas that really do not belong to your core set of competencies – like email, social networking – just for the sake of beefing up your stock of inventory. It often helps, when you get into such forays, if you are a Rediff or an Indiatimes, whose presence in the average Indian internet user’s psyche is mind boggling.

Even with a 10% conversion ratio, for such major internet players, the numbers can turn out to be quite beneficial. Let us assume that of the half million unique visitors that an Indiatimes or a Rediff would get on a daily basis, the 10% conversion would translate into 50,000 users from the word go, which is an awesome number for any new service. In such set ups, they are not limited by infrastructure or development costs that constrain smaller start ups. And if you can convert even half of that 50,000 into regular users, you end up with 25,000 users who could comfortably be generating upwards of 8 to 10 page views per user. That’s at least 200,000 page views worth of ads you can now now serve on a daily basis. Not bad, huh?

In all of this, the odd man out is Orkut, which is yet another of Google’s much ignored services. For some weird reason India has fallen in love with Orkut all over again. The phenomenon is nothing short of an alternative lifestyle, where you have to be a wizard to follow conversation threads in forms of ‘scraps’ with everyone’s replies stacked on different pages. And really, what is it with high traffic websites and awful user interfaces? Myspace, Hi5 and Orkut are nothing short of third degree torture to use. When did they change the rule book that you need to be completely unusable and slow like hell to be successful? And here we are breaking a sweat in trying to brand even our second newborns as a ‘two point ohs’ and pouring DHTML and Ajax goodness all over it.

Coming to K’s post, what I can say for sure is that credibility is not a major factor anymore. One of the good and bad things about recent developments in media is that we are gradually throwing out the ‘unbiased’ label. Media was never unbiased. Hell, no human is. So how can something that is created by the same humans ever be unbiased? The difference between print and online right now is that they represent different activities. Online can’t do a print. Most people don’t log on to news websites to read stories in excess of 1000 words. They want it in a jiffy, scan and run back to whatever they were doing earlier. At the same time, print can’t do an online. It can’t really ‘break’ news anymore, that’s a competency it has long forfeited to internet and television.

What has changed recently is reach. More people are on the internet these days, while you’ve probably reached everyone you’d want to reach with print as the medium. And even then our penetration is so pitifully low that the potential numbers are worth bucket loads of marketing and ad sales drool. Print also has a problem in terms of inflexibility with target demographics. I can advertise in a publication knowing the target audience, but my message would still be lost on a small percentage, who are the minority within the publication’s readers, because they don’t fit the profile I want to advertise to. The beauty of online ad delivery is that I can specify by region, by platform, by time and by frequency, who and where I deliver the ads to, even without forcing them to register on the website.

But none of this what is going to create the maximum amount of trouble for the traditional forms, print and television. What is giving them trouble are costs, of production and distribution. In print it is not good enough that you can create a lovely newspaper in QuarkXpress every night. You still need someone to dirty feet, hands and risk other parts of their anatomy in the awful world of print distribution. Costs of newsprint are awfully high and from what I remember it is a process that is still strictly regulated. Most of the publications can afford to sell their wares for an ‘invitation price’ because it is underwritten by the advertising, the rate for which is hiked every time the new circulation numbers come in, provided you’ve held your ground or even improved on it. Effectively, the reader gets an increasingly smaller piece of the pie because, well, he does not really figure in the picture.

Television pretty much follows a similar pattern, though production costs are considerably higher there (unless you are one of those fancy nuts in print who still own a printing press of their own), which shows up in exceptionally high advertising rates. Again, distribution is the nasty piece to bite on here. Ever wondered why some godforsaken channel that nobody wants to watch still shows up in your prime band? It is not because your cable guy has a soft spot for the channel, it is because he’s been paid a nice sum of money to do it. That guarantees the channel a minimum degree of viewership, which in turn brings more than enough cheers to the ad sales teams.

That leaves us with the question that was asked, how do you monetize your internet audience? For starters, start up costs are minimal on this side of the town. A cheap dedicated server with truckloads of bandwidth will only set you back less than Rs 6000 these days. The average internet set up does not need more than a designer, a technology person and two for the editorial. Even with page views in the thousands in a day, an optimized website will generate enough cash by means of AdSense to cover the costs of at least half of the set up. That, of course, is doing things on the cheap.

When you have the moolah to throw around, you profile your audience like your life and your entire family tree’s depended on it (a certain company based in Mountain View is very good at doing this, raking it billions every month) and keep your costs under control (not in the maha kanjoos way, but in terms of spending in places where you can actually recover your cost or acquire a new bunch of visitors). Marketing and advertising yourself does get you new visitors, but if you don’t have a good product to flog, they’d never stick around. So, it is generally a good idea to be at least excellent at what you intend to in the first place. Rest is to incentivize every damn thing. How do you do that? Well, that’s worth a lengthy post in itself.

But, to answer the core question, yes, people do make money publishing on the internet and some of them make a lot more than what you or I would give them credit for. The industry still suffers from the age-old ailments of inflated numbers and other artful misrepresentations, but the clients are wizening up and it is a practice that’s very much on the decline. The numbers are still nowhere in the region of what print or television can boast of, but, like I said earlier, the production and marketing costs are lower in this side of town too, thus making my margins much more healthier. All you need is a bit of patience, a good product and oodles of respect for the user.

tags: india, internet, online advertising, social networking

The air too, like the skies, always turns a dull shade of grey when it is overcast and rainy here. Much before I finally started for home, sometime past eight in the evening, what was left of the late evening sunlight was already being given a tough time in finding its way to the ground by the millions of tiny, needlelike drops of rain.

It is a very strange kind of rain, for even when it rains hard, it is more like a shower of micro-sized pins, than the usual mid-sized splotch that we are normally used to. Surprisingly, it was all fine at the first flyover and quite okay at the second one; but it all came to naught after passing under the third one, when I was caught in another of those infamous traffic jams in the rain.

Logically, it has to be an unsavory situation. The windscreen fogs up, the lighting is always lax, traffic crawls along in four unruly lanes and you can hardly see anything, nor can anyone see you. But I adore such situations. I’ve always loved strange, dark places filled with strange dark people, where there are no set rules and everything from your ancestry to your professional status are of no import.

Chasing down such thoughts, I end up with the essential irritant of a question: who am I? I am afraid I don’t have any answers for that. I represent varied things like a decent professional, a wayward and quasi-estranged son, a good friend who is no longer that to so many and a former lover to some others. But, what do I mean for myself? I don’t even know.

I’ve always lived with ideas of what I should represent, but I’ve never known what I actually am. I could almost never identify with the way I look (helped in no smart part by the fact that I don’t look good from any angle), though I could not figure out which look I could have identified with. And I could never believe, even without any indoctrination, in things I was supposed to have believed in when I was growing up.

Flash-forward to now and having been in this city for seven years now, I can hardly identify myself with where I came from or with anything here. Apparently, my accent has gone a bit wonky in my mother tongue, I speak the language here with shades of my mother tongue and my English represents the places I’ve been, the things that I have read and the things that I’ve seen. In a sense, I can belong only to a feeling of being perpetually lost.

But when it all works out fine, there is this most amazing sense of calm and lucidity; for you are moored to nothing and there is nothing to fight against, because you are for and against everything at the same time, thus amounting to a sweet nothingness. When it does not work, well, it is a mess. You struggle to clasp on to foundations, even virtual or non-existent ones, while searching for even a single smell, a familiar feeling or verifiable memory to hold you together.

Meanwhile, the deadlock disintegrates, and after another traffic light, trees, vehicles and blurry lights fly past me. It is quite unsafe, for I can’t see half the things, including vehicles, potholes and people crossing the roads, out there. But I have grown to like uncertainty to the point of it even being quite a flirty relationship. We don’t quite ‘get’ each other, but we certainly do seem to thrive in each other’s company.

When do you know for sure that enough is enough? It is applicable in both cases – good and bad. If you go by a purely numerical definition, good or bad enough could probably be defined as anything that is ‘x’ units above the halfway point. That way, if you spend even 49% of your time in a particular situation in a good way (and 51% of the time in a bad way), you would still end up with two additional units of bad. Would that mean it would be a good idea to cut your losses, ditch the situation and move on ahead? Of course not.

The problem with people and relationships is that you can’t ever really quantify either. A fair number of people exist in situations where 90% of the time spent is practically living hell for them; but the other 10% is, according to them, absolute heaven, which redeems the otherwise lousy situation. Naturally, in such circumstances, the good is given a higher weightage than the bad. Is that a smart idea? Well, I don’t know. Whatever that rocks your boat, as they say, even if I may not agree with it. Moreover, factors such as practical considerations, only serve to muddy the waters further.

The question actually covers a whole lot of things other than just relationships. For example, you know you are putting on weight, but you are not overweight yet. So you get a particular weight in mind that would quantify the state of being overweight or a state of lurching rapidly towards it. But where exactly is that point? Is that point somewhere you can easily climb down from, like a minor flirtation over the lower limit or is it the minimum possible gap towards the upper limit, from where the climb down is a long way off, but not quite over the upper limit?

These are interesting questions to ponder, but very real ones too. People face it every day and deal with it using different methods. Some morbidly overweigh the little good and sign up for a lifetime of unbearable suffering, others make well-judged and sensible decisions that hover around the 50-50 level, which is more or less failsafe, while other idiots like me look for the 90% good and 10% bad to make the call that it is actually enough. Strangely, it is probably the 90% good rule that is the most prejudicial, especially if the other party has the lousy fortune to present the bad 10% up front first.

I think it is about time I gave up on the ‘have no time for this’ excuse and wade out into the open with the possible real reasons as to why I have been blogging lesser and lesser these days. First on the list would be the fact that my blog is awfully boring. I mean, there are only so many ways in which you can put forth the same crap again and again, and when you yourself have trouble reading all that you’ve written, it is a fairly good indication that it has become somewhat more than unbearable.

The second reason is, no matter how much I would want to deny it, that the loss of anonymity has taken a bit of a toll. In the early days, only a couple of close friends knew about the blog, which later grew to include a lot of friends. These days almost everyone knows – including a lot of people at work – about the who, the what and the where. By nature, I am a bit of a private person and these days I don’t get any time to be that. If I have to pretend to be nice and write about how lovely the weather is when it is not exactly beating down with niceness out there, then there really would be no point to this.

Then there is also the fact that I am a bit bored and disappointed with the entire blogging circus, especially in the Indian context. There are a couple of reasons I could come up with as to why it is so, but I can’t put my finger on the real big issue that could be the reason. Quite a bit of it is the inflated participation numbers. There are un-conferences and whatnot going on these days about it, but it does lack the personal touch of the early days. There is just no warmth, but a lot of vain posturing and turf wars over almost everything. Maybe it is also the fact that I find the other side – of facilitating conversations and making the business case for it – more exciting than the conversations themselves now.

These days, every time I sit down to write, my mind just blocks the thoughts out. As an old habit and as something I used to like doing, I do want to write; but, as something that involves going out into the open with what I feel and think, I don’t feel like doing it anymore. At a personal level too I’ve become more guarded, a lot less expectant and generally a whole lot less willing to put a lot on the line. It is not the most brilliant state of mind to be in, but it is not all that bad either.

In general, I think the truth is that I’ve been yearning better company, better conversations and better ways to spend my time. It is true that I have very little of it with me these days and I can’t honestly complain much about it because I quite like it this way and I am treated quite well too. But that does encroach on my personal time. As a person who used to lavish a lot of that on friends and close ones, it is a bit of a struggle now to do that any day or even as infrequently as once a week. That said, the realizations it has led to has been quite intriguing.

The thing is, a lot of the interactions you have on a daily basis arise out of necessities. In regular, mundane life, that could be having polite conversations with people from the milkman to the cabbie, not because it is absolutely necessary (you won’t exactly stop getting any milk or be left unable to hire a cab if you don’t do all those), but because it makes things easier for a variety of reasons; some of which makes things easier for you, while the others make it easier for the other party.

In personal life too, things tend to be the same. It is not that you’d exactly stop being alive if you were to suddenly stop being nice and caring on a superficial level. Most of the people you know and interact with often, would gladly give up stopping by you if you were to guarantee them safe passage in terms of what they desire from you. It is quite the same if the roles are reversed too. How often do you say “that’s so awful” to someone else almost out of an impulse than because you actually feel that is awful? By the same turn, how often do you count on hearing the same from others? Of course, you can accuse me of extreme cynicism, but I don’t think you can accuse me of being not right.

But what’s blogging got to do with any of this? Beats me. But the strange thing is that after what I guess must be a couple of hundred words, I still have not mentioned important things that have happened to me recently, like developments at work, an excellent trip to Bombay and even the fact that I went to work and back on a bike after almost a year and how overwhelming an experience it was. Instead, I am putting up a smokescreen to pretend that I am saying something useful or important, while all that I am doing is to try and bore you to death to see if you ‘really’ want to hear what I want to say?

So, what if a voice stands up and say ‘yes’? That would be quite an interesting turn of events, for I have no clue what I would do in that case. See, I guess what I am getting at is that I am quite a boring person who pretends to be more interesting or intriguing than what I really am. Of course, none of the older imagery regarding myself has been accidental. I’ve played, more than willingly, to the gallery and contributed to the situation in huge parts. I guess I am asking to be left alone, but it is hugely interesting that anyone should ask for precisely that on a blog.

Honestly, I can’t pick between Bombay and Delhi, both seem awfully bad at the same time, though the familiarity of Delhi is always something to look forward to, while the eateries (they almost always do good food in the seaside town as a rule and the decor does not smack of cheapness under the covers) are a pleasure in Bombay.

To cut a long story short, it was three days of not much else but a lot a lot hard work, heavy eating and heavy drinking in Bombay. Now that I am back here, it is time for the follow up, I guess blogging would be one of the parties to suffer immediately as a result, if it has not already. And I’ve finally gotten an invite at Vox, and it rocks too.

I do not know what is more scary, that you have settled into a risk-free rhythm with yourself without any effort or that with each passing day more of the frivolous aims and targets disappear one-by-one? Maybe these are the essential rites of passage, before you take the final steps into the hallowed portals of definite adulthood, that the lack of any real expectations fail to do much more than amuse you, when you can spare the time for it.

There are places where things used to be kept, which now gawk back empty at me and I am baffled once again, for I can’t remember what used to be kept there. There are faint echoes of familiar laughter and memories that streak away like shadows flying from light. To strike up a marginal flame, to aid the vision and warmth, I feign curiosity. I feign a genuine inclination towards learning. But I already know how the story goes and all the lessons that are to come. I am such a fake and an excellent one at that.

I could almost say I am married. To predictability and a lack of surprise. The crimes I accuse others of, are the crimes that I too specialise in. I look into your blindness with my darkened soul and float in and out like the tide, soaking up everything, yet retaining nothing and stay un-retained in everything. It is fearful to contemplate that this sentence might be for a lifetime, for a singular count of the ghastly crime of being born.

I look into the eyes of complete strangers, wondering, hoping, that you are one of them, but they never look back, so would you. If your lips were to break, even into the hint of a smile, I could genuinely laugh back, even at the risk of being mocked again, but they never smile, so would you. I plan and I plot, as I walk and I drive around that curve, of the things I could say and the things we could do. But you were never where I was and will never be where I could be.

It so happens once probably in everyone’s life that you tug really hard at the rudder and hoist the sails in a direction much removed from the one where the usual winds happen to pass by. I have gradually been spending lesser and lesser time under the temporary shelter lent by the awning of youthful exuberance. I am not sure if it was intentional or if it all happened by chance, but the days of endless revelry, reckless love and pining over all things strange have all but disappeared. For better, than for worse, it is finally a good time to chart a new course and look for destinations new, without actually going anywhere.

Hell has frozen over! Blogger is rolling out a new backend. On second thoughts, it is only getting a bit chilly out here, but it certainly ain’t cool enough for things to freeze over. At least not yet. Apparently, the greatest of the changes is in a place where the end user, like you and me, don’t see much of. Blogger is going off the static publishing set up (one where it would pick up content from its database and spit out static HTML and XML files based on the templates and settings you had specified) and moving to a new set up where all the content is served dynamically (the way in which WordPress blogs functions now).

The immediate change you’ll get to see is a top bar, quite similar to wordpress.com once again, that will show you as logged in and also display other useful information, if you are logged in. Behind the scenes, and I am guessing here, the entire operation would now move to an application server (probably the same server that handles the posting/editing backend) from the old set up which was probably serving a directory of files based on the host header. The other significant change is the authentication part, for which you can now use your Google account (for new blogs, not for existing blogs) or your old Blogger account. The logic there is quite mixed up and needs a lot of work.

That said, the new beta is a complete dud compared to WordPress.com. The interface is still the dated, clunky one and true to the beta label, some of the stuff is broken, like the new WYSIWYG layout editor that was spewing out Ajax debug information on to my screen when it was not functioning as intended. Access control is nice, but I did not see the option for controlling access per post and determining access on the blog level is not a fun thing to do.

The good points? Well, the archive links are laid out much better now and there are Atom feeds for posts and comments (per post too) now. There is also something called “labels”, which looks like a bastard child that resulted from a love making session between tags and categories. Pretty nice, but once again it is something they should have had yesterday.

But someone really has to get some new default templates into the system pretty soon. I am sick of seeing the same 10 all over the place. And the upgrade itself is symptomatic of how Google treats Blogger, more like a stepchild than as a product that deserves a whole lot more of attention and resources allocated to it. Yeah, I know, it is not easy to roll out features for a framework that supports a huge number of users, compared to something like wordpress.com that is new and had a clean sheet of paper to start with. But it can’t be that difficult either. After all, it is all just a data, pulled in and out of database servers and presented on web servers.

Thanks to Chris, I stumbled upon Windows Live Writer. Till date, I’ve used a variety of blogging clients like wbloggar, ecto, Performancing for Firefox (the current one) and almost everything else that supports the Metaweblog API. And I have to say I am quite impressed. The only weak point I can see is that it does not allow easy Technorati tagging like how Performancing does. Now, for the positives:

• WYSISWYG authoring with non-MS Office mangled HTML source.
• “Web Preview” that allows you to see the post within your blog’s layout without having to publish it.
• Multiple account support (meaning that you can post to Blogger, WordPress, Windows Live Spaces etc).
• Spell check (ahem, one feature that’s badly needed for most bloggers).
• SDK to integrate other services (that should take care of my tagging complaint).
• Support for RSD, Metaweblog API and Movable Type API (in layman lingo that means it would support most of the blogging services out of the box without forcing you to wade into the ugly tech details).
• Absolutely spanking support for embedding images.

So the verdict for now is that it is really a non-Microsoft product in terms of being usable and irritation factor. There are downsides like being based on .Net and a standalone application. But for most Average Joes, this would really be a great addition to the regular blogging toolbox.

p.s: The spell checker does not have the word ‘blogging’ in its default dictionary. Now, that’s really hilarious.

Update: Tim Heuer, as promised, has made the Flickr and Tagging plugins.

tags: windows+live+writer, microsoft, blog