Recently a close friend started an aggregator for India related news with the name Grabline. Well wishes to him. Take a look if you are interesed in reading India related news at one site.

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These days there is lot of talk about mass media and its future in the coming age. There are those in the blog world that pronounce that mass media will be marginalized more and more as we move further along. Then there are those in the mass media like Forbes who dedicate a full issue for attacking the bloggers.

My personal belief is that a lot of stories in the blog world start by referring to something seen/read/heard from the mass media and then the author’s take on it. I am not saying that there is nothing original written in the blog world but rather there is good amount of let’s say filtering from Mass Media that happens. Posts about good stories get published a lot and get a lot of comments. While if the mass media committed a folly, it would be pointed out loud. Most of the blog writers do something else for a living while journalists or professional writers do it for a living so naturally they have more time to research and are generally better articulate in putting their thoughts on paper. Coming back to what is mass media disappeared one day - it would be a very dull day for bloggers. So much that we might even see a drop in internet bandwidth usage that day :D

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Long time readers of Beta Thoughts would know my love for Maps. May be this comes from the time I spent in creating GIS for Chandigarh while still at college. I was so happy when Google released its map offering with cool AJAX features. I even did a little screencast using Wink.

Today Yahoo released the Beta version of its maps application based on flash and I love it. Yahoo maps API is so easy that it takes less than few minutes to comeup with your stuff. Based up on their Javascript API I created a flash based map of the center of desi land i.e. Lawrence and El Camino cross section with a overlay of “Indian Food” You can see my favorite grocery shop in the map along with 10 other points.

So far it is only US based (I can see smoke coming out of Niks ears) Hopefully they will cover the rest of world along with a little island somewhere in Asia-Pacific.

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May the festival of lights bring light of joy and prosperity to every day of your life…

 

 to every one.

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One of the blogs I often read is Brad deLong’s Semi Daily journal. You can always find good discussions on various economic trends and news from Brad’s prespective on this site. In one of the stories he linked, it had the following line from original author

The Holy Grail in economics is that price should equal marginal cost

I ended up spending more time in thinking about this line than I should have. Obviously my first attempt was to think about software pricing where this would fail miserably. The cost of producing next unit of software is practically nil. Infact this is true for any thing which can be made digital. This is the reason MPAA and RIAA are fretting over this so much for the music and movie copying.

Pricing is a very interesting topic. First instance of this would have been during the bartering system in the early stages of civilization. Initial pricing techniques must have been very simple. Some thing on the lines it costed me this much in producing 100 kilogram of onions. With this much as markup I should price this item this amount. Ofcourse the compitition should be kept in mind over here.

This simple concept must have taken drastic turn with the introduction of branding. I am not sure when the pricing technique of how much the customer would be willing to pay for this product/service would have come into practice. I guess it has been there since early ages :) Here are few pricing scenarios

1. Stock valuation - the most crazy and weird thing in the world to price. Is Google really worth what it is now upwards of $300?
2. Software Licenses - This is again a art.
3. Price difference between the similar quality branded and non-branded stuff. For example a simple white shirt stiched by a taylor in Bangladesh with GAP logo and without the logo
4. Health Care costs in US

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For the past few weeks/month Silicon Valley has been abuzz with the talks about Flock - a browser based on Firefox with lot of stuff added to make life easier. Before going further I would like to remind the readers a phrase coined by Om of GigaOm

“Silicon Valley is a hot house where everyone smokes the same crappy weed and participates in a constant feedback loop.”

So with that grain of salt let me say that I was happy when read it on Matt’s wordpress.com site that Flock it out. First thing I did after downloading was to post to my Hindi weblog as this is something I have been looking for. None of the free blogging clients offer a good support for unicoded Devnagari. I was a happy puppy when flock recognized the name of my weblog correctly.   You can see my shiny little hindi post from weblog at Haanbhai Incidently this might be the first unicoded post from flock. Needless to say this post is also from flock. I like the ability to put technorati tags from interface itself. Will keep using Flock and let us see how it helps making my online life easier. Kudos to Flock team.

Update: This is from WP interface. I had some formatting challenges from the Flock interface so making the changes from WP interface. Plus how do one posts to a particular category from Flock. 

Technorati Tags: flock, hindi

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Om Malik reflecting on Nicholas Carr’s Amorality of Web 2.0 writes about the culture of participation which is the center of so called web 2.0 -  

 

if this culture of participation was seemingly help build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset - time. We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off. While we may (or may not) gain something from the collective efforts, the odds are whatever “the collective efforts” are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will they share in their upside? Not likely!

Coming to Om’s point of being the outsourced workforce - there has to be something for this to work. So far del.icio.us, technorati have been hugely successful. Any successful transaction involves give and take. If I create a link pointing to AJAX, there are thousands other links created by the community in the same area for me to see. Naturally I got the benefit of that collective work. So yes 1 Person vs. del.icio.us is definitely in favor of the site but n Persons vs. del.icio.us definitely tilts the scale towards an individual.

 

I have often wondered about this in regards to Akshargram - the online hindi bloggers community website I have the honor to host. It is sort of a virtual meeting place where hindi blogger’s ruminate on various things like geeks talk about technology on Slashdot, Culture of participation thouhts of Om are true about akshargram too. Without the community akshargram would have died a silent death. So if participants spend time in  writing posts to Akshargram, do they lose or gain any thing. In my opinion I think it works both ways.

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