Blue Screen Of Duds

At least that’s what a report in The Hindu Business Line claims. Strangely, the body of the story does not say much, other than what is already known: the T-Online Venture Fund infusion and Intel Capital’s involvement in Jajah. In fact, the story in itself reads like a rehashed PR pitch and it is kind of crappy that you can lead with a grand headline (which is kosher is you are a blogger though!) and not follow it up in the body.

Any kind of telephony over IP is a major minefield in India and it will be chased down tooth-and-nail by both the regulators and the existing regular telephony players. The legal side of matters is also quite confusing in this regard. But this should be an interesting one to watch, since various parties have for long been trying to get even voice chat in popular instant messaging platforms shut down. The Jajah website does identify users by the originating country’s IP address and for now for unregistered users the service is available only in the landline-to-landline combo.

The world of blogs is reacting to an Op Ed by Neil Henry about the decline of news and the role that internet properties like Google and Craigslist have played in this decline. This latest missive has been attributed to The Chronicle’s announcement earlier this month that they are going to let go 100 newsroom hands in an effort to save costs.

According to John Battelle, there were around 400 journalists working recently with the publication and I can only share the shock he has expressed about the number. It does not take 400 journalists to bring out any kind of media publication these days. Those numbers belong to online travel agents and their BPO operations; they don’t belong to any self-respecting news organization. As usual, the outrage is justified, but the blame certainly is not Google’s.

The blame squarely lies with the people who run traditional media, who, in the first place, should fire their sales team instead of the journalists. After all, it is not the fault of the journalists that advertising revenue is dropping alarmingly year-on-year. Can you recollect even a single sales head that was fired recently for the decline? I can’t, I’d be surprised if you can.

The sales team should have seen the trend (and that is nothing new, it is at least 3-4 years old now) and used their brains to usher in innovation. Online classifieds are a mix of fairly useless and unorganized listings, flavoured with a nice helping of spam and scams. There IS an opportunity to list and present this information better, the only problem being that they just did not bother. When was the last time you heard a senior sales executive reach out to the online classifieds segment and figured out something innovative in that space?

Moreover, newspapers cannot sit on their asses, leaning on their former glory, with a sulk that would put a menopausal depressive to shame. Get over it; you are fighting with the lolcats for my attention. Now, figure it out how you are going to do it than keep repeating this endless tripe about how someone stole your favourite rag doll.

And as a starting point, please fire your sales team. They are not pro-active, innovative and they have constantly underperformed by any desirable metric.

Updates have been far and few in between here due to the same old reasons: life being mostly all work and very little play. There are a couple of pretty interesting developments that has been in the works, I will write more about them if and when they work out. Meanwhile, in the technology sphere, other than the recent and continuing dalliance with Lucene, Nutch and crawling the tubes, there is one bit of technology – RDF and the semantic web – that’s been taking more and more of my thought cycles.

Firstly, I will readily admit to not yet understanding the core concepts – triples and the subject, object and predicate soup — to the required level of finesse, but I am trying hard to implement a subset of it in regular and existing applications, so that data can describe itself and generate multiple views that would otherwise be pretty much impossible to. This is also necessary because most of the tools in the RDF space – including application frameworks and data browsers — are far from being scaleable or stable enough at this point. Besides, paradigm shifts are best left out when it is based on currently evolving technology.

Over the past week I’ve been putting the finishing touches on version one of an internal API and remodeled it to be REST-compliant than to use XML-RPC as the earlier one used to do. It took me a while to wrap my head around URIs being used as unique identifiers and other concepts, but you can call me a convert now, after having seen the positives, thought I will admit that getting the URIs right is one hell of a bitch.

Smoke House Grill is not the ideal place to do gigs, so it came as a surprise to me when I heard that Ma Fazia and Woody were playing there on the 23rd. Since I could not find any of the usual suspects to tag along, I went for the gig, post couple of rounds of beer at the seriously icky Press Club and as expected found a mostly unappreciative crowd not giving too much of a damn about what was being played.

See, the problem with SHG is that it is not your average clubbing joint. It is more of a place where the rich lads, uncles and similar beings drop by to get that Manhattan feel in sadda Dilli. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with the joint (if the price point does not impale you first). SHG is by far one of the better done up restaurants in Delhi, backed up by pretty decent service and food, but it just ain’t the place for gigs.

The music, though, was mind blowing. Ma spun (contrary to my perception of her playing only mostly psy) some ambient and plenty of house (nuffink outright commercial though) and flashes of electro. At the same time Woody dazzled with his saxophone and the flute, bringing in songs with the flute and doing either side of the breakdown with his sax, embellished by a faint smattering of reverb that made it dreamy and prominent at the same time. For the faithful, this was one not to have missed and sadly most did miss it.

Last time I was the SHG, the resident DJ was playing mostly lounge and chill out tracks, but this time around, after Ma and Woody packed up, he played some spanking hard house tracks and once again, no full blown commercial on the decks! Admittedly, I’ve not been clubbing for a while now, but what is it with the gigs now playing stuff what you would have expected a Peter Rauhofer to play? But I have no complaints, keep the good stuff flowing!

Congrats to the lads at Automattic on their anytime-now millionth sign up on WordPress.com. The company is the dark horse in the entire blog hosting business and they quietly go about doing their thing. And other than the long-forgotten misdemeanor of placing some icky ads on the WordPress homepage, Matt’s hardly put a foot wrong in recent times. And for a ‘virtual’ company (there is no real office these guys work from), they have accomplished some amazing feats:

1) Use cheap hardware and mostly open source software to deliver performance and reliability that far outstrips any expensive solution out there. The list of software used reads something like this: Debian/Ubuntu, PHP, MySQL, Litespeed, Pound,  Wackamole, Spread, Nagios, Munin, Monit, NFS, Postfix, MyDNS. How often have you read about an unplanned outage on WordPress.com? You can get an idea of their set up at Barry’s blog.

2) Scaling out PHP and MySQL to support an operation of this scale. Okay, it is not quite the LAMP stack (Litespeed instead of Apache, read Matt’s comments here on the subject), but it does make the case that PHP, when done right can do incredibly well, both in terms of scale and performance, which is only augmented by this post by Steve Grimm on the Memcached list about Facebook’s architecture.

3) WordPress.com also has what could arguably be called the best user contributed text content repository online at this moment. There is such a wide variety of content — from technology to adult — that is of a pretty good quality. Excellent and pro-active policing of illegal content has also ensured that there is little spam within the network, a problem that is a growing problem on Blogspot.

With 7.5 million daily page views and 45 million unique visitors, they look more like an acquisition target by any of the big boys who would be drowning in a pool of drool of envy after seeing those numbers. Any guesses as to who they might be talking to/have already turned down?

In any case, way to go guys and keep the good stuff pouring in!