RutSum

Archive for the ‘It's called Web 2.0’ Category

The Indian Blogging Community has long been growing since 2005 and has now emerged into a powerful source of new media. Opinions, reviews, poetry, fiction, updates, cribbing, pictures, videos, music, sports, jokes, technology, money, issue-based-writing - We’ve seen it all. What the Indian Blogging Community lacked (till now), though, was an active platform for live discussion and mutual support. The community is no longer merely a community. The Indian Blogger Forum aims at uniting the creative forces of the country at one place- to discuss, to learn, to speak out and to simply have fun. So jump on..

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Tennis fans out there would agree that there is nothing like watching your favorite player in action in a while sitting in the stadium, but watching a match on TV can be pretty boring, especially with the advertisements and lack of control. Don’t you wish you could rewind and watch that swing again? Or maybe pause it at that moment so that you could run to your kitchen and grab some popcorn?

Well, I know it sounds dramatic, but MediaZone has done us all a favor by making your favorite Wimble matches available for you to watch online! The service is called Wimbledon LIVE, and they give you good reasons to pay them $24.99 (for an all access pass). They have video on demand services, which include full matches and extras such as interviews. They also have a section for old matches from last year, or all time classic matches, if you want to relive the glory of old times.

Apart from the paid services, they also provide a few free-of-cost services such as reviews and radio commentary. For more details, or to watch Wimbledon episodes LIVE online, visit their website.

I recently joined SocialSpark.com to earn some additional income from my blogs, apart from the earnings that I get from running Google AdSense. The concept of SocialSpark was the thing that attracted me the most – you get paid for what you love to do – blogging. However, even though the concept sounds amazing theoretically, but actually it loses it’s meaning if you are forced to write for money. That is what is happening at SocialSpark right now – because of lack of advertisers, bloggers are grabbing the very limited opportunities available, and are forced to write on topics they have no idea about. This results in disillusioned readers, who get confused about the topic/theme of your blog/website.

Take my example. I think that I would be more happy at SocialSpark if there would be more sponsored post opportunities related to my field on interest – Open Source, Technology, Internet Services, Gadgets, Movies, Rock/Metal Music and Education. However, I find that post opportunities related to these fields are very limited, obviously because the respective advertisers are either unaware of SocialSpark or are unwilling to put in their money on a relatively new network.

So this post is a request to all advertisers – come along and join SocialSpark! It has a lot of traffic and link popularity in store for you! Moreover, due to the wide variety of bloggers at SocialSpark (people with varied interests), you can look forward to get featured on websites which are related to your product and can therefore receive maximum targeted traffic.

This post was guest blogged by Sneezy Melon of The Goofy Express.

1) Different browsers mean different displays.

2) None of the displays match the way it was supposed to be.

3) Internet Explorer 5.5 is “recommended”.

4) Same set of username and password results differently on different occasions.

5) Flash is used more than HTML.

6) Internet finally makes your head all dizzy.

I recently happened to come across one such website. It was designed for the Employee Information System of the Delhi Governent. Not-so-surprisingly, the title tags said otherwise. The stupidity didn’t begin here, actually. The password for login (a 3-letter string) was the same as the username. Both were printed on thousands of notices which were circulated across all the employee offices in Delhi. Yet, a “highly-secure database” was insisted upon. I don’t see how that works.

As expected, the website worked neither on Opera Kestrel (9.50 Beta 2), Opera 9.27, Mozilla Firefox 3 (Beta 4,5), Mozilla Firefox 2, Apple Safari or Konqueror. The only hope left was the world’s best browser of all time. Yes, I’m talking about your, mine and Microsoft’s favorite (*drum roll*) Internet Explorer! Now working on Intenet Explorer and that too on Windows would have been no better than sleeping with two ugly witches.

So, some Googling and a few minutes later, I had downloaded the IES4linux project and was already running it. I decided to start with the latest stable version and step down one-by-one (which I was pretty sure I would have to). Sadly, the beta feature (in ies4linux) didn’t work as the Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Setup file was “corrupted”. 6.0 got installed easily. 6.0 gave up easily. 5.5 was no better. And 5.0 did not get install altogether. Again, the file was “corrupted”.

Finally, 48 hours, lots of head-banging and around a fifty thousand curses later, I’m still stuck. And I know I may remain stuck till eternity, unless I die about 20 years from now due to food-poisoning. Let’s hope the dog pees in my porridge!

I’ve recently noticed that a lot of ads from one.com, a popular webhost, are appearing on RutSum. The ads said that they promised a 1 year free account along with the domain. Now when you read on a page by, lets say, Google, that it provides a free service, you know for sure that you won’t have to yield a single penny from your pocket, neither would you have to provide them with your credit card number.

But one.com chose to fool their customers by using fine print, using a small asterisk and putting this text, below, in a font about 60% smaller than the rest of the font on the page.

* Setup fee USD 13.80. All prices are without VAT. 1 year free domain + hosting offer is only valid for companies and individuals in India.

Now this was very very disappointing, and to clear things out I clicked a button that said “Click here for live help”. A customer support executive called Arjun popped up.

Arjun: Thank you for using One.com 24/7 Interactive Online Support. How may I assist you?
you: Your homepage lists that you would provide a domain and hosting for free, for 1 year.
Arjun: Hi
Arjun: Yes we do
Arjun: for the 1GB package
you: But there is a “setup fee” of USD 13.80
Arjun: Yes that is only the setup fee being charged, the domain and hosting is entirely free of cost
you: How is it free if you are charging me 13.8 dollars?
you: I do not know what this money is for
Arjun: This is charged because we need to setup your webspace, assign your IP address, register your domain, etc
you: Of course!
you: I know that takes money
you: I can go and buy it elsewhere
you: But how is it free if you are charging me for it?
Arjun: fine
Arjun: the domain and hosting is entirely free of cost
you: That is absurd
Arjun: Is there anything else I could assist you with?
you: You can use the word “free” only if the person can avail an entire service, in whole, without weilding a penny from his pcket
you: pocket*
Arjun: alright
Arjun: Is there anything else I could assist you with?
you: Yes. I would like you to forward a request to a senior at your company, to please remove the word “free” from your advertisements, as it is misleading, and instead, put a banner that says, “1 GB free hosting with domain for one year in $13.80 flat”. That would indeed get you more customers.
Arjun: Thank you for chatting. Good-bye.

I thought that companies cared about customers. I hope that with this post, you lose at least 10 of your potential Indian customers. With this, I am also banning you from advertising on my blog. I don’t care if I lose revenue from you. I do not believe in misleading people who visit my blog. I provide information, clear and open.

UPDATE : After I published this post, I went back to one.com and asked another live support executive to read this post and forward the matter to a senior at his company. When he opened the link, my amung.us logged the visit and the map over there told me that this executive was located in UAE (United Arab Emirates).

About an hour later, I get a comment from a guy called Akki, who says this -

Anyway, when u find out its not free just leave the damn company dont bargain !

This comment came from the IP address 80.227.44.122, a quick look up on which reveals that this IP too, belongs to Dubai, UAE. Of course it isn’t a coincidence.

That’s right. He called his own company damned.