A one-stop shop for PR folks accessing bloggers

 Here is how bloggers are getting together to engage with PR folks.My friend Ajay Jain at TechGazing is doing this.

The site is http://www.blognewsroom.com

Wow! Can micropayments rescue folks from Loser Generated Content?

DEMO: Bringing Micropayments to User-Generated Content

via GigaOM by Stacey Higginbotham on 9/8/08

As a business journalist, I have to confess that I love it when money starts changing hands. I can get excited about all sorts of new and upcoming technology, but until people can find ways to create real value and get paid, it's kind of hard to take seriously, like the 25-year-old married to your 60-year-old boss. So that's why two startups launching at DEMO caught my eye.

Photrade is a platform on which photographers can post pics and track their use across the web. As part of that tracking, they can set fees for their photos and/or control which sites can use them. If the photo has been taken from the Photrade site, licenses can be revoked and updated at will. There are a few problems with this model, such as convincing people to use it in the first place — both to put quality images on it and pay for said images — but it's a step in the right direction.

The other is MixMatchMusic, which not only enables online musical collaboration between artists and but payment for such collaborations. The service takes a recorded track of music, analyzes it and suggests other music on the site that might compliment it. Musicians can use this to collaborate remotely, or meet musicians whose work they like. They can also create entire songs on the site and list them for download or commercial use. If someone buys the music, musicians get 85 percent of the revenue. Again, the site will have to get both buyers and sellers to particpate.

We hear plenty about all the people willing to work solely for their 15 minutes of fame on the web, and so far most efforts to help people cash in on their 15 minutes have fallen flat, but it's good to see startups trying hard to address this problem. Maybe users will start taking them up on the solutions.

Future of FM radio-- a hilarious statement of truth

From Vineet Singh Hukmani, CEO of Radio One.
I really loved this.

Death of the 30-second (prime-time) commercial?

Now I am right, now I am not.

I was only a month ago wondering if I had spent three years predicting the end of prime-time (as we know it) to eat my words.

Then I thought that live TV will stay with a prime-time kind of feel (I still do).

Now I think could still be right either way. Anything that is recordable need not necessarily be watched live, and hence, the bulk of entertainment programmes will fall into this category.
For instance, now, viewers switch between channels when there is an ad on --while advertisers have to struggle to keep them viewing. With digital video recorders and time-shifted TV programmes, people will concentrate more on the content, with flexibility of viewing more than ever before.
Read this story on the death of the 30-second commercial for more on what things are headed for.

H.Y. Sharada Prasad R.I.P.

Does the name H.Y. Sharada Prasad mean anything to you?
To a whole generation of journalists, it was synonymous with Indira Gandhi, to whom he was a media advisor. Amazing how the next generation cannot even recall such names. All things must pass, yes.


From sans serif by churumuri on 9/2/08

sans serif announces with deep regret the passing away of Holenarsipur Yoganarasimha Sharada Prasad, aka H.Y. Sharada Prasad, the legendary Mysorean who served as media advisor to three prime ministers of India, in New Delhi, on Tuesday, 2 September 2008. He was 84 years old, and is survived by his wife Kamalamma, and two sons.

"Shourie", as Sharada Prasad was known to relatives and close friends, was born in Bangalore, educated at the University of Mysore and jailed during the Quit India movement. He joined the Indian Express group in Bombay in 1945, and was a Neiman fellow in journalism at Harvard University in 1955-56.

He edited Yojana, the journal of the Planning Commission, after which followed his stints at the prime minister's office between 1966-78 and 1980-88, under Indira Gandhi and later Rajiv Gandhi. During the Janata government, he worked with Morarji Desai for a few months before being posted as director of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC).

The ultimate exemplar of the "Mysore School of Writing"—not too light, not too heavy—that R.K. Narayan, R.K. Laxman, T.S. Satyan among others exemplify, Sharada Prasad wrote books on Karnataka (Exploring Karnataka with Satyan), on the Rashtrapati Bhavan (The Story of the President's House), and on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (Selected Works).

Is the browser the new desktop?

Remember that old slogan, "Network is the computer?"...that was Sun Microsystems' paradigm-shifting slogan that showed the end of the desktop-based PC era.
Now, with the Internet and Google's announcement of the new browser called Chrome, the new slogan could well be: "The browser is the desktop"
Tremendous implications for your future -- and that of Microsoft and a lot else that we do in a connected world.

Here is the story.

The implications: Before long you won't be reaching out to open an MS Office or any other word-processing/spreadsheet and possibly, even presentation files. You could do it the way you bookmark a page on a browser and publishing directly to the Net.
I am already doing it thanks to a plug-in, but all this is going to be made easier, intuitive and above all, a habitual and cultural thing.