Broadcasting news, Manipur style
A great example of community news broadcasts comes to us from a little village in Manipur, where some villagers have got together to do a daily morning broadcast of news culled from local newspapers. No radio, no license. They simply use a microphone, four loudspeakers and very crude PA system. Such is the broadcast’s popularity, that the villagers have taken to structuring their lives around the broadcast. Read more of this PANOS Relay feature here.
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1 minute read | 75 words
TV as babysitter! How about 24 hour TV channel for babies?
As products proliferate marketers will research and find the smallest niche available. First videos, then Tv programming and now 24 hour channel dedicated to babies under 3. In-womb will be next! Or is it already out there? Fortunately there are pockets of sanity – see this Associated Press Story
France’s broadcast authority has banned French channels from airing TV shows aimed at children under 3 years old, to shield them from developmental risks it says television viewing poses at that age.
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1 minute read | 153 words
Community radio: grappling with forms
I eat my words. Okay not all of them. But at least the ones in the last blog where I cribbed about the WPC site. It turns out that the site has all the links – just that none of them show up when you access the site using Mozilla Firefox. Or for that matter if you’re using a version of Internet Explorer that is less than 5.5.
Since I am guilty of the first offence (I was forcibly evicted from my comfortable but limited IE existence and made to learn Firefox), no wonder nothing showed up.
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3 minute read | 433 words
Community radio: at the mercy of a shoddy website
Here we are, at the receiving end of a Letter of Intent from the Ministry of Communications informing us that they were considering the possibility of bestowing upon us a community radio license for Gurgaon. Cheers went around, and we then gleefully typed up the URL that we had been asked to visit to register online (http://www.wpc.dot.gov.in/). There was no offline option. A diktat had been passed - all applications had to be done online, followed by the printed version being sent off to the Ministry.
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3 minute read | 478 words
Community radio: ready for a recce
The NGO I work with (not for), The Restoring Force (TRF), has received the preliminary Letter of Intent from the Ministry informing TRF that it has been granted a license to start a community radio station in Gurgaon. Considering TRF’s existing work in government schools in Gurgaon, especially in the area of career counselling and infrastructure development, it seems appropriate to focus, at first, on this area alone.
Having taken on the demanding yet exciting challenge of getting the radio station off the ground for TRF, I’m dazzled by the possibilities of this medium.
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3 minute read | 578 words
Refusing to serve underage customers?
If you were running a bar, would you refuse to serve an underage customer? Would you make systems to prevent the serving of alcohol to children? How about if you sold cigarettes in your store? What about adult content – either in your store or on your website?
What if you were a social networking site? Would you do something to prevent the eight-year-olds from registering?
I know all of these are not exact parallels, but the fundamental idea is the same.
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2 minute read | 305 words
Google Trends & Google Insights -- Social Science Toolbox
I have been using Google Trends for some time now – for work and sometimes just for fun! Trust me it can be fun and educational. You can tell a lot about what is going on in people’s minds and you can even break it down by geographies.
Consider the word ‘terrorism’ for instance. Trends shows that steadily people’s preoccupation with it seems to have declined over the years. Search volume is much higher in India than in the USA.
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2 minute read | 270 words
E-mail newsletter sold for $125 million?
Aimed at stylish women, Daily Candy is being bought by Comcast Corp for an estimated $125 million. According to Philly.com Daily Candy “delivers more than 2.5 million e-mail subscriptions through local editions in 12 key U.S. cities, including Philadelphia and New York”.
Is $50 per “loyal subscriber” a good price?
“We’re trying to build a large presence online as more and more of our customers look to the Web for entertainment and content.
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1 minute read | 111 words
What does a heart attack feel like?
It does not always feel like what you may have seen in the movies or on TV. Sometimes it can even feel like a bad case of indigestion.
Interesting story in Guardian quoting a British Heart Foundation (BHF) survey that found that four out of 10 people get information about heart attacks from movies or TV and that can be “dangerously misleading and because of it, many of us ignore the real symptoms until it is too late.
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2 minute read | 232 words
Social Networking for Kids
Most major social networking sites require their users to be at least 13 years old. Anyone who has kids knows that the kids are all over Facebook, MySpace and Orkut. Of course the kids fake it, because they want the ‘social networking’, but don’t have anywhere else to go. And we know that they are at a place they shouldn’t be, and most of us can offer no alternatives…
To create a safe social networking platform for kids eight to 13 requires some doing.
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1 minute read | 164 words
Corporate websites: cater to media
It’s part of my job as the editor of an industry-specific magazine to visit corporate websites in search of company information, contacts, and images. Some companies are large multinational conglomerates with head offices in Europe or the USA; others are much smaller entrepreneurial efforts trying to leverage visibility for their company through the web.
All, without exception, fail to cater to that harried journalist rushing to meet deadlines, and in search of a company logo, or image that can go with a story or feature.
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2 minute read | 363 words
Trek to Chandratal -- the moon lake
Freezing temperatures, mutinous children and kindergarten values
Educational consultant Ajay Jaiman, 40, trekked to Chandratal over the Dussehra break last year with three other families—the Bhattacharyas, the Chopras and the Chakrabartis—ranging in age from 7 to 51. Despite a recent heart attack, which has postponed a high-altitude lake expedition this summer, he has not given up on physically demanding outdoor breaks
Click on any image to view an enlarged image gallery I like to be outdoors when on vacation.
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6 minute read | 1229 words
#photography, #photo-features, #adventures, #himachal pradesh, #hiking, #trekking, #walking, #spiti, #trek