Google is going after new revenue streams and old media is snoring on their archives. Times of India has an century worth of archives..

NYT’s TimesPeople Social Network Tops 100,000 Users (NYT)

Impressive growth in less than 100 days! News does have a role to play in social networking and vice versa. Watch this space

Crain Closes Financial Week Print Mag; Now Online Only | paidContent.org

More print media are moving online as print costs go up.

Many thanks to Steve Rubel for the links.

Tribune Co. Mulling Bankruptcy – BusinessWeek

If Tribune does file for bankruptcy it would significant low point for the industry and a shift in the direction of where the industry is headed.. It was meant to happen but it still does hit you when it does.

The Medium – Content and Its Discontents – NYTimes.com

A fabulous write-up and analysis of whats wrong with current state of journalism and where its headed to! Kudos to the author.

NewAssignment.Net | an experiment in open-source reporting

An interesting experiment with the cutting edge phone. Nokia is the market leader in India. I am sure people would sign up and contribute if the right tools are available at the right time ..

CNN Cuts Entire Science, Tech Team : CJR:

I have watched Miles O’ Brien time and again, a fabulous reporter! As media organizations trim down in the US its only a sign of the times & a good lesson for the indian television industry to learn from. I hope we do.

The New York Times Clutters Up Its Homepage With Links From Elsewhere (In Beta)

Interesting model for news aggregation. NYTimes understands that the users are looking for options and cannot control them. If you ask us its a brilliant move.. NYTimes wants to become the start page for news.. Thoughts?

Mauj Takes FHM Mobile | MediaNama

Mobile News in India is becoming a pretty fragmented market without a clear revenue model in sight. Not many mobile users use these VAS services. Do you?

The automated posting from delicous is not working. We contacted delicious support and it appears that its a known problem, so please pardon the delay. The news industry is transforming… And we have front row seats to this generational shift.

More links on the way..

As more people get online(Rural+Urban) and when there is more mainstream and user generated content, there would be handful of startups like Baidu in China addressing the information glut problem.(Think local language search + aggregation and filtering tools). A tool like TaaZZa would be more relevant and thrive in such a scenario.
Web 2.0 In India

We think Dinesh Tantri hit the nail on the head! Wham! It is very easy to fall into the traditional way of thinking and continue to offer news from a national perspective. *Almost* all web media enterprises within the Indian space and world market fall into this category. Most of these sites take the approach of going top down or bottom up, by which i mean
• National media tend to concentrate on national news and interestings news stories (Top Down)
• Local media tend to focus on local news and other national news (Bottom up)
Which is precisely why neither of these approaches have succeeded! Which is why people have look at 2 news sources atleast. The oppurtunity lies in smoothening the differences or taking a radically different approach to cater news to a person’s needs.

Again, there are at-least two approaches that are being taken as far as we have seen

• One is to take a list of feeds that the user reads and analyze them to understand the list of topics that one is interested in. This assumes that the user is an avid RSS user which substationally reduces the audience that you are catering to. (Tailrank.com)
• The other is to track what the user clicks and rates and implicitly recognize the interest. Although this expands the audience base, We are not sure if this would work. Only time will tell.

At the Taazza, we will be taking a totally different approach to personalization, which is different from either of these approaches. More to come later! But nonetheless, a thought provoking post by Dinesh! Kudos!

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TaaZZa stands out from the lot with their design.
Web 2.0 in India

Thanks! One of the founding principles of Taazza is to provide a simple yet elegant design to the end user.

Taazza looks interesting. But again, it’s interesting because I know what is googlemap, what is tag etc. And again from their screenshots, it looks like their target audience is indians amongst the 50k subscribers of techcruch, and which is not our target audience. However, it’d be interesting to see how it goes when they launch it.
BarcampMumbai – 4

Beg to differ with the whole notion of branding Taazza with web 2.0 terminology. Sure, we utilize web 2.0 technology but it is only incidental. News is about people, places and categories. Everyone understands tags and categories. So the argument doesn’t hold up!

• As more people get online(Rural+Urban) and when there is more mainstream and user generated content, there would be handful of startups like Baidu in China addressing the information glut problem.(Think local language search + aggregation and filtering tools). A tool like TaaZZa would be more relevant and thrive in such a scenario. I haven’t had a chance to look at TaaZZa yet but I am waiting to see how different it would be from TailRank kind of a service that helps me keep track of most popular India centric feeds based on my browsing habits? By the way, I enjoyed Amit Ranjan’s review of TaaZZa .
• Web 2.0 In India

There are lot of differentiators from Tailrank, we will get into the details at a later post. Keep your fingers crossed we are working diligently to release soon.

Thanks for all the link love! But keep them coming.. A few teasers coming your way soon! So stay tuned!

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