Nepal’s internet penetration is 18.28 per cent as of June, 2012, according to Nepal Telecommunication Authority (NTA).
Wow! That’s not bad for a country where the literacy rate is below 60 per cent.
And, most amazing thing is the growth rate of internet users. In 2010, the internet penetration was 3.69 per cent and it was 10.89 per cent in June, 2011. Continue reading…
On Wednesday, Nagariknews.com ran a news story along with a ‘sting operation video’ on the copyright infringement by a well-known cyber business company.
Police arrested the owners of Dreams & Ideas – Dipankar and Abhinav Kasajoo who made name, fame and money through cyber business. They also redefined Nepali modeling industry with their very popular cybersansar.com and made money by developing websites for government agencies and others.
Their greed for money probably was much more and that put them into the illegal business of downloading pirated High Definition (HD) movies through torrents and selling them to customers through a website – givemehd.com (now closed) which lists hundreds of available movie titles.
Nagariknews sting video shows a man posing as a customer visiting the office of Dreams & Ideas and buying a 3D movie with Abhinav himself talking about it and handing a copied movie on external hard drive.
I wonder how they can do this so openly. Didn’t they know that was illegal or they were just trying to ignore? The news surprised many and a lot of people, including those in similar business, have asked me the same question: why they need to do so to earn a little more money?
It becomes even ridiculous with the price of the movie – Rs. 100 (US$ 1.5) for HD movie and Rs. 200 (US$ 3) for a 3D movie. With so many successful sites running, I know they earned a lot of money only through advertisements, and there was absolutely no need for them to go into something illegal.
In Nepal, we could buy a pirated DVD of any English or Hindi movie for Rs. 25 (less than half-a-dollar) anywhere as freely as we could buy a newspaper. Copyright law is not strongly implemented, but that’s not an excuse to anyone to do an illegal business.
Sadly, the Kasajoos are sons of Vinaya Kumar Kasajoo, a noted journalist and writer who is the chief commissioner at the National Information Commission and has been an advocate/expert for online journalism and related issues.
It’s still to see if they are proven guilty or not, but it should go down as a story of greed!
After a long anticipation and a few weeks of jealousy [when others were talking about it and I had not invitation], I finally got to use Google Wave – the great Google’s new project in coming.
I have 20 of my 635 Gmail contacts on Google Wave – most of them are not my regular contacts. So, my use of Google Wave is all about thinking of possibilities and learning about it.
So what I find? Wave is chat + email (including multimedia) + (optional crowdsourcing)! The best use could be for group discussions – as a journalist I say for group reporting or following large scale news like election or natural disaster. Better than using email in such scenario as its just function like group chat.
Threaded email – a great feature introduced by Gmail – looked confusing at the beginning but now I found it a must. This is threaded chat – with more possibilities.
Easier than Facebook to control who can see your updates (or wave). It’s not an alternative to Facebook or Twitter or even Gmail right now – but I feel – that the Google guys have kept all the doors open, as they go on, they will introduce everything and when they will have a good user base they will leave nothing to turn it into the one alternative to all such services!
They don’t have much extensions now but the scope for extensions is unlimited.
Not much of good things right now, but of course, with huge possibility to be ‘a must have’.
The latest buzz is social media connections but I wonder how can journalists use there effectively.
The rise of social networking and microblogging in the recent past has changed the idea of relationship, sharing and remaining connected to each other. In the virtual world of computers and waves, life is almost null without the connections – via web services – to people you know/may know/seem like known.
Friends not in social network or twitter follows are almost forgotten and everything is known about the people in your connection though never physically met or talked. Welcome to the virtual world that’s increasingly having affects on our personal lives in an unprecedented way.
It’s interesting to see how new web services are taken by whelms and people start searching a way to utilize that particular services for their benefits.
The latest buzz is all about social networking (facebook), video sharing (youtube) and microblogging (twitter) and it’s not surprising to find, on the web, articles with best use of these in various fields – business, fight for democracy, organizing protest, promoting events, literature and everything… including journalism.
Twitter, a service that can also be easily updated using mobiles (GPRS/sms), became a source of information for the world, including journalists, for the protest post-election of Iran. Blogs were atop the table during Iraq war and… Nepal’s fight for democracy, but the buzz of blogs seems subsidized for now.
Being in the developing world, for us, has a benefit of itself: watch everything before actual use. Same with social media; journalists in Nepal are hardly using facebook/twitter to aid their works [of course facebook updates are news, news and more news…].
How journalists can use all these connections effectively? That many are looking the answer for and some technology to facilitate. The use of social media connections to aid journalistic works – coined by Publish2 – is social journalism.
How can social connections be used for journalism? Of course, we can follow the updates on what’s happening [be audience first to gather and produce] or we can take the lead from such updates [that could happen, but not very frequently] and more effective ways, I have found, is use it as a tool of information gathering – small inputs from a few friends make it big.
Sharing is also interesting as an audience but many of the journalists hardly practice sharing in a level to help journalists.
For now, for us, the journalists in Nepal – a developing country – life is just connected without many aids to our work [internet still seems elusive to many of us] but the future of journalism – even here – is closely connected: to the social media, to the people we know/may know/seems like know.
I am not very clear on how this all could be done; and I am trying to find out via the social journalism network. If you have any experience, share it.
For the purpose of this entry, Linux refers to Ubuntu – a Debian based linux disto, and XP stands for eXPerience (of course, as in Windows XP).
For litgeeks (the little geeks – in between of geeks and non-geeks) like me, testing new software is always as lucrative as watching a new movie can be. And, then of course there will be a few crashes resulting in hours of re-installation and all every six months or so. Continue reading…
When I began my NepalCricket site, I didn’t bothered to look whether it was first Nepali sports site or not. But now I feel like I should have checked that. It was after around two years that I made an official announcement of the site releasing a press release. At that time, Bhakundo.org.np was a good site for soccer and there was another site for football hosted on geocities. Both are defunct now.
After around four years, the scenario is different with a few more sites but what still lacks is professional sports sites. I believe there has been no substantial development on professionalism with my site but many other sports sites have appeared (some of them have already disappeared too). Continue reading…
Roman to Nepali Unicode Converter launched today is simply a wonderful attempt that will help to grow Nepali language websites.
When I opened the mailbox this morning there was a mail from Nepali Unicode Project. It was about the Roman to Nepali Unicode Converter. I didn’t understand it first but when I visited the website (www.unicodenepali.com), I was amazed to see what it was.
When opened the site is two panes – the left is for typing Nepali in Roman (for example Ma Nepali Hun) and the right pane will convert it into Nepali unicode format. It allows people to type Nepali in Roman and get that in Nepali unicode and I hope this will not only make easy Nepali blogging for the people like me who don’t know Nepali typing. Continue reading…
The population of the blogosphere – the virtual world of the blogs – is 26.1 million. Blog, the shortened form of web-log, was the hottest Internet technology in 2004 which grew and matured in 2005 to become a household name.
The debate of whether blogging is journalism or not is over, as the critics have settled on the pendulum – in some cases, blogging is journalism, and in many, it’s not. The Pulitzer Prizes announced that they would accept online materials along with print ones in its journalism categories, starting with the 2006 competitions.
For many bloggers, blogging is a hobby, something that satisfies their soul by opening up their hearts. But blogs are more than that. Blogs are used for advertising or keeping intact the relations with their customers by corporate offices by what is called corporate blogging, for campaigning or advocacy, and even by many newspapers to tell the audience why something got published and others didn’t.
Instead of writing something, people record their thoughts and put them up (called podcasting) and upload the video (vblog). Blogs primarily are personal sites containing mostly news, called posts or entries, regularly updated, in the form of a diary with most recent posts at the top of the page and allowing visitors to instantly publish their comments. With many free services and tools available for blogging, it can be set up easily and is as easy as creating an email account.
For democratic nations, blogs are the media’s watchdog. In the countries with suppressed media, blogs are heralds of the freedom of expression. During calamities, like hurricanes or tsunamis or earthquakes, they are sources of firsthand information. Blogs are personal, thus biased and subjective. That very characteristic of it makes it better than traditional media in such incidents. What people prefer to read during such calamities – how many died and what are the police and government saying, or how the people are experiencing the incidents? Blogs go for the latter.
In 1998, there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs, so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997. But within a few years, blogs became the buzzword – millions of people turned bloggers. Blog directory sites and blog search engines emerged along with free blog hosting services. Many freeware scripts for bloggings were introduced and the blogosphere was thus formed.
Blogs nowadays are personal identities – if you aren’t blogging, you’re missing something. Blogging is simple and blogging is easy. Blogging gives an individual an opportunity to tell the world what matter to him/her. As the heralds of free expression, blogging can take on any subject in any style and any frequency. That makes blogging popular to millions of people, and it looks like the fever of blogging won’t go down for a few years on.
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Blog jargons
Blog – Short for Weblog: A website that contains written material, links or photos being posted all the time, usually by one individual, on a personal basis.
Blogger – Person who runs a blog.
Blogosphere – All blogs or the blogging community.
Blogroll – List of external links appearing on a blog, often links to other blogs.
Moblog – Contraction of mobile blog: A blog that can be updated remotely from anywhere, such as by phone or a digital assistant.
Permalink – Contraction of permanent link. Web address of each item posted on a blog.
Photoblog – A blog mostly containing photos, posted constantly and chronologically.
Podcasting – Contraction of iPod and broadcasting. Posting audio and video material on a blog and its RSS feed, for digital players.
Post – An item posted on a blog. It can be a message or news or just a photo or a link. Usually a short item, including external links, that visitors can comment on.
RSS feed – The file containing a blog’s latest posts. It is read by an RSS aggregator/reader and shows at once when a blog has been updated.
Trackback – A way that websites can communicate automatically by alerting each other that an item posted on a blog refers to a previous item.
(From Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents published by Reporters Without Borders)
(As published in the CityPost of The Kathmandu Post today.)
This is an absurd question today for many because almost all post-paid mobile phones are ringing. But for me, a man happy with the pre-paid mobile, it’s an important question. My mobile is dead for more than six months, I had almost thought of buying a post-paid one. But an advertisement in newspapers by Nepal Telecom requesting for re-registration of pre-paid mobile gave me a new zeal to find out the already dusted mobile set, to take out the SIM card to find out what 19-digit number it carries on its back, downloading and printing the form, and attesting it by a high-ranked official. All that finished, ready with the form to be submitted, I turned on the mobile to see how its doing and alas! Nothing happened, it wouldn’t turn on neither will accept the charging. Anyway, today I submitted by form, hoping that one day, I don’t know when, will others’ pre-paid mobile ring and I will rush to mobile mechanic with my old set. Continue reading…
After Google acquired Blogger.com and turned it into the most popular blogging service (no wonder a free one), Microsoft stepped up and bagan MSN Spaces (I feel the name is a bit odd) and now Yahoo! has come up with the beta version of its blogging service – Yahoo! 360. It is not yet launched but after the search engine competition, its now time for these giants to move into the ‘Blogwar’.
