Play and donate

On FREE Rice you can donate rice by playing vocabulary quiz. I came to know about it from Sandesh's blog. It's an interesting initiative and the web page is very simple and effective.

It's a UN initiative to let people play vocabulary based quiz and for every correct answer 10 grains of rice are donated. Donations go to UN World Food Program .

It also informs that approximately 3.8 billion grains have been donated since its launch on 07-Oct. I donated too and would suggest others to spend 5 minutes out of a few hours of monitoring cricket scores on the net or while chatting with your friends.

Deviating a little from the main topic and looking at the two aspects of the
website.

Vocabulary:

I don't think such a quick quiz can improve one's vocabulary substantially. It
takes time for an individual to assimilate new words and such time does not exist in this case. But, it could still be used as a refreshment from busy schedule or to gauge your vocabulary levels. If you try taking away just 2 words a day then some lingual gains could be made as well.

Donation:

UN being the most respected organization when it comes to world development, I cannot challenge the effectiveness of this initiative. But, I have doubts about how much rice registered on the servers actually translates to real rice? And then we all know about the rest of the delivery chain and how much will reach the end! Going by the 3.8 billion figure, it translates into approximately 3,80,000 KG of rice, assuming 10 grains would weigh 1 gram. Per capita consumption of rice in Indian urban areas is around 4.7 Kg per month. Considering higher consumption in other countries, in less than 3 months this program should have donated rice to feed 70 to 80 thousand people for 1 month. I doubt so many people would have been freed from hunger. But it is worth spending a few minutes every day for a fraction of that.

So go ahead and spend a few minutes.

Yahoo can do but Google cannot!

Nice post on digital inspiration which lists some of the the things Yahoo search can do but Google cannot.

Blocked

Though I am not one of those regular bloggers who writes everyday or once in every 2 days, but i do visit my blog regularly to visit other blogs on my blogroll. Out of so many times I visit the blog I do write a few times.

Here in China my blog used to get blocked and unblocked every now and then. I knew it was the government which was blocking blogspot.com but this time the block has lasted for more than 2 weeks and after I read this Going global? Prepare to play by local rules yesterday on the fastcompany site, I relaized it might be more official this time. And then this ain't India where the media can shout slogans against the government , go to the streets and demand for freedom of speech. This is china where government(the party) decides and public follows(has to follow).

Interestingly the authoroties seem to have missed something as they have blocked only blogspot.com but not Blogger . So I can still write but not view my blog. Let us see how long this remains open.

Well I am using slimtrust in the meanwhile to view the not accesible links. Which primarily includes blogspot and wikipedia.

Orkut turns more Indian

I am not saying, "Orkut turns Indian" because there are lot of Indians using orkut. But, it is interesting to see that till yesterday on the home page of orkut there was not even a single picture of an Indian among the 8 pictures of some smiling people.



Today I check the same page and see that 4 of those 10 smiling people are Indians.



This number is quite high as compared to the actual number of Indian on Orkut, which is around 14% of the total Orkut users as on 28 Feb 2007(Orkut on wikipedia).

This is interesting to see that orkut is turning so much of attention to India leaving China. Reason I would attribute to this the fact that it is not just that Google (orkut belongs to google) believes lot more Indians are interested in orkut social networking than Chinese are but it is more because orkut is facing much less competition with other networking sites in India. In India new friends/social networking portals popped up only after a huge success of Orkut where as such things started simultaneously in China, which has made the penetration of google (orkut, youtube, blogspot) a much difficult task than it has in India. Services like these started by Chinese service providers have existed in India for quite sometime before they caught fire in India.

I think there are two important aspects to this:
1. Indians are more visible in global activities these days.
2. But, we need to have more indigenous products (I am not being chauvinistic).

More on that some other time.

Blogger hunt

Great Indian blogger hunt :

ibibo

Though i came across this quite late(i just noticed its ad. on Yahoo yesterday).

It looks interesting since to become a great blogger on ibobo means achievement of a certain score. The score can be increased by adding a new post or by someone's visit or by somebody rating your post.

This is quite hilarious as the best to way to increase your score is by continously adding more and more posts, and that means one must have umpteen amount of free time with 24*7 access to the internet. All you need to do is keep on writing everything and anything into different posts and you end up with a great score.

About ibobo: It is very much like indian version of blogspot. 1 feature that i liked is availabilty of an option for the readers to rate the post. This is a great feedback for some serious bloggers as many times people read but do not comment, but rating is much easier for the reader and possibly there will be more people rating a post than commenting on it.

Rest you can check out!!

Yahoo Answers

Abdul kalam asked solution on terrorism, and then Sri Sri Ravishankar and Leander paes answered him. Kiran Bedi asked something yesterday and now Sri Sri Ravishankar is asking something again.

How come suddenly all the who's who are present on yahoo Answers? I guess because yahoo wants them to be !! isnt it?

What if there is a comment on my Blog by profiles named Amitabh B, Sachin T, Mukesh A, Manmohan S?? I guess that would indicate my bolg is very popular, great content and well read.

It could be so because somebody is just having fun with me!! or may be, it could be because i am having fun with the very few comment readers i have.

It was intersting to notice that Our honourable President sought Yahoo Answers as a medium to communicate with common educated people(because to use yahoo, one needs to be educated). But, it was even more interesting that suddenly some more important people wanted to communicate to the President through yahoo Answers!!

Bottomline: It was a good and innovative idea to advertise through a popular and respected personality via a serious question instead of the so common celebrities. But regular use of similar names will reduce the sheen of surprise it brought to people. Even if new ideas take time to come in, the same successful idea must not be used so frequently that it looses it's value.