Blog :: 'PariveshaNa'

It had been quite sometime since I ordered books online. The books I ordered two days back with three different Indian online shopping websites reached here the same day and almost at the same time! Looks like there's some cut-throat competition between them now.
While flipkart was really quick and professional in shipping (and notifying about the shipment), indiaplaza had the books at best prices. Their notification system is quite good as well. However, their package is colossal addition to waste considering I had to throw away more than 8 dirty plastic covers for just four books that I ordered. Hope those will get recycled! The bubble wrap can be reused.
Flipkart's bubble wrap envelope reached clean. The bubble wrap envelope they packaged the book with, can be reused if torn open in a proper way.
It is nice to be able to order books after searching them or reading about those online, however it is sad that it adds up to as much plastic and packaging waste. Maybe sometime in future, jute bags would replace these.

Google India paid local companies/agencies to test and use their Indian language translation tool. The platform they chose was Wikipedia.

What happened next was disastrous. Especially on Kannada Wikipedia.

Rumors spread that "You get paid for writing on Wikipedia". The regular  contributors felt discouraged as they continued to contribute as volunteers while others, the translators commissioned by agencies were getting paid pretty well.

Google was actually paying the agencies, translators who used their translation tool to translate articles from English Wikipedia to the Indian language projects.

A rather rare photo that has ShishunaLa Shariff and Govinda Bhatt. I captured this from a photo at poet H S Venkateshamurthy's place.

Note: The quality of photo ain't that good.

Going by the description on the photo, ShishunaLa Shariff is the second one from right - last row.

Being someone who's behind the camera for most part, a photo of me with the camera in my hand is a rare and memorable shot. Here's one:

Photo: Wikimedia Isreal

Back home from Haifa. Wikimania 2011 was excellent.

It was great to meet Wikipedians from all over the world. There's plenty to take forward from the event.

A special thanks to Wikimedia Israel for the marvellous event. I heard from others that this one has been the best Wikimania to the date. I haven't been to any of the previous events, but this one was quite an event in terms of planning and organization. It was the best.