My personal blog - a space where I plan to publish everything that I can’t here on finaltag.com - has officially launched. http://pranavchavda.com Expect my thoughts about life, spirituality, tech, etc. Subscribe with caution.

My apologies for the off-topic post, however, since the official google blog hasn’t a commenting feature, posting this here so that I can leave a trackback. Google announced a couple days ago the launch of what they call “Indic” language support - with transliteration facilities for english to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tamil.

In response to google’s post titled Building the Indic Web : The latter three languages are actually Dravidian languages, you can’t term them Indic! “Indic” refers to Indian languages of the Indo-European/Indo-Aryan family - The ones that use the Dev Nagri script or it’s derivatives. South Indian languages are a completely different family of languages. The term “Indic” refers to Sanskrit and it’s Prakrits, such as Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi (Funny how all prakrits end with an “i” as the last letter of the name of the language). This, obviously, does not include the four south-Indian languages - i.e Tamil, Kannada, Malyalam and Telugu. The only place to the south of India to use an Indic Language is Sri-Lanka with it’s non-tamil population speaking sinhalese which is very similar to Dev-Nagri.

FinalTag, the blog that journals the evolution of e-business, is a continuously evolving blog.

It is true that I wasn’t posting much over the last few months, and the blog has become a not very active area of the web lately. Earlier today, I decided to change that.

I am going to re-establish my enthusiasm in blogging, reading (my rss feeds, that is), and participating in the social media in general.

To help with the blogging part, FinalTag has been upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 and decorated with “The morning after” - one of the best wordpress themes I have seen - created by my friend Arun Kale.

Did you know I mantain a link blog? I’ll be including content from there as”Asides” on this blog (Asides are tweet like micro-posts with or without a link that appear on the home page), so that will keep the blog alive even when I am not posting.

That’s it from me for now, Until the next post, Tata!

Today, 15th of August 2007 marks the 60th year of India’s Independence from foreign rule and the birth of the world’s largest democracy.

Happy Independence day, All!

Enjoy your freedom while it lasts - before (you vote for) the communists to rule the country in the next elections.

That’s According to the WSJ:

The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger, are imperfect exercises. Others, such as David Winer, who blogged with Scripting News, and Cameron Barrett, who started CamWorld, were alongside the polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard. And before them there were “proto-blogs,” embryonic indications of the online profusion that was to follow. But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form.

Happy Blogiversary!

(from the six month old blog - FinalTag.com to all Bloggers and Blog readers worldwide!)

It’s 4 AM in the morning on the 4th of July here in India as I type this.

So, From a citizen of a free country to the citizens of a country that has defined for others the meaning of freedom - Happy Independence day!

GoDaddy.com, the leading registration company for Internet addresses, has agreed to take over and manage more than 850,000 domain names belonging to customers of a troubled rival, officials announced Tuesday.

This is good news, I had a few domains stuck with registerfly that hopefully will be on godaddy soon. That would make much easier to transfer them to another registrar - which was very difficult to do with registerfly.

The full AP news story here

I saw the the web cast of the event where Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, now nearly six months ago. At that time, I wanted to buy it right away if I could, but it seems now that Apple did the wrong thing by announcing the iPhone so ahead of it’s actual launch date.

The “reality distortion field” has begun to fade and i don’t want an iPhone any more - not unless the iPhone has something truly ground breaking feature that my PDA phone does not have, and such a thing, if the iPhone has it, wasn’t announced back in January.

I don’t think I am going to buy an iPhone next year when it comes to this part of the planet.

A couple of hours ago, I had a fierce argument with my dad (who is also the managing director of my company)
Our’s is a private limited company, which means, we can sell and/or distribute company stock privately, without being listed in a stock exchange, etc.

Dad suggest that we should distribute some of the stock to the company’s employees, to motivate them for working harder and better - Not as an incentive, just as a benefit for working here, a number of shares allotted as per the employee’s post. I was strongly against this.

I am of the opinion that making employees partners would be a terrible mistake and can result in a lot of bad things - it will make employees work less in terms of the quantity of work done and less efficiently in terms of work quality rather than more.

If a partnership is given without having to work for it first, it will be much less valued than if one actually earns that position by sticking with the company long enough and being a radically important factor in it’s growth, adding their visions to those of the founders and all that.

Being in the performance marketing industry since as long as I can remember, I am strongly for identifying employee performance and offering incentives based on that - and we already do that, the system here is to offer incentives to each employee after they have stayed six months at the job, based not only on their performance, but also the performance of the company overall - maybe this system needs some re-structuring and the incentives should be based on broader factors etc…

Anyway, as I was thinking about this; co-incidence, as it happens, happened.

Hugh Mcleod, explained all my thoughts in this cartoon that he posted on his blog.

I’m addicted to twitter, and today’s post will be twitter style, a few “tweets” in this post. Each less than 140 characters.

• More affiliate programs starting affiliate blogs every day - the latest is Kodak - http://kodakaffiliate.blogspot.com
• Ebay to roll out a brand new feedback system - http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m04/i26/s01
• Affiliate marketing jagron - http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/glossary-of-affiliate-marketing-terms/
• [social network] Web 2.0 site lets users send virtual scratch cards -
• http://www.prweb.com//releases/web2-0/sweepstakes/prweb522060.htm
• The Google reader theme is very cool!
• New BumpZee! Features
• Top 10 reasons why web 2.0 sucks

Was just browsing my Bumpzee! Feeds and came across this post that I am pretty excited about. Cricket is what everyone is talking about here in India, the world cup semi-finals have started, after all!

And there is a website that I came to know about only now, that sells lots of stuff related to the game, and it also has an affiliate program!

I’m signing up! Unfortunately, the website says “We do not ship outside of the UK.” which means I won’t be able to buy from them, only sell. Oh well.

1. My Blog post about how I lost my blogging armour at a shopping mall in India
2. The Trouble With India - Businessweek article about how businesses just can’t do business the way they are supposed to in India
3. Om Malik Replies to the businessweek article, says: One man’s traffic jam, is another’s opportunity. That is exactly what I take away from Business Week’s latest cover package

Wile the first post in the meme talks about the problems for individuals running small and very small businesses and the cultural and security problems faced, the second and third posts talk about infrastructure and other issues.
The bottom line, however, is that there are two Indias - one at the very top and another exactly opposite to that place - the problem, is when these two Indias clash, it’s quite a mess.