Delip Andra's Blog

Few weeks back I had an interesting email discussion today with my friend Bala, Director of Green Card Fever (among the top movies in Indo-American genre) about the impact of blogging on the Media & Entertainment Industry. 

I first met Bala 2 yrs ago when he just started researching on the plot for his next movie project. He came down to Silicon Valley from Hollywood to interview a bunch of us (Indian Immigrants in the Tech Industry). His new movie project seems to be named Blind Ambition.

While the value of Face to Face meetings can not be underestimated – blogs can be effectively used as a good tool to poll the audience and get some good insights while researching on a new movie project. Yes – that’s really true. I recently attended lectures on the New Media and it’s impact on Journalism by John Battelle (the search guru) author of The Search and Dan Gillmor (former San Jose Mercury News fame and a Citizen Journalism evangelist) and the author of We the Media. Both John and Dan mentioned that they used blogging effectively to interact with their audience while writing their books.

News Papers present News as a finished product. Journalism is really an on going conversation and not just a finished product. 24hr News channels have understood this very well and hence they focus a lot on getting the Voices of the man on the street into their News coverage and conversation. New Media tools like blogs enable interactive communications in a much better way. Interestingly News Papers are working to cope up with this trend and are giving a significant face lift to their Websites. NY times recently revamped the Look and Feel of it’s website to make it look like a blog. San Jose Mercury News is trying to bring the readers to participate in the interactive discussions online. I am sure a lot of News Papers will join this band wagon and bring in more interactive features, forums and blogs into their Websites to have an ongoing conversation with their audience.

Past several weeks have been quite busy with lots of stuff happening at Minekey. Hence I didn't post anything on my blog. I am hoping to blog more frequently going forward.

We have made good progress on Alpha. Just recently we moved the Software from an Intel Desktop at IIT to couple of Servers in a Data center in Texas. Now we can do all the needed rigorous testing over the next several weeks to see if the Software delivers the promised results.

Also, I attended a few Lectures, Events and Conferences during the past few weeks. I will summarize my take aways in couple of posts shortly.