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Journalism of Courage
If you own a company, decide to set up the Website mycompany.com and find that someone else has already registered it, are you seriously expected to pay big money to take it off them? Should you have to go to court to get what is clearly yours, by every standard of natural justice? That8217;s one of the major questions exercising online hearts and minds this year.
There8217;s been a gold rush on the Internet, with small operators registering domains related to events in advance, and then either running parallel shows themselves or offering to sell out.
People the world over have realised that the quality of an address on the Internet is as defining a criterion as that of a street address. The 20008242; in Sydney2000 is the city8217;s business district, not just the date of the Olympics. Similarly, somebody in the ad business would be more comfortable with an address at madisonave.com than at boilerplate.com.
Where you live has a lot to do with who you are, and tells people where you8217;re coming from when you8217;ve barely got a toe in the door. And when a well-defined address also happens to be connected to an event which will bring viewers, and therefore advertisers, in droves the guy who runs it stands to make a killing.
So it is depressing that only one Indian operator has had the imagination to take out a site pegged to the celebrations for the 50th year of Independence. MediaWeb, based in Noida, near Delhi, has registered India50 india50.com.
Apparently, the idea had been in the pipeline for a year and a half, when the company was formed. That8217;s foresight for you. Features include The Indian Emigre8217;, a virtual photo-essay spanning the globe, Contact India8217;, for people who have drifted apart and would like to get back together a forum for children, and live audio feed from Freedom Music Yatra II at the Taj.
The mainstream celebrations will, naturally, be covered as well. Later, the freedom motif will be sustained by discussions on civil and human rights, and free speech online. Going by the interest generated by the celebrations in the traditional media overseas, India50.com ought to be getting a fair number of hits in August.
Most of the events are sponsored and should be attractive for corporates, who can have their own home pages on the site at a 50 per cent reduction. MediaWeb already serves a decent basket of companies, including ICI, HCL Corp and Bharti Enterprises, and should have no trouble attracting custom. The pages will be up until 15 August 1998, when the official celebrations close, and then they can be converted to standalone Websites.
Other Indian operators, too, are running celebration pages, but no one seems to have an event-based address. Rediff on the Net, for instance, has excellent stuff on everyone from Baba Amte through Sam Maneckshaw to Mridula Sarabhai, but it8217;s all under the Rediff hierarchy.
Not a very mnemonic address, and therefore much more difficult and irritating to find or get back to. Other sites, like allindia.com/india50, suffer from the same drawback.
Finally, of course, the foreign sites are likely to do better business than the ones here. Sad, but true. India has less than 50,000 Internet users. Overseas, there are several million. They8217;ll go for familiar brands established publishers on the exotic East like Rough Guides roughguides.com, who already have an India 50 project up andrunning.
