Gauravonomics Blog

A few hours at the Indian consulate in New York induced a rare rant from Seth Godin -

Many of the chairs are broken, leaving sharp steel platforms on which to crouch. And there aren’t enough chairs, broken or not. The signs are confusing, the two clerks are protected by a sheet of glass a full inch thick (which is twice the thickness of a typical bank’s) and the little machine that dispenses deli-style tickets is broken.

When Seth Godin is in India, which he is presumably going to be, someone should take him to the US consulate to check if getting a US visa in India is a more pleasant experience than getting an Indian visa in the US. I have a suspicion that the visit will inspire another, even more spirited, rant from him.

Check out this cute Super Bowl Bud Light ad with comedian Carlos Mencia teaching a group of immigrants the regional American accents (via Manish) -

“Buud Light” indeed!

I stumbled onto Apple’s ‘Switch‘ ad campaign when I watched the Ellen Feiss commercial at Kiruba’s blog -

The campaign - which first aired in 2002 - featured what the company referred to as ‘real people’ who had ’switched’ from the PC to the Mac.

The commercial featuring Ellen Feiss became an internet phenomenon, partly because of speculation that Feiss was under the influence of illicit drugs during the filming of the commercial, due to her slurred speech and disoriented eyes. She denied these claims and ascribed the ‘drugged’ behaviour to the effect of the Benadryl cough syrup, together with exhaustion.

Feiss’s popularity grew to the point where she was offered appearances on both David Letterman’s and Jay Leno’s late night shows, both of which she turned down. In September 2005, Feiss made her movie acting debut in the French short film ‘Bed and Breakfast’. Ellen recently spoke about the making of the ad, and its effect on her life, in an interview.

Here is the 2002 Joy of Tech cartoon entitled ‘Mona Switcher’ that was based on Ellen -

Here’s the other Ellen Feiss commercial that was never aired -

My blog is worth $16,936.20.
How much is your blog worth?

Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, Dane Carlson of Business Opportunities has created this little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays a blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

My blog is worth $16,936.20.

Here’s what a few popular Indian personal blogs are worth:

Amit’s India Uncut is worth $461,793.72

Rashmi’s Youth Curry is worth $346,063.02

Gaurav’s Vantage Point is worth $209,444.34

Great Bong’s Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind is worth $204,363.48

Annie’s Known Turf is worth $186,862.74

Kiruba’s blog is worth $176,136.48

Neha’s Within & Without is worth $149,038.56

Jai’s  Jabberwock is worth $128,150.58

Kaps’ Sambhar Mafia is worth $103,875.36

Sonia’s blog is worth $93,713.64

Patrix’s Nerve Endings Firing Away is worth $78,471.06

Sakshi’s  To Each His Own is worth $75,083.82

Chandrachoodan’s Selective Amnesia is worth $72,261.12

Nilu’s Recursive Hypocrisy is worth $36,695.10

Of the popular Indian group blogs,

Sepia Mutiny is worth $380,499.96

Desicritics is worth $270,979.20

Pickled Politics is worth $219,041.52

From Gapingvoid 

These are interesting days in the world of social bookmarking. Diigo is trying to position itself as an alternative to both del.icio.us and Digg, Weblogs is willing to pay bloggers $1,000 a month for their social bookmarking rights, and two very active Indian bloggers - Kingsley and Chandrachoodan - have started ‘PutVote’.

Now, PutVote is not the first indian social bookmarking site; Indian Pad, Indiagram and Forums of India have existed in the Indian blogosphere for a while.

I started an experiment about a week back and submitted the same stories (55-fiction pieces from my blog) in all these four sites. The idea was to track the relative number of responses from the four sites. In six days, India Pad generated 156 hits, PutVote 27 hits, Indiagram 7 hits and Forums of India 3 hits. Evidently, Indian Pad seems to be the most popular of the four sites in terms of traffic.

In terms of appearance and functionality, Indian Pad once more is the best (but also the most impersonal with an off-puttingly high amount of porn), Indiagram is OK, PutVote is work-in-progress and Forums of India is quite bad.