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.

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In the end, who benefits from online anonymity?

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“Buud Light” indeed!

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Are people ready to let it out?
Turns out, all it takes is a good listener and a box of Kleenex tissues.

- and an addictive soundtrack - ‘Let It Out’ by Starrfadu -

Do you want to lay your head on my shoulder?
I don’t mind if you cry.
Sometimes we all just need to let it out.

Just let your tears run down my arm,
So I can keep them in a blue jar.
We’ll drink them later, so just let it out.
Let it out.

Let’s take a walk just to clear our heads.
I don’t mind that you’re holding my hand.
You say you love me, so just let it out.
Let it out.

Your smile is a pleasant change from before,
When you thought that you couldn’t take anymore.
Sometimes we all just need to let it out.
Let it out. Let it out.

- the new Kleenex ‘Let It Out‘ ad campaign has a lot going for it.

The US version of the ad (via Patrix via StyleStation) by JWT is more ‘talky’ -

- while the UK version of the ad relies more on the soundtrack -

Starrfadu was started in the fall of 2001 by singer/songwriter Austin Hartley with drummer Brian Moody and bassist Dave Martin.

In 2002 the band released their first four track EP entitled, ‘The Joys in Feeling Sorry for Yourself’. In March of 2005 they released their first full-length album, entitled Narrow Road to Silence.

The band specializes in a meld of acoustic and electric rock, tempered by Hartley’s warm vocals and greatly influenced by Brit rock, Indie bands and faith. In fact, they can be best classified as a Christian Indie Folk-Rock band.

Here’s the story of how Starrfadu was featured in the Kleenex ad -

Kleenex and its marketing team had already come up with the idea for a ‘Let It Out’ campaign and went looking for a song to fit the ads. Hartley says they found Starrfadu via Google and iTunes, where the band’s music is available for download. They contacted the band in April, and the ads began airing in the U.S. and Great Britain this month. (link)

- and here’s the story of how Hartley wrote the song itself -

“My wife used to say, ‘Why don’t you write something sweet and romantic? I know you can do it, but you don’t do it in music,” Hartley says. “And I thought, ‘What’s there to do in a love song that hasn’t already been done?’”

So Hartley sat down to write a love song and came up with ‘Let It Out’, which implores a loved one to open up and let their emotions come out. And he found something that hadn’t been done before. It came in the form of a lyric about tears running down his arm and into a blue jar. (link)

Yet the song almost went unrecorded. It was accidentally deleted after one recording session, and Hartley says the band didn’t even want to put it on the album. But people had responded to it at shows, so they decided to re-record it at the last minute. “Now we look back and say, ‘Oh, man, who knew what a big decision that was at the time,” Hartley says. (link)

Listen to more of Starrfadu - including ‘Let It Out’ - on their website or on their MySpace page.

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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 -

Certain ads in the ‘Switch’ campaign also featured celebrities, such as Tony Hawk, DJ Q-Bert, Yo-Yo Ma, Kelly Slater, Will Ferrell, and the members of De La Soul.

And you know what - there’s a desi in tere too!

When you have a great ad campaign, how can you not have great parodies?

Hilarious!

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He was demoted, then lost his job, and couldn’t pay his mortgage. His wife divorced him, his children disowned him and his blogger-mistress left him.

But he was happy – he had his blog.

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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

Desipundit is worth $150,167.64

Mumbai Metblogs is worth $124,198.80

And just to put it all in perspective, Boing Boing is worth $11,780,256.18!

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Valuation, Blogs, Indian Blogosphere, Lists

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 From Gapingvoid 

That I already have too many unresolved high-school issues, I have decided to let this be my only post today.

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RICKSHAW-SHAYARI POSTSCRIPT

Ay admi! Haram khana chhor dey.

Tyre mehngay hain, race lagana chhor dey.

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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.

Where PutVote scores, however, is in its content and its sense of community. The choice of words is engaging (“You Putting Vote, Computer Selecting!”) and Kinsley/ Chandrachoodan comment on a lot of stories. Both these factors help in creating a sense of community. As Kingsley says:

When you go to PutVote.com, we want you to not only enjoy our really immature humor,we also want you to find the same bloggers you enjoy reading already, sharing the new cool things that they’ve found. So it’s not about the concept, it’s about the the community.

Guys, if that’s what you wanted to do, you are already digging it quite well.

Check what DesiPundit, Neha Viswanathan, Varnam, Gilli, Selective Amnesia and Snap Judgement have to say about PutVote.

For the sake of completeness, there is also IndiaHappenning and Humdigg, but more about them in an update.

And finally, do check out this cute post on digging it by Dhoomketu. 

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55-FICTION POSTSCRIPT

“Weblogs offers bloggers $1,000 per month for their social-bookmarking rights.”  

$1000. $1000. $1000. The number repeated in his mind, multiplied like a viral code. 

He thought of his yacht moored on the trendy Mediterranean coast, the Dom Pérignon flute in his hand and the bevy of beauties around him… and posted another link at PutVote.

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