Image by Getty Images via @daylife
This post, was in part motivated by Shyam’s incisive commentary on FirstPost. It is promoted by Network18.
First Post primarily remains an “aggregator” of news; perhaps the underlying motivation is SEO tricks of identifying the trending topics and create topical interest by paying “journalists” to create blogs around it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this. Trying to covert the traffic into “unique visitors”, cross promoting it on other media channels and identifying the “trends” to write on issues smacks of Huffington Post‘s tactics.
I personally believe that much of criticism that stems for Huffington Post comes from the mainstream media; possibly they are unable to comprehend the huge gains that this site has made in a short span of time. The owner has been able to do a web alone business, “aggregate” or scrape content, pay out dimes for it’s star bloggers and more important, get the advertising $$$. Hence, it tends to get the ire of the “purists”.
Indians, of course, wish to replicate a proven model. No one, wants to adapt to a new order or invest serious resources in building up a web property that has a lasting value proposition. Top of the mind recall is Techmeme and is my first
Image via CrunchBase
stop everyday in Google Reader to identify the breaking stories as it happens (it utilizes RSS feeds in the background; you could search for it’s leaderboard OPML file on their site to read the stories). A simple implementation (e.g. Webmeme) would have sufficed and promoted it’s journalists to blog independently of the constraints of “mainstream media”.
How is this really concerned with the ethos of the blog? Well, for starters, social internet is all useless hype. Twitter and Facebook are not here to stay; Orkut was a huge failure and Twitter is growing without a service model. It still doesn’t know about advertising nor is
Image via Wikipedia
there any reasonable model to influence it’s evolutiton. Nevertheless, in this internet access challenged country, this is a huge let down.
Perhaps the people behind the product are blissfully unaware of mobile access dominating the landscape (I doubt whether they have a mobile interface optimized) or of the “niche audience” that would be attracted to something like this. However, a cursory glance at the written articles leaves a lot to be desired.
(Highly recommended write up).
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