Friday, 4 May 2007

The Perfect Video Blogging Camera for Mom

While it doesn't take rocketscience to transfer video from the camcorder and upload it to YouTube, a new video blogging camcorder called "Flip Video" makes the whole workflow much simpler for the not so tech-savvy crowd.

Capture the video with your Flip Video camcorder, plug-in the device to your computer (PC or Mac) via the USB port and it'll upload your video directly to YouTube.

Other than sharing video on the web, carry your Flip Video camera to the nearest photo lab and they'll burn a DVD of you precious moments. The vidcasting camcorder retails at $119.99 for the 30-minute model and $149.99 for the 60-minute model.

Advanced users can also edit video clips, add custom music or extract still photos from video. The camera can also connect to your large TV screen with the included cable. The video quality may not be the best for TV viewing but decent enough for the 320x240 Youtube screen.

Flip Video - Blogging Camcorder [Thanks Jacque]

Vodcasting Camcorder
Related: Adobe Video Blogging Software

Monetize Blogs With Indian Audience using Nautanki.tv





Nautanki.tv is an online TV channel producing original video content that's primarily focused on entertainment, social issues, humor and Indian cinema.

Anyone can watch these videos on Nautanki.tv for free by either visiting their website or through the Nautanki.tv video player that's now embedded in few hundred websites and blogs. [check out a real example on Nandita's blog - extreme bottom]

The videos and documentaries available on Nautanki.tv are generally crisp (around four minutes is the average size), creative and always entertaining. Each video has pre-roll as well as post-roll video advertising of around 10 to 30 seconds each.

Nautanki Video Player
Nautanki.tv has adopted a very unique revenue model that makes it a very attractive option for content producers as well as bloggers or web publishers. Nautanki.tv shares advertising revenue with the film suppliers and also the website owners who embed the Nautanki.tv Flash video player on their websites.

Bloggers are paid, on a Pay-per-view basis, around 15% of the advertising revenue that Nautanki.tv charges it's advertisers (which is generally in excess of INR 5 per view). Since each video played inside the Nautanki player has two ads (pre and post-roll), you effectively generate twice the ad revenue from a single view.

This 400x350 Nautanki.tv widget can also be good source of revenue for regional language blogs (like in Hindi, Tamil, etc) where contextual advertising programs like Adsense do not perform so well.

The video quality at Nautanki.tv is much better than what we see on other video sharing sites like Youtube or Google video. Co-founder Sunil Nair expects to roll out a more "intelligent" advertising platform in the next three months that will deliver video ads based on site's content and will have more detailed reporting for ad publishers.

Overall, Nautanki.tv has an impressive system in place with immense potential in terms of revenue and audience, but they do need to work on the speed at which video is distributed on partner sites.

Nautanki.tv | Bloggers Apply Here | Corporate Blog

Thursday, 3 May 2007

Find Bargain Deals on eBay That Are Ending Soon

If you are looking for some cheap deals on eBay that are about to expire, LastMinute auctions website may assist you in the hunt.

Like your nearest Dollar store, LastMinute auction searches for deals or offers on eBay that are priced at less than $1 (minus Shipping and Handling) and are ending in an hour's time.

As soon as they find an item on ebay that meets the criteria (less than 1 dollar, less than 1 hour), it is listed on LastMinutes website.

Last Minute Auction
These less than a buck eBay auctions are arranged in categories (like books, DVDs, Stamps). Other details like number of current bids, shipping charges and auction remaining time are also displayed along with the item description.

LastMinute Auction.com [via Spluch]

Related: Software Auctions on eBay | eBay.com Trivia

The Best Time for eBay Shopping: Most auctions end between noon and 8pm, eastern standard time, because that's usually when people post them. In the wee hours of the morning, there are fewer available, but these are often some of the best!

What Drew Yahoo to Flickr When They Already Had Yahoo! Photos

Yahoo Photos director Will Aldrich had earlier denied any plans for merging Yahoo Photos and Flickr. But it was probably not making perfect business sense for Yahoo to manage two competing photo sharing websites under the same umbrella.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield today informed TechCrunch that Yahoo! Photos is shutting shop and all existing Yahoo Photos! users will be migrated to Flickr. They'll also get a one-click option to export Yahoo photos to Photobucket or Shutterfly. And like Picasa and PhotoBucket, video sharing is meeting Flickr soon.

Download Yahoo! Photos
I was reading this interesting book - How Innovators Connect - coauthored by Techtribe founder Rohit Agarwal and journalist Patricia Brown, where they have interviews and success stories of Silicon Valley veterans like investor Ram Shriram of Google, Ashish Gupta of Junglee, Subrah Iyer of WebEx and many more entrepreneurs.

Here's an excerpt from the same book, using the current example of Flickr, that suggests "timing" can play a crucial role in the success of a company. Makes perfect sense.

Time to market, Be a trend spotter

In 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr, a Vancouver, British Columbia based company that lets users upload digital pictures from computers and cameras, and arrange their photos into albums and include them in blogs and other postings. Timing was critical in this acquisition for a number of reasons, says Bradley Horowitz, VP of product strategy at Yahoo, and the primary coordinator of the acquisition.

Yahoo already had the world's most successful online photo site in 2005. But there are something Yahoo saw in a small company of just a dozen people: Their ability to build a community - or ecosystem - around the concept of photography was scalable. Flickr recognized the new keywords - social networking, interaction, and ubiquitous broadband. The Flickr founders simply connected the dots in a timely fashion.

Yahoo's Horowitz says there were four specific factors that drew him to Flickr:

1. User Generated Content - This was not new to Yahoo. Yahoo had been soliciting user generated content through Geocities for years - but it had not generated the mass appeal that was driving the Flickr buzz.

2. User Annotated Content - Although Yahoo had billions of photos up in its section called Yahoo Photos, most of them didn't have "metadata" built around them. In essence, Yahoo created a huge digital shoebox with billions of people's photos, while Flickr offered users the ability to organized their photos in a sophisticated and intuitive manner using tagging technologies. Flickr made it much easier for common people to add metadata to the photos. As a result, roughly 85 percent of the photos in Flickr were tagged or annotated with some human entered metadata.

3. Community Distribution - Following the open-source model, Flickr encourage its members to share photos among its community. Yahoo and other companies at the time went to extraordinary lengths to preclude people from using the photos that lived on its servers outside the context of the Yahoo! environment. The Flickr model turned Yahoo's business model on its head. Instead of positioning Yahoo as the destination site for these images, Flickr allowed Yahoo to pay for the storage and bandwidth, while encourage third-party sites - mainly bloggers - to use that content. Tens of thousands of bloggers began to use Flickr as their imaging backbone, Horowitz says. This drove up awareness and dependency on the Yahoo site after the Flickr acquisition.

4. Platform Distribution - Flickr delivered a great end-user service. But it also delivered the services and facilities that allowed the community of developers to continue enhancing their own services. In effect, they had developers that were not on the payroll building enhancements - like the Flickr Macintosh coupler - at no cost to Yahoo!.

Flickr Founders
Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield developed an ecosystem that was possible only because of specific trends occurring in the market at the time of their innovative thinking process. Flickr's innovators created an environment in which millions of people contributed and distributed photos while a combination of Flickr's internal team and external collaborators created new offerings.

"That's the leverage you get when take a risk and trust that people are creative, and trust in the idea that many people can do more than just a few," Horowitz says.

Update: Rohit has offered DI readers a 40% discount on the book (cover price: $28) if you enter the coupon code "tiediscount"

Sort Search Results by Google PageRank or Alexa Rank

Are you aware of any search engine that lets you sort search results ? Some blog search engines do allow sorting by date or by relevance but nothing beyond.

Enter AfterVote.com that's not just another meta search engine combining the top results of Google, Yahoo or MSN - AfterVote will let you interact with the search results like never before.

Flickr Search
AfterVote displays the Alexa Rank, Google PR and StumbleUpon reviews next to each search result. The URLs in the search results can be directly saved on social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc.

And the most impressive feature - you can sort results based on the Alexa rankings or Google PageRank. The more you use this feature, the more addictive it gets.

There's an option to block results from certain web domains (blacklist). And if you are worried about search companies collecting your search queries, Aftervote may be a good solution since it lets you search the web anonymously - even your IP addresses are not stored anywhere.

AfterVote.com reminds me of another Ajax based meta search engine called Zippy Search that displays lot of additional SEO related data next to search engine results.

Update: AfterNote is no longer active. Check out Wolfram Alpha tricks.

How Fast Do Search Engines Index Fresh Content

Yesterday was a unique day in the blogosphere. Following the crackdown by Digg staff, the infamous hex key - 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 - was written all over the Internet from blogs to news portals to social websites.

Legal issues apart, this mutiny at Digg gives us a great opportunity to compare the indexing behaviour of search engines and how frequently search bots scroll the web in pursuit of fresh content.

We executed a search for 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 (without quotes) on all major web and blogs search engines and here are the results.

Web Search

Microsoft owned Live search has just 18k pages containing the HD DVD key while Google has indexed over half a million documents containing that number.

Blog Search

In case of Blog Search Engines, Bloglines (owned by Ask.com) found 6160 blogs and RSS feeds that mentioned the HD DVD key while Technorati suggested the number as 2200. Google Blog Search results were ~5.5k.

Email a Handwritten Message Using UPS WhiteBoard

Handwritten Message Greetings
Logistics giant UPS recently launched a viral advertising campaign on TV and the web to promote their various services using a whiteboard.

If you remember those I'm a PC, I'm a Mac ads where the characters play on a white background, UPS whiteboard is something similar but much more interactive and fun.

Using UPS whiteboard, you can also send a personalized message greeting to your friend over email. Just type in the message and the UPS guy will actually write it on the whiteboard using a dry-erase marker. Very creative and impressive too.

The UPS Whiteboard - Create Your Whiteboard

Related: Turn your Computer Screen into a Drawing Board

Do You Have a Soft Corner for Blog Advertisers and Sponsors

Would you publish a bad product review of some company that's also sponsoring your website ? Will the fear that this vendor might withdraw their ad campaign from your blog for giving them bad publicity hold you back ?

Colin Crawford, the CEO of PC World Magazine, may have faced a similar dilemma when he prevented his editor Harry McCracken from publishing a story on Apple and Steve Jobs.

PC Word Magazine Screenshot
According to Kim Zetter at Wired, Harry had drafted a story titled "Ten Things We Hate About Apple" for the PCWorld print edition. When Colin stopped the story from going to press, Harry resigned from PC World.
Apparently Crawford also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers.
The news about Harry leaving PC World is not official yet and he probably wrote his last blog post on the PC World's Techlog yesterday.

Who do you think are more important - subscribers or the advertisers ? One Wired reader sums it best:
I am a PC World Subscriber, not a computer whiz, and I rely on the magazine and web site for accurate product reviews. This is not good news for me..only if Steve Bass stays will I keep renewing!
Related: Why no tough questions for Mr Bill Gates

Restore Your Disabled Adsense Account for $99.95 ?

This morning, there was an email from Adsense Club that said - "Your adsense account can be restored"
Even after being kicked out from Google Adsense, you can have a new account in your name. Just visit AdsenseClub.org.
You are required to pay $99.95 per year (Paypal accepted) to join this "apex club for Adsense Publishers".

Google Adsense Account Banned
The benefits - if your Adsense account has been disabled or banned by Google, AdsenseClub will arrange a new Adsense account for you with 99% success rate plus some free Adwords coupons.

Like the Adsense toolbars on eBay, AdsenseClub may well be one the biggest Adsense scams around. And considering that hundreds and thousands of publishers have their Adsense account disabled, some ex-Adsense publishers may fall in the trap.

Don't click on your own Google ads. Don't ask others to click on your Google ads. And be responsive to emails sent by the AdSense team. That's the Google mantra for keeping your Adsense account safe.

Read about some Adsense Alternatives when Google refuses to reinstate your disabled Adsense account.

Related: Someone Else Using your Adsense Code ?

Video Blog Software CockPit To Challenge VlogIt, Adobe Visual Communicator

Adobe Visual Communicator 3VlogIt and Visual Communicator software from Serious Magic Adobe are popular choices for creating video podcasts (or vlogs) and other on-demand video presentations.

Unlike complex video editors like Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas Studio, Visual Communicator and VlogIt do not require editing - they have an onscreen teleprompter, green-screening, scrolling titles and more inside a non-geeky interface for producing and sharing professional quality video quickly.

Adobe's current dominance in the vidcasting software market may soon take a hit as a Netherlands based company is developing a similar video blogging software called "The Cockpit" that will be free to download - they say it's a complete editorial environment for consumers who want to produce high-quality video.

The Cockpit Video PodcastingCockpit will have a full screen teleprompter and absolutely no recording time limit for vodcasts. When you’re in the recording process Cockpit’s interface changes into a full screen mode displaying just the teleprompter.

Like VlogIt, CockPit also supports background images, transition effects, overlays and will let you publish video blogs or newscasts easily .

There are no details about how Cockpit plans to monetize the vidcasting software but it could be from partnerships with video sharing websites or even a pro version.

The CockPit | Adobe VlogIt | Video Podcasting Software

It could be an interesting development for budding citizen journalists and podcasters who have the content but not the budget for producing good looking vodcasts. Cockpit will be available in "Summer 2007?" while Adobe Visual Communicator 3 is expected this monthh.

The Official Dell Ubuntu Homepage is now live


We'll soon have an option to buy Dell desktops and laptops pre-installed with Ubuntu 7.04, one of the most popular Linux distros. This was announced by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, on Dell's corporate blog.

The Dell-Ubuntu tie-up announcement should generate enough excitement among Linux cheerleaders and even in China where Naked PCs are popular, though for different reasons.

Currently, a Microsoft sponsored tagline that says "Dell recommends Windows Vista™ Business." is pasted on almost every webpage of the Dell.com website.

Not sure if that'll change in near future because Dell is likely to advocate Ubuntu only for consumer PC's and not businesses. You may however be surprised to learn that Dell founder & CEO Michael Dell is an Ubuntu fan himself and his home laptop runs on Ubuntu.

Dell has just launched a placeholder website for Ubuntu at dell.com/ubuntu.

Overall, this development may bring down the prices of Dell machines and help Dell make inroads into the Linux community. For Ubuntu, it's an excellent opportunity to become mainstream.

Wednesday, 2 May 2007

Reduce the File Size Of PowerPoint Presentations

Gur Saran has a large ppt slideshow that weighs around 25 MB and he's looking for options to compress the PowerPoint file and share it as an email attachment.

If you have such a bulky PowerPoint presentation, chances are that you have embedded some high-resolution images and photographs in the presentation that's causing the PPT file size to explode.

You can however significantly decrease the size of PowerPoint presentations in some simple steps:

1. Click the Compress Picture button (available in Picture Tools Format ribbon of PowerPoint 2007) and select "Options". Now choose Email (96 ppi) as the target output and click OK. This should change all the pictures used in your Presentation to an optimal size.

Reduce Powerpoint file sizes
(For PowerPoint XP and 2003, the "Compress Picture" setting can be accessed from the Picture Toolbar or by right-clicking any image used in the PPT and selecting "Format Picture". Choose the Web setting.)

The picture compression trick should solve most of your PowerPoint file size woes. If the issue still persists, read the next two tips.

2. Incase you are using any BMP wallpapers or scanned TIFF images in the PowerPoint presentation, convert them to JPG and reinsert.

3. Are there any audio mp3 file or movie clips embedded in the Presentation slides. You may upload them on a website (like Twango) and place a hyperlink in your presentation.

Your PowerPoint Presentation should now be light and more manageable. The other solution is to use Scribd or Slideshare where your friends can even download the original PPT file or watch it online as a Flash object.

PowerPoint Hack - Extract Sounds, Pictures from PowerPoint Slides

Free Push Email for Mobile Phone Users in India

Mobile Phone subscribers in India need not envy the Blackberry crowd any more as they can now convert their regular cell phones or smartphones into a Blackberry like push mail devices for free.

Mobile Phone Push Mail
Consilient (former partner of RIM) today entered the Indian market with their free push e-mail service that will bring your GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail or any other POP3 / IMAP mail right on the cell phone screen. Consilient Push Mail also supports most file attachments including PDF, ZIP, Excel and Word.

Free Push Mail IndiaYou supply your mobile phone number on the Consilient website, they'll send you a confirmation SMS with a link to download a small application from your mobile phone browser. That's it.

Consilient Push Mail can be used on any data network including Airtel, Reliance, BSNL, Hutchison, IDEA and Tata Mobile. (Or through Wi-Fi hotspots)

What's the catch - Consilient is supported by advertising and at the time of signing up, it's mandatory for you to pick upto 5 areas of interests. Ads will be embedded within the Consilient application, and will not be delivered to the inbox.

Are your email passwords safe ? - Consilient says that no emails or passwords are stored on the Consilient Push server.

Consilient.com Push | Supported Mobile Phones

Create a Live SlideShow of Websites with TrailFire

Trailfire.com helps you annotate (via virtual post-it notes) and share multiple webpages with other users in one go. For instance, you can create a trail of your favorite news websites (like CNN.com WSJ.com, etc) and invite friends to follow your trail on their own computer screens.

People can add ratings, extend the trail by adding more sites or even leave comments on your annotations.


Other than the social angle, TrailFire also presents an alternate way to surf the internet where the browser consumes less memory because you scroll webpages in one window.

A lot of us dump our favorite websites in Firefox Bookmark Folders or set them as homepages and the first thing we do in the morning is load all these bookmarks in multiple tabs.

That may not be a bad approach but if you religiously check more that ten websites every morning, image the CPU usage of Firefox when so many extra tabs open up in one browser window.

TrailFire could solve that problem in an elegant way - Create a trail of your favorite or must-vist websites and then browse them inside one browser tab via the navigation arrows of TrailFire.

Related: Web Presentation of del.icio.us Bookmarks

Let Visitors Leave Comments on your Google Pages or Geocities Website

Integrate Visitor Comments in Google Webpages
Haloscan comments have long been the favorite service of webmasters who want to integrate comments and guestbooks in personal homepages hosted on sites like Geocities, Tripod or Google Page Creator that do not provide native support for visitor comments.

Haloscan provides a small Javascript snippet that goes inside your webpages (no server-side PHP scripts). Site visitors can click this Haloscan link to leave comments on your webpage inside a popup window that can also be customized with your logo and custom CSS.

Haloscan provides an easy dashboard to manage comments left by visitors on your webpages. There's even an option to block IP addresses. The only downside is that comments open in a separate window and visitors cannot be view them inline with the webpage content.

Another interesting player is JS-Kit - a single line of HTML code that will instantly enable comments on any webpage - no registration or signups. Unlike Haloscan, the users comments appear on the webpage itself in a threaded format.

Webmasters can also change the look-n-feel of comment boxes and how the comments are displayed though there aren't any readymade templates. While JS-Kit is clearly the simplest and most effective commenting solution around, you'll miss the comment management dashboard available in Haloscan.

HaloScan | JS-Kit Comments - Add comments to any webpage.

Tuesday, 1 May 2007

Wikipedia Deletes HD DVD Article, Digg Takes a U-Turn

Digg removes HD DVD Stories
Submit a new story on Digg.com with the string 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b -d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 and chances are that your Digg account will either be suspended or removed.

This cryptic hexadecimal number is actually a cracked HD DVD encryption key that can be used for decrypting and playing HD-DVD movies in Linux.

Jay Adelson, Digg CEO, shares some thoughts on why they are going with a stick after Diggers who are digging this HD-DVD serial number:
Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property.

This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.
This reason maybe classified as Joke of the Day.

Tons of stories on cracking Photoshop CS3, bypassing Windows Genuine Check, skipping Windows XP activation or links to Photoshop CS2 keygen have hit the popular pages of Digg in the past.

Were these Digg stories not violating any copyright rules ? Why is Digg suddenly feeling worried about their safety at the hands of "IP owners" when such things have always existed and encouraged (read, digged) by Digg members.

Or is it a change of heart and Digg has decided to go strict on stories that break rules. If that's the case, going forward, any story that encourages hacks or any video clip that's breaks copyright should be removed from the Digg queues. Are they willing to go that far ?

Update: Wikipedia staff has now removed the "HD 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 DVD" page from their website and also protected it meaning other Wikipedia users cannot recreate the page.

Watch this nice and timely song on the HD DVD encryption key:

Update: Fearing backlash, Digg founder Kevin Rose has suddenly taken a U-Turn - "You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be." [Thanks Kunal]

That statement effectively negates what Jay Adelson had said just a few hours ago.

Say No to Junk Snail Mail with Green Dimes

Stop Junk Mail in Mailbox
Tons of unwanted marketing mails (including store coupons, product catalogs, magazines, etc) are delivered to homes and offices in America and Canada every year that either land in the shredder or the paper recycle bin.

It can take some of your precious time to sort these "unsolicited and useless" junk snail mail from important business mails plus they also pose a threat to our environment (read, trees).
To produce junk mail for one year, we use 100 million trees and 28 billion gallons of water.
A new service called Green Dimes hopes to eliminate the "junk mail" from your mailbox for just a dime a day.

Green Dimes LogoGreenDimes will get your name and other family members' names off major direct mailing lists, unsubscribe you from unwanted catalogs and will also help reduce the amount of credit-card, loans and insurance offers that land in your mailbox.

GreeDimes promises to reduce the junk in your postal mail by 75-90% and they'll also plant a tree sapling on your behalf, every month.

If the mailing list requires your signature for removal, GreenDimes will send you pre-printed, pre-stamped postcards that you can simply sign and drop in the mail.

I learned about Green Dimes from Shripriya. Here's what she feels about the GreenDimes service:
..they tell me not to unsubscribe from catalogs that I don't get because the evil catalog companies will then add my name to the list [much like junk email]

..There is no catch-all for catalogs. I will have to get the catalogs, go to the Green Dimes site and unsubscribe. I guess that is better than having to call the companies, but I hope they can come up with a better idea for dealing with this.
Another interesting bit, you can decide the countries or continent where you want them to plant the trees for you. All this for a dime a day.

Related: Turn Off the Computer, Reduce Climate Change

Aodhan Cullen - The Google PageRank 10 Guy

Aodhan Cullen
Can you recognize the person wearing the red tie in the picture above ?

His name is Aodhan Cullen, is only 24 years old and runs a hugely popular web stats service called Statcounter.com.

Based in Ireland, Aodhan Cullen founded StatCounter.com when he was just 16 years old.

Today his service is used by around 1.3 million webmasters and bloggers to track over 9 billion pageviews or hits a month.

Due to the widespread usage of Statcounter, the site enjoys that perfect but elusive Google PageRank - 10 putting it in the august company of sites like Google, Apple, Adobe, MIT, etc. Even Microsoft.com is at PR 9.

Google Page Rank 10
Statcounter.com is the only Google PageRank 10 website that actually accepts Text Link ads and also Google Ads. While the amount that Statcounter charges for a Text link ad on their PR 10 page is not known, they are very selective in choosing advertisers. If you thought of running ads of a pharmacy store, no point approaching them.

Though Aodham maintains a low profile, he does have a good following - his first blog post attracted over 900 comments and was digged over 900 times.

Making Money with Google Ads in India

Google Adsense ClicksSometime back, there was a report saying that India has a large but secret army of college graduates and "work at home" housewives who are clicking Pay-Per-Click ads on the Internet (e.g. Google AdSense) to make few hundred dollars per month.

In all these years, Google may have vastly improved their click fraud detection mechanisms and the problem of invalid clicks may not be so grave as before, the perception that one can easily hire cheap AdSense labor in India continues to exist.

When Google Ads publisher Mark Percival received his first AdSense cheque from Google, here's what he wrote:
Well I've officially made money from Google. And all without paying guys in India to click on my links.

Now I just need to move to a country where its possible to live on $100 a month. Rural china maybe?
Similar concerns were raised when Google announced their AdSense support team based in Hyderabad, India.
Is this new team going to help them [AdSense spammers] create more SE spam? Can they help create better SERPs by educating and stopping - at least these Indian AdSense publishers from doing it the wrong way?
Would you agree with the observations of these people ? Do these Ad clicking jobs really exist ? If not, can something be done to change the general perception.

Related: AdSense Toolbars on eBay

PlanetRead - What You Hear Is What You Read

PlanetRead.org is an e-learning project supported by Google.org where the letter "e" stands for entertainment through movie songs of Indian films.

As you will noticed in this example, PlanetRead aims to spread literacy and give reading practice through films songs and folk music which are so close to the heart of most Indians.

The PlanetRead concept, envisaged by Dr Brij Kothari, is simple but very effective - when a song plays on the TV screen, the subtitles in the same language follow the lyrics of the song as scrolling text. As a particular word is being spoken by the character in the song, the color of the subtitle-text changes helping the audience identify the word.

This helps people learn or practice reading while they hum bypassing the traditional textbook method. They have paid attention to every details - look at the font sizes, they are large enough so that even the back-benchers can read what's on the TV screen.

Kamla Bhatt has done podcast interview with the founder of PlanetRead. And here's another interview with Dr Larry of Google.org who also played as an extra in an old Dev Anand movie.