Amit Baruah To Head BBC Hindi

Hindustan Times is losing two senior editors. Foreign editor Amit Baruah is leaving to head BBC’s Hindi service. Baruah has been foreign editor since 2007, prior to which, he spent 19 years at The Hindu, variously as foreign correspondent at Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South East Asia, and also as diplomatic correspondent in New Delhi. Baruah confirmed the development.
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Raghu Menon Is New I&B Secretary

The government has appointed Raghu Menon as the top-ranking official overseeing media and entertainment industries at the ministry of information and broadcasting. The 1974-batch IAS officer from the Nagaland cadre will replace Sushma Singh, who retired in May. Tourism secretary Jawahar Sircar was holding additional charge of I&B thus far.
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Google set to battle Microsoft

GOOGLE is set for a fierce battle against bitter rival Microsoft after announcing plans to create a new computer operating system. The search engine will make its own version of the software brain that makes our PCs work, going head-to-head with the Windows systems currently used on hundreds of millions of machines worldwide. And Google promise security will be one of the key features of the software in a bid to do away with the need for separate virus blockers. It is also expected to be designed to ensure the internet is a faster place to navigate and make it easier to share content between friends and family. The Google Chrome Operating System follows on from the firm's Chrome internet browser released last year. That itself was designed to compete with the popular Internet Explorer made by Microsoft. The first Chrome OS will be for netbooks, the tiny laptops that have become increasingly popular on the high street. It is expected to be released in the second half of 2010. Currently these devices run either Windows XP or its current rival Linux.
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YouTube Won’t Have To Pay.....

The latest ruling in a copyright case brought against Google and its YouTube subsidiary doesn’t move the needle much on the core issue but it means the bill should be lower if—and that’s still a big if—the company loses in court. The English Premier League started a class-action suit against Google and YouTube back in May 2007, a few months after Viacom sued for $1 billion; it was joined by music publishers and the case now has 15 plaintiffs. The sports and music companies claim that sports and concert material was being posted on YouTube without permission and that the foreign material was governed by U.S. copyright law without registration.....
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No control over blogger

Google India says it has no control over blogspot or blogger
Mumbai, June 24, 2009: Google India says it has no control over blogspot or blogger or Google, its parent company. Google is the top search engine, biggest online advertising company and provider of hosts of other online facilities. The tech giant was dragged to the court by a Mumbai based physician who sought court intervention saying that he was defamed by some bloggers using Google’s famed blogging service. Google’s blogspot is a free service. Anyone can use blogs for everything from updating one’s friends and family about his life, giving his own advice column, discussing political views, or relating experience in a topic of interest.

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Indian Web Users

Indian Web users decry the "gag" on blogs
Bangalore : Thousands of Internet users in India have been unable to access blogs (or Web logs) since the weekend. Throughout Monday, angry customers of almost all major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country exchanged mails and flooded user group sites with postings to report that blogs, created using the free space provided by Web services like Geocities, Typepad and Blogspot (a Google initiative), could not be opened. Many were told that the blog sites had been blocked in response to a directive from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

Reporting the gag : The Indian portal, Rediff.com http://rediff.com/ was the first to report the trend on Sunday, quoting a Gurgaon teacher, Mridula Dwivedi, who had discovered the anomaly while trying to visit Blogsite.com http://blogsite.com/blog. Since then, other bloggers established that the "cyber gag" had emanated from a communication from the Central Government on July 13 to all the ISPs, listing some 20 odd sites — mostly blogs — which were to be blocked forthwith.

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Chairman of Rediff.com

Ajit Balakrishnan On What Is Wrong With The Digital Space, What It Needs & What Lies Ahead..

Ajit Balakrishnan - Chairman of Rediff.com gave the keynote at the IAMAI Digital Marketing Conference held at Delhi yesterday. Personally I felt it was one of the best keynotes that Ive heard at any event. Ajit traced the growth of internet right from 1995 to this day and also pointed out key pain points for the growth of Internet today and gave his insights into the road ahead.

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