Taazza newsroom

As more people get online(Rural+Urban) and when there is more mainstream and user generated content, there would be handful of startups like Baidu in China addressing the information glut problem.(Think local language search + aggregation and filtering tools). A tool like TaaZZa would be more relevant and thrive in such a scenario.
Web 2.0 In India

We think Dinesh Tantri hit the nail on the head! Wham! It is very easy to fall into the traditional way of thinking and continue to offer news from a national perspective. *Almost* all web media enterprises within the Indian space and world market fall into this category. Most of these sites take the approach of going top down or bottom up, by which i mean
• National media tend to concentrate on national news and interestings news stories (Top Down)
• Local media tend to focus on local news and other national news (Bottom up)
Which is precisely why neither of these approaches have succeeded! Which is why people have look at 2 news sources atleast. The oppurtunity lies in smoothening the differences or taking a radically different approach to cater news to a person’s needs.

Again, there are at-least two approaches that are being taken as far as we have seen

• One is to take a list of feeds that the user reads and analyze them to understand the list of topics that one is interested in. This assumes that the user is an avid RSS user which substationally reduces the audience that you are catering to. (Tailrank.com)
• The other is to track what the user clicks and rates and implicitly recognize the interest. Although this expands the audience base, We are not sure if this would work. Only time will tell.

At the Taazza, we will be taking a totally different approach to personalization, which is different from either of these approaches. More to come later! But nonetheless, a thought provoking post by Dinesh! Kudos!

Technorati Tags: blogs

Over the course of the last 2 months we have gotten lots of feedback from the blogosphere. Here are some interesting comments so far

TaaZZa stands out from the lot with their design.
Web 2.0 in India

Thanks! One of the founding principles of Taazza is to provide a simple yet elegant design to the end user.

Taazza looks interesting. But again, it’s interesting because I know what is googlemap, what is tag etc. And again from their screenshots, it looks like their target audience is indians amongst the 50k subscribers of techcruch, and which is not our target audience. However, it’d be interesting to see how it goes when they launch it.
BarcampMumbai – 4

Beg to differ with the whole notion of branding Taazza with web 2.0 terminology. Sure, we utilize web 2.0 technology but it is only incidental. News is about people, places and categories. Everyone understands tags and categories. So the argument doesn’t hold up!

• As more people get online(Rural+Urban) and when there is more mainstream and user generated content, there would be handful of startups like Baidu in China addressing the information glut problem.(Think local language search + aggregation and filtering tools). A tool like TaaZZa would be more relevant and thrive in such a scenario. I haven’t had a chance to look at TaaZZa yet but I am waiting to see how different it would be from TailRank kind of a service that helps me keep track of most popular India centric feeds based on my browsing habits? By the way, I enjoyed Amit Ranjan’s review of TaaZZa .
• Web 2.0 In India

There are lot of differentiators from Tailrank, we will get into the details at a later post. Keep your fingers crossed we are working diligently to release soon.

Thanks for all the link love! But keep them coming.. A few teasers coming your way soon! So stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: blogs, feedback, taazza

Technorati Teams With The Associated Press to Connect Bloggers To More Than 440 Newspapers Nationwide:

Technorati and the Associated Press this morning initiated a service to connect bloggers to more than 440 AP member newspapers nationwide.

When readers visit an AP member Web site that uses AP Hosted Custom News, they will see a module featuring the “Top Five Most Blogged About” AP articles right next to the article text, dynamically powered by Technorati. Additionally, when readers click on an AP article, Technorati will deliver “Who’s Blogging About” that article. Now, if you have commentary about an AP story, you can get mentioned in that module simply by linking to that AP news URL, akin to what you can do with Washington Post articles, Newsweek articles, Der Spiegel articles, and a host of other media partners that currently work with Technorati.

More people read blog than many newspapers:
“Barely four years after Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a former American soldier who grew up in El Salvador and Chicago, started Daily Kos from his home in Berkeley, Calif., the site…

1/3 of referrals to washingtonpost.com from blogs:
In a signing of the growing power of blogs to drive traffic online, WashingtonPost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says that one-third of the referrals washingtonpost.com gets now comes through blogs….

All these point to one phenomenon! Blogs! Not hosting them but integration with them. Another distinguishing factor of Taazza!
Lots of people have blogged about Taazza in the last few weeks, some of them very encouraging and some without merit. A detailed post with link love coming up!

Technorati Tags: Technorati, blogs