cplash.com

The first coverage that cplash.com - the citizen journalism website  had in the mainstream media was when it found mention in a Livemint Article ‘Citizen Journalism finds a new platform : the Web” by Samanth Subramanian.

“ Other journalists have written about hospital wards infested with an antibiotic-resistant bacterium, about the displacement of small shops by the ongoing Metro rail project, and about waste segregation. These quotidian topics have not traditionally been the preserve of Indian citizen journalism ventures. Websites such as Merinews and Cplash function largely as forums for reader-written opinions on bigger news stories that have already been reported elsewhere.”

Today cplash.com found mention in the National Newspaper of Abu Dhabi , UAE  when a splash by our cplasher singhupendra25 was quoted in the article Movie-star politicians seek to shed ‘glamour puppet’ image .

“No wonder that blog writers are critical about this “impurity” in politics and accuse political parties of using them to achieve narrow gains.  “It is a bitter truth that political parties which were selling their ideology to the voters and their promises of better life have nothing more to offer and they need cricket and film stars to sell their so-called ideologies and win them votes by hook or crook,” says a post on Cplash.”

We had shared the March 08 stats in one of our previous updates. We are putting out the March 09 stats to review the progress made over the last 1 year. Its been a slow but steady progress over the year with a lot of improvements put in place , especially in our UI.

We hope that the coming year would see cplash becoming a lot more popular as a citizen journalism platform, enabling people to share their views with the world.

-Regards

Team Cplash

Bye Bye 2008

The year 2008 comes to an end and with this cplash also turns an year old. The experience has been a good learning curve for Team Cplash and the experience of the first year would help us improve upon the site in the coming days.

The biggest happening of the year was, undoubtedly, the Mumbai Terror attacks. Cplashers, like the rest of the countrymen were aghast by the attacks. and there was an outpour of emotions on cplash as well. We would thank the cplashers for displaying a great sense of maturity in dealing with the strikes. From disseminating information about the attacks, to promoting harmony in the time of strife, to proposing a solution to political situation in the country, cplash.com as a citizen journalism website did well in discharging its social responsibility in the time of crisis. Lets hope that steps are taken to prevent the repeat of such terror attacks.

The Year Ahead

For those who believe in astrology, the year 2008 was the Chinese Year of the Rat, which generally is a hard year. The Year 2009 is the Chinese Year of the Ox. The Year of the Ox promises success with hard work. As a citizen journalism website, cplash would continue to strive to provide a better platform to people to voice their opinion.

Lets hope that the coming year would bring success, joy and happiness to everybody’s life.

Wishing everybody a very happy new year ahead.

-Team Cplash

Hi all,

I guess its been quite sometime since some update had been posted on this cplash team blog. Since the last release we have implemented a back-end tagging system that allows us to tag posts on relates issues.  This would help us in tracking what the various cplashers felt about issues in our society.

We have compiled a list of improvements that we need to work on our Alpha release. Once that is done, we would proceed to start the work on Beta Version and do some actual “social” networking to meet the aims for which this website has been launched.

Keep tracking this space for updates.

-Regards

BBM

Its been over over 5 months, since we launched the Alpha version of cplash.com - the citizen journalism website, and we have been able to stabilize the system over this period. Many thanks to all the cplashers who helped us with reporting the bugs and motivated us to go ahead with the system in spite of the initial hiccups. We can assure all our cplashers that we constantly strive to better the system and provide new features to make the experience at cplash a pleasant one.

Its time to review our progress over the last 5 months. We were crawled by Google on the 25th February 2008 and Google ranked us 102nd in February in the search results for “Citizen Journalism Site”. We have moved up in Google’s ranking to the 23rd position. We started as the 34th search result in Google for Citizen Journalism Site in India. We have moved up to the 7th result as on the 30th July 2008.

We are looking to cross the 100 registered activated users mark soon and very soon, we would be starting with our progress towards the development of the Beta Version of cplash.

A big thanks to all the Cplashers for your support! We are looking forward to your suggestion!

-Regards,

Cplash Team.

First full month stats of existence. The Traffic stats are:

• Total Hits : 77718
• Total Visits: 2367
• Total Unique Sites: 1211
• Average Hits per Hour: 104
• Max Hits per Hour : 1063
• Average Hits per Day : 2507
• Max Hits per day : 5304
• Average Visits per day: 76
• Maximum Visits per day: 138
• 63 Activated Users
• 67 posts
• 221 Comments

We have to work a little harder to attract new members to the community. Lets see what April has in store for us.

Hi all,

We have put in place the initial version of the Rating system in place. We plan to refine it in future to  meet some bigger objective like giving more power into the hands of the end-user with regards to the display of the splashes.

Some Javascript issues still need to be sorted before we stabilize this version and go ahead with further feature additions.

-Regards,

BBM

This year the equinox has been especially auspicious with almost every major religion in the world celebrating one festival or the another.

Wish you all a very happy festival time on behalf of the cplash team!

-Regards,

BBM

Hi All,

After  putting the UI on the back-burner for quite sometime, finally got working on it after a little rebuke [thanks CTO for that [:p] ]  and a new look has been put up.

Changed the fonts and color …new scheme appears clean…

Also felt good to find a mention as a new startup in the field of Participatory Journalism on the  blog of Stephan Dill.

Thats all for an update today.

-Regards,

BBM.

We have replaced the editor with that a new one that allows a lot more flexibility to the end users. You can re-size the editor window ( by dragging the right hand bottom corner of the editor), edit the HTML code, embed videos and pictures along with a host of other features.

With this new editor in place, probably we would be in a position to finally fix the issues with copy pastes in the posts.

In case, you still face any issues while trying to post on the site, please let us know.

-Regards,

cplash Team