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.

Hi All,

We at cplash decided to attend the Bar Camp at Delhi that took place in the Amity Innovation Incubator lab on the 17th May 08.

The BarCamp is a place for enthusiasts about IT to meet and share their idea.

The Delhi BarCamp4, May 08 started with an enlightening talk from Mr Talwant Singh, a distinguished member of the Indian Judiciary. He enlightened us on how technology is changing the way Indian Judiciary functions. He highlighted us how earlier it used to take days before the judicial staff used to type out the judgements delivered by the judges. However the use of technology has streamlined the process today, and in Delhi today the judgements are delivered much faster.

Cplash asked Mr Talwant if blogging can really change the society? We were enthused by his reply that indeed today blogging was influencing the mainstream society.

The BarCampers were then introduced to Mr Aseem Chauhan, a VC ( any startup gets excited by hearing the term VC and so were we! ) from Amity. He enlightened us how young individuals should go about entrepreneurship ( with a few wise words about importance of EBC, Entrepreneur Blood Cells [;)] thrown in from the BarCampers). This was followed by a presentation by Mr Apoorv about the Amity Innovation Incubator that offers Investment Banking services, helps create Intellectual Property, and guides entrepreneurs to turn their dream into reality by providing all possible help.

Everybody must thank all the volunteers who put in all their efforts to help BarCamp take off smoothly!!!

After a short break, we moved to individual presentations.

Troble Fixers

The first presentation that we attended was from Trouble Fixers who are running a very innovative blog that tires to help people facing problems with their Windows OS . Key points from their presentation:

- Be user friendly and connect to the people.

- Be responsive

-Use simple language and answer the questions and don’t show your linguistic skills.

- And Finally you need money ! So monetize your efforts!!

Facebook Guys

We then attended a good session from the Facebook Apps guys who gave some great tips about what sort of Social Network apps one can go ahead and build.

Key points: Focus on features, make it simple, make something useful and make it better than other products,if any , that exist for the same functionality.

Lunch Session

The BarCamp organizers must be thanked for the great lunch organized for the BarCampers.

Quest for a Great East Internet Company

After having our fill, we went for an interesting presentation that compared history with the evolution of the internet. Ford Commands a valuation of 15 billion dollars, facebook commands a similar valuation. Why? According to the BarCamper Prashant, we are moving towards a society based on knowledge, where information is valuable unrestricted by any geographical boundaries. He wished that the next Great Eastern Internet company would be from India.

The Eye Opener - EnTrip.com

This was followed by a session from the EnTrip.com. What was most impressive about these guys was that the guys were clear what they wanted to do and then everything that was not core to their idea was mashed up from other available services.

The BarCamp came to an end with a quiz and some performances that enthralled the audience.

All kudos to the organizers whose hard work made the event a success!

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.