Bharti Airtel Ltd is one of the better ISPs in India. However their chief problem has been the lot of un-solicited pre-recorded voice calls and SMS spam they generate to annoy their customers in their quest for VAS profits. Advice to them: Get back to basics and fire your fugly marketers, reduce expenses and provide what people want, there is a lot of market in small towns where BSNL is the evil monopoly and your next billion rupee revenue is assured by expanding over there. Quality of service and billing was not an area they were castigated much until now. As a shareholder who holds a puny number of shares I hate to see them annoy paying customers like Balaji and yours truly. My medium term tip for Bharti Airtel stock would be 'SELL' they are going the Vodafone way of growth through acquisitions without worrying about existing customers.

A tremendous number of mainstream Indian web businesses don't seem to understand that spamming is evil. And a lot of shady startups seem to think if the big guys are doing it, then mainsleaze must be just fine. So we find that new social networking sites think it is quite cool to send invites from non-existing people to join in. Mainstream and well funded travel portals, matrimonial sites, banks everyone has cosily joined the bandwagon of mainsleaze spam as a way of 'free' marketing, shady methods of lead generation and sharing of data without permission of customers, coupled with never ending telecalling spam pre-recorded or otherwise.

Off on and on I have been ranting on this blog about this lack of imagination amongst mainsleaze spammers. There is clear refusal of VCs and other Internet biggies to punish these rogue businesses.

Unfortunately the pressure mounts on good startups to spam if their competition does. Perhaps its time to un-veil an effort to promote the Do No Evil startups for free. Perhaps a blogger network with Free ad banner space for Do No Evil startups to even the odds of competing against mainsleaze led growth numbers of spamming web businesses. I don't have any definite idea on how to help promote the Do no evil startups but I am doing some loud thinking.

It is not often that the big G's applications are described as braindead. But Google talk chatback badge sure is.

What happens when you use the chatback widget, it shows your gtalk handle's presence correctly. So far so good, now a visitor comes, clicks on it which that opens a new browser based 'chat' window where the visitor is called guest. Now I am sure if someone had a look at livechat used by most webhosting companies and gotten some clue the 'guest' could have been allowed to have a temporary handle or optionally allowed to sign into their google account based on their browser's cookies. There is no captcha to dissuade spammers from sending you random messages, yes Google's blogger has that but not gtalk chatback. Now lets assume you still think that having a chatback badge on your blog/website is a good idea and you do get a visitor clicking on your gtalk chatback badge, however you can't converse with this guest using your regular instant messenger, instead you get a largish URL in your messenger client window clicking on which opens a browser based 'chat' window for you. Did no one in the gtalk chatback badge team ever use twitter's jabber bot application or ever tried out any of other jabber bot applications. Has the inevitable slide into mediocrity begun at Google, their betas used to be much more awe-inspiring.

R K Misra's online initiative ChangeIndia.in. Runs on Joomla and uses Fireboard a forum module for Joomla. The site is hosted at Y! India and E-mail at Google. Changeindia.in doesn't have clean URLs its kind of hard to have custom paths defined in Joomla. No candidates announced for Karnataka elections. RK is a great believer in Private Public Partnership's potential to change India amongst other things he advocates.

lok-paritran.org uses Drupal as the CMS for its site and uses Drupal's in-built forums and looks like they have Gallery integrated into their drupal installation. Though they have clean urls they are not taking full advantage of Drupal's ability to define custom URLs and the clean URLs don't extend all the way to the Forums. Its not clear to me what exactly is Lok-Paritran's agenda, lots of high sounding philosophy and no practical agenda un-like RK's PPP mantra. And shudder they use a M$ Word document to announce their Bangalore candidate list.
However since I am a big fan of Drupal all is forgiven. My vote for Lok Paritran.

Funny how many of us think that Joomla is a pretty CMS but drupal is a workhorse with lots of features and a clean codebase. It would be interesting to draw conclusions about politics of people who use Joomla, Drupal or raw PHP :-)

Jaago.in is built using PHP and shudder these guys are appealing in a very demagogic fashion to the middle class's insecurities and sound downright populist with Rs. 2/KWh electricity provisioning they are promising. There is no candidate list they have announced for Bangalore yet. Their frontpage boasts of a typical GOI like site welcome screen with a enter into link and a flash object.

Wahjava says: so in next elections, no need of polls, just check out the CMS of their site, and compare it on some CMS ranking site, one whose CMS has higher rank should be declared winner :P