We work in a knowledge economy and it is very important for a manager to classify people around us to know what are their capabilities.

This classification can help in identifying the right person for the right job. Again the same can be used by an individual to plan a career -

What to do?

People who know "what to do" are the "heart and soul" of an organization. They can see the big picture, set the vision and direction for the organization and motivate team members to achieve the goal. They think beyond the obvious and are extremely passionate about the end result.

Generally these people leads an organization, venture or play a pivotal role in a project which needs the team to innovate or invent.

How to do?

People who have good expertise in their domain and have a good idea of the internal workings of a given area can precisely guide a team and get things done. These are managers who know "how to do" a task.

Most project managers, consultants, team leads and technical experts They solve problems, create tasks for subordinates, track progress and put the vision in reality.

To do

They make the biggest chunk in any organization and of course the most important one as well. They implement the vision of the "what to do" visionary by following the "how to do" leader and do the ground work which is most important for real life implementation of any project.

A successful person need to move up the ladder from
"To-do" -> "How to do" -> "What to do"

An individual need to traverse them in order and by mastering each class as they need to set an example for his followers to get their trust and respect, which is most important for the model to survive.

Notes:

1. There must be a proper ratio of "how to do" and "to do" team members.

2. It is advisable to limited (if possible ONE) "what to do" visionary in a team working on one project / venture to ensure that there is one set "goal"

3. For a diversified organization, there must be several "what to do" type leaders, else there will be an environment of chaos and confusion.

On July 15th, the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) had sent ISPs a list of sites to be blocked. R H Sharma, senior engineer with MTNL, said that the list of sites ran into some 22 pages. – A blog at Rediff India

This directive led to blocking of several sites including hundreds of blogs. This was an unpredecent ban on online media in recent times. I have been following the entire event closely and here is a quick summary of the events and the current situation:

Which sites were banned?

The list is quite long if we go by the statement of R H Sharma of MTNL. However I have been able to lay my hand of this partial list:

http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Sites_Banned

Here is a scan:-

The worst part was that this mass media censorship was done wrong. They ended up banning the entire domain which includes thousands of blogs. How come all blogs be banned if some blogs within these sites were not appropriate.

ISPs were lazy and they found that it is easiest to block the second level domain instead of typing few extra URLs and banning individual blogs! May be they have not heard about Blogspot or Typepad!

Listen to a podcast interview of spokesperson from Sify, a leading ISP of India.

An excellent post about Censorship Done Wrong is worth reading, which highlights how a normal censorship procedure which was hardly ever felt by internet users of India got blown out of proportion. Blocking genuine sites and blogs have got DoT their share of trouble in form of flames and rants of thousands of internet users (mainly bloggers) and the matter is even going to court in form of a Public Interest Litigation (PIL).

Isn't India a democracy with "freedom of speech"?

Indeed. And this is the reason why I am shocked over this ban. Since freedom in 1947, Indian nationals have enjoyed an environment of free speech. There have been few exceptions, but the current young generation have never faced such censorship.

It has been very nicely summed by by Mr. M Raj at BloggersCollective -

"As part of a generation that has NOT experienced first-hand censorship of the mass media (the last time this happened was during Emergency in 1975) this 'blogger block' has come as a deep shock to all of us. Living in India prepares you for some of the toughest realities that LIFE could throw your way but freedom to say what you want has been largely a sacred cow, especially since the trauma of Emergency." – Mr. M Raj at BloggersCollective

Over past six years, DoT has blocked more than 100 websites. Generally sites are blocked when they are anti-national, illegal or adult in nature.

However this is for the first time that such a large number of websites have been blocked in one go. And besides this, it was done wrong making matters worse.

Is this censorship lawful under The Indian Constitution?

Inspired by the ISPs, I also showed some laziness and borrowed the legal research done by Rediff.

Under the Information Technology Act, 2000, a body called the Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-IN, was created along the lines of similar authorities the world over. Although its main task is in the domain of Internet security, it also oversees Internet censorship under a clause that seeks to ensure 'balanced flow of information.' Any government department seeking a block on any web site has to approach CERT-IN, which then instructs the DoT to block the site after confirming the authenticity of the complaint.

Web sites can be blocked if they contain pornography, speeches of hate, contempt, slander or defamation, or if they promote gambling, racism, violence or terrorism.

"Such sites may be blocked within the provision of the Fundamental Rights to free speech and expression, granted in India's Constitution," said cyber-law expert Praveen Dalal, adding, "If, however, the blocking is arbitrary, unreasonable and unfair, it would be in violation of Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution of India."

Read the full Rediff.com story.

Therefore it needs to be analyzed, if banning so many sites in one go was well thought out and planned after reviewing the content closely OR was it a ad-hoc decision to simply divert attention from the failures of the Mumbai Serial Blasts!

How are people reacting to this ban?

There is an outrage among bloggers, who is the most vocal supporters of freedom of speech. However the general mood of people is against this censorship as people see this as censorship of mass media, which has its own drastic implications.

Some reactions can be read here:

• BloggersCollective Rant Thread
• DesiPundit's Collection of Reactions
• Reactions at SiliconBeat

Some people believe that the government has taken a well planned step in favor of national security (excerpt from SiliconBeat thread):

Mihir and Bala,
This is not a knee jerk reaction, this is being done to track the SIMI (Islamic fundamentalist in India) blog community hiding inside sophisticated blog community. Read more on this in http://indiauncut.blogspot.com/

It has noting todo with free speech and politics.
SK on July 18, 2006 08:10 AM

What are people doing about it?
Apart from the most evident rant and verbal protest, a Public Interest Litigation has been filed (no concrete confirmation has been received yet)

People have protested to ISPs and it seems things are moving in a positive direction with ISPs understanding their lazy blunder and removing "full domain" censorship and retaining censorship to specified areas of the censored websites.

BloggersCollective group has been formed and lots of active bloggers are joining the group. See the growing list of members.

Want to know how to bypass the ban and see if the sites really deserves to be banned?

You can simply use any proxy service which is hosted outside India. The one I use very often is http://www.the-cloak.com/

There are tons of reseources which tells you how to by-pass the ban and read on! They are listed on http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/Bypassing_The_Ban

So whats going to happen next?

A lot happened over last few days. With ISPs correcting their mistake, a lot of sites are already showing up. Again many ISPs have not followed the DoT directive in full.

The latest status of the censorship can be seen here.

The DoT & Government of India should come ahead to clarify the situation and put an end to an unwanted controversy which is taking up quite some time of the intellectual mass of India. And yes, they should not forget to mention that the subject got blown up due to laziness of ISPs.

Lets hope for an early end to this controversy.

Abhishek

Hi Folks,

Gmail is fast.
Gmail is easy to use.
Gmail is virus and spam free.
Gmail is web based and universally accessible.

But, for most internet users, the biggest turn off is the fact that you cannot use your own domain name with Gmail. In fact no free webmail service is known to me which provides this facility as on today.

However there is a workaround! You can use the "cool and fast" interface of Gmail and send/receive mails using your "professional" email ID using your own domain name.

• Grab a domain name. Register it from any leading registrar
• Host the domain on a reliable server
• Create an Email account. Say you created yourname@yourdomainname.com
• Open a Gmail account say yourname@gmail.com
• Now you can set a forwarder in your server to forward all mails coming to yourname@yourdomainname.com to yourname@gmail.com. Thus you are keeping a copy of all incoming emails on your server and sending a copy to your Gmail account so that you can access it from there.
• Now log into your Gmail account. Go to Settings => Accounts. Click on Add another email address. Enter yourname@yourdomainname.com email address there and confirm.
• Now Google will send you a verification email. Since it will be sent to yourname@yourdomainname.com, it will be forwarded to yourname@gmail.com. So you can instantly check that and enter the validation code.
• Once validated, you can again go to Settings => Account and mark this account as your default account.
• Now, whenever you will send an email, it will go from yourname@yourdomainname.com even when you are sending it from your Gmail account. And of course all replies will come to your gmail interface as yourname@yourdomainname.com emails are forwarded there.

Enjoy the productivity enhancement Gmail offers to you without losing on your brand image.

Regards

Abhishek

Hi Folks,

Google is doing everything in their capacity to weed out spam and return meaningful results for search queries. However it seems that they missed on an important aspect!

Concept

A good quality website will definitely have proper (if not accurate) spelling and grammar. Using advanced spelling and grammer checking routines, it is very much possible to weed out spam and provide higher rank to high quality websites.

Benefits

This approach has many advantages:

1. Quality will get preference over quantity

2. Sites which are ranked lower due to poor quality spelling and grammar have a chance of imporving ranks by correcting spelling and gramatical errors. This will initiate a rush to improve user experience and we will be able to see better quality sites all over.

3. Sites which use more "generic terms" and less "proper nouns" will get higher rank as they are simple to understand and are written with a generic audience in mind.

4. Spam sites which simply puts in pages generated from search results will get totally eliminated as they will have broken sentences.

5. Links farms, FFA, Generic directories can be identified and ignored unless specifically requested by the user.

Implementation

The implementation can be further enhanced by setting up a baseline and quality benchmarks, just the way Google did for link popularity (Page Rank).

Sites can be evaluated on a regular basis based on the following parameters:

• Total number of words in the page
• Spelling errors per 100 words of content in the page
• Gramatical errors per 100 words of content in the page
• Another parameter which can be useful is how the page validates. Is the page full of HTML errors? Is it XHTML validated? Is the CSS validated?
• How often the page have been updated?
• How often the site has been down?

This data can be collected over a period of time and can be be used to determine how the site has improved or declined in quality.

Can it be implemented?

Now the question is – "How difficult is the implementation?"

I have recently been watching some of the changes introduced by Google in order to refine their ranking algorithm:

a) Penalty being imposed for duplicate content
b) Reciprocal links getting lesser weightage than one-way links
c) Usage of Latent semantic analysis (LSA) to find relevant related results

If we consider the total processing power required for each of these refinements, we can safely assume that they have enough processing power to implement spelling and grammar check.

I will not be surprised if Google is already working on this. Therefore it is advised that try to improve the above mentioned parameters before the magical google update strikes you!
I hope to see "quality based ranking" in action soon.
Abhishek