tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54976416816090409872024-03-07T19:31:17.746-08:00Department of Journalism and Media AffairsThe newest addition to the fourth estate. We are here to get the word out about BITS, Pilani - Goa Campus.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497641681609040987.post-75585367915281789272008-09-07T07:01:00.000-07:002008-09-07T07:11:54.957-07:00Elections !?<p>I guess you have had enough of them already :P.Let the comments speak for themselves.</p><p><a href="http://www.prlog.org/10114598-voters-day-out-annual-elections-held-in-bits-goa.html">E-Voter�s Day Out -Annual Elections held in BITS-Goa</a></p>Pratik Mandrekarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09285785021596133547noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497641681609040987.post-65535390570500474202008-08-09T03:50:00.000-07:002008-08-09T03:57:41.155-07:00Happy Blogiversary!!<span style="font-size:85%;">A decade has passed since <span style="font-weight: bold;">Jorn Barger</span> -- began his business of hunting and gathering links to items that tickled his fancy, to which he appended some of his own commentary.</span> <span style="font-size:130%;">Thus was discovered Blogosphere, an entire universe of humans turned aliens back to humans and other like minded creatures.</span><span style="font-size:180%;">So what do we do to celebrate a decade of blogging? </span><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;font-size:180%;" >We Blog more!</span><br /></div><br />Coming to celebrations, do we need to really celebrate days? Aren't such days just an excuse for our avenged souls to find more reasons to make us warm and eventually melt our beds and the aspirations of the one lazing on them?Well whatever be the reason here we have another reason to celebrate..<span style="font-weight: bold;">the Beijing Olympics.</span><br /><br />It all started with the <span style="font-size:130%;">8.08 PM, 08/08/08</span> inauguration in which the Indian contingent led by <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">R Rathode</span>(That's another way of how we flaunt the only thing we have) staged a flag bearer's march appearing impressive from a distance but when it came near the media stands there you could see..<span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Sania Mirza</span> dressed in her training jacket,another lady with a similar dress besides her and another one in a green saree...what a delightful combo(!) for a <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">2.4 billion TV audience,80 world leaders and the biggest billionaire Olympic inauguration ever</span>.And if that wasn't enough here are the results even before the first day draws to an end..<br /><br /><ul><li><span class="f12"><b>"<span style="font-style: italic;">Mansher falls back after good start</span></b><span style="font-style: italic;"> India's Manavjit Singh Sandhu is placed 12th while Mansher Singh was at 21 after the first round qualification in the men's Trap shooting event..</span>" excuses..excuses!! and here more excuses: " </span><span class="f12"><span style="font-style: italic;">Earlier, Indian shooters began on a false note, with <span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Anjali Bhagwat, Avneet Kaur and Samresh Jung failing</span></span> to qualify for the finals of their respective events</span>."</span></li></ul> <span class="f12"><br /></span><ul><li><span class="f12">A few more results to celebrate:"</span><span style="font-style: italic;" class="f12"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Samresh Jung fails</span>: Samresh Jung failed to qualify for the final in the 10m air pistol event, </span><span class="f12"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tombi Devi crashes out</span>:</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> Indian judo champ Tombi Khumujam Devi's Beijing Olympics campaign lasted only two-and-a-half minutes as she was knocked out in the preliminary round of the women's 48kg event on Saturday</span>."</span></li></ul><span class="f12"><br /><br />Well I guess Olympics will be a far happier occasion for the Indian audience if they consider the fact that <span style="font-style: italic;">the Chinese and the Indians have evolved from essentially the same species of primates or apes or whatever</span>..so we can celebrate almost every hour when a chinese wins a medal and we don't even reach close to qualifying for the finals....so obsessed are we with finding an Indian connection to anyone rich,famous or talented (aka <span style="font-weight: bold;">Vikram Pandit,Arcelor Mittal</span>,...) that we forget to build our own Identity.Or is it that we like being lazy enough to win one silver medal,clap about and then celebrate for the next four years?<br /><br />Whatever the reason be,wherever the blame game may lead to...we'll still be the same(as far as I can perceive the Indian contingent at the Olympics)..That's why <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">monginis</span> was intelligent enough to come up with its Tagline.."go ahead...lets celebrate!"<br /><br />Ciao till we win some medal :P<br /></span><span class="f12"> </span>Pratik Mandrekarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09285785021596133547noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497641681609040987.post-29323332305262534602008-08-07T12:48:00.000-07:002008-08-07T13:02:22.211-07:00Internet Journalism I<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Internet is a powerful tool for the media.News portals like Rediff,Yahoo and Google News offer a vast repository of diverse happenings from America to Zhangjiakou.<span style="font-size:100%;">Apart from these portals there are search engines,RSS Feeds,Wiki and there's Google.Well googling has become an integral part of our daily lives but its neither the beginning nor the end to what you want to find</span>.<span style="font-size:85%;">Here I cover some search engines that offer specialized sevices and in most cases these will help you end up with a better result than google...and in the end I'll just copy-paste a few tips on how to use Google in a better way!</span></span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">The keywords I used to compare were "<span style="font-weight: bold;">quark goa</span>" without the quotes and the following are the results and what I think about the corresponding Search engines:</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">www.Google.com</span>- Gave the <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">www.bits-quark.org</span> site on I'm feeling lucky! which basically means its the first site that appears on its search result page.199,000 results in all but the worst part:the rest of the immediate results were nowhere close to the official site which shows that google's *<span style="font-style: italic;">crawler</span> isn't exactly the most intelligent bot out there.Neither is Google the most exhaustive search engine.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">www.yahoo.com</span>-First hit: <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">www.bits-quark.org</span>, next www.bits-goa.ac.in and the rest all relevant to either the BITS Goa Home page,wiki or blogs with the quark Tag.More results than Google in this case.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Windows live search</span>- Excellent new engine.No need to hit next button 'coz all search results on one page.results close to yahoo's,Fast and offers excellent Image search options.Apart from that google still offers more tools than this.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Ask.com</span>-Very good at searching across blogs and social networks.Use it when you are searchin for people or the birth place of your grandfather's aunt in Ullan Battor.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">AltaVista.com</span>-Good relevance of results but I see no point using this when there are other options already available.<br /><br />Then there are slower engines like <span style="font-weight: bold;">lycos.com</span> and sites which integrate all engines in one.<br /><br />Use <span style="font-weight: bold;">www.555-1212.com</span> to search area and country codes and email addresses,<span style="font-weight: bold;">forumone.com</span> to search across forums,<span style="font-weight: bold;">www.infospaceinc.com</span> to search across yellow pages and different directories and <span style="font-weight: bold;">findforms.com</span> for finding all kinds of legal material but all mostly related to US.<br /><br />Then there are other specialized sites pertaining to medicine,news only,regional engines,computers,market watch and industrial products.<br /><br />Now coming to the part of optimizing your Google search:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">1)Use <span style="font-size:130%;">"Laloo Prasad yadav"</span> in quotes when you want the results to contain the entire phrase as you have typed it else you'll end up with things like railway LALOO,rabri prasad yadav.</span><br /><br />2)A capital<span style="font-size:130%;"> OR</span> to find either of the two parameters on each side of OR.<br /><br />3)<span style="font-size:130%;">The + or - operator</span>. Eg. search elizabeth -queen and you will get all instances of things in which elizabeth is not a queen.<br /><br />There are plenty more tools and sites but these are fairly adequate at the moment.Of course Google is still the ONE but my favourite search engine is<br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><br /> <span style="font-weight: bold;">http://www.cuil.com</span></span> : Recently established by a bunch of former google researchers, this site provides 3-4 times more results then google and boasts of a very fast and efficient engine.The Intelligence component in the crawler is surely more than google which just ranks on basis of its pagerank feature.<br /><br />So for a general search my ranks are:<br /><ol><li>Google OR Cuil</li><li>windows Live search</li><li>Yahoo</li><li>ask.com & www.555-1212.com</li><li>Any of the rest</li></ol><br />That's all 4 the day folks!<br /><br /><br /><br />*<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">crawler-</span></span>Well this is a program or something we may call a bot that roams all over the world wide web and indexes pages so that they are marked in an appropriate manner for the key words.This indexed data is then used when you press the search button.Read more on the crawlers at ht<span style="font-weight: bold;">tp://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html</span>Pratik Mandrekarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09285785021596133547noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5497641681609040987.post-20911131611385388332008-07-24T22:25:00.000-07:002008-07-24T22:58:33.298-07:00<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Hello all, this is the opening post in the official blog of the Department of Journalism and Media Affairs or DOJMA ( for some reason our fearless leader wants to shorten it to DJ, dunno why??) for the BITS, Pilani - Goa Campus. First of all to the members of DOJMA who read this, hope you all had a great summer vacation. I know some of you were probably busy with your Practice School I madness, hope the experience was a useful one. To the juniors in DOJMA, congrats on the summer issue you guys came out with, it was some good work and I'm sure you guys will do great in the future as well. To any random blog reader who stumbled onto this post ( BITSIAN or not), here is a little explanation as to what DOJMA is about.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">The Department of Journalism and Media Affairs is the latest incarnation of the group formerly known as the English Press Club (EPC) of BITS, Pilani - Goa Campus. Its main aim, as the name suggests, is to cover the important and not so important happenings of the campus and at the same time maintain contacts in the various mass media out there, so as to spread the word on BITS, Pilani - Goa Campus.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Well the long term plans for this blog aren't all together clear at the moment but we will be posting the latest happenings in campus and the little happenings of the department. Also barring any technical difficulties (= college net speed, BPGC readers will know what I am talking about), we will also probably be posting the BITS Herald in pdf format.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Well I think I've probably rambled on long enough for the first post. Peace.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4