Seraja is making good progress. Yesterday and today I saw progress in all areas – from technology development to content enrichment. In about a month, the Seraja site will see launch of the new much improved version. Search environment, results presentation, and experience presentation will improve significantly. But the real major change will be in event entry. The event entry environment will make it a breeze to enter events and reports.
Currently most events (say 90%) on Seraja are those crawled and entered by our content team. With good event and report entry tools, the situation is likely to be reversed in the next 6-9 months. I think we will have more than 90% content entered by users.
On 7/11 Mumbai saw a disaster. Terrorist were successful in multiple bomb blasts (7 in 10 minutes) in crowded local trains. This resulted in more than 180 deaths and more than 600 injured people. During this tragedy, one could see a new phenomenon (actually not so new) – most TV stations were showing photos and videos coming from ‘citizen journalists’. Seraja believes in this citizen journalism idea and uses it extensively. An event can receive reports in any form – photos, video, audio, or text – from any body. What is more – it uses Wiki philosophy and allows people to creat events and add reports or add reports to an existing event. One could also write their comments on the event or reports. All this provides a more complete multimedia perspective and experience of the event. Current News – in paper, audio, or video – focuses on the medium and one reporters perspective; Seraja liberates News from these limitations. This is how News should be.