Finally, Google has also jumped into the music-bandwagon! Google India today launched Google Music India – a fully-blown music streaming service.

The Google Music home page with album listings.

The service, which was launched earlier today under ‘Google India Labs’, is available at http://www.google.co.in/music and is accessible by users all across the world.

Google Music is pretty-impressive – especially the search part. Existing streaming services like Raaga and MusicIndiaOnline have appalling search – and that’s where Google‘s service scores. The search feature is quite comprehensive. You can search with the movie name, the lead actor’s name (e.g. a search for ‘Shah Rukh Khan’ lists songs from his movies), songs according to time period, and what not. You can even use complex queries to find out Guru Dutt track from your childhood that you’ve so badly wanted to catch up with, using some smart search queries.

Fresh from watching the movie, I badly wanted to listen to the songs. Lo and behold, Google comes to my rescue.

The service does not use a native ‘Google‘ player, neither does it host tracks in its server. The songs are sourced from ‘Saavn.com’, ‘Saregama’ and ‘in.com’, says the Google India Blog. Users can choose the player of their choice, for some songs.. The audio quality is decent. ‘Saregama’ and ‘in.com’ players do a good job, while the ‘Saavn’ player quite buggy. The streaming works well in a 2 Mbps+ connection, but the songs stutter in 256Kbps. Another drawback is that the service does not offer playlists.

Currently, Google Music has a comprehensive collection of Bollywood. Tamil, Malayalam, and other regional tracks are yet to make it.

The service is fully legal – since it offers just streaming and not downloading. It is a successor to Google‘s music search service in the US – which offered search and previews of tracks.

Google has also launched its new music service in China.

The extent of Google Music’s success is doubtful since India has a strong ‘downloading culture’. Users prefer downloading songs rather than listening to audio streams online – they would still opt for pirated tracks available for download.  Another major con would be the slow internet connections in the country – the service needs at least 256Kbps (or above) for smooth playback. Besides, a bulk of India’s internet users use internet plans with data-transfer caps – such users would give this service a miss, in all probability. Then again, Google will have to tackle many established players like Raaga.com and MusicIndiaOnline.

However, the service is a boon for all music addicts. Foraging for that long-lost-track, can now be done in just a click. Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Google’s april fool hoaxes for 2009
2. Google’s environment film project: Home
3. Idea Star Singer ads in Google Adsense!

Why would you need a good web host? A self-hosted website/blog always adds on to your credos! Having a domain gives you an edge, trust me. And it won’t even cost the skies! Thanks to competitive companies and democratization of the web, you can get a great domain and a web host, at a very cheap price!

There are trillions of web hosting companies in the WWW. But it’s an extremely hard task to find a great one! Which is where rateyourwebhosting.com solves your problems!

I found this site: Web Site Hosting Reviews (rateyourwebhosting.com) on a Google Search. It has a rather cool listing of web hosting services available in the World Wide Web. The front page shows a list of top 11 hosting companies, featuring the creme de la creme among the hosting companies out there. There’s a detailed review of all the best hosting companies, with all their price plans, packages and services compared and contrasted down to the last detail.  In addition to this, the website also has a lot of helpful articles that would help you choose the web hosting plan/company as per your requirement. It also has a good repository of articles related to web hsoting which will help you with all your queries.

Wanna get a cool hosting package? Check out rateyourwebhosting.com now!

Related posts:

1. An expert’s take on Satyam, Infy and the like…
2. Accident 2.0 a.k.a. One great trip!
3. 15 tips to make a great blog

Idea Star Singer is  a very popular reality show in Malayalam television. The show is on its fourth season now and is the quintessential ‘best singer’ show, with all the masala and moolah. This very great reality show is the sole reason why yours truly has abandoned television!

I almost died laughing when I saw these ads in my blog a couple of days back!

Asianet Idea Star Singer:

Watch ISS Season 4 an Musical Entertainer!

LOL, I thought Ranjini Haridas knew enough crap about articles in English!! At least they could’ve made the ad grammatically correct!

This means just one thing – people have realized that the show’s downright crap! Or is this ad the ‘brilliant’ idea of someone behind the scenes trying to cash in on the free $50 Google AdWords campaign.

Looks more like it!

Well, turns out that the website’s actually a fan site! Nevertheless, the ad-placement and the ‘grammar’ would only leave a far negative impact about the show rather than a positive one. Maybe there must be some regulation on fan sites and stuff….

And yeah, Season 4 sucks harder than ever!!

P.S.

Yep, this IS an arbit post. But I do have university exams coming up, and I seriously can’t afford to flunk!

HOT Post alert:

Brace yourself!

Related posts:

1. Google’s april fool hoaxes for 2009
2. Google’s environment film project: Home
3. Google India Comes Up With Music Service With Search

When the whole world’s concerned about Global Warming, climate change and other perturbing issues, how could Google stay behind? No, I’m not talking about the much-talked-about green initiatives powered by Google.org. This time Google takes the power of mass media through YouTube and Google Maps to pull of this massive awareness initiative. Starting June 5, in cue with the World Environment Day, the ninety minute movie, ‘Home’ will be available to all YouTube users.

The movie, pioneered by Luc Besson and Yann-Arthus Betrand, tries to give a wholesome glimpse of the planet and depicts the very imperative need for change. In a massive online-cum-offline effort, the movie will also be telecast in movie theatres, television channels, et al, trying to create a synergistic and cascading effect in the promotion of a clean, green world.

To get a preview of what you can expect on June 5, check out some of the spectacular footage in the Home YouTube channel, to get some footage on the making of the movie. Trust me, it’s stunning! Google has now added a new feature to Google maps with more layers of images so that people can properly comprehend the movie.

Check out this stunning night view of Los Angeles from the Home channel:

For more details on the Home project, this post from the  Official Google Blog.

Update:

The movie Home has been released!! Check this out:

Related posts:

1. To Did. – A short film
2. Is the Malayalam Film Industry Dead, yet?
3. Apple iPhone 3G-S releases today!

April First came and went with its set of jokes and hoaxes. Thankfully, I didn’t succumb to any, but for a few from our very own Google! Yeah right, Google too released its set of April Fool Hoaxes very promptly, this year! If you didn’t know, Google has a history of April Fool hoaxes in the past including very inventive stuff like Google Gulp (A fictitious energy drink) to Google TiSP (a toilet-linked broadband service!)

So, the very inventive jokes by Google this time are:

1. CADIE or “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity” was the first in the long list of gags. Users of Google books and GMail found this queer announcement on March 31st. That day, the Google homepage said this:
   

   “For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.”

   LOL, ain’t it? Here’s the link to CADIE. And guess what, CADIE even has an official blog, on which page, Google shows an error. Here’s an image which shows how the blog looked like.

2. Almost all other hoaxes, including this one on YouTube, were based on CADIE. YouTube had a very hilarious ‘new viewing experience’ page, which actually inverted videos!! Take a look at this to see a featured video by the user ‘CADIE’.
3. GMail gets a new ‘autopilot’ option‘ with which, one could ‘adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings.’ It even has a ‘relationship ender’ which sends messages like ‘Terminate relationship’ as response to relationship related messages – says the FAQ page
4. GBall powered by CADIE comes next in the line. Exclusively for users from Australia, is said to be a ball for the Australia Football league in prototype. Whoa! And its technically engineered too!!
   
5. Even  Google analytics wasn’t spared. Here’s an analytics report of CADIE’s activities!!
6. There was even a 3D edition of Google chrome – running with the power of CADIE. Here’s how it looks!
   
7. Then came Google’s brain search, reminiscent of the old MentalPlex hoax. Same logic, but works only with mobile phones. You have to hold your mobile phone to your brain so as to ‘search the brain’. And you’re not supposed to search others without permission!! Try it… it’s damn funny! This is a sample result!!
8. Then there was Picasa with auto red eye… LMAO!!

Related posts:

1. Seminar on Blogging @ FOSSMeet 2009
2. Off to Tata Jagriti Yatra 2009
3. Google India Comes Up With Music Service With Search

WordPress is an awesome content management platform! It’s easy, dynamic, customizable and user-friendly – especially for bloggers most of who aren’t familiar with the nuances of PHP, HTML/CSS, Javascript and other ingredients for web publishing. More and more people are realizing the power of this dynamic content management platform and are yearning to move over from other platforms like Blogger/Typepad/Livejournal et al. But some of them stop in the mid-way, bogged down by technical issues. Even I had the same fears about importing my Blogger blog to wordpress. But once done, I realized that it was just a piece of cake.

But I too had to face my set of problems. Here are a few tips for all of you who badly wanna embrace WordPress. (Remember, I’m talking about the custom content management system available at WordPress.org, not the free blog at WordPress.com)

Here I go!

1) Install your wordpress blog correctly – First, buy your domain and get some good quality hosting space. 100 Megabytes is more than enough for a good wordpress blog. Make sure your hosting package includes a MySQL server, since, only then can you install wordpress. You can find detailed instructions on how to install wordpress here. Edit the sample post and add your stuff

2) Import your wordpress blog - In the ‘Tools’ section of your wordpress dashboard, there’s an option called ‘Import’. Select it and you’ll see a host of options, including ‘Blogger’ on the top. Choose it, and follow the instructions. However, there is a possiblity that you might encounter a problem. In such a case, make a WordPress.com blog and import your blogger blog into it. Then export it into an XML File (Dashboard – Tools – Import) and log back into your domain and import all posts. Voila!

3) Maintaining Permalinks: Now, this is going to be an issue you will face. If you’ve used a domain in your blogger blog, your old users won’t get redirected to your wordpress blog, because the permalink structure is different. But again, you can change it by changing the format of your wordpress permalinks to /%year%/%month%/%postname%.html. This feature is available at the Settings tab of the wordpress dashboard.

All this takes just 10 minutes!

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. I chose WordPress!
2. The Blogger’s block!
3. Makeover!

Disclaimer:
Prior knowledge of Malayalam (മലയാളം), or rather,its roman variant known as ‘Manglish’ in common parlance, is suggested in order to decipher the contents of this post.

Excerpts from a GTalk conversation:
One fine evening, the world was going as placidly about its ways, while I was killing time online. Like bolt from the blue, this chat window opens up with an ear-jarring ‘ping’! Please note: Statements within brackets are not part of the conversation. They’re ‘footnotes’. And yeah, the name ‘Random Guy’ is an alias for someone… ah, never mind. It’s irrelevant.

Random Guy: hi kozhi
me: Kozhiyaa??
Njaan kozhi alla. Period.
Random Guy: aint u one??
me:
Random Guy: phew loyolite naa?
me: When was I a kozhi?
ah.
Random Guy: heard ur a big one
me: Yeah. technically, I am.
Random Guy: and dont correct me puh-lease
me: wow.
From whom, I may ask…

okay okay.
me: I won’t puh-lese correct you.
Random Guy: i’m Random Guy
me: I accept your proposition.
yeah, I know you buddy
Long time.
Random Guy: hehe yeah loong tym

me: So, who told you that I’m a kozhi?

Random Guy: is dat imp?
me: Sure it is.
Random Guy: i don think sooo
me: I’d love to know the source behind my good-name, of course.
It’s vital.
Ah.
But I do.
Random Guy: it aint pal
me: Most-certainly.
Random Guy: naaa
me: aw.
But yeah,
I’d love to hear that.
Random Guy: and i don care wat u love

me: Duh!!
As if I didn’t know that…
Anyways.
Random Guy: hehe
me: how’s the sem-break?
Random Guy: not starte dyet
me: It started for me.
Officially, that is.
today.

YIPEEEE!!!
Random Guy: teachers tooo caring abt our studies
hehe
me: aw.
Random Guy: in cet
phuu
me: That’s pretty pathetic.
heh.
Interestingly incorrigible.
Random Guy: we gotta go till 30th
me: heard that

Random Guy: so howzz lyf?
me: ah, life’s pretty fine.
As you rightly put…
I’m ‘kozhi’ying it out!
hehe
Random Guy: gud
me: how ’bout you?
Random Guy: ben better
me: Good.
Well, I’m nothing compared to you, in that case.
I’ve heard you’re a pro.
Random Guy: hmmmm..
u can catch up
don worry
me: I’m trying.
Random Guy: i’m takin VRS
hehe
me: hehe
I’m not.
I don’t intend to.
Random Guy: then u can most certainly reach my status
jus try hard
a li’l more thatn now
me: Hmm…
yeah yeah.
Takes a lot of time.
Random Guy: tym aint a factor
ur orkut dp is better
this is crap
me: thanks
duh!
I’ve heard this one’s far better.
Well, opinion’s differ.
And basically, I’m not good-looking.

So I don’t give a damn whether it’s crap or not.
Random Guy: humble??
:O
okkey okkey
me: aw.
Not quite.
I just speak facts.
Random Guy: thats gud
keep it up

me: thanks.
Random Guy: naa don mention

me: okie.
Consider my thanks withdrawn, then.
Random Guy: take it
*Random guy stops responding*

Image Courtesy: XKCD

Random Guy returns with a vengence…
Random Guy: hey pal
me: hey man!
Random Guy: read ur review of the new chetan book
me: ah.
It’s a good book.
read it if you can.
Random Guy: i bought it too
Random Guy: and read it
me:
What say? :
D
Agree with me?

Random Guy: its ok
well yeah
me: The
ending was crap right?
I was like after i finished it.
Random Guy: but asking for change?
me: Avasaanam angeru kodam kondudachu. (He blew things up at the last moment)
yeah.
Like…
Random Guy: like wat?
me: he’s been writing on the same mould for a LONG time.
Read all 3 books and you get to see a similarity.
The First Person style…
Random Guy: thts wat he is good at
lets face it
me: heh.
yeah.
But someday he should change if he should be accepted as a mainstream author.
Random Guy: that i agre
agree
me: did you hear what Jeffrey archer said about indian authors?
he dissed them.

He meant Chetan Bhagat when he said that..
Random Guy: wat is the need to write the time taken by u to read the book??
show??

me: chumma…
hehe
Moda kaanikkaan. (Just to show off… of course I’m bluffing!)

Random Guy: hmmm… that makes a poor impression
seriously
me: Never mind.
Random Guy: yeah
don care
me: eg jactly!
hehe
So, what’s your display pic about?
Random Guy: amy lee
dunno her?
me: ew.
dumb me.
dunno her.
Random Guy: evanescence
vocalist
me: oh.
Random Guy: ring a bell?
me:
I listen to Evanescense….

She’s the lead singer, eh?
Random Guy: yeah
me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Lee


Random Guy: quick work
wats the point?
me: nothing much.
Just a waste of a few MBs… that’s all…
again, moda!!
hehe
My GK is very poor, you see…
So, I have to access the wiki everytime!!
Random Guy: yeah i see
one fellow from ur school did tell me u r a big show-off
and talkin to u strenghthens my belif
me: Your belief on/about what?
me: duh!!
Great to hear that.

Well, actually I show off a lot.
Mostly to no effect.
Still I persist!

It’s no harm no?
Technically, at least…
Random Guy: i call such guys dumbos

me: duh!Random Guy: anyways carryon
don worry man
u ne
ver mind

me: Honoured to be a dumbo by your definition!
Dumbos rock!
YAAY!!!
hehe
Thanks anyway for your heartening words.
I’m pretty-elated.
Random Guy: typical loyolite
me: thanks, buddy!
I’m a Loyolite
me: and proud to be one!
Random Guy: let me be honest
yeah.
me: Please do!
Random Guy: u sing very well
Me: thanks.
Random Guy: and u r writing is ok too
me: yeah
Not okay.
It’s just kinda average.
LOT of room to improve.
And I’m trying.
hehe
Random Guy: i’m speaking on my terms here
me: okay.
shoot.
Random Guy: listen
me: Listening intently.
Random Guy: so u got talent
pls stay by that
me: yea…
good.
I think I should
Random Guy: and ppl will like u bit more i guess
me: Hmmm…
You have a point there.
Random Guy: u r very good
me:
Random Guy: but frm wat i heard..ur personality shd improve a lot
me: So, in your opinion, erm, how do I stop showing off?
ew.
Random Guy: try working on that
me: okay.
thanks, anyway.
Random Guy: callate
anyways carry on as u wish
me: heh.
Random Guy: i’m going then
bye
me: okie buddy
Random Guy: take care
me: Thanks once again for the ‘candid’ comments.
bye
tc.
Random Guy: if u take it eriously good 4 u
me: I sure will.
Random Guy: sarcastically..
me: duh!
Random Guy: bye
me: bye once more.

Epilogue:

Only a bored, jobless and idle guy can fight a professional ചൊറിയന്‍ !

@ Random Guy (if you’re reading this; which is unlikely): No personal digs intended. This post is another temporary construct of my feeble human intellect (Celebrating the centenary of this line in my blog!) No one’s EVER goanna get your identity! Rest assured…

No related posts.