Diggindianews is now MinkIt

Diggindianews is now with a new avatar as Minkit. The concept of MinkIt is simple. Open source happens when the demand side starts supplying itself. As Open source came as a revolution to proprietorship, the same way MinkIt is born as a revolution to current indian mainstream media. Presently mainstream media is in the few hands and is easily manipulated and influenced by rich and powerful people. MinkIt has the power to turn readers into news editors and transform conventional journalism to Distributed journalism.

For those of you who haven't heard about MinkIt, it's a news site for india that relies on its readers to determine what the most important news stories/headlines are that day. With lots of newspapers being in india, each one it either gives a scattered news or even if it is local there is still no platform that gives local news for a location on internet. MinkIt brings localised concept to news. Any local news for a particular city from classifieds to jobs to news can be published by any user. The most minked news comes in the front page. Any person from a local city can bring his news/blog/matrimony/resume/advertize his shop/classifieds for anything, and submit in MinkIt. He does not need to visit newspaper publishing houses and spend money in getting his news published because MinkIt provides this facility free of cost. A common man can simply target the local public for his business through internet. Lets say for example i stay in noida and i have a car that i want to sell then i simply join MinkIt and go to classified section and make a posting for my maruti car. The people of that city who are interested in buying my car can contact me by seeing my classified posting.

MinkIt has been launched at a perfect timing when indian mainstream media has made normal public frustrated of the way how they manipulate news as per their business. MinkIt is powerful because the public has right to vote down the news which is absolute junk. This is why MinkIt is called Distributed Journalism. We have the right to enjoy democracy in every aspect and with Minkit we can surely bring transparency to indian news content.

Diggindianews: Indian content (news/blogs/stories) sharing platform

I excitedly watch for new start-ups coming up in India. Today I came across another Web2.0 venture - Diggindianews. As the name may suggest it is a India based content sharing and discovering platform where the content that rocks is promoted to the front page.Amazing thing is if a story becomes popular it can literally drive thousands of visitors to a Web site within minutes.

Being indian i would promote sites that promote swadeshi content.Unlike digg which is too much segregated because of sharing entire worlds content, Diggindianews best thing is its localised concept which brings focus on indian content.

On looking at Diggindianews, one question that came instantly to my mind was "So why would anyone come post on Diggindianews instead of Digg?".My point is correct to an extent.But apparently i realised it is a simple issue of branding,brand image and brand recognition.As Coca Cola is linked with drinks so is Google with search and so is Digg with content sharing.Founder of Diggindianews says,"Diggindianews is not engaged in a battle to replace Digg instead it has altogether a different market to capture i.e India.In todays internet world, everything is becoming open source from search engines to social networks then why now open journalism where reader is a publisher.In a democratic country like india, people have right to express their thought then why not readers decide the promotion of a news instead of editors".

A recent Wall Street Journal article, The Wizards of Buzz, defines social bookmarking sites as “A new kind of Web site turning ordinary people into hidden influencers, shaping what we read, watch and buy.” Diggindianews seems to one platform through which the India news would be no more influenced by editors but by user ranking.As rightly said Be indian,buy indian, i would add appreciate products that focus on india.