Human beings are social creatures and attending events (social, cultural, religious, personal , professional, political etc) is second nature to them. Given the emphasis of Web2.0 on user generated content, there is immense information about events, that lies scattered amongst various sources like news websites, blogs, discussion boards etc. It would help to have an internet based repository of this information. Something users could lookup, to know about upcoming events in their city; or relive past events by browsing through user documented accounts/reports that include multimedia elements like images, audio/video clips etc.
This is exactly the vision that spurred Ramesh Jain (researcher, entrepreneur, teacher) and Rajesh Jain (who needs no introduction) to create SEraja. SEraja is a Bangalore based website that helps users to search, experience and list events worldwide. It provides a service to document your events- past, present and future. You could post details about any event- be it your birthday, anniversary, meetings between friends/ professional groups, seminars, exhibitions, concerts, courses, lectures, camps, reunions, special offers etc. The name SEraja incidentally, doesn’t have a very precise origin. Various theories exist about this– from ‘Search Experience ka Raja’ to ‘Search Event by RAmesh JAin & RAjesh JAin’.
Its not difficult to understand the purpose behind SEraja; however it’s not easy to figure out how it actually works. Initially, I thought that SEraja operates like a listing board for upcoming events; on closer inspection, it looked like a search engine; and finally I was convinced, that it must be an aggregator website. I must admit, that I needed help from Satish Rajan, (Manager Alliances- SEraja) to understand SEraja’s modus operandi.
SEraja is actually a mix of all of the above three. You can create a free account and list an upcoming event. It also works like a wiki, as anybody can add any info about a public event. In that sense, its like a publicly editable announcement board for events. SEraja’s search capabilities are based on an automated crawler that trawls the web and retrieves event-related content like text, multimedia etc. These are checked by SEraja’s own team and then uploaded into the search database for retrieval. So what you finally get is an aggregated database of events, part of whose content is user created and part of which is retrieved from the web.
So what all can you do with SEraja? You can create an event and add related links (text documents, images, audio, video) to add perspective to it. You can tag or bookmark the event, leave comments, set personal reminders/alerts, or email friends about it. Once the event is underway or over, users can create reports about the event in a similar manner. The idea is to weave together a repository of ‘near real’ experience of remote, time-displaced events.
I created a test account on the site and created an event for the Mobile Monday meetup (held in Delhi on 5th Aug); the results of that are displayed in the webshot above.
That’s not all. Now you can also look up SEraja (http://m.seraja.com) on any internet enabled mobile phone. You can use your mobile to search out events in the top cities, while on the move. Pretty useful. And you can also add SEraja’s RSS feed as a widget to your website/blog to display the latest events being held in any city of your choice.
While on this, there is one specific feedback I have for the SEraja team. I think SEraja is a very well conceptualized product and it addresses a very basic human need. However, I spent quite some time going through the website and in my opinion, some of the communication about the product and how it works, needs to be explained better. The casual website visitor is unlikely to be able to comprehend the full range of SEraja’s capabilities from the website’s content.
The user experience for the new releases would be much better and I think that to a certain extent would help.
But I agree they do need a “things you can do with SEraja” kind of a page.
Yes, a page listing and detailing out what all can be done on SEraja will be quite useful. Point taken and will be implemented ASAP. Thanks a ton…
Just to add to the review, SEraja has been through a couple of rounds of limited testing and we have recieved many insights that will help us improve. Somewhere in the next quarter, you will see the new release with quite a few improved and new features. You can of course check these developments by going to our blog at http://blog.seraja.com/
By the way, thanks for the review and the feedback. We at SEraja will be watching this space for more insights and promise to respond to all queries and comments. So, if you have any queries, please comment here or mail us at [email protected].
Cheers…
I don’t get the name SEraja. Atleast http://EventsInIndia.com is a decent name and the site works better for people who are not so web savvy.
– Rohen
I don’t get the name SEraja. Atleast the site EventsInIndia.com is a decent name and works better for the non web savvy people.
By the way you don’t have a preview for your comments.
– rohen
Hi Rohen,
Thanks for writing in. We value your feedback.
I totally agree with you that SEraja is a difficult name to get used to. That is what I felt when I first started working on this Project. But if you ask me, after knowing and working on this project for just a short time, I can’t imagine it with any other name.
EventsInIndia.com, is talking about “Events in India”, and hence their choice of name totally justifies their purpose.
We also could have called ourselves some other name, maybe “Event Repository” or “Events for All” or some other easy to understand and maybe catchy name. But in that we face one problem, the name will not be able to do justice to all the many needs we hope to address with the site. Yes we are about events, but we are about events you and I don’t relate with the word “Events”. Think “The first time I saw a Kannada Movie and felt like watching a captionless comic book”. We are about events, but we are trying to push the envelope to becoming an “Experential Search Engine”. We are hoping to look at storing data on the Internet in a new way, around data points called events rather than in and around documents. We want to bring together the uses of a wiki with the appeal of a Blog. There is so much we are trying to do that any name with a preassigned meaning will not do justice to our purpose.
Instead, we hope that SEraja (like maybe Ford, BMW or some other examples) will define what we are trying to do, rather that use a name that will try defining our purpose.
We agree that we are being ambitious, but then, we won’t have it any other way.
Thanks again…
Cheers
For Satish:
1. how do you pronounce seraja?
2. why would i want to publish ““The first time I saw a Kannada Movie and felt like watching a captionless comic book†as an event for others to see?
Rajesh,
You’ve asked something, that I was wanting to ask Satish i.e. how do you pronounce SEraja .
Satish,
One quick question- the search box (that basically defines a search engine), is at the bottom of the homepage. Should it not be at the top of the page for maximum eye contact. Or its intentionally kept at the bottom?
amit
“How do you pronounce SEraja?”
Well, again, we leave it open to the comfort of the person using it. There are two ways in which I have seen people pronounce the name.
1. Some people call it “C-raja” (as one word). This is what we, at SEraja, prefer to call it.
2. Due to the capitalization of the first two alphabets, some people have come to pronounce it as “Ess, E, Raja” as in three distinct words.
Rajesh,
As to why one would publish, “The first time I saw a Kannada Movie and felt like watching a captionless comic book†as an event may depend. In my view, this was a very memorable event in my life and I have a couple of photographs and a short audio clip capturing my reactions at that time. I would post this on SEraja as a “Private” event for memory sake. I may even post this as a “Public” event as a funny moment in life, maybe even a serious note to emphasis on the “In Rome do as the Romans do” idea. There are many reasons why I may post it, but capturing an event that still remains fresh in my memory on to a platform where I can attach experiences to it, share it with a group or all or even keep it private or even create an activity around it for a select group of people (“Have you ever watched a movie, not knowing what’s going on?”), is enticing and open to an array of uses only limited by our imagination.
Amit,
It has been a conscious decision to keep the search bar to the lower part of the page for the following reasons:
1. We wanted to shift the focus from “Searching” of events to “Exploring” of events. There are some more new ideas on the burner that will help us with this. We are hoping to bring relevance in the top half of the page to the visitor (like IP mapping of the events on the homepage) so that search is used only when required. We are working on the premise that not all experience need to begin with a search. “I don’t know what I want, but I know I want something.” (This will also help in cross consumption, “I came looking for something, but found something else more interesting.”)
2. We thought that the search function should be used only after consuming the contents on the page, not as the starting point, wherein we could reach a stage where the user will ignore the rest of the content and just go to the search bar. (Every user should feel that he will find something useful at our site whenever he visits, rather than visiting only when he needs something specific). (to draw a limited parallel, how easy has it become for us to ignore the ads in yahoo mail or hotmail.)
Thanks for your questions…
Cheers
Pingback: Ramesh Jain’s Blog » Blog Archive » SEraja
Great discussion.
One important fact that has not come up in this discussion and the original post is that SEraja is ‘EventWeb’, not just events. It is the Web of events that makes them a lot more interesting. The Web is a lot more powerful in case of events than it is in case of documents that led to the DocumentWeb also called WWW. Events naturally are related and lead to understanding that is otherwise not possible.
Another important thing is that ‘calendar of events’ like in Eventful or EventsinIndia represents only a very minor fraction (say 1-2%) of events that we take interest. News, history, movies, etc are all past events and our life is full of those and their effects on us thru the EventWeb.
By the way, I am doing a series on EventWeb to make sure that the problem mentioned in the last sentence of the post (‘The casual website visitor is unlikely to be able to comprehend the full range of SEraja’s capabilities from the website’s content.’) can be taken care of. And, I started that much before I saw this post. It is at
http://ngs.ics.uci.edu/blog/
1. I like Satish and Ramesh’s conceptualization of the EventWeb and thinking of the web with a new form of basic data. While we it is immensely difficult to change consumer behavior, I believe it is implementations of concepts such as these that will lead to some reduction in the web’s complexity. Thanks everyone for some really good thought on this post.
2. Also, from the product perspective – this shows quite a good mix of user-driven, editor-managed, robot-initiated.
3. (as a word of caution though, won’t success mean that the current internal company editorial process will get unwieldy?)
Gaurav,
“Also, from the product perspective – this shows quite a good mix of user-driven, editor-managed, robot-initiated.”
I feel the way Seraja is aggregating data is quite unique. Though (as you point out) once they start scaling up, it might pose problems. It will be interesting to know what goes into the editor managed part of content creation. I mean, who does this and how? maybe Satish can give us some insights into this.
amit
Hi,
Thanks for your responses.
About the editorial process at SEraja, we have a dedicated inhouse content team that generates events using the automated crawler and then based on certain parameters, refines and completes the information aggregated. We know that the present content team setup is not scalable as more and more events get added into our system.
But, there are two ways we hope this will resolve itself. Firstly, more users would mean more people visiting the site and with the ability of collaborative enhancing of knowledge, the wiki way, the content should behave itself to a great extent without any editorial team intervention. Still the inhouse editors will have automated tools to pick out possible exceptions that will then be looked at and approved/disapproved.
The second way is that we plan to set up small editorial teams across the world based on the demand for events from that location and this in turn will allow us to cleanse and manage more content than from a central place with limited local knowledge.
In all, the editorial team is mainly involved only in the management of content that is auto generated. We hope that once the usage goes up, so will the self monitoring of the user added content and then the editors can merely monitor the content thus enabling scalability. The automated part of content generation should grow but in the ideal case be just a small percentage of the user generated content and this will reduce the expectations out of the editorial team.
Thanks again,
Regards,
Satish Rajan