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.
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