SanskritVoice is a Web 2.0 enabled, non-profit website that has been created by Seshu Karthik (whose earlier project Stuff-a-Blog was profiled on Webyantra). The idea is to create a community of Sanskrit lovers and spread awareness about the ancient language. Seshu was driven by the urge to create a project that serves India & its culture.

The website is based on PHP, Text-Pattern and the data for the Sanskrit glossary in the RSS feed is extracted from Arthur Anthony McDonell’s ‘A Practical Sanskrit Dictionary‘.

Seshu says that he used the ‘Om’ (or Aum) in the site’s logo, for it is believed to be the basic sound of the world, and contains all other sounds. This logo was selected only in the light of Sanskrit language, and has no religious connotations.

You can submit links to the Sanskrit resources section. They can be Sanskrit tutorials, book-reviews, collection of links, or any resource that will serve the Sanskrit loving community. You can subscribe to the Sanskrit RSS feed, which contains a list of Sanskrit word-meaning pairs, and is updated several times every day. True to the Web 2.0 paradigm, there are campaign buttons supporting Sanskrit that you can embed on your blog or website. And there is also a slick widget that displays the Sanskrit glossary and this can be embedded as well.

As of now, SanskritVoice is a one-man (rather a kid’s) crusade to create a repository for the dying language on the web; if case, you can contribute to the site, or you know of somebody who can, pass on the reference and help build this community. And hats off to Seshu, who is all of 25 years old and seems very much a Web 2.0 addicted geek.

We have one for cricket enthusiasts, another one for Bollowood buffs, yet another one for Hindi music lovers- so can one for the huge legion of IT folks in this country be far behind ? I am referring generically to social networking sites and specifically to techTribe, which is aiming to be the professional avatar of Orkut for Indian IT/BPO/KPO professionals. The site was launched a few months back and is slowly picking up steam.

techTribe is headed by Rohit Agarwal, a seasoned Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and former software marketing/sales professional. He is assisted by a seven member team which is based out of Silicon Valley. techTribe is funded by friendly “angels/VCs” who have been behind companies like Webify, Sybase, CommerceOne etc.

The idea behind techTribe is indeed quite striking. It is essentially a career or professional networking site and its is aiming to help you leverage the power of social networking to enhance your professional life. It is based on the premise that you can develop a network of professional buddies, colleagues etc who can be a source of help throughout your career. The site can be a catalyst in helping technology professionals establish their identity ­ based on their background, their achievements, their abilities and their network of friends and colleagues.

You might wonder how this is any different from the LinkedIn model. I posed that same question to Rohit ; he believes that LinkedIn is a place to find professionals you don’t know. techTribe on the other hand, is a place where you build a network and utilize that network for counselling, guidance or mentorship. Rohit also thinks that while you can build specialized groups on Orkut, they tend to become too bloated which makes meaningful interaction within the group very impractical.

So how does the tribal system work. It actually works very similar to a social networking site but its general look/feel is very sobered and professional. You can create an account and start a tribe or join one created by others. The name of these tribes are limited only by your own imagination. Sample a few of these – BlackBeltTechies, Jack of all Trades, VirtualTeamforSoftwareDev. You can create a blog, add photographs, upload/write articles et al. Something that caught my attention was the ‘Create you 20 questions‘ section, where you can create a list of questions which are posed to people browsing your profile. The answers given by various users can be browsed publicly.

The future revenue model will be based on corporates who are interested in sponsoring relevant parts of the sites (or maybe relevant tribes), premium membership for paid users or from unobstrusive advertising. Given the fact that the user base is likely to have a very strong technology orientation, its entirely possible that many tech companies would pay to capture eyeballs on this site. Techtribe wants to get en masse membership through corporate alliances with IT companies. They have an early success story with Zensar Technologies, which has announced a partnership to help foster innovation within its developer base.

Overall the website has a lot of promise. It has successfully identified a niche and seems to be having a game plan to build up loyalty with that niche. Something they could do is to try to give a more social networking kinda feel to the homepage itself, which looks a trifle static/bland at present. BTW, I love their logo, its really looks ‘tribal‘.