Tag Archives: news

Digital Spring Cleaning Checklist!

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As our lives increasingly go digital, it is useful to periodically run a status check on our online assets and relationships. I recently did my annual online services (subscriptions) spring cleaning. It threw up multiple surprises & uncovered leakages.. sharing a quick checklist here

  • Unused Subs: Found 2 subscriptions I’m paying, but not using.. promptly killed!

  • Broken Subs: Found multiple sububscriptions that got broken by the RBI credit card issue took some time, but painstakingly resurrected each one!

  • Dual Billing Shocker: Turns out my Audible a/c was being billed both by Amazon India (in Rs) & Amazon USA (in $). So weird – emailed customer support, they acknowledged the problem & reversed the US dual billing. What a relief!

  • Android PlayStore Billing: Realized this has ballooned into a sizable, slippery list. Found one paid kids app I was unaware of. Seems like the handiwork of my 10yr old daughter… led to some family drama:)

  • Foreign news sites: Foreign news publication Economist, NYT, WSJ have HORRIBLE a/c settings. Confusing navigation, bad UX & findability. My WSJ account has no record of my invoices of 2yrs! Some of these services have been applauded for overcoming their print legacies and growing online subscriptions strongly… I’d guess that turnaround is largely confined to news consumption interfaces… they still have a long way to go on basic hygiene stuff.

  • Free Subs: But credit where its due – NYT has offered 8 months free subscription (Nov21-Jun22) due to RBI billing issue (in India). Thanks NYT. Guess every cloud has a silver lining… some good finally coming out of the RBI CC mess:)

  • Only Monthly Billing: Not sure why, but some services only have monthly billing (e.g YouTube premium). Hello.. its 2022, the Big G cant do quarterly or annual bills?

  • Unsubscribe Flow UX Dark Patterns: Came across UX dark patterns in unsubscribe flows of multiple services! Customer retention ninjas at work:)

  • Indian Subscriptions: Its heartening to see Indian startups catching up. I am paying for multiple Indian services now… this was zilch 2-3 years back!

Last but not least, replugging my old rant about the need for a meta news subscription service (instead of signing up individually with each). Hasn’t the world made any progress on this?

Recommend everyone does this spring cleaning once in a while… you’ll end up saving some $$, besides getting on top of things!

Instablog rolls out user generated video news and it is impressive!

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Instablog, the blog & citizen journalist network has launched a daily video show called Global Report. The show is styled on the familiar television news format and features short video reports from their reporters in different parts of the world. Check out the screenshot & the video below- the final production is quite impressive. This show is available in different video formats and also for mobile devices, including the iPhone.

The video show is a powerful exposition of citizen journalism at its best. Media consumption habits for certain sections of the society are changing, courtesy the internet. I now spend lesser time reading the morning newspaper, which has been substituted by what I read online- either on online news channels or via the blogosphere. And while my own example is a slightly skewed sample to extrapolate to a larger audience, the change is incrementally perceptible for large swatches of metropolitan India.

Screenshot:

The most challenging thing in producing a video show of this kind is managing the logistics on a continued basis, apart from achieving consistency in production quality. You can do it for a short duration fairly easily but getting this running as a regular show is a demanding exercise. This is what Instablog says “….putting a daily show together of such magnitude has been an adventure in itself. We have writers sending us information putting their own lives at risk to get the truth out. We have literally put together a global news organization using tools which have to be available in even some of the world’s poorest countries….“. I can imagine that.

Instablog (for those who might be unaware) is an excellent social media news website. They have over 25,000 registered members and gets more than 3 million pageviews per month. And you can’t but feel jealous – they are based out of Shimla, the popular hill station in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. WOW! Having an office overlooking the Himalayas – I could kill for that!