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

“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

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?)

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 http://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/

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

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