Government Requests is  a tool from Google that reveals what different governments across the Globe are asking them to reveal. These are categorized into two – Data Requests and Removal Requests. Data Requests include requests for information about Google users and products and Removal Requests include requests for removal of content from Google search results.

The data is based on the number of requests received between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009. Brazil tops the list with 3663 data requests and 291 removal requests. India is in 4th position in Data Requests with 1061 requests and 3rd in removal requests with 142 requests.

In the FAQ section it says – “We are working on a separate tool to show you when Google services have been blocked by governments or government agencies” .

You can view India’s profile on Open Net Initiative here.

It’s your life and you should have the right to choose how to live. Why on Earth would someone want to control you unnecessarily as long as you don’t cause trouble for others.

Internet giants are doing no good. According to this blog post at Digital Inspiration companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft co-operate wholeheartedly with the Chinese government in implementing internet censorship there. Even Google shows a separate set of search results for China.

WordPress is different That would be the good news to all those WP fans including me. Matt said a big NO to the Communist government on blocking some topics in WordPress or giving out details about WordPress users. Big Kudos to Matt and WordPress.

Thank God the Communists are losing grounds in India and their anti media activities are limited to calling  the main stream media “a syndicate against the communists”.

Image: Xanga-TaiwanIndependent

Why should you vote ?

Earlier I thought I would never vote. Why should I vote for these corrupt politicians? I know many have this same question. Then I changed my mind. After all something is always better than nothing. As far as there is no option of “NO VOTE” somebody would be elected even if you don’t vote. So vote for better one ( I believe the better party).

Political party or the candidte?

Our constituency Kottayam had the largest number of candidates contesting form the state (20). But the contest was primarily between two contestants and I had to choose one among them. I preferred one candidate over the other as a person. Unfortunately as a political party I preferred the party of the other candidate. I was really confused whom to vote.

Finally I decided to choose  the political party. After all the policies of the political party matters more than an individual. Forget about regional development. That won’t be a lot different. They know very well that they have to face the people at least in every 5 years.  Only a stable government with less number of parties can take the country forward.   ( I hate this coalition government  and the associated  political bargaining).

Should there be a a no-vote option ?

Personally I don’t think this can make any difference.  And I’m sure at least for this state of Kerala number of people who would choose that option if available  would be very less.

My advice to all those who haven’t voted and are yet to vote would be to go out and vote.

Image: rediff.com

I think he is in many ways the most different candidate contesting from the state for many reasons. For many ordinary voters he is still alien in spite of the heavy campaigning done for Mr Tahroor. Some one who doesn’t speak Malayalam well, some one who was never seen in any of the political activities in the state before.  But there are some serious issues about Mr Tharoors candidature.

Mr Tharoor in his election website http://www.shashitharoor.in make his intentions and view about his constituency and politics clear. He has also explained ‘Why UPA ?’. Really I liked his website very much.

But there are some serious issues regarding Mr Tharoor, especially because  of his involvement in many controversies because of his view about Israel and Coca Cola. Many others believe he is an opportunist. The are still others who campaigns for him.

This makes it clear why the road is not that smooth for Shashi Tharoor. He has to face opposition from even within his party. Anyhow the result of the Thiruvananthapuram constituency will be a landmark in many regards.

The US elections and the Obama campaign was closely followed here in India also and the way Obama reached the youth and common people inspired many. Now it seems that the political parties are experimenting with similar campaigning tactics here also in the coming Assembly elections. The youth forms 2/3rd of the total population and the political parties are trying to reach them through the new age media’s including  the internet and mobile phones. While the Indian National Congress has produced some promotional videos (link) that are widely promoted over the internet the BJP goes much beyond that through official websites and forums. Through this BJP hopes to reach individual voters.

BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate LK Advani has recently launched his official website ( http://lkadvani.in). The site has an audio introduction by Mr Advani. It also includes a forum which has members close to 1K and covers  a variety of topics. BJP’s Delhi Chief Ministerial candidate VK Malhotra has also opened his official website(http://vkmalhotra.in) hoping to prevent Mrs Sheela Dixit becoming the CM for the 3rd consecutive time.

Advani plans to go obama way -NDTV news

All the parties have special internet units along with their media group that leads their campaigns over the internet. Both the Congress and BJP has their unofficial Orkut communities. While the BJP has almost 18.5K members the Congress has just over 10K members. Interestingly while searching for Congress or BJP at Orkut the communities ‘We hate congress’ and ‘We hate BJP’ also comes among the first few results.

In India these online sentiments can never be taken as that of the aam aadmi. These political parties still has to depend lot on traditional road shows and door to door campaigning to get their support. Hopefully these online promos might bring more youth to the polling station. And who know in the coming Parliament elections we might see some Google ads of these political parties.

First Step: Getting the feed URL of your scrapbook

Goto OrkutFeeds and give your scrapbook URL (something like http://www.orkut.com/Scrapbook.aspx?uid=1559222230473877..) and they will give you the feed for your scrap book.

You get you feed URL http://www.orkutfeeds.com/feed.php?uid=15592….

How to get your scrapbook URL

Here is how you can get your scrapbook URL, it is like http://www.orkut.com/Scrapbook.aspx?uid=xxxxxxxxxxx You can find your uid by clicking on the profile link on your Orkut home page, you will be directed to the profile page and you can find uid from the address bar.

Second Step:  Creating SMS channel

In this step we will create an SMS channel for our feed. Goto Google SMS channel and sign in using your Google account. If you are using this for the first time you have to get your mobile verified by getting an SMS with activation code. Once that is done click on try it now section at the right side of it home page to create your own channel.

You will have to fill a long form like the one below now where you have to give the feed URL obtained in the previous step.

You have to be very careful about two things.

1. You have to select RSS/Feed Atom as Source and give the feed URL obtained in the previous step. (Without http:// as that is already given there)

2. Change Allow publishing by to Only me and Who can subscribe to By invitation only. This makes your feed private so that only you can view them.

Almost done , now click create channel.

From now onwards whenever someone scraps you ,you get an sms notification with your friends name.

Here is how you can get your Gmail emails as SMS for Free in India. This uses the Google SMS Channel that has been recently introduced and FreeMyFeed service

About FreeMyFeed

Free my feed is a service that allows you to bypass password protected feeds. They say passwords are “never stored on the server,” and discarded immediately after parsing your feed. This is featured in Lifehacker and Google systems. So you might try this risk free.

First step: Getting the feed URL of your inbox

Gmail provides a RSS feed for your inbox which is by default http://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

But this requires password authentication. So we use FreeMyFeed to by pass that. Go to FreeMyFeed. Give your feed address ,username and password and submit.

Here the feed URL is http://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom

They will give a very long URL, some thing like http://freemyfeed.com/feed/asjdasjkdhas232h3… This is the feed URL for our inbox

Second step: Create an SMS channel

In this step we will create an SMS channel for our feed. Goto Google SMS channel and sign in using your Google account. If you are using this for the first time you have to get your mobile verified by getting an SMS with activation code. Once that is done click on try it now section at the right side of it home page to create your own channel.

You will have to fill a long form like the one below now where you have to give the feed URL obtained in the previous step.

You have to be very careful about two things.

1. You have to select RSS/Feed Atom as Source and give the feed URL obtained in the previous step. (Without http:// as that is already given there)

2. Change Allow publishing by to Only me and Who can subscribe to By invitation only. This makes your feed private so that only you can view them.

Almost done , now click create channel.

From now onwards you get an SMS whenever you get an email. However it has two limitations, one that you get only the Subject of the email in  your SMS and that there can be considerable time delay. But for those who don’t check their email every hour this can be  very useful.

There was some other userscripts for firefox similar to this that replaced user name with links to scrapbook, album etc, but this one is better and beautiful. See screenshot

This script works only with Mozilla Firefox free downloadable.

• Install GreaseMonkey addon for firefox if you haven’t yet. Click to install
• Install the Userscript for user menu. Click to install