Hindi Blogoshere: From freedom of speech to blog theft! · Global Voices
Amit Gupta

Time again for yet another update on the happenings of the Hindi Blogosphere. And this time we will start with something different, outer space for example. Ashish tells us about smaller sons of Sun, the asteroids & the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Ashish elaborates further on the origin on these asteroids by giving the known theories that many have given, the stronger of them suggesting that perhaps these asteriods are the remains of an ancient planet between Mars and Jupiter which somehow disintegrated!! He also tells us about how stars are born out of a Nebula and about the Neutron Stars and Pulars.
But the theories don't only exist about creation and destruction of heavenly bodies, they very much exist for those living on this planet Earth and one of them is how Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose died, with his death still a mystery, Sanjay remembers the great patriot and contemplates on how and when Netaji actually died. Lokmanch also puts forth some new facts regarding Netaji, giving more room to existing and new theories.
On the other hand, there's no better outlet for theories than books, so Jitu shows us the new way of telling others what books you have. I'm, frankly, still not convinced with the idea and its possible use, but then I think the guys at Shelfari must've something in mind to get the concept moving around if its not just yet another Web 2.0 application sprung from a momentary brainstorm without much thinking going into it! ;)
Moving on, we find that Pankaj is trying to compare the opposition end in the Indian Parliament and in the United States Congress as he finds it very disturbing that while the opponents of the ruling party in US laud on actions of the ruling party and the president, the opponents here in India can mostly be found trying to find one fault or another in the actions of the ruling party without giving thinking whether the action they are opposing is good for the country or bad. And in the meantime, Ravi Ratlami found that someone stole the content of his blog and published it on his/her blog in his/her own name. Getting on the gun, Ravi immediately found out the culprit website and came to the conclusion that the whole website is about stealing other bloggers’ content and publishing that in their own name, quite probably in order to get better search rankings and benefit by displaying ads like Google AdSense etc. on the blogs! On the queue, Fursatiya published his “Blog 101: How to protect your content theft”!! ;) Time continued at its own pace and thus arrived India's 58th Republic Day and on that day Jitu thought about what we've given to the country. He wrote that its not the time to think what the country has given us but to sum up what we've done for the country because every country is identified by its citizens, their thoughts, their work and their will to do something. On the occasion of Republic Day, Sunil writes about the freedom of speech and expression and how ruling bodies of some countries have been curbing this freedom by taking strict actions against those who indulge in this practice! But thats not all that is to freedom of speech. Sanjay writes about this explaining the social responsibilities of those who want to excercise their right to freedom of speech and expression. But while some were thinking and writing about serious issues on the Republic Day, some like me and my friends were taking a break in the city of Ajmer which has a history dating back more than 1000 years. :)
But does the freedom of speech and expression gives the right to freedom of action? I would hardly think so. Looks like the season of theft is on, as another guy started a couple of websites by lifting content from blogs of many bloggers. He did attribute the content to their respective writers but did it without permission from a lot of them and that is indeed wrong given that almost all the bloggers, whose content was lifted, don't have a copy-left on their blogs’ content meaning that you can't just go around and copy their blog posts in whole publish them on your website. Justifying the action of theft, the offender came up on defensive saying that his motive is not profit and the websites publishing the stolen content have been created with the purpose of serving Hindi on internet! He asked for permission from several bloggers, some of them gave him the permission to publish their content freely or on some conditions, his action of publishing without waiting for an affirmative from the content owners is indeed unjust and is something that people need to understand, that you just cannot take away someone's work as and when you desire!!
After an year's waiting comes the next chapter from the keyboard of Jitu as he shares his experiences when he moved base from India to Kuwait as he continues with his story telling us the Visa problems he faced.
On the tech front, Jagdish on the other hand is reflecting some light on Windows Vista with his mirror. Debashish is not behind in informing us about the incompatibility problems between the newly released WordPress 2.1 and the popular tagging plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior.
And to end this update, we take a look at the narration of Mahabharat by GK Awadhiya as it reaches the Kunti-Karna dialogue as Kunti reveals herself to her eldest son before the greatest battle of the time since her eldest son Karna was going to fight against his five younger brothers since he owes to Duryodhana, cousin and arch-enemy of Pandavas.
Links courtsey: Narad