How do you like Google Plus so far?

A friend of mine believes that a lot of sites and companies are now using the g+ button more than the f one that has taken the online social sphere by storm since its inception. Who will take over as the king here, I don't know.

What facebook had over the others (at the time Hi5, Friendster, MySpace, etc) according to me was their simple interface. I disliked MySpace totally for the lack of ease-of-use, and Hi5 and MySpace was okay. Facebook has shown its agility in trying out things and improving their interfaces very quickly (discounting a few bad experiments). It would be anyone's guess that Google would not fall behind in that! The current Gmail interface is useful and the G+ interface got a makeover recently too. However, I am not too happy with it!

Most of what I go over next will refer to this diagram below, where I've marked the areas on the Google Plus page as Main Area, Chat, Circle/Not-in-Circle, and Choices. Click on it to view a larger version.

Focusing on the Main thing
My first point of discomfort, is that the main area sits on the left. Many websites center their content, as that aligns more with where the viewer is probably sitting. With widescreen-equipped laptops, this gets worse. With the Cirlces-bar on its right, combined with the Chat portion, the main area seem to occupy very little space here. The Chat part is static - it doesn't scroll, but the Circles bar does. So, once you scroll down a little, there is an emptiness beside the main area. That makes me wonder, exactly how important that bit of information about who is/isn't in my circles actually is to the user. In the Choices bar, you have an option to edit your Circles, and this info could easily go in there, or in the notifications panels.

Choices
I also wonder if the Choices bar could've rested better on the right hand side. One of my theories is that since I use the  mouse or trackpad with my right hand, it feels like I am going a long way to access those options. (I wonder if its the opposite for left-handed computer users. Never really noticed. A bit disgraceful that I didn't).

A Shuffle?
One recommendation, would be to shuffle things about a bit:
 Choices  - Move to just left of the Chat bar
 Circles - Move to the far right, but modify it too - Coming after the next image.
 Main - While doing the shuffle, why not make it a bit wider?!

If the left hand list of circles could be used to filter the feeds from all the contacts, then that'd be a nifty little feature. This is a quick shuffle to see if the usability of the plus interface can be improved. Use of colors here could also emphasize the options on a single post, or the area where the feeds are coming. The use of subdued colors is a bit too much on the page.

Usability is just one aspect of a software. Unfortunately, if we think of Google Plus as being up against Facebook, many other factors need to be considered. Plus doesn't put advertisements around us, but the ones on Facebook aren't actually a bother. Facebook has lots of Apps - is that a plus?!  Then if my friend is right, Plus is finally getting the backing of the online community. Thats the number one thing in this market. As I was telling another friend, if all my friends decided to hang out in Cafe A, its no use if I ended up in Cafe B!

Digital Bangladesh: A Review

I think it took a year after it was announced (4 Mar 2010 as per Google/The Daily Star) that people could make GDs online (A general diary) to announce that this service is being scrapped, for it was not working. This news, however, was within the news of the Police HQ being opened for anyone to make GDs since many reports of lack of cooperation from the police had come up! Instead of curing that ailment, we tried going digital, and we now opened up the HQ for a process that should remain decentralized.

The purpose of any product, including software, is to solve a problem. If you look at the case above, one can easily sense that the problem was not a lack of software. Software developers often see when proposing solutions an inclination to changes in a process that existed in the non-digital way of doing. So, its not to say that software couldn't have solved the problem. As was the hope with the promise of a "Digial Bangladesh", that we'd be able to bypass the corruption and the grim faced people at the government office counters who nonchalantly ignore the people requesting their services.

Dhaka is a prime place for automating services. The greatest benefits would be derived from avoiding long drives from one point of the city to any other point. Even neighboring areas like Banani and Gulshan are far in terms of time if you are going between them by car. Another benefit that citizens would hope for is to avoid the circumstances where they are victim to unlawful payments for services they rightfully deserve. Sometimes they don't want payments, but they also don't want to serve you. From my own experiences and of others, I know sometimes they would just ignore you and carry on a conversation with someone at a nearby desk.

Thus, digitizing the GD process should have involved careful considerations of what was required for it to come of use to the citizens. Issues like authentication and electronic signatures should have been considered and processes redefined and the whole police camp trained to work with it. As far as avoiding traffic goes, digitizing processes in government offices combined with a use of the postal services could simultaneously reduce the amount of people traveling on the roads of Dhaka and also increase the revenues of the postal department. I am suggesting using the postal department in sending final papers, or even something like passports for renewal, etc, back and forth between government offices and the public.

As of now, a lot of the progress so far is having a lot of forms scanned and put up on the respective websites. That is a good start, but one from which we should now evolve to provide further assistance. The government now takes the liberty to sms its citizens about the evils of corruption, but so far not enough was done to root out the go-slow attitude and inefficiencies of the offices where we avail government services. If a service-oriented culture is not harnessed, the computers sent to these offices might never even be turned on.

Also not encouraging is the Digital Bangladesh website itself being so far unavailable for a month.

Related:
Road to Digital Bangldesh

Social ICT: Research/Social ICT Entrepreneurship

The research for cheap computing solutions for providing computing services for children from poor families or communities led to the development of the XO laptop from MIT. Similarly, Intel had also run their own research with the same goal. Though, recently both of them lost a bid for providing education computing services to Andhra Pradesh, India to NComputing's solution using virtualization (where each student only has peripherals like a monitor or screen, and a mouse and keyboard, and all computing is done on a central computer. This solution proved cheaper than both XO and Intel, costing $70 per student), nothing can undermine the need for research in areas such as this. Poor countries have less money to spend, and thus the cheaper the technology, the more those societies can reap it's benefits.

Another research project will take us back to the issue of accessibility. As it turned out, two separate researches done in two different continents produced similar results - one in USA and another in Italy. Both developed a system to help navigate people with blindness around an area using RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification). In the case of the research in Italy, they installed RFID transponders into pavements and they each hold an ID. These get activated by chips installed on the tip of the canes and this results in the ID being sent to a smart phone which uses the ID to search a database of locations to retrieve information about the current location and announce it to the person using the cane. This way people with blindness can know where they are, or if they are at a crossing, etc.

A story closer to home is of the work of Tapan Parikh, who helped the fishermen and MFI's (Micro Finance Institute) achieve efficiency in a village in Kerala, India. Without really doing something innovative in terms of creating technology, he thought of a way to harness the computing power of modern cell phones to bring about managerial improvements for self help groups (little groups formed by those taking the loans from MFI with a common goal to achieve).

'Sustainable development' is a term well known, practically, everywhere today. It is a very important fact that development cannot be considered without thinking about whether it is sustainable or not by the community it is being sought out for, and in that scenario, if technology is to be used for the benefit of third world countries, it has to be affordable. This phenomenon has been observed here with mobile phones whose market is now full of different brands of a wide range of prices. So, projects like Tapan's is now easily attainable and sustainable for its target group. Phones with the advent of GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and EDGE (Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution) that allow them to access the internet can do a lot to reduce a digital divide. Another aspect in computing is software, which is also getting help achieving sustainability from the open source software development community. Linux has been from a long time ago, been the favorite operating system (OS) of choice in many research circles/academia. As mentioned before the XO Laptop for children in poor areas also used Linux as its platform in helping keep the price of the product low. Considering that the XO and Tapan Parikh's work are quite recent happenings, research along these lines started long before that, at the beginning of the 21st century, a research with the intention to help the poor farmers in India by providing computational power in the form of a simple computer running on a Linux OS. That simple computer was also small, as the size of a PDA, and was aptly named Simputer. Though developments in other ares even half a decade later brought to question the success of the Simputer, it was a deserving research area - reducing the digital divide. The license to develop Simputers were given out to two computers who still continue to manufacturer devices based on the Simputer specifications (search online for the Amida Simputer).

There are also organizations out there who continue to reinforce the use of ICT for social change, for social empowerment. These organizations do their part by showing their appreciation for those who directly contribute towards bringing about social empowerment and change.

A lot of the readers probably heard of the Stockholm Syndrome, and now its time to hear about the Stockholm Challenge. This is a contest that has been taking place since 1994. Its current organizer is The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH for short), which also happens to be a mildly popular destination for students from Bangladesh to go for higher studies. The challenge is meant to promote and appreciate projects in ICT that help sectors in society which might go overlooked normally, to “counteract social and economic disadvantage”. The award is given in six categories:
1.Public Administration, 2. Education, 3. Economic Development,
4. Culture, 5. Health, 6. Environment, and 7. Global Knowledge Partnership (Included from 2008's competition).

The Stockholm Challenge is now a biannual event, and the winners of this challenge receive a trophy and cash prize, and has some big Swedish companies as sponsors – Ericsson and Sida, and the City of Stockholm. Though the competition for the current year is over, our students and researchers of ICT might want to start thinking on whether they are up to this challenge for 2009! Lets hope so.

There is also an annual conference on ICTD, with even biddings taking place to host them. Well known and respected universities like Berkley take part in those bids and host these conferences. 2009's conference is destined to take place in the Qatar campus of another well reputed university of the United States of America - Carnegie Mellon, with none other than Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates as the keynote speaker. At each of these conferences, many research papers are presented, workshops are held, and panels of researchers are poised to hold discussions on important, novel or unresolved issues on the use of ICT for development. This is also an event that the universities of a country like Bangladesh should be very aware of, and they should organize their students to think about and participate in these kind of events. We are operating in a country where there is a spectrum of economic divide, where the right kind of education is not accessible to most, and bad bureaucracy steals the life of most good intentions. ICT might have a way out from a lot of those used in the right context, or not, and that is the matter of research. The call for papers for the 2009 ICTD conference is open, and the details of this is laid out nicely on their website (Available in the references section below).

Social ICT: Education

How can ICT help education? The answer to this question probably has a million components. To be very optimistic, we could replace workbooks with desktops or laptops, books would not be needed to be carried in backpacks to school, but downloaded from the internet and students would no longer need to write small notes to each other behind the teacher's back, they could IM (Instant Messaging, the likes of MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger)! Not quite, but why not?

We mentioned the project DonorsChoose.org before, and that is one way that education can be facilitated by ICT. Education is a necessary component of any healthy well functioning society. Schools lacking things necessary in instilling that education on their students will be falling short of their goals, not doing as good a job as might be possible. So when projects like DonorsChoose step in and lend a helping hand, it fills in a void that would otherwise hamper the goal of a good education. What is interesting is that it started in a country like USA where people assume they have everything. I smile thinking about the possibilities of such a project carried out successfully in a country like ours where economic disparities are high. We need a link between the low end of that spectrum and the high end badly, and in more sectors than just education.

The Internet is the largest database in the world, and it serves as an important accompaniment to books for students everywhere. However, those who were not privileged to attend technology savvy schools in third world countries are missing out. Some schools might have one computer, or more, but then they might not have internet. They might have internet, but the teachers might not have the right idea of how to use it to benefit the students. So besides having technology, another important criteria is to have a plan or understanding of how to use the technology to better educate.

SchoolSat is a project that was launched to improve Internet speed at schools in Ireland, with the help of the European Space Agency, and the Internet to the schools there were considered a higly useful resource. They used the Internet to search for materials to support the subjects they were already teaching their students. Later they also learned to use the internet to showcase student projects complete with pictures. This way schools could also see what the others were doing and learn from it. The SchoolSat project was supported by the National Center for Technology for Education (NCTE), which was formed by the government of Ireland to advise, inform and support schools on how to use ICT in education. Thus, the technology is there, the purpose is there, and a government body is in place who actively support the use of technology in education. Definitely these are things we, as a country, can emulate.

Another initiative to promote the computer as a teaching/learning tool was the One Laptop Per Child project. This is not a project that just arranges for each child to have access to a laptop, but it was an initiative to design a different kind of laptop that would appeal to a child's imagination and curiosity and also provide software appropriate to children's learning needs. This laptop was named XO. Another goal was to keep the price of the resulting product to a $100. Without getting into whether the price is/was conducive to be really sellable to the third world countries, the rest of the computer was just marvelous. It had a colorful appearance and ran on free Linux operating system which helped keep its price low immensely. It also has multimedia support and assuming that the children in a small village were using this laptop, in relative proximity, they could share their drawings, or other things they worked on. The XO was developed mostly in the research labs of MIT driven hard by Professor Nicholas Negroponte and made all kinds of design decisions like the kind of battery life that would be necessary for surviving in a village to how to avoid the most usual point of failure of a laptop (the connection between the mother board and the screen, the XO's motherboard lies behind its screen) to ergonomics.

Social ICT: Accessibility

One issue remain either unsolved or ignored even in some of the developed countries, and its a huge issue in poorer, badly governed countries. This issue is of integrating people with disabilities into the rest of society. One dimension of this issue is 'Accessibility'. In the physical world, the solution to this rests in providing the support for people with disabilities to enter a building, e.g. with ramps that is an alternative to stairs for those who use wheelchairs; or making sure buses, trains, planes allow accessible passage for them to get on, so that the bus' floor is at level with the pavement on the side of the street, or it has a folding ramp in it for wheelchairs. Similarly, for ICT, there is a need for accessibility for people with disabilities. This is thus a social awareness issue for manufacturers of ICT equipment and software.

Disabilities arise from the loss of any or many of the senses or physical function of a person. In interacting with technology, we use our hands, eyes, ears and our mouth, and thus the experience of ICT can be disrupted with a loss of any of them. There is a condition called 'low vision' whereby the print on this paper would be impossible for a person with that condition to read. A magnification of 5 times would possibly make it readable for them, or maybe more. Whereas a newspaper on its print is not readable then without a magnifying glass, the online version of a newspaper could achieve that magnification easily. Any website for that matter can make sure they have support for people with such disabilities. With the development of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) that allow the separation of the styling of a site from its html (Hypertext Markup Language) code with holds the content, this has become easier for both website developers and also companies who make web browsers (the software you use to view a website). Mozilla's Firefox is an example of a browser that allows its users to magnify the text on pages easily.

Other features are necessary to make web browsers accessible to a majority of the people with disabilities, keeping in mind the different kinds of disabilities. One such feature would be to make a website readable by a 'Screen Reader'. This would be a separate software or one that is a plugin installed on the browser, that reads out the content shown on a browser. This will be helpful for those with any kind of visual impairment. However, how the content is arranged on the website can make it difficult for a screen reader to read the website, or the user will have a hard time navigating a website. To tackle issues like this, W3C.org has stepped in. W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium who lay down the standards of markup languages like html, and they have also laid down what needs to be done to ensure accessibility in surfing the internet. All that is laid out in a website maintained by the specialized Web Accessibility Initiative, and its very important to be noted by both who develop websites or those who make web browsers.

The US government has actually also gone a step in that direction by laying out guidelines of its own for what it accepts as 'accessible' technology, all grouped under an act termed Section 508. These have been laid out as a guideline to be followed and comply to by all federal agencies, and those working with them. If people with disabilities can handle data the same way as those without any disabilities can, there is nothing to stop them to function at the same level as any other colleague, or member of society.

Design of interfaces like keyboards for computers or keypads for phones also need to be considered for accessibility. Braille keyboards, keypads will be very helpful for people with blindness. People with low vision would need large keys with the characters in large size they can view. Phones like the Samsung's Touch Messenger is a good example of innovations made to increase inclusion of people with disabilities into mainstream society. The Touch Messenger is a mobile phone whose interface uses braille number input, and can also send braille short messages (SMS) to other braille phones.

There is a strong movement within people with disabilities across all countries in taking charge of making sure their rights to all facilities enjoyed by people without disabilities are given and preserved. Over the years they have and are still striving to take charge of their own plight in society by demanding they be given the necessary facilities to operate normally in society. This is opposed to the idea that society will hand out things to them out of pity. To be able to do this successfully, accessibility to all forms of communication technology is vital to their purpose. Speaking locally, its probably easier to ensure that the people with disabilities in Bangladesh have more accessible technology, faster than providing accessibility on the streets and buildings. Even till now however, there is no Bangla screen reader. It has not been long that content has been able to be served in Bangla and so, the needs to have screen readers for Bangla are also quite untouched.

Social ICT: Internet Philanthropy

Lets start with the simple examples, since within the simplicity of these ideas lay the beauty of its achievement. Lets start with a few websites. Up first is DonorsChoose.org. At their site, they have a section where teachers from different places, schools list project proposals, for which they do not have enough resources to implement it fully. A price tag is usually attached to these projects so that visiting philanthropists can make better judgment on the commitment they can make to these projects financially. This goes with their tagline: 'Teachers Ask. You Choose. Students Learn'. And the resources listed can be simple things like books, dictionaries, to technical equipment like projectors. As part of the process, the receiving students also send back thank you letters and photos to the donor, which I am pretty sure makes for a very happy ending for everyone.

This site, in a nutshell, performs one very important task - it brings the right people together. There are many out there who have the intent of giving, but not sure how, and where, and schools are also struggling to find funds to finance all their needs. DonorsChoose.org is the place where these two parties shake hands. Similar websites are out there which also bring the right people together. Kiva.org is one such site, where micro-financing is given a lift. Micro-financing is usually associated with financial institutions like banks who give out the small loans. Here, the financier is an individual, and through Kiva's help, this donor can find another individual to loan his money out to. The individuals listed as seeking loans are from the developing countries, and in these countries, sums of money which might be considered small in developed countries, amount to a lot of money. Not to forget, its still a loan, and is at some point returned back to the lender. Kiva doesn't operate entirely independent of MFIs or Micro-Financing Institutions. The MFIs help Kiva pick out the candidates for loans. Similar to DonorsChoose.org, the visiting philanthropist can go through a list of these candidates, see which country they are from, learn their story, what they plan to do with the money, etc. The lenders can thus get a feel for the person they are borrowing out their money to. The actual handing over of the loan is handled by the MFI.

As long as we are on the subject of connecting, mention has to be made of TakingITGlobal.org. It has existed for as long as the most ancient of social networking websites, long before MySpace, or Facebook. Though not as popular (in terms of media coverage received) as the latter two, it does have an enormous number of members who are dispersed all over the globe and who interact with the aim of learning and pursuing social work. TakingITGlobal is a non-profit organization based in Canada which connects youth all over the world committed to social change. As stated on their website, their mission is to provide opportunities for learning, capacity-building, cross-cultural awareness and self-development through the use of Information and Communication Technologies, and beneath their logo are these three words - inspire, inform, and involve. With these goals in sight, the site is available in 12 different languages, has a good organization of information, and provides ample search facilities to locate kinds of social activities, organizations, discussions etc. The main navigating system is a menu with the following options (each with many sub options within):
Make Connections - with discussion boards, e-cards with social messages, user defined groups, search facilities for locating members, reading stories on social work or social issues posted by members, newsletters etc.
Take Action - contains guides to how youth can involve themselves in taking action in various fields like climate change, or HIV/AIDS related work etc. These are downloadable electronic documents and free. Other sub sections of this are projects (to create or browse through projects to which the viewer or other users can join depending on the vicinity), an open forum, petitions, commitments (where people can state a commitment, e.g. - to stop using non-biodegradable plastic bags, and others can take pledges to do the same, thus creating a kind of virtual solidarity for a cause). Each commitment gets a page of its own, where its acceptability can be tracked in terms of how many pledges it had targeted and how many pledges it received in reality, and also a blog for the commitment and more.
Browser Resources - with search capabilities to locate organizations, events, financial opportunities (scholarships, grants), professional opportunities (internships, volunteer positions, etc) and publications.
Express Yourself - with a global gallery (a potpourri of art, poetry, and other creative outlets that the members want to express themselves through), an online magazine called Panorama, and a printed publication called TIG Magazine, and the member blogs.
Understand Issues - with a list of internationally declared special days celebrating different causes, small games demonstrating different global issues, and whole sections dedicated to the following topics: Art and Media, Health and Wellness, Human Rights and Equity, etc.
Explore the World - Has data organized according to countries, and also a separate section on Aboriginal Canada.
The organization of information is multifold, in the sense that it is presented in many perspectives, tagged with appropriate categories. The categories in Understanding the Issues are also available for selection as search criteria when using the search facility under Browse Resources to locate organizations, financial opportunities, etc. Similarly, International Days is a sub category under Understand the Issues, yet, if someone is viewing an issue such as Health and Wellness from the Issues list also under Browse Resources, that page will also list the international days that are related to health and wellness. This makes sure that the readers are aware of all presented information from all angles on any topic.

TakingITGlobal sends a monthly dispatch to its members which outline the topics covered in its Panorama magazine, and other updates of the activities of its members. Its vast database of resources, plus its community approach, its creative outlets, make it, in my opinion, quite ideal for use even within schools and colleges, and maybe even universities to get them organized in social and community activities. TIG realizes the potential for use of its resources and toolkits for educating children about social issues, and thus one can find the link 'For Educators' right below its 'About Us' link. That outlines what they call TIGed ('TIG for Educators' made short), which has support for the issues presented as easy to understand lessons and also lets the teachers create virtual classrooms where students are taught to use tools to write and speak out on social issues. The tools are basically blogs, podcasting (audio/video content in digital formats that can be subscribed to) software, digital image galleries discussion boards, etc., put together to good use.

Best of the Web: Amadergaan.com

Amadergaan.com came from humble beginnings. In the early part of 21st century, it was merely a chatroom on the IRC network! It served one simple purpose - as a place where people would gather and talk about music. From there came a site with a forum in 2002 (or a bulletin board system or BBS as it is usually called), and some downloads of bangla music. These combined to make a pretty good recipe for success for Amadergaan.com which to its loved ones would later be known as 'AG'. After 6 years of existence, it still holds some of its first generation members, plus has hoards of new ones who are keeping the forums alive with its members' camaraderie, banter and most of all, love of all kinds of music. Hence it boasts the fitting tagline of "From Baul to Rock".

The founders of AG are Safwan and Faysal. Faysal first started the IRC chatroom while he was a student in Canada, and it was there he first met Safwan, and this is the start of the history of the site we see today. From chatroom, to a social site, they transformed AG finally to become an enterprise.

Let us first go over what AG offers its guests and members. Go to www.amadergaan.com to face the site's homepage, and there, you get an account of news from the world of music, which can consist of the new albums releasing or being worked on in a studio somewhere in Bangladesh or abroad, to news of concerts, interviews of artists, etc. Its does well to deliver on the world of music when there is not really any other source as well organized as AG.

There is a wave of a different kind flowing through the world of music in Dhaka and other urban cities for variations of rock and heavy metal music, which is classified as 'Underground' music due to its lack of support from the mainstream music industry. For the followers of such music, there was really only one option at a time, which was AG. AG is thus home to a lot of musicians now pretty well known to bigger circles, like members of the alternative rock band Arbovirus, or the now very famous producer Fuad Al Muqtadir. So, AG is also a place to keep up with the offbeat trends in urban Bangladesh, which now even includes 'Electronic' and 'Hip Hop'.

In the 6 years of its existence, one could say that AG went through a transition into adulthood, replacing its free music download section with an online shop for Bangladeshi music. This stems from a realization that our local artists need the support we can provide them by popularizing their works. That does not happen until their CD sales go up. AG has placed itself in partnership with almost all the big music production organizations in Bangladesh, e.g. - G Series, Ektaar, Sound Machine, Rage Records, Bengal Music etc.This partnership allows AG to bring these music to the audience outside who do not readily have the opportunity to pop into a local music store and buy the CDs. Locally, we are not able to purchase music online due to a lack of availability of credit card services necessary to do so, but stopping the free downloading at least forces us to visit our local stores to get the CDs. To help us make our minds up, AG provides previews of tracks from upcoming albums in their Media section. You can actually still find some free stuff in their Downloads section of Media, where there are the items not holding any copyrights restrictions. The Audio section loads a music player with a play list that has previews or teasers you might call them, of upcoming albums, and sometimes, even Demos of songs as they are being composed. The Video section is scarce, but still holds a collection of rather interesting clips, one of which if you visit soon enough is Babna (of Warfaze fame) playing some enchanting flamenco in a studio somewhere! There is a section for Articles also where you can find reviews of shows, albums, and articles from actual music reporters.

AG had another ambitious project, which was to create and host websites of a multitude of music artists. Though this didn't see the light of day fully, it was a noble effort and I hope someday we'll get to see these sites in their full glory.

AG's two creators live and work in Canada, and the level of information you see on AG would not have been possible without the team working on the grounds here in Bangladesh. This team also, was selected from none other than the forum of AG. If anyone needs proof that man is a social being, I'd welcome them to this forum. This has been an active place of communicating with Bangla music fans scattered all around the world, since its inception. And over the years, it has spread its premise from music, to culture in general, technology, to user contributed content like poetry, blogs, artworks and recordings. The best way to go about the forum would be to browse through the categories on the forums' main page. One would have to become a member and log in to access all the sections of the forum however.

Apart from the reviews of albums, and concerts in the Articles section of the site, the forum has its own section for reviews of this kind, but contributed by its members. There is also a section where concert organizers announce upcoming shows, and the members can respond to the selection of artists to perform, or the venue and other such detail not possible without a forum of this kind. Also, artists (or their friends) can come and announce upcoming releases. It’s not uncommon for member artists to upload demos to gather early comments or just for the purpose of sharing. As mentioned before, some famous and semi-famous bands and artists are part of this forum. Probably one of the most public figure to have become a member of this forum is Maqsoodul Huq AKA Mac, an artist and once the singer for the very famous Feedback (remember 'Melay Jaire'?). Here members found out how articulate and passionate this man is about music, and writing. Also among the public figures who are members of this forum is singer and TV presenter Alif Alauddin who takes feedback on her TV shows from the other members. So the forum is home to artists from the famous end of the spectrum to the obscure end of it, all using a common platform to voice out their opinions, experiences and dreams.

Debate is also one thing that happens frequently on the forum. So, the social interaction is not just on a level of entertainment and fun, but also intellectual; and it gets edgy at times. Issues like copyrights, and whether the artists actually benefit from the sales of CDs, to whether adopting western music styles lead to the tarnishing of one's own culture, to much more serious topics of local or world politics, or social issues. On occasion AG's members have even gathered themselves for social action. The most successful of this was organizing a concert in 2003 to raise funds for the then ailing great artist Abdur Rahman Boyati. Meetings were arranged from discourses within the forum, which later translated to physical meetings and then a massive line up of artists performed for a whole day playing 3 to 4 songs each to honor and help Abdur Rahman Boyati at the Shilpakala Academy.

Amadergaan today through its partnerships play a huge role in promoting music related events on the web. Next time at a concert, you should check the event banners or the ticket to the event to see if you spot the AG logo, with the saying Web Partner above it. Sometimes, the artist's Thank you note inside the album sleeve has a mention of Amadergaan. This goes to show the rising level of significance of this entity which was once just a chat room. AG in its 6 years has risen to great heights, and I wish it success in continuing its rise to provide its guests and members even more things to enjoy and hold dear.