Quizzing – Page 15

Gyaan.in

Coming soon…a forum for quizzers at Gyaan.in. To be accompanied by offline meets under the same group for encouraging and nurturing quizzing in Delhi. Expect this somewhere around the end of February. (Because I expect that by then the school exams would have finished, thus allowing more people to join this initiative.)

This has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time – something related to quizzing – and I’m happy to see Rishav and Prateek spur me on to do this, along with Karmanya who I roped in later. Full details would be up later when the site is launched so I’ll keep it hush-hush right now. I was pleasantly surprised to find such a ‘premium’ domain name hadn’t been snapped by anyone yet!

About the placeholder pic: No, that’s not our actual logo. That will be revealed later at the launch. This is just a placeholder. Had a tough time finding out a usable logo. Why is that even after being such a best-selling book, there are hardly any high-resolution Hogwarts logos available?! (To clarify further: No, the actual logo has nothing to do with Hogwarts. Although it’s kinda poetic that there are four ‘founding members’ as of now for this initiative. I wanna be the snake-guy.)

I’m leaving town for a cousin’s wedding today. Will be offline for a few days. For the ones who’ve their school exams coming up, wish you luck!

Lycos – another victim of recession

The global economic crisis has taken another toll – Lycos has announced that it will be shutting down its Lycos Mail and Tripod services, calling them ‘unprofitable’. Nobody gives a shit about Lycos Mail, but Tripod shutting down will hurt a lot of people. Many people used it to host files / images – heck, even I used it in the early days of blog to host JavaScript files. An interesting question is whether they’ll shutdown their other service similar to Tripod – AngleFire – also sometime soon; although AngelFire was nowhere as popular as Tripod.

In a way it’s true that web pioneers like Tripod, AngelFire, and GeoCities (by Yahoo!) have become obsolete in the New Age Web. The age of static HTML sites with animated GIFs, blinking text and marquees that defined an era is gone for good. Still, it’s sad to see one of these fall prey to the times.

One group which will be affected quite badly would be the Indian quizzing community. I don’t know why, but a lot of long-time quizzers have been using Tripod to put up their questions. Probably just didn’t bother to shift, because at the time they started, Tripod was a very good option. Then when new media like blogs came out it would obviously have been a pain to manually post all that static HTML to blogs.

The situation is quite serious. The Karnataka Quiz Association, one of the oldest quizzing societies in the country, uses Tripod to host its official website. (Yes, kqaquizzes.org exists but it was more of an individual effort taken by one of its members; moreover it’s got much less info than the Tripod site.) KQA also uses Livejournal for its official community blog, but even Livejournal’s future existence is suspect at the moment.

Time to start taking backups, eh?