Netxpress Online

A while back, Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple Fellow, launched Alltop.com, an online news aggregator. Kawasaki himself, describes Alltop as an online Magazine Rack on various topics, and that is essentially what the theme of the website is. It’s easy to use information on whatever topic you want, without hassle. Not convinced, well, imagine you want to know the latest news on politics, sports and weather to name a few; along with your daily dose of views on your various hobbies (photography) or your favorite industry or on marketing or maybe you just want to know about various oddities. Anyway, rather than going here and there, you have it all aggregated in one page: Alltop. It’s in a way akin to rss feeds, but somewhat easier to use for newbies. As all good ideas go, this one is simple and easy to use; but the better thing, and also the reason why it finds its way into my column on e-Pakistan, is that a week ago, Alltop Pakistan went live. We are now the fifth country (yes, India is already there) to have our own Alltop page in the Geo section. The efforts of Atif Khan in this regards have to be lauded.

Now apart from the usual “Pakistan is now part of the world community” pride, Alltop Pakistan actually will be quite useful. For a long time, I and a number of other people have felt that a central depository of information regarding Pakistan is something that the Web is missing. Yes, we have a number of other aggregators, Wikipedia’s definition of Pakistan and CIA’s fact book (I might also mention our Tourism Website), but the truth is that if someone sitting in Australia wants to know about Pakistan, its culture, its people and how the thinking is over here, he would be in a bit of a quandary. He (or she) may find a number of blogs or websites that mention Pakistanis in less than a glorious light, and come away with the generic (and largely untrue) perception of Pakistan as a backward nation. But with Alltop Pakistan, he (or she), may read about Pakistan from the perspective of Pakistanis, through their blogs, websites, newspapers and so on. At least he will have a first person account of what we are all about. So on behalf of all Pakistanis, Welcome to Pakistan, Alltop!!

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece on Zong and its functional, different, creative, unique and personal ad campaign; and lauded its Print and TV campaign. Having said all that I recently discovered this, the British Ad on which the Zong TVC was based on. So I will retract a bit of what I said earlier. Whereas the print campaign still stands just as unique and admirable, and whereas there launch TV Ad was ‘nice’ if not outstanding; their rather blatant copy of the British Ad left a bit of a bad taste in the mouth. I keep harping about the creativity that we have in Pakistan, and then when you have a good example of it, you are left with a Zong shaped disappointment. What really amused me was that they showed people playing soccer at one point in the Ad, why not Cricket or Hockey? But having said all that, I still laud Zong for at least having the decency and the intelligence that they need something more than just Random Noise that the Telecom Media is generating through elaborate song and dance routines. So at least, Zong remains unique in the Telecom Clutter. On a further note, the production values of the Zong Ad (sound quality for one thing) left a bit to be desired.

On that bombshell of a note (thank you Jeremy Clarkson), I shall bid you all adieu!

Till next week, Watch More TV and beLIEve!

Share This

Bookmark to