Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

One-stop Net shop for State-related news

C. Gouridasan Nair

The address of the site is www.grass-roots.in The web address is www.grass-roots.in

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Ever searched the Internet for that vital information on Kerala that you need for your project or article - like how many Doha-based Indians have visited the Holy Land or the date of the Muthanga incident or what was the outcome of the 2000 local body elections?

You would have had to hop from one site to another searching for the right information. You would have found little that is of help to you. But, the next time round, you might find it easier to get the information on Kerala that you want for Monday's seminar paper. A virtual one-stop shop that aggregates news on Kerala is now available on the web, a place from where you can take information and give information by posting stories under tags of your choice.

Website

The work of J. Murali, a netizen with a keen eye for the latest developments in the web world, the news aggregator is accessible at www.grass-roots.in and goes with the banner `Kerala in Length and Breadth.' It is a site that hopes to grow with the contributions of each visitor as anybody who wishes to add a story of her choice to the resource base can do so with a very simple tool. As soon as a news link is posted on to the site, it would appear automatically on the service's front page.

Apart from helping an information hunter with the needed material that is normally spread across multiple/diverse news sources that include on-line version of newspapers, blogs and the like, the service can be used to share a person's favourite news items with others. Thus, anyone who feels like breaking some news or wishing to make sure that an important news thread read by him/her should be seen by others as well, he/she can just post it on to the service.

What makes `grass-roots' special is that it has `cached' copy of the news that is posted. Given the possibility of certain news items not getting cached, this facility is of great help to the user.

The service, which promises to soon become a good archival resource, can also be used to track news threads. When news link is posted, it can be given a `tag' or label such as `tourism,' `health,' etc.

Thus, a person wishing to track all the news stories related to `Kerala tourism' can get them with just a click on the tag and also add to it with her own selection of stories.

To post on to the service, one need not visit the site. The service provides a button that enables a person to post directly from her browser. An Internet Explorer user need only drag the `PostGrassroots' button to the `Links' bar of her browser to facilitate this. If the `Links' bar is not visible, it can be enabled using the option (View/Toolbars). Once the button is placed on the browser, one can start posting by just clicking on the `PostGrassroots' button.

Mr. Murali is optimistic that the site would grow in the days to come as it fills a yawning gap in Net-based resources relating to Kerala.

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