In a recent Blog entry Adam Tinworth the head of blogging for RBI wrote this:

This is a Bad Time to be a Journalist if…

• You don’t like change – because change is all the industry has to offer you
• You don’t have passion for your subject – because people with passion are already talking about your beat on the web, and they’re more interesting
• You want to do the job you signed up for five years ago – because that job is history
• You don’t like the readers talking back – because they have innumerable methods to respond to your work, whether or not you have comments on articles
• You don’t like linking – because links are the new economy of content
• You want to decide what is important – because that power is firmly back in the hands of the public
• You hate technology – because it is the future (and anyway, the printing press and typewriter were technology back in the day)
• You have a narrow view of what skills you need – because the skills you needs are evolving all the time
• If you don’t like competition – because your competition is increasing every day
• If you can’t listen more than you talk – because if you can’t do that, you’ve never been a journalist at all…

We had a talk from Adam a few weeks ago, and one thing that hit me was the importance of Blogs in today’s multi-faceted online media.
As Adam said: “The web is the biggest information infrastructure humanity has ever had,” and because of this Journalism has had to change.
RBI the company Adam works for make more money through online adventures than in print.

A recent article on techcrunch has revealed that contrary to previous suggestions the blogosphere was dying, it is in fact still growing. While twitter has seen a plateau in the number of unique users, WordPress saw 10million new unique users in October.

In the lecture from Adam Tinworth he pointed out a number of simple ideas to increase the traffic in your blog.
First of all you need to have a niche and be enthusiastic. You must be inquisitive, communicative, socially informed and honest.
A blog is essentially the reporter’s notebook in public and it is important that photos, videos, polls and links are used to supplement your copy and engage the user. Group debates are also a good way of generating traffic – in the recent group debates on this site I have almost doubled my traffic.

Blogs are no longer places where people pass comment they are places where news can be broken. You only have to look at the blogs of the likes Guido Fawkes and Heather Brooke to see this.

merisarkar news service
New Delhi, November 27, 2009

Indian government said on Friday that it is keeping a close eye on the financial crises in Dubai. The financial crisis is caused by debt repayment crisis of a state firm – Dubai World.

The government said that it would examine the scope of the problem but claimed that no impact is visible as of now.

Commerce Minister Anand Sharma has said that he does not think some development in real estate in Dubai will have an impact on the Indian economy.

Anand Sharma said that India is a very large and resilient economy. He said that as far as India is concerned, the housing, real estate sector and construction industry are all doing well. This is confirmed by the increasing demand for construction materials, cement and steel.

The Finance Secretary Ashok Chawla said that the issue will have to examined to see what is the problem, what will be the possible implication, if any for the Indian economy, the people and corporates.

Asked if the crisis will impact money flows into India, since the Gulf region accounts for over half the total inward remittances worth over 25 billion dollar annually from expatriate Indians, Mr Chawla said that this is unlikely.

The state-run Dubai World stunned the global financial world yesterday when it announced it needs to restructure its debt, estimated at 59 billion dollar to preempt default and asked creditors for a six-month deferment.

RBI Governor D Subbarao said the officers of the central Bank have been asked to study the impact and make necessary recommendations.

Source: http://www.merisarkar.com

Saya mendapat ‘teguran’ dari pimpinan karena telah memberikan informasi bahwa ada kawasan hutan yang dapat dimanfaatkan untuk Izin Usaha Pemanfaatan Hasil Hutan Kayu (IUPHHK) pada Hutan Tanaman. Sesuatu yang lucu saya pikir. Mengapa?

Dalam banyak diskusi dan pembicaraan dengan beliau saya selalu mengemukakan bahwa kita harus terbuka. Sebagai suatu institusi daerah, kita sebenarnya bersaing dengan pemerintah-pemerintah daerah yang lain untuk menarik investasi. Satu-satunya cara agar hutan (dan kawasan hutan) lebih terjaga adalah dengan menempatkan pengelola dalam lingkup Forest Management Unit atau KPH. Menunggu KPH yang masih mencari bentuk dan komitmen, alangkah baiknya Kawasan Hutan Produksi yang masih belum dibebani hak kita promosikan ke para pengusaha. Jangan justru sebaliknya disembunyikan.

Berangkat dari paradigma yang saya percaya benar tersebut, setiap kali ada pengusaha yang sneaking ke kantor bisik-bisik mencari informasi areal untuk HTI, saya berkata "Tidak perlu bisik-bisik, akan saya beri tahu berapa dan di mana yang prospek untuk HTI". Tentu saja jika mau informasi dalam bentuk peta biasanya saja minta yang bersangkutan menghadap boss dulu. Tetapi kalau cuma lokasi dan luasan kasar akan saya berikan informasikan langsung.

Contoh yang lain banyak sekali yang menyiratkan mahalnya sebuah informasi. Namun menurut saya, sebagian besar kasus harusnya informasi spasial diberikan secara free khususnya data spasial yang dihasilkan oleh suatu kegiatan yang dibiayai oleh negara. Sebagai contoh adalah hasil interpretasi citra yang dilakukan rekan-rekan di BPKH. Logikanya, kegiatan yang dibiayai oleh negara seharusnya hasilnya adalah milik negara yang harus kembali kepada publik.

Pengecualian tentu saja bisa dilakukan per kasus. Misalnya, suatu perusahaan melakukan studi atau pengumpulan data spasial di suatu wilayah. Otomatis karena studi dibiayai oleh perusahaan, maka hasilnya pun menjadi miliki perusahaan. Orang atau institusi lain harus bayar untuk mendapatkan informasi spasial tersebut, itu pun kalau management membolehkannya keluar.

Saya punya angan-angan tentang bagaimana informasi spasial itu dapat digunakan secara maksimal untuk pembangunan bangsa ini. Data publik harus dikembalikan kepada publik. Data hasil pengukuran cuaca oleh BMG harus open akses. Data hasil pengukuran debit air oleh instansi terkait harus open akses. Peta-peta dasar ataupun tematik harus gratis, paling tidak yang dicharge hanya biaya pencetakan atau media softcopy. Hasil-hasil studi spasial yang dibiayai oleh APBN ataupun APBD harus dipublikasikan seluas-luasnya. Dengan begitu maka akan banyak sisi positif sebagai berikut:

1. Ada check and balance. Data-data spasial yang keliru akan lebih cepat terdeteksi. Selanjutnya perbaikan pun akan cepat dilakukan.
2. Studi-studi yang dilakukan oleh lembaga-lembaga riset atau siapa pun dapat menggunakan data-data standar yang sama.
3. Penghematan biaya. Jika data-data sekunder sudah tersedia dengan gratis, tidak perlu lagi dilakukan pengambilan data spasial yang sama dan berulang oleh berbagai studi. Di sini harus dilihat penghematan secara ekonomi atau agregat kita sebagai suatu negara.
4. dsb

Mungkin pembaca akan mengcounter apa yang saya kemukakan dengan argumen bahwa "Ah kalau begitu konsultan kerjanya ngapain? Kan semua data sudah ada". Justru di sinilah kemudahannya untuk memonitor bagaimana suatu studi dapat secara efektif memberi nilai tambah. Jika kita semua sudah tahu data-data dasar sudah tersedia akan sangat mudah untuk mengetahui apakah suatu studi memberi nilai tambah atau tidak. Toh selama ini, maaf, mungkin sebagian besar pekerjaan konsultan adalah cuma hunting data. Dengan cara sneaking itu tadi. Setelah semua terkumpul tinggal buatkan kembali peta yang sama. Selesai.

Saya pernah baca di salah satu buku pegangan, lupa judulnya, bahwa komponen termahal dari GIS sekarang ini adalah ware (hard dan soft). Tapi tidak lama lagi komponen data lah yang akan lebih menyedot belanja GIS. Saya setuju dengan hal tersebut. Tetapi jika data/informasi spasial yang dibiaya oleh negara harusnya tersedia bagi publik, tidak disembunyikan, yang perlu kesaktian luar biasa untuk memperolehnya.

RBI recently released the draft version of Payment systems in India – Vision 2009-12 document for public comments. It’s an important document that sets the direction for the development of the payment systems in the country over the next three years. It can also act as a guide for the banks in designing forward-looking systems for their operations.

Some of the interesting points:

5.3 The Bank shall publish the Red Book on Payment Systems for India in collaboration with CPSS-BIS.

Red Book is a reference publication by the Committe on Payment and Settlement Systems under BIS on a country’s payment systems. It’s hightime we had this document published even though RBI’s payments section gives a comprehensive overview of the same along with statistics.

6.5.2 All bank branches will be enabled with IFSC and MICR codes. The intention is to leave the user with the choice of product for retail and small-value transactions viz. use MICR for NECS and IFSC for NEFT.

With close to 50K of the 64K (as of Mar ‘09) branches already NEFT enabled, this should be one relatively quick target to accomplish. And probably making all new branch licenses contingent on participating in NEFT/NECS should help!

6.5.6 Efforts would be made to provide positive acknowledgement to the remitter confirming credit to the beneficiary’s account for transactions initiated in NEFT will be introduced. This would give comfort to the remitter and enhance his usage.

Oh yeah, definitely! Senders naturally face anxiety in a Implied-positive-unless-negated scenario, and a positive confirmation should go a long way in increasing customer confidence in the system and consequently increase its adoption. Though a ping-back is easy to implement in a completely automated processing system, banks still using manual processing of NEFT messages for posting credits will face the increased burden of generating confirmation messages. Well, one more way to push banks for automated integration with the payment systems!

6.5.13 Further to the initiatives taken to operationalise Indo-Nepal Remittance Facility Scheme (for one-way migrant remittances from India to Nepal), operationalisation of electronic products like NEFT and ECS / NECS in Bhutan will be taken up….

Having a seamless cross-border payment systems would be a primary requirement for establishment of any single-currency system or a EMU-like structure for SAARC countries.

6.6.6 Cheque Truncation System (CTS) will be rolled out at Chennai. National roll-out of CTS will be considered once this project is operationalised.

The ‘…will be considered once…’ doesn’t really inspire confidence! Instead of setting a clear deadline, RBI still seems to be waiting for some more experience/data before deciding on the national implementation of the much talked about CTS.

Now to the really stand-out bits of the document:

India MoneyLine – A 24×7 system for one-to-one funds transfers – ….The Bank would pursue the suggestion to consider the need to extend NEFT to function on a 24×7 basis or to develop a new system akin to the Faster Payments Service in the UK which operates on a 24×7 basis

Apart from person-to-person payments, this would definitely be a great boost to the e/mobile-commerce with the merchant establishments now having to tie-up with payment gateways individually for credit card payments or net banking transfers for round the clock service. Having a 24×7 NEFT system should provide the next jump in electronic payment volumes.

India Card – A domestic card initiative –The concept of a domestic payment card (India Card) and a PoS switch network for issuance and acceptance of payment cards would be looked into. The need for such a system arises from two major considerations (a) the high cost borne by the Indian banks for affiliation with international card associations in the absence of a domestic price setter (b) the connection with international card associations resulting in the need for routing even domestic transactions, which account for more than 90% of the total, through a switch located outside the country.

This will be one awesome achievement! Though in conception stage since 2007, India Card can save a lot for the Indian Banks in the mandatory cut of the Intercharge fees typically paid to the card networks of Visa, MasterCard etc. China’s UnionPay is a similar system in operation since 2002 which seeks to achieve the same purpose.

Mobile payments settlement network – Mobile phones are expected to emerge as an important channel for transmission of payment instructions. Efficient mobile payments would require real time transfer of funds with adequate security. Currently all inter-bank mobile transfers are payment instructions for settling funds through existing payment systems. This would require building a national infrastructure for facilitating real time mobile payments.

The need for the mobile payments settlement network has been highlighted by RBI in its operative guidelines for Mobile Banking transactions in India, issued in Oct 2008. Though the guidelines themselves have been a bit of a dampener, RBI should hopefully open them up in the future to make setting up this settlement network worthwhile!

Mumbai: A mysterious letter threatening to trigger multiple bomb blasts in different places of the city, including the Raj Bhawan and the Chief Minister’s residence, threw the police into tizzy and prompted them to step up security around vital installations.

The letter, received by the Churchgate railway station master eight days ago, was written in Hindi and posted from Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, the police said.

The letter claimed explosives have already reached three different locations in the metropolis and five to six persons had been given the responsibility to execute the blasts either on November 14 or November 28.

The letter claimed explosions would occur at Vidhan Bhavan, Governor and Chief Minister’s residences, RBI, iconic locations like Nariman Point, Juhu Beach, railway stations CST and Dadar, the police said.

It also mentioned the landmark Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels in South Mumbai and Central Hotel in suburban Kalina as the targets, they said.

The letter has named two persons Arvind Singh Arora and Bhupinder Singh Arora who it says have hidden explosive material, including RDX, near Bhabha Farid Institute of Technology in Dehradhun in Uttarkhand.

Though not ruling out the possibility of the letter being a prank, the police said vigil has been strengthened.

RBI emphasizes more on Managing economic Recovery

The Reserve Bank of India, country’’s Central bank, has said that managing economic recovery is now its focus area and the first phase of monetary tightening will arrest inflation without hurting growth.

RBI Executive Director Deepak Mohanty was found quoting  that at present, the focus around the world and also in India has shifted from managing the crisis to managing the recovery.

He said that withdrawing soft monetary policy, which was initiated to weather the financial crisis is the key challenge.

“The key challenge relates to the exit strategy that needs to be designed, considering that the recovery is as yet fragile but there is an uptick in inflation, though largely from the supply side, which could engender inflationary expectations,” he said.

Besides this, Mohanty said that the first phase of exit has been initiated by RBI in its monetary policy review in October 2009.

That was done mainly by withdrawal of unconventional measures taken during the crisis.

RBI, in its monetary review in October has raised the requirement for banks to hold portion of the deposits in cash, gold and government securities to 25 per cent.

Moreover, it had also done away with special liquidity provision for banks to provide money to mutual funds and others.

Hello Friends here we come up with an extension of our previous blog, “Points to Remember while Selling Stocks Part 1”.

Points to Remember while Selling Stocks

In previous Blog we had touched upon few points related to selling stock tips.

In this blog lets get to know more of valuable points in this regard.:)

Major points when to sell your stocks ( starting from 4th..three already being discussed in Blog 1)

4. Stock is Over Valued:

During bull market, high quality stocks appreciate value.

But more importantly, with so much hype around the stock, they are often set up for a fall.

Therefore, investor may use the strategy of selling them first and buy at lower price.

5. Need Some Cash-

Certain unexpected circumstances may affect the time when to sell stock.

It is not wrong to sell stock to solve your financial emergency, especially the underperforming one.

However, it is advisable to have some emergency cash funds.

After all, basic investing rules is to start investing if you have enough money.

6. A Change in Monetary Policy-

The Central Bank, RBI changes monetary policy if it perceives that inflation is heating up.

By raising interest rates, it contracts the money supply and slows down the financial system.

It is generally seen that stocks normally react negatively against the action, and some time markets become more volatile.

If you are not happy with this type of risk then you should move a portion of your portfolio into stocks that will not be as affected with such changes.

7. A Company Suddenly Cuts Dividends or Lower Income Estimates-

This event should be investigated carefully before making any judgment to sell.

For good reason, the board of directors might want to retain more of their earnings for internal growth, rather than paying them out in dividends.

Sell a company’s stock if the performance is down.

Investors must never sell the stock of a fine company if its price goes either ways significantly – up or down.

Falling earnings margins and slowing earnings must be treated as a warning signal.

Lastly, I would like to say that always do your homework (Research) well while selling a company’s stock; you can use either the top-down approach or the bottom-up approach.

Markets are often full of rumors. You cannot make money in the market by acting on market rumors.

Always listen to the stories, but remember you should do your own research–and do it thoroughly.

Make your buy or sell decision based on your analysis of the company, not on what others tell you to do.

Note : For More Finance Gyan, Latest Industry, Stock Market, Economy News and Updates, please click here

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday proposed an action plan on payment systems which have been targeted to be achieved in the next one-to-three years, including putting in place alternate settlement arrangements in the event of non-availability of RBI as a settlement bank.

Further, a road map for National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) will be finalised. NPCI has been set up as an umbrella organisation by the banking community to take over the retail payment system activities. The operations of NPCI will be permitted after due authorisation and the activities will be closely monitored.

NPCI would also undertake initiatives in India Card, a domestic card initiative; redesigning ECS to function as a true automated clearing house (ACH) for bulk transactions; and mobile payments settlement network by building a national infrastructure for facilitating real time mobile payments.

All large-value and time-critical payments will be processed only through the electronic mode. All bank branches will be enabled with Indian Financial System Code (IFSC) and MICR codes. The intention is to leave the user with the choice of product for retail and small-value transactions namely use of MICR for National Electronic Clearing Service (NECS) and IFSC for NEFT.

Operationalising MICR-Cheque Processing Centres (MICR-CPCs) will be considered at all locations that are viable and have a daily volume of 10,000 instruments or more. Speed clearing to clear outstation cheques at the centre of presentment will be extended to cover 100 major centres. Cheque truncation system (CTS) will be rolled out in Chennai.

The RBI has placed on the website the draft of ‘Payment systems in India — Vision 2009-12’ for public comments. Comments may be addressed either by post to the Chief General Manager, Reserve Bank of India, Department of Payment and Settlement Systems, Central Office, Fort, Mumbai-400001 or sent by fax at no. 022-2265 9566 or sent by e-mail on or before November 30.

From the Guardian:

Reed Business Information is to make 18 staff redundant as part of a restructuring that will include the closure of 130-year old Contract Journal.

This follows the pattern of death by a thousand cuts for RBI.

Earlier today, the Twitter grapevine tweeted the news that UK construction industry weekly magazine Contract Journal (CJ) and its website, contractjournal.com, is to be shut down from the end of this month. The announcement by parent company Reed Business Information was made in an email (a tweet from Kirstie Colledge of Simply Marcomms prompted me to look in my old BIW inbox – bingo!), and – having written more than once about CJ’s online presence in my blog at ExtranetEvolution.com – I quickly cut and pasted the relevant paragraph into a blog post about the closure.

Contract Journal has been a fixture of the UK construction market for 130 years, but faced a double whammy. First, like many newspapers and magazines it suffered from dwindling circulation in the face of the digital onslaught (Laura Oliver’s Journalism.co.uk story points out that other RBI titles have also been forced into redundancies, in addition to the six at CJ; yesterday saw news of 100 redundancies at the Guardian media group). Second, CJ was also focused on an industry that has borne the brunt of the current recession. With too many firms chasing too few contracts at too tight margins, construction firms going bust daily, recruitment almost at a stand-still, and hard-pressed survivors cutting their marketing expenditure, it was perhaps inevitable that CJ – so dependent on advertising – would be at risk.

Not just the magazine

The closure also has repercussions for other CJ products. Brian Green’s almost unremittingly gloomy Brickonomics blog should, I think, survive, but other CJ efforts to embrace web 2.0 and build relationships with readers will probably disappear.

CJ’s two major awards programmes will also vanish from the calendar. Construction PR and marketing people will no longer spend hours each spring polishing entries for CJ’s Construction Industry Awards, or working out seating plans for the awards dinner each autumn (apparently the engraved trophies from this year’s event have just been despatched to the winners). And CJ’s Best Places to Work in Construction (which probably no longer include RBI) won’t be challenging AEC firms’ HR departments either.

The gut reaction from many industry PR and marketing people will almost certainly be one of sadness. We have lost a venerable title, six journalists (some of them long-standing friends and experienced industry-watchers and opinion-formers) stand to lose their jobs, and there will be one fewer weekly to which we can pitch our news stories and feature ideas, buy advertising space, or look for sponsorship and publicity spin-offs from events.

So where next?

Emap’s weekly Construction News clearly stands to pick up some of the advertisers but it is by no means clear how that publication is going to cope with the changing media environment. It is about to enter uncharted waters by imposing a subscription model on its online content, and UBM’s Building magazine’s recent reintroduction of reader registration hints that it may also bring down a paywall on some of its website content. Both publications are also investing in social media and in online and offline events and awards programmes.

But maybe, in the current media environment, now is a good time for us PR people and marketeers to rethink our focus on publishers and to augment some of the tools we have tended to rely upon (literature, events, hospitality, direct marketing, email, corporate websites, etc).

I would argue the recession makes this a good time to look at cost-effective ways of communicating our messages direct to customers, employees, influencers, investors, regulators and other publics. Instead of regarding the digital onslaught as a threat, perhaps we should see it as an opportunity to invest in social media tools and techniques, start conversations and take a more active role in helping people formulate their own opinions about us, our companies, products and services.

The recently announced RBI credit policy indicates a phased withdrawal from stimulus measures, but it may still be too early for strong action.

As the real estate industry looks up after a year of sluggish sales, Reserve Bank of India’s monetary policies are being closely watched. The recently announced credit policy leaves a great deal unchanged; however, there is a slight change in two aspects, that is, statutory liquidity ratio (SLR) for the banks, which has been raised to 25 per cent for the banks and higher provisioning for standard advances of 1% from the earlier 0.4%, implying costlier bank loans for the real estate in the coming quarter.

Some analysts and the developers are optimistic, but many feel that the RBI could have waited for a while. According to Priyankar Bhikshu, head, consulting and research, DTZ International Property Advisers, “SLR has been hiked which is unlikely to make any material difference as of now. But by increasing the liquidity ratio, the RBI’s policy points to a reversal in the benign interest rate regime on the retail (Home) loan front in the near future. It is expected that by the end of this financial year, the mortgage rates would inch upwards.”

On the other hand Shobhit Agarwal, Jt. MD, Capital Markets, Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj says, “The impact on the sector is not as significant as we see it. Banks will now be a little more cautious while lending to indian real estate players. However, interest rates are at their lowest in recent times, and a marginal hike due to this tightening in provisioning will not affect the overall sector seriously. Rather, it might help, as the Central Bank is trying to curb the formation of an asset bubble – in other words, trying to control the asset prices for end users. If well implemented, this policy will benefit property buyers in the long run.”

The developer community has also seen mixed reactions. Rajnikant S Ajmera, MD, Ajmera Realty and Infra India Ltd., says, “The current credit policy clearly indicates a phased withdrawal from stimulus measures. RBI’s directives on increasing the SLR or increasing the provisioning required for standard advances to the commercial real estate is meant to strengthen the banking system, but will have a negative impact on the real estate industry.”

There have been mixed reactions to RBI’s recently announced credit policy
Some experts point out that if it is well implemented, it will benefit property buyers in the long run

India buys 200 tons gold from IMF

Times of India
November 4, 2009

Read Full Article Here

A few weeks ago we had a lecture from Adam Tinworth. Adam is the Blogging Editor for Reed Business Information. RBI is a business publisher with an extensive range of successful titles.

Adam talked mostly, as you would expect considering his job title, about blogs, how to blog and the future of blogging.

There’s an old saying: ‘everybody has at least one book in them.’

Literacy and the ability to string together a sentence aside, I have always agreed with the sentiment. Everyone has some form of information or view that some person somewhere will find interesting.

The modern equivalent is that everybody should blog.

Similarities can be drawn with the old-fashioned concept of a beat journalist. Modern thinking has forced the beat journalist to the brink of extinction. There is too much information to gather and most it available online. Financial restrictions for papers and media organisations don’t aid the situation either. Todays reporters have far more ground to cover and information to collate which often means they rarely leave the office.

A journalist is not necessarily the most knowledgeable person on his beat or patch but he does have the contacts, information and ability to get in touch with the people who are. In a simple explanation, a journalist writing a science article will not have the knowledge of a scientist. But with blogs and social networking it is much easier for said journalist to ‘pick the brains’ of the experts.

Blogging is interactive. This is the whole concepts greatest asset.

Nobody really knows where journalism is going. It is my opinion (and stringent hope!) that professional standards will always be necessary. Citizen journalism can only go so far. In future, in part due to the blogosphere, journalism will be a team effort. User generated content being collated by trained journalists in order to provide trustworty and creditable content.

Blog Off……………………

Just when you thought that RBI were getting dull again, up pops this from Press Gazette:

Ian Smith, the chief executive of business publisher Reed Elsevier, has resigned with immediate effect after little more than eight months in the post.

Reed Elsevier announced that Smith resigned “with mutual agreement” and has stepped down today from the company’s board.

Elsevier chief executive Erik Engstrom has been appointed as his replacement.

A company spokesman told Reuters that Smith had been the wrong man for the current economic climate.  “Ian and the board decided it wasn’t the right role for him in the current economic circumstances… There is no disagreement on strategy.” [my emphasis]

I love it when everyone agrees about everything, don’t you?

I recently attended a lecture by Adam Tinworth, Head of Blogging at Reed Business Information (RBI), Britain’s largest B2B publisher. Being trendy journalism students, we at Cardiff have been bombarded recently by lectures on the importance of social media, of tweeting and blogging and linking and so on and,  if I am perfectly honest, a lot of it was beginning to sound the same. So it’s just as well I found Adders lecture  most illuminating.

One thing that particularly struck was his explanation of the three social tiers of the internet.

The three social tiers of the internet, according to RBI's Adam Tinworth

For RBI to best penetrate the web, it pays to spread across distributed space (sites with free traffic like blogs and microblogs), public space (open forums, sites with comment) and closed space (firewalled content and privately accessed sites).

In this way, users can be enticed from their comfort zones in private forums and the like into the wider web world and towards the specialised, and monetised, content that RBI offer on their own websites.  Surely an implication of this is that, despite what Messrs Murdoch might think, it is in fact possible to make free content profitable, even if in this case it is only indirectly.

But for all the online jargon, it’s important to remember that journalism is journalism, and the essential skills are the same.  Enthusiasm and dedication online are essential. Regular posting and commenting (and general activity online) make bloggers visible, trustworthy and reliable sources of information/opinion/ideas.

Journalists need to be inquisitive, communicative and above all social. People bang on about the internet being ’social’, but this is only true because we made it that way because we are social. The web is just another (albeit insanely massive and powerful) platform for conversation. And journalism is all about having conversations.

Just an extension of our previous blog “RBI, Monetary Projections And Indian Economy”

RBI’s Monetary Policy Stance - Part 3

In this Blog we would touch upon the aspects as that of RBI’s Monetary Policy Stance and few more facts which carries direct or indirect connection with the RBI Policies.

For example, business confidence index ,industrial recovery status, overall consumption and investment, export-imports status etc;

The True Facts:

So far business confidence has also improved, and demand conditions seem to have picked up, as seen by better order book and increased capital finance requirements.

Industrial recovery seems to be on its way with 5.8% growth in IIP during April-August ‘09.

A revival in capital flows, and stronger performance of the core infrastructure sector (4.8% for April-August ‘09) seems to be indicating a slight recovery in the economy.

However, there has been a deceleration in growth of private consumption and investment demand, and raw material prices are expected to rise on account of inflationary pressures.

The deficient monsoon could also reduce rural demand.

First quarter earnings of corporates reflect a decline in sales, and non-food credit growth has decelerated, with credit card and consumer durables related credit turning negative.

Exports have continued to decline as external demand dependent services remain sluggish.

The economy is showing some signs of recovery, while a rising CPI has now pushed WPI into the positive territory, mainly on account of higher food prices.

The RBI’s stance will thus have to manage the trade-off inflationary pressures between supporting growth and controlling .

Monetary Policy Stance

On the basis of the above overall assessment, the stance of monetary policy for the remaining period of 2009-10 will be as follows:

- Keep a vigil on the trends in inflation and be prepared to respond swiftly and effectively through policy adjustments to stabilize inflation expectations.

-Monitor the liquidity situation closely and manage it actively to ensure that credit demands of productive sectors are adequately met while also securing price stability and financial stability.

-Maintain a monetary and interest rate regime consistent with price stability and financial stability, and supportive of the growth process.

Stay Tuned for more on the topic.

We would cover Analysis view from the Analyst with respect to the monetary point of view.

Note : For More Finance Gyan, Latest Industry, Stock Market, Economy News and Updates, please click here

RBI to Assess Affairs of Foreign Banks Operating in India

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) decided to run a detailed assessment of the risk-management capabilities and evaluate the transparency in financial affairs of all foreign banks operating in India with an aim to ensure that they do not pose any systemic risk to the banking sector.

However, until this process is finished, foreign banks are doubtful to be permitted to open more branches in India while India has committed to allowing 12 new branches to foreign banks in a year, but has been more liberal.

Moreover, this has resulted in a high presence of foreign banks in India as their WTO commitment allows them to deny licenses to foreign banks once their share in the total assets of the banking system exceeds 15%.

Additionally, as it comes in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the audit reflects concerns over an unduly large presence of foreign banks creating risks for Indian financial markets.

Meanwhile, the finance ministry and the central bank had always supported allowing foreign banks to operate in India as they thought that increased presence of foreign banks boosts the efficiency of the domestic banking sector.

It has been an incredible turnaround for India.

In 1991, New Delhi kick-started the economic reforms process owing mainly to the serious balance of payments crisis it was facing. Then, India — just an inch away from defaulting on its loans — had less than $2 billion in forex reserves (that would not even have taken care of three weeks’ of imports) and had to pledge gold with the International Monetary Fund to get a loan to get out of the crisis.

Today, it is the IMF that has sold gold to India to ‘borrow’ money to loan to poor nations!

That is indeed irrefutable proof that the economic reforms that Manmohan Singh (the then finance minister and current prime minister) set in motion have borne fruit.

On September 18, 2009, the IMF’s executive board approved gold sales strictly limited to 403.3 metric tonnes, representing one eighth of its total holdings.

India and China were seen as the likely buyers the IMF gold, given the two Asian giants’ economic strength even in the face of the global recession that ravaged most economies.

Many analysts were surprised at the speed with which India bought the IMF gold. However, they believe that it is a very smart move as by buying IMF gold, New Delhi is shoring up its bullion reserves and slowly trying to hedge its bets on the US dollar which has been losing value against other currencies.

Some analysts believe that India could be buying the yellow metal to push for a larger voting share in the IMF. India has been angling for a larger say in world economic affairs and for a bigger representation in the IMF.

The RBI, meanwhile, says that the buying of IMF gold was just a part of its foreign exchange reserve management strategy.

The RBI paid on average about $1,045 per ounce for the gold and the transaction would be paid in hard currency and not in IMF Special Drawing Rights, the IMF’s internal unit of account.

IMF, meanwhile, has not given out any details on whether any other central banks had shown interest in buying the remaining 203.3 tonnes of gold on tap for sale.

For long, China has been slowly but steadily building up its stockpile of gold and India does not want to be left behind.

In my last online journalism lecture we were spoken to by Adam Tinworth, head of blogging at RBI, and the author of One man and his Blog, a man seemingly well qualified to talk to me and my fellow young bloggers, but I found what a lot of what he said went against what I thought I had learned about blogging in the short time I have been writing (and making a pretty ham-fisted attempt at it by all accounts), but I was willing initially to cede to a man who had been doing this a lot longer than me, and an awful lot more successfully I might add.

One of the things I had contention with was his focus on not giving blogs, and especially specialist blogs an opinion, but more to collate pertinent information and links and then distribute it to your readership. I can understand the principle, whereby the author has built up a certain amount of respect for their knowledge on a subject and the readers go to it in order to be informed of things around that topic, and this certainly makes sense for Adam, whose company focuses on B2B information, but for me I just don’t see it.

On my own shoddy blog about Manchester I have tries to simply collate information on where the best places are to go on a weekend such as during the Oxjam takeover, but I felt like writing like this was a little bit cold, detached, and failed to have any of my own imprint on it, which is kind of the whole point. If people wanted to just find out what was going on they could go to somewhere like CityLife (please don’t), but I want my readers to read my blog because I sift through all the listings, find out who is really worth going to see and say why, because I am trying to convey the idea that I know what people would want to see because I go to a lot of events and have built up a certain expertise (oh dear that sounds arrogant). So surely my opinion is central to my blogging?

Maybe I'm just confused

Well, I’m off to this week’s lecture now, hopefully this will clear everything up…………..