Online Media Cultist

I’m fascinated by how the web is being utilized to transform peoples’ lives and in many real ways is accelerating the pace of change.

Cultural change fostered by web-based communication and interaction is something we’re going to be hearing a lot about, particularly outside of the United States and Europe. In India, for example, a country where divorce was a big no-no until very recently, SecondShaadi.com is a site devoted to helping divorcees find new love.

For more news, opinions, and reviews about India and South Asia, check out Desicritics, a site that I was involved in founding and a member of Blogcritics’ network of sites. A fascinating part of the world to be sure, and one that is right in the center of helping to shape and transform this new webby age!

Meanwhile, ESPN announced that it is purchasing Scrum.com, a leading rugby site, on the heels of acquiring Cricinfo.com, a cricket site, and launching soccer sites in multiple languages to target European “football” devotees.

Rugby, not very well known in the US, is a sport close to my own heart (I played for my university for a few years, the old BURFC – Binghamton University Rugby Football Club – as it was known). Very cool to see its growth online.

The craze to tap well educated, highly skilled, and cheap technical resources in India over the course of this decade may just be making those resources much less cheap than they used to be. So much so in fact that Computer World reports that American firms are starting to scale back their offshoring operations in Bangalore and other Indian high tech centers.

Next stop: China and Southeast Asia.

While low level tech skills will continue to be widely available and relatively cheap as compared to hiring American workers, it’s the highly skilled and experienced workers who can take on projects with minimal oversight and management who will command salaries comparable to colleagues in the west.

So hopefully this current trend will not stifle India’s booming tech sector and will help to spread the technology job love throughout Asia.

And with the US dollar so weak these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing a host of stories about countries outsourcing to American tech firms.