The India TV sting op caper made me think of The Wizard of Oz, another showbiz hit. Just like the Wiz, it features a spunky young girl who finds out the truth. Also, it has men of straw and cowardice and, most important of all, the Wizard turns out to be the biggest fraud in the end. Too bad the Wiz wasn't a Bollywood biggie, though. Else, his sycophants - boley to  'chamchas' - would have rushed to the Mehboob - oops! MGM - Studio and rescued him from Dorothy's sting op. The sting also has all the trimmings of the Advaita metaphor. The entire manifestation is appearances. Or, if you prefer Shakespeare because we're in showbiz, "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players:/ They have their exits and their entrances;…" (As You Like It, II:7). That includes the Shaktis and Amans and Pehlajs of this world, people. And, since all decent folks must keep up appearances, in fact, appear like Caesar's wife to be totally above board, it explains why the present-day Wizs decided to forthwith ban Kapoor from all acting jigs. By the way, all those who're pleading for 'poor' Shakti to get a break ought to look at the picture in the Midday Hit List supplement of 15 March. It shows Papa Kapoor looking a wee bit like Pran and his puttar in their Juhu apartment. To the left of them, i.e., in the right hand corner of the picture, stands a piece of fabulously faux Grecian sculpture: a man holding a vessel from which water cascades down. It made me wonder what kind of moldy low life would choose to possess such kitsch. That's what Bollywood is all about, I guess, in the final analysis. Tacky unmitigated kitsch spawned by denizens of the nether world! For a peek-a-boo at kitsch, go here: http://www.worldofkitsch.com/ and http://eagle.ca/~cadams/lex.htm. Download The Wonderful Wizard of Oz free here: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/People/rgs/wizoz10.html. Download The Nether World, also free of charge here: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4301. In it, George Gissing (1857-1903) painted a rather grim, non-Dickensian picture of poverty and the emerging mass culture in the late nineteenth century Britain. Nothing to do with low life in high places, friends.

FAV OL' SCAM. Fab new twist.

In 2005, the Nigerian scam or 4-1-9 (as it's called after the 4-1-9 section of the Nigerian Penal Code) uses the 'For Sale' sections of various Web communities and auction sites like eBay, Bill McCloskey ('Those Darn Nigerians') tells us. Recently, he was trying to sell a couple of guitars on a music forum. He got a letter from "Trisha Emde from Belgium". She "wanted to know how much I wanted. I responded with my price of $3,200 and got an immediate response that this was acceptable." The next step, if one agrees to the offer, is a forged cheque to pay for the price plus shipping. After the shipper is paid and the goods dispatched, one finds out the truth. The Nigerians have apparently gone abroad to the European Union, no less. http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=28253&art_search.

SPAM'S HERE. In blogosphere, too?

Close 40,000 new Web logs are created every day, claims David Sifry, founder and CEO, Technorati, a real-time search engine that monitors posts and content in almost 8 million blogs. A part of this booms is owing to 'fake' blogs launched either to improve Web sites' rankings in search engines or to drive traffic to boost advertising revenues. Until 2005, Sifry wrote on his blog, such spam wasn't much of an issue. The number of blogs Technorati is tracking has doubled since October 2004, though. "With the launch of MSN Spaces and the growth of tools like Google's Blogger, SixApart's LiveJournal [and] AOL Journals, the number of people out there blogging has jumped in the past few months," he averred. His remarks are a part of a report ('State of the Blogosphere') http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000301.html that he will update through the week. His example of a 'fake' blog? This one: http://rent1.blogspot.com/. Sifry has a few pointers about 'the clout' in blogosphere too. BoingBoing.net is, in his estimation, the blog that has achieved the most attention and influence on the Web when measured by the number of people who link to it. (Technorati considers linking a proxy for attention and influence.) His exact words are: "BoingBoing and Instapundit are highly influential, especially among technology and political thought leaders, and sites like Gizmodo are seeing as much influence as mainstream media sites like MTV.com." Also: "The most influential media sites are still the well-funded sites like The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN."

SMALL ADS. Soon, it's Yahoo! versus Google.

The first vague clue of Yahoo!'s intentions, it seems, came when of late text ads were noticed on some Yahoo employee blogs, for instance, here: http://www.emmanate.org/wretch/. In the first week of March, Dan Boberg, Yahoo subsidiary Overture Services's Director (Business Partnerships)confirmed in an interview that Yahoo is interested in the market without revealing details. Yahoo apparently plans to launch its own advertising option for small publishers, an ad network similar to Google's AdSense. So far, Yahoo's Overture subsidiary, to be renamed Yahoo Search Marketing next month, has been serving ads to large publisher Web pages (such as The Financial Times) since 2003. The program known as 'Content Match' . requires vetting to ensure quality when matching pages with ads. http://techrepublic.com.com/2100-10548_11-5609792.html?tag=nl.e019.

AFTER PHISHING. Pharming, it is.

Pharming, i.e., using e-mail to rob you of your personal information, is by now common knowledge. For instance, you get an e-mail from your bank asking you to go to its website (url obligingly provided) and re-enter your personal information. The website is of course 'fake'. So you end up by leaving your information in the wrong hands. But now there's another - even more menacing - threat out there. 'Pharming' they call it - a new name for 'domain spoofing'. In other words, fooling your local DNS server to redirect your Web request somewhere else. Read the full story here: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3513-5670780-1.html?tag=nl.e497.

BLOGGERS, KEEP OUT. This is the US of A.

Jeremy Wright, the Canada-based co-founder of InsideBlogging (a consulting firm) writes Ensight.org, a Web log about business and technology. It seems he was harassed and strip-searched recently at the New York airport by US Immigration personnel because they couldn't believe his reply to their question about how he made his living. His answer was that he worked as a blogging consultant. He has pulled his comments about what happened for reasons explained here (don't upset Big Bro and get thrown into jail, in short): http://www.ensight.org/archives/2005/03/16/issues-with-immigration/. BoingBoing's story is here: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/19/dont_say_blogger_to_.html.

EGO BOOST OR BUST. Which one?

"Preople is the ultimate ego booster or perhaps the ultimate ego buster," says this Website's "About" page.

http://www.preople.com/' It is a Netherlands-based technology company's site offering to discover a ranking of the number of times search engines find a person's name online. Try it at your own peril.