E-Pao! - a journey through 2007
- VIII Anniversary -

2006 was the year when it was widely accepted that the WWW is a tool for bringing together the small contributions of common people and making them matter. 2007 was an extension to that. We have now what is popularly called the Web 2.0 - a movement started a few years ago.

Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs.

Much before Web 2.0 gained it's popularity and acceptance, e-pao.net has been moulding itself as an e-platform for the Manipuris. We are not a wiki site but we have been a platform where Manipuris shared their thoughts and creativity with other Manipuris and even the rest of the world. There are various channels available at e-pao through which web-based communities are supported. E-Pao runs on an involvement from guys such as you.

We have recently added a toolbar for Firefox users which can fetch the news - headlines, Sports and Snippets - and display them as a drop down for your easy view and choice. This was a swift delivery form the development studio. We would be collaborating more to enhance this tool bar to do more things for you. Stay tuned for more updates.

YellOut featured two more artists this year - Alan Vaca and Vivek Sharma. Both are talented musicians and we are fortunate to be able to collaborate with them. We will continue to work on adding more profiles in this section. Interestingly there had been a renewed interests in Rock music in India as India positioned itself as a fertile destination for a touring band from the western countries. E-Pao runs many an announcments and write ups of such shows as experienced by a Manipuri.

High participation from Manipuris are also seen on the Job Posting and Education announcement sections. There has been seventy and odd education announcements and 80 and odd Job postings this year. These announcements and postings comes from our esteemed users. If this isn't an example of sharing information through a web community, what would it be? On the other hand, it also displays the good intention of the contributor (of the news) which could benifit another Manipuri.

Back at our homestate, The 9th Manipur State Assembly elections held in January and February months of 2007 were covered on e-pao.net. We were able to list out the complete candidature list, Poll schedules and the results as they are being announced. This is the third time we are covering the Manipur Polls.

In our opinions sections, two new streams of opinions emerged. One is made on Politics and Governance and the other is on the Effects of Insurgency. We have regrouped these articles under two separate sub-sections by the same names for a better view. The views and opinions are not only by scholars but also from layman Manipuris who are just plain worried about their homestate. Many gem of an article are noticed amongst them. This goes to show the increasing concern of a layman Manipuri about the affairs of Manipur. And the fact that they are about to get vocal about the situations and predicaments existing in Manipur.

We also did a lot of restructuring in many of our existing sections. These are a direct result of the increasing number of contributions from the users. The most notable re-arrangement was carried out for the play listing of E-pao Radio. This is a web based radio with a unique capability of browsing and controlling the playlist directly by the listener. (We'll not be surprised if the Web 2.0 evolution of the net Radio will eventually allow listeners to control the playlist).

Through feedbacks, we realised that the application was taking long to load and in cases, not loading at all. We ran some experiments and identified the root cause of this concern to be the organisation of the song files. Basic changes has been implemented and now the radio is loading and playing much faster. What better way to make our users smile than by enabling them to hear Manipur's wide range crop of home grown songs. Since we implemented this streaming alternative to our earlier 'Download & Play' approach, We have rechristened it as Radio from the erstwhile MP3 list. We have opted for a controllable feature on the playlist rather than the traditional radio so that Manipuris can select and play their songs according to their choice (and play them again and again too). With this we have removed our old list of downloadable links.

We have also reorganised the pictures in the gallery section. The number of picture files has become quite enormous that we have stopped counting them. On the gallery's home, we have given some basic groupings such as 'Landscape" or 'Festivals' but under each of them, you would be able to find more sub-groups 'SikPui Rui', 'Yaosang' or 'Leimaram waterfalls' etc.

The articles on various Manipuri Personalities is also organised under a sub-section under the Features channel. The profiles of Manipuri women who have created a space for themselves through their struggles (but about whom the society knows quite less about) are grouped together and found under the "Better Half" series. These are the works of Thingnam Anjulika. Another notable profile we received this year was that of Mr Jayanta or Tapta as he is popularly known as. This was the work of Mr Ringo Pebam. Others like Oinam Anand, W Damodar & Sriman Prasad Das contributed with other profiles of Manipuri personalities.
Simillarly we have grouped all interviews together under the "Interviews of Manipuri personalities". Nehginpao Kipgen's research works on the political conflicts of Burma or Myanmar, our neibour has also been grouped together under the Author's corner.

The word corner reminds us of the Poems and the regular Poems' corners that has been created for the poets. As earlier year the contribution here is unending and tireless. We try our best to promote these young talents and also the Metei Mayek but rendering the Meiteilon language poems using that font.

We also supported education related events in Manipur. Two notable ones are the Linux Manipur's IT Talent '07 and support of the Don Bosco Imphal Alumni's effort to link its alumni to support the school in its golden jubilee year through a sub-site. IT Talent '07 was a huge hit and e-pao is fortunate to be able to be associated with young guns of such an energetic group who works selflessly towards betterment of its society.

We are also starting a new forum / listing to list Baby names. Its easy to discover that there are no Meitei (or Manipuri) Baby name listings found on the net. This has been an ever increasing request from the Manipuri diaspora to start such a listing. We have put together some Meitei names together to start the listing. Of course, we are not happy with just Meitei names. If you are a Manipuri, do send in your suggestions. We are hopeful that with your contribution, the names database would grow and that it would grow to cover all communities of Manipur.

We are also working on the new look of the e-pao home page. We have arranged the presentation of various sections into the tabbing structure which has been adopted by the web world as a standard in the recent times. Now, the 3 sub categories of the News Section will be seen together with any one of the categories being displayed at a point of time. Other categories can be opened up by clicking on it's tab (named as per the category). Opening one tab would hide the others. Simillarly, we are arranging the hotspots into few more groupings and would be displayed as tabs on the home page. This will give us more real estate and a very logical grouping for your easy identification and use. We also have given a different color scheme to the whole layout. Hope you like it.

We are also currently working on a new section or service to be launched soon. We hope to go live with it in January 2008.

E-Pao is filled with opinions and experiences contributed and collected from users of the site. They give us insights of issues, helps us understand any situation from another angle and enriches us with their experience stories. Sometimes, they just lets you relax or maybe relate at the best. All of them are gems in their own rights. E-Pao is thankful to all contributors for using this platform to reach out to others. E-Pao would also like to thank all readers, from the authors side too, for coming and looking up for these articles and reading them. This is Web 2.0 at work as far as Manipur is concerned.

To wind up this year, we would leave you with some numbers from the year 2007 for the E-Pao!
1     Sessions/visitors: 36,47,055 (nearly 3.65 million)
2     Page views: 19,666,324 (nearly 20 million)
3     Hits: 65,176,036 (a little over 65 million)
4     Bytes downloaded: 391.28 GB (excluding radio , galleries and efrenz data).
Coming to the new live site (e-paolive.net), the Most Streamed song is Uttam Eidi Ngaore by Uttam with an average of more than 13 thousand streams per day since its webcast. The most popular collection is the "Manipuri Rock" followed by oldies such as "N Pahari". The E-Pao! Radio streamed nearly 1.5 tera bytes (1524 GB) of MP3 data.

Some more interesting statistics that revealed itself from the recent analysis is that E-Pao! received visitors from 168 countries. The ratio of Returning visitor to the new visitor is: 60.60% / 39.40%.

We would also like to explain some of the terms used above (for the benifit of non-techies) as defined by Urchin(a Google company), which is the tracking tool we use:
Session: A 'Session' is defined as a series of clicks on your site by an individual visitor during a specific period of time. A Session is initiated when the visitor arrives at your site, and it ends when the browser is closed or there is a period of inactivity.

Pageview: A 'Pageview' is defined as a request from a visitor's browser for a displayable web page, generally an HTML file. Urchin's configuration controls which file extensions are treated as Pageviews. In general, images and other embedded content, such as style sheets and javascript, are not considered to be Pageviews.

Hit: A 'Hit' is simply a successful request to your web server from a visitor's browser for any type of file, whether an image, HTML page, an MP3 file, or any other type. A single web page can cause many Hits - one for each image included on the page, etc.

Team E-Pao wishes you happy times in 2008.

See a flash presentation on this occasion here.