(26 September 2006 4:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Imagilon, a New York based media company, has launched www.jhanki.com, an online community for sharing news and views.

Jhanki – literally glimpse or snapshot in Hindi, is a site where readers can add news stories that they think are interesting, along with their comments. Readers can also vote or “Jhanki” stories posted by others, and post comments. In this way, Jhanki provides a very powerful forum for all Indians to voice and share their opinion about news, states an official release.

Jhanki includes stories in many categories, including current affairs, international news, Hollywood, bollywood, cricket, television, citizens’ concerns and many others. Within a week of its launch, over 1300 stories, all submitted by readers, can be read on the site. There is no editorial control over the content, it is entirely driven by the community, the release adds.

Speaking at the occasion, Imagilon CEO Jay Joshi said, “We felt that the time was right for an online news community, as net usage among Indians is at a never-before seen high, with almost 40 million users. More and more people are turning to the net to access news, but more importantly, many are also using the net to voice their opinion in the form of blogs and online communities. We designed Jhanki to be a meeting point for news and opinions that would normally be dispersed among various news sites, blogs and communities. Our job is to provide an excellent technical backbone, that makes it easy and fun for users to add news and comments, then the community takes over.”

The future plans for www.jhanki.com include – more opportunities for the user community to express their minds, providing public opinion information to media and researchers, and advertising sales.