Sotuth Asian PJ and SMS update

In my survey/update on Indian PJ last month, I made mention of the seemingly vanished citzenxpress.com. I did hear back from Dr. Dinesh Sawat Singh in comment to that post:

I am dr. Dinesh Singh Rawat a leader of an Indian Young researchers who had started Citizenxpress.com in 2006.
We had off line our dream venture in july 2007 for economical crisis because in India we could not able to get successful business model for CJ Venture.
As all other Citizen media ventures
subsidiaries of traditional media groups thus majority depend money from others resources.where we were lacking.
So we have deiced to generate money by knowledge as researchers(Citizen Research Foundation)
along with building Citizens' media strong in India.
We are in this month coming with our citizen media venture under
domain name www.citizensxpress.com
This our fully self sustain business model based Citizen Media initiative.

The CRF page has a couple of recent posts and feels like its ready to launch with some more detailed news; the new domain Dr. Singh mentions isn't loading in as of March 30, but I'll keep checking. Very much looking forward to seeing what comes of this new version of the citizenxpress efforts.

Meanwhile, calcuttacentral.com now gives a page saying the domain has been suspended.

I do see a fair amount of initiatives come and go, and the viability for these ventures to remain afloat -- what particular difficulties are encountered in sustaining or creating an Indian business model for PJ -- is something to explore in detail.

The SMS dialogue continues over at the ICT4Peace site with Sanjana's very nice response to some thoughts I posted here.


Miscellany: still thinking on what will constitute good SMS journalism, organizing bookmarks and updating/restructuring my RSS reader feeds to blog more efficiently and frequently.