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AOL adds new language portals

Bangalore: Six months after it launched an India-specific English language portal, global Web services giant, AOL (formerly America On Line) has added two new language portals — in Hindi and Tamil.

The www.aol.in/Hindi page offers four main sections: Samachar (news), Bollywood, Gossip and Kala-Sanskrithi (culture). It headlines the news that the Hindi remake of Sholay is soon to be followed with Gujarati and Sindhi versions. It even sneakily suggests the possible new dialogue: “Ketla manas hatha?,” Gujarati rendering of Gabbar Singh’s menacing “Kitne aadmi thhey?,” How many men were there?

With a canny eye for regional appeal, the Tamil portal www.aol.in/Tamil has localised the movie pages to Tamil cinema and added a section on astrology and religion. On Saturday, visitors learnt that the next vehicle of actress Tanya of Thirudi fame is a suspense thriller, Thatak, thatak while devotees are reminded that the Skanda Sashti festival begins at Palani on Sunday.

Both the language portals are linked to AOL’s main India site www.aol.in in English.

Also launched last week were eight country-specific editions of AOL’s new video search engine Truveo, for the U.S., France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Spain, Taiwan — and India. The India site (http://in.truveo.com/) offers desi-interest video clips in categories such as news, sports, entertainment, music, movies and viewers’ choice.

AOL seems to have wisely chosen not to compete with video hosting services such as Google’s ‘You Tube’ or ‘Yahoo Video’ — but instead aggregates and searches for videos based on the user’s request, trawling all such sites.

This includes the just-launched Hulu video service from the U.S.-based NBC and NewsCorp.

Top ranked at the Indian edition of Truveo are videos of the weekend premieres of the two big Diwali Hindi movie releases, Saawariya and Om Shanti Om; the successful surgery of the multi-limbed child in Bangalore and Yuvraj’s always-in-demand ‘six sixes.’

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