Entries from March 2008 ↓

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The death and life of the American newspaper. I see that slowly happening in India too.

• Newspaper are struggling between global, national and local news coverage
• Newspapers no longer have intellectual magnetism or star reporters whom you would like to track
• Most of the journalists are flocking to TV news channels.
• Newspapers are doing the triple duty of running a newspaper, online version and a TV Channel Some of the media houses are trying to expand their markets by getting into web 2.0 band wagon without excelling in any one damn stuff.In future they are creating multiple pits for themselves to fall in to.
• The news that you see today in news paper was there Online first and was already covered in the prime time last night on TV.

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If you think plastic money has only impacted the way we shop, then you are totally wrong. The plastic money or the credit card has impacted how we buy, how we shop, how we do business, how we sell stuff, how we manage our finances and all the other important stuff which you can’t even measure or analyse - stuff like culture, society and humanity. In a same way our screen consumption has led to many things we had never thought (at least I had never thought). I am sure many people must have discussed this is the past, researched it , researching it or thinking about the future - but I was not able to find out the word for this phenomenon and that’s why for my own comfort, I coined a new one - screensumer.

What is a Screen ?

There is no definition for a screen, the very first screen known to humanity is his own shadow or the reflection in the waters. The first man made screen must be definitely the mirror. Mirror according to me is the most high-fidelity non-electronic display system that man has invented so far. But Mirror has a problem you cannot store image on the Mirror in any way. And transmitting images through Mirror is still a pain. Fibre optics is of course a system of transmitting information through mirror but requires lot of electronics - to capture, transmit and project the image.

As we progressed we experimented with different Screen system -

Symbolic and textual images can be created using series of bulbs or LEDs.

Magically Movie Screen, the biggest screen in the history was invented before the small one - television . But you had to go to Movies, it was available to you but not on a daily basis. Movies almost had the same impact which Television created later. Television is the evolution of a movie screen in all the possible permutation and combinations - technology, production, delivery, entertainment, culture, society, news and many many other things.

The biggest invention in retail space (in your home) so far has been Television which was backed by the entire system of recording, storing and transmitting, projecting and display. Television itself has evolved as a device from CRT to LCD to Plasma and to Touch based going forward. The standards, electronics and capacity of this medium is evolving day by day. The biggest invention is actually the web, but again the computer monitor that we use is just a modified Television to support near distance viewing.

What is Screen Consumption and who is Screensumer ?

Definition of a screensumer is simple - "a person who consumes screen". Am I stupid or what ? Screen consumption ? Screen is a delivery medium not an information, entertainment, product or service which you can consume. But do we really know in our life what we consume ? Remember that song by Bruce Springsteen 57 channels and nothing on. I think it was the first artistic mention of Screensumerism.  Have you ever experienced this ?

" You are in your office, suddenly all the Air-conditioners have been shut, lights are still on and there is no problem with the electricity. Suddenly you experience such a deep and spooky silence, you really realize now that Air conditioners are actually so noisy but you never realized the sound when it was working for you, you realized it when the sound was missing. In short, you were till now consuming noise. And hence that is why I say that we don’t even know most of the times what we are consuming."

When we are browsing channels on TV and end up spending 2-3 hours in front of it without actually watching any program, liking any stuff or remembering any of the stuff post consumption - at such times we are consuming screen, the television and not the channels. The same goes for Mobile, Web and any other Screen based medium.

The screensumerism is getting hard coded into your lifestyle - you are in front of a screen throughout the day 8,10,12,14 and much more crazy hours. You are so stuck to this screen that even besides your work, if you get any time you end up spending it on the screen. You eyes are already burning and they are exhausted, but still when you come back home, the first thing that you do is - switch on the TV. Some people like me, have gone beyond this and have taken their laptops to their beds and late night reading has transformed to late night browsing. You don’t even know or realize that, at this odd hours you don’t have any mails to catch up with, there is no mission critical stuff, but still you end up with a screen. And last but not the least set your alarm on a mobile (your last screen of the day) and waking up to it in the morning (your first screen of the day)

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I have started spending more than 12-14 hours in a day in front of a screen, be it mobile, be it computer or be it television. Today morning when I got up I was tired, eyes were still straining and I felt as if I had a screen hangover. As I have a very noisy brain, I couldn’t stop thinking about the impact of the screen of our lives and society. I started having train of thoughts in so many directions that finally I came up with a gimmicky word ‘screensumer‘ = ’screen + consumer’ that is, people who consume screens.

And I thought to myself I would really figure out how screensumerism has impacted our perception, thoughts, knowledge, interactions, personality, society, culture, evolution - yes evolution. I will write series of blog post on each of these points in more depth. This blog will be now a commentary of my thoughts on screensumer, screensuming and screensumerism.

An hour back, this question was posted on LinkedIn and already received 3 answers, I have also posted this question on slashdot, not sure if it will be accepted. I searched on various search and news searchengines - couldn’t locate this word anywhere, I guess I am the first screensumer :). Please do let me know if you know of someone who has already talked about this phenomenon or topic.

Linked In Question:

How much screen do you consume ?

We all have become screensumers consuming different mediums on screen - mobile, handhelds, TV, computer monitors and all. This is the first generation of human beings which is spending more than 10-12 hours in a day, in front of their screens. How it impacts the person consuming the screen and the society as a whole. Will so much of screen consumption mutate our eyes, physical vision, perception of reality, online life Vs real life, face to face interactions. What has been your observation and experience on this, is there any study on this ?

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How to get good PR for yourself in the blogosphere - Robert Scoble of Fastcompany discusses how you should get a good PR. Blogs are the most powerful ’socal network’ - a eco-system of like minded people connected with each other through blogposts, blog roll , tags and topics. It is up to you to utilize it and connect with people and form a symbiotic relationships with them.

1. Go where the bloggers are
2. Read the blogs of the people you want to cover you
3. Send bloggers interesting stories
4. Start blogging.
5. Don’t send press releases.

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How to build community: Start with the individual - I have read this on Joshua’s blog before and this is worth noting and understanding.

"Personal value precludes network value: Paradoxically, to make a strong social site, you’ve got to start by making a good personal site. If the features you offer don’t serve a solo user, it’s unlikely your users will stick around long enough to become social. Examples: YouTube and Flickr both work as utility sites for individuals, even without the social component. Most users on Deli.cio.us start by using the service as a bookmark saver. The social angle comes later. "

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Instapreneur - on demand buy and sell trend on wired talks about how amateurs are are shaping up the new age manufacturing. Check out some interesting examples like Ponoko, Zazzle, StyleShake, Spreadshirt & CafePress.

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Barcamp Bangalore 6 is happening on 19th and 20th April at IIMB. Visit the website and checkout how you can contribute - by attending, by volunteering or simply by blogging about it. Such camps are collective and democratic effort. Come here, share your experiences, learn from others or just mix and connect with some like minded people. You can visit the Sessions page to know about what will be discussed and who are all going to talk at this event. But of course you will come across many more interesting people and can have a nerdy chat or fume about Bangalore Airport, Autowallas and traffic conditions also.

Now my story:

There are many exiting techie events happening from a quite some time now. But due to my work schedule and maramari in Mumbai, I was never  able to make it to any such events. Now that I am in Bangalore and life is much more peaceful, wanted to attend and did some twittering around to find about such happening stuff in Bangalore.

And guess what ? -  some good friends immediately replied back with a twitter. First was @aDese (blog) who had desiged a poster for Barcamp Ahmedabad and she informs that  Barcamp Mumbai Edition 3 is coming up on 29th. You should also visit her interesting blog and know her success story through such Ahmedabad event.

The second guy who replied back to me was @adityamishra (blog)who is actually the planner of Barcamps in Bangalore and Mumbai. Not only did he quench my thirst for info, he was also kind enough to connect me with others.

Thanks Aditi and Aditya, it’s nice to meet you and yes yes now I admit that Twitter is some serious stuff too.

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Nice article by Anupreeta Das on Gaurdian on Social Networks & Monetization. Social Networks are now entering into a maturing phase and monetization can no longer be treated as future promise. Not just social networks, but the viral widgets providers have started making money (for themselves). Investors who would put money without realizing the roadmap and monetization strategy would be the victims of SNS gold rush and I really hope it doesn’t become yet another bubble.

Social Networks are the future gateways of the web, like we had directories and search in the past. Social Networks can also be about communication, engagement and content, it may not necessarily be the gateway for the more useful or day to day stuff in life - booking airline tickets and all. SNS like Facebook are already bombarded with Apps & Widgets and having too much on a Social Network is not a good thing. People are enjoying the novelty today but some are already experiencing the social network fatigue also.

The semantic web may be the answer going forward for Social Network too. The intelligence and discovery tools are the most important factor for any social networks. What we have right now is that I do a certain patchwork and spam my friends through Widgets and other playful stuff. Sometimes it is fun and sometime its not.

Coming to Monetization - Monetization in the current scenario is mainly limited to context and the behaviour. The content and the behaviour is very tough to analyse in the present scenario . The information from profile, relationships and conversation is very limited. On any social network the most difficult task is to find out the profile information of the user (and the right profile information). If you don’t get that right you do not get any click throughs. Behaviour again is challenging if people are just spamming each other and doing random stuff. The last but no the least - Conversation - well it has gone really really micro and super super random (see twitter).

Ultimately it comes to analytical study of your users - how to make sense from 100 widgets, 1000 friends and 10,000 scraps/guest books or Twitts. Signal Vs Noise

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Dear Indian Blogosphere friends, since I was handling my own products most of the time, my learning and observations were limited to the scope of work that I was doing and my deadlines . Would really like to understand from you if you have spotted some wonderful stuff in the Indian Internet Market for the following

1. Web Directory - Something like Dmoz. Nothing comes to my mind when I think of this.
2. Classifieds - Like Craigslist - Thousands and millions of them, but I almost end up calling Just Dial.
3. Search - Already done by Google, Yahoo and MSN. The rest that we have doesn’t give me something special, that I won’t find here. Which one do you use which is uniquely Indian.
4. Social News - Not like social gossip, I mean real news like OhMyNews
5. Tech Community - Millions of developers & IT professionals, what is there home page, where do they interact ? Where do they slashdot
6. Jobs - Naukri you are a rockstar !!!. Actually you, Jobsahead and Monster do such a excellent job that there are no further invention in this space.
7. Social Networks - A real, pure, raw, arrogant, desi twist. Not another mai-bhi orkut and facebook types.
8. Blogs - After changing 3 CMSs and at least 5 domains, finally I have a permanent place to call my home at my own domain now. Just within a month of active blogging, spotted couple of few cool blogs from Gaurav Mishra, Rajesh Lalwani, Rajesh Jain, Atanu Dey, Dina Mehta, Amit Agarwal, Kiruba and many others. Can you please share some few more.
9. Blog aggregator - I have seen many Indian blog aggregators come and go, which is the place where you belong
10. Events - There are so many blogcamps, barcamps and such. Really the cool ones but stupid me, I always end up checking that place few months later. Where do I find these updates, all at one place. Please recommend

Please don’t limit your comments, suggestions and feedback to this. Any insights, observations for Indian Internet would be very helpful to me or the readers. You can post in the comment, write on your blog, buzz me on twitter:@santoshmaharshi or hotmail:santosh_maharshi me.

Thanks in advance

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Gaurav Mishra is at it again. He and friends are coming up with a weekly digest - The Best of Indian Business Blogs. Also covered by Rajesh Lalwani & Ranjan

Hope, I make it to the list sometime

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Complete web site testing by Digital Inspiration and 7 tools to track your blog visitors by createlf.

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Angela Gunn dicussed mob justice - Digg mob dispenses rough justice to alleged thief

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YoutTube video award winner video- Another world is possible - a video by Avaaz.org - The world in action

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Times : From MTV Insight Studio’s book, The State of Cool:

Only 1 pc of young visitors of UGC sites actually upload any fresh or orginal. 90 pc are passive participators and 10 pc participate (in any form ) and leave comments

There have been previous study in the past which had the same observations about the UGC category in general. For people who work on UGC they know for real that it is always under 2 to 5 percent. It has become sort of a thumb rule - 2% UGC rule. But this is not a problem, the UGC should focus on overall growth and invite a steady flow plus incremental growth in these numbers

Youth across India spend up to Rs 9 billion in pocket money every day and only mobile phone is a item where they have 100% ownership

I hope this report should have come 10-20 years earlier, I would have shown this to my parent and prove them how I was below poverty line in terms of pocket money.

I hardly see anything happening in India in terms of personal electronic devices. In any of the metro’s you can see 100s of hawkers selling of cheap FM, MP3 players and myriad of other stuff which is mostly imported from China. But most of the electronics manufacturers have not ventured into personal electronic items - even though it has a great potential.

59% of youth visits social networking sites on the web to stay connected with their friends

Indian youth demands privacy and self-expression. He can post porn on Orkut, vent his anger against politicians and enjoy all voyeuristic pleasure - which is not at all possible in the so-called cultural Indian society. But they also engage into meaningful stuff or just to be in touch with real friends.

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Very simple and effective explanation on 6 Phases of the Web Design & Development Process

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Om Mashable: 15 Free Social Media White Papers and Ebooks

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Interesting, is this the future. May be in semantic’d world - this could be for many How Long Until All Homepages Are Widgets?

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Steve Garfield - 3 steps to Live Mobile Broadcasting

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Not just the conversation but even the search is getting fragmented. Scott Karp explains how search has transformed news consumption on the web.

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Brian SOlis Discovering and Listening to Conversations in Twitter. Talks about #hashtags and various other tools to track conversation on twitter.

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Lalit Bhise of Mobisy talks about Mobile Monday on Plugg.in. There is one happening in Bangalore on 24th March. I am planning to attend one from a long time, hope I make it.

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So SEO is already gone semantic ? Marshall Kirkpatrick writes about semantic web seo service Semantify by Dapper.net and Deepak Singh has some more bytes. Yahoo had also spoken about semantic SEO recently. Michael Martinez throws some light on the meaning of semantic web from SEO perspective and Michael Marshell on its impact on search marketing. Frederick Townes explains that it is more about indexing content and not just keywords. Peasonified has the definitive guide to semantic markup. And found this slide on Deepak’s blog which is from Dapper’s team:

| View | Upload your own

| View | Upload your own

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WSJ : How three nobodies from Spain built basketballs most powerful site Hoopshype.com

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MSN India Weather Channel - check out the latest weather conditions and forecasts for more than 500+ indian cities.

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Water Partners Village - a meeting place that offers a virtual exploration of the global water crisis. Through characters and places that represent a composite of real-world experiences on social networking sites like Second Life, you will be able to better understand the daily reality faced by more than a billion people who do not have access to safe water. You can also follow their stories through Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr and learn how you can team up with WaterPartners to help provide safe drinking water and sanitation to people in need."

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Older Internet Users Feel Web Advertising and Content Not Relevant well if you see just the age demographics, you can see so much of a confusion, if you add other demographics such as sex, location, interest and such complains from user will rise exponentially. No matter, how much we complain about privacy and other issues, to deliver relevant ads the advertisers need to know who you are and that can only come when they collect some data about you.

And this is not something new, I really don’t mind if Facebook collects data about me and shows the most appropriate and useful ads. Because, I know Gmail knows much much more about me than any other social network would know about me in the life time. Just think it this way, if someone wanted to blackmail you does he have to attack your Facebook profile or Gmail account.

As a user it’s actually going to help me. I will start seeing more meaningful, useful and relevant ads if the web properties know me and deliver me the ads intelligently. In the free world, the producers needs to know more about the user. It won’t be a win-win situation if I am offering my stuff free and that also to the bunch of anonymous user. So the social networks, portals and search engines who offer you free service, they have a right to know you, because their entire business model depends on the business of user understanding. Remove the understanding part and search engines would be nothing but a dumb collection of links.

It’s like going to a restaurant or a salon which we frequent quite often - the more they know you and know about your preferences and choices the more customized and effecient service you will get from them.

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Surely I don’t wanna do this, do you ? 22 Ways to Frustrate Your Site Visitors

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Content is evolving very fast as the memes spread, blog ripples are creating and the user is getting more and more social and twittery. But what about the advertising, how it is evolving and how it needs to keep up the pace with the fast dynamics of the web. Still we need to find the answers, because it’s not just the problem for advertisers and but also a problem for publishers and the ad-platform providers.. Mark Masnik shares some issues related to content and advertising "Advertising Is Content; Content Is Advertising". I am not sure if this can be brought just by engagement and usefulness of the content, it is more about how users are getting used to the similar formats from ages and turning a blind eye to it. It is not about the properties, avenues and the place which can give you the best inventory. The focus should be now about the intelligent delivery of ads, context of the place, understanding about the user and the way your users will find the ad. And I am still thinking….

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101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site

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Learn programming on your own at google code university

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