DISQUS

Thanks, Desh!

Do you absolutely love my website? Do you absolutely hate it? Do leave a comment and let me know.

Hi Gaurav,

Sometime back, I tried to capture Indian mainstream culture in one sentence --

The Indian cultural mainstream is Hindu, speaks Hindi, watches cricket/ Bollywood movies/ Hindi prime time soaps, lives in the past but saves for the future, accepts its place in the world and believes in putting family first.

Perhaps, the folksonomy based approach you are trying out is more appropriate for studying a culture as diverse as India.

Here are my additions to your list:

1. Film: Regional films, Rajnikant, made-for-NRI movies

2. Music: Regional film music, Indipop, bhajans, ghazals, mobile ringtones, "street procession music"

3. Gaming: Mobile games

4. TV: Hindi soaps, reality shows, dance shows, Chitrahaar, DTH, 24 hour news channels

5. Comics: Diamond Comics, Chandamama, Indrajaal Comics, Amar Chitra Katha, newspaper comic strips, Sarnath Banerjee

6. Sports: Cricket, gulli danda, kabaddi, badminton

7. Fashion/ Lifestyle: Bridal couture, mobile phones, coffee chains, multiplexes, shopping malls

8. Education/ Historical: Freedom struggle, Vedas, Bible, Quran, Ramayan, Mahabharat

9. Cultural/ Travel: Backpacking, weekend getaways, religious "darshan" trips, spiritual tourism, medical tourism

As you study culture, you may want to differentiate between cultural heritage, cultural assumptions, popular culture, subcultures and cultural artifacts.

@Harshil/ Varun: I know that searchability of social media content is a huge issue. My approach is to rely on filters to screen content for me. These filters can be people like Robert Scoble/ Jeremiah Owyang/ Susan Bratton, or they can be websites like Techmeme/ Digg/ Technorati, the last two of which are great wisdom of crowd filters.

@Ms. Garcia/ Jed: Thank you for your attention. I'm looking forward to being a part of the Georgetown community.

@Beth: Apologies. Made the correction. :-)

@Harshil: Your post deserves a full post in response, but here are three aspects of social media you have overlooked --

- Wisdom of crowds: The more people link to/ vote on/ tag/ share a piece of content, the more visible it becomes. So, every click does count.

- The Value of Mashups: There is as much value in creating connections between existing pieces of content, mashing them up, as in creating totally original content.

- Personalized News Feeds: Since you can't read/ watch all the content available in the world, you learn to read/ watch only what is truly relevant to you. As a result, instead of superficial "awareness", you build deep "knowledge".

@Christine: Thanks for making it simpler. I signed up at iPetitions.

@Saurabh: I actually mailed the folks at WOM World to share the links to my Nokia E71 review/ Nokia E71 vidcast and ask them some questions about apps available on Nokia E71 for another post. I guess they are so busy "pushing" phones on to bloggers that they don't have any time to respond to "pull" queries.

@Philip: Great! It's nice to know that there are more people who are asking themselves questions about the value of buying/ owning things. It will be nice to know what event or thought process inspired your lifestyle. :-)

@Anita: Yes, Neha has been writing some really interesting articles about the Indian social media scene. I guess being a woman blogger is tricky anywhere in the world, but in relatively conservative countries like India, it is even more so.

@Sumant: Thanks for pointing out that "the other major catch in this hypothesis is the belief that ‘only the hardcore’ currently click through."

@EndPoverty2015 Actually, a lot of Indian corporates have CSR extensive initiatives. They may not understand "CSR on social media" but that's only because they do not understand social media to begin with. All Tata Group companies, for instance have extensive CSR initiatives.

@Chhavi: Thanks for sharing the Karmayog CSR list. I'll check out the two Breakthrough initiatives. My understanding of SM4SC is that it's an event that social media types attend with the proceeds going to a charity. It is an interesting idea, because we are all sneezers and if we attend an event like this, we are likely to talk about the charity on social media, starting a positive spiral. However, it is only one (limited) use of social media for social change. I think that to be truly powerful, a social 2.0 initiative needs to be mobile, scalable, and self-sustainable. More thought on this theme soon.

Even though I love the delicious subversiveness of the idea, I agree with the SEM folks. I have done CPC advertising both as a blogger and a brand manager and I have always had zero tolerance for websites (or keywords) with high clicks and low conversions. If clickthrough rates go up and conversion rates drop, marketers would shift ad dollars to search, away from content/ placement, and ad budgets available to bloggers would drop, instead of going up.

Seth Godin’s “more clicks -> lower conversions -> better landing pages -> higher conversions -> higher budgets” hypothesis assumes that marketers can learn to design significantly better landing pages to convert disinterested (or mildly interested) leads. I’m not sure if I share his confidence.

@Douglas: The invite key "pact" is shared right on the top of the wiki homepage. :-)

@Tao: A million apologies for my inadequate fact-checking.

@Vivek/ Karthick/ Aditya: Nobody gave us a rulebook, or a how-to guide, for finding happiness, so we fumble around, make up rules for ourselves, often swing from one extreme to another, until we find some answers.

@Kiran: I really want the iPhone 3G but there's the little question of AT&T;'s 2 year contract. Plus, I have to return my office phone tomorrow and I would have been without a phone for two weeks.

@Balaji: Thanks for the WPhone tip. Wordpress now has an iPhone app. It will be interesting to see if it works on my Nokia E71.

@Hari: Yes, the Nokia E71 has totally changed how I create and consume content. I'm now accessing my feeds and e-mails almost entirely on the phone.

@Kaustav: Dude! The bluetooth keyboard totally rocks!

@Olaf: Yes, I had heard about the E61i's slow processor. E71 is usually great, but the GMail app hangs sometime.

@Amit: Like there's no end to acquisition, there's no end to relinquishment too, and the only absolute ideal in both cases is to give up your life for your pursuit.

When I watched 'Into the Wild', I felt fake. My own experiment seemed but a shadow in front of the extremes to which Chris went.

So, of course, my off consumption experiment is fake.

But it's fake because I need a (any) mobile phone to begin with, not because I want a high-end smartphone like Nokia E71.

It's a version of the breakfast cereal argument I once had with a reader: if I consider breakfast cereal to be a necessity, I might as well buy the high-end, branded version that I like, instead of the cheap store brand version that tastes terrible to me.

From the beginning, my experiment has been about wanting fewer things, not cheaper things. There's a difference between the two, even though it's a subtle one sometimes.

@eh: I felt the same when I saw 'Into the Wild'. But now, when I think of Chris McCandless's life, my primary thought is: "what a waste!"

Like there's no end to acquisition, there's no end to relinquishment too, and the only absolute ideal in both cases is to give up your life for your pursuit.

So, maybe, Chris McCandless's example is not only an impossible ideal to aim for, but also an unworthy one.

So, maybe, moderation, albeit boring as an idea, is indeed the happy mean.

@Kristen/ Dexter: The pleasure is all mine.

I have always wondered why participants in a group project like this rarely link to each other, when they write about the project.

One exception is the 'Age of Conversation' collaborative book (1 and 2) where the authors have generated tremendous energy by promoting each other.

So, with that as my benchmark, I always link to my fellow participants when I'm blogging about a group project.

Dr Cris: Yes, it is indeed fascinating to see 108 blogs experiment with different tactics to increase their subscriber counts.

@Paul: I think part of the reason we became so close so quickly was because we were spending all our time together talking, so it wasn't all bad. However, is has resulted in a schizophrenic relationship. Maybe, that's how it was meant to be. In any case, it's too late to change things now, given that I go away to Washington DC in ten days.

@Karthik: Well, the learned old man here isn't really peeved with MNCs. He is basically peeved with anybody who doesn't agree with him, and expresses his unhappiness in an extremely personal and tasteless (read abusive) manner. I toyed with the idea of publishing the entire thread, but decided that it won't serve any purpose.

@Vivek/ Chhavi: Thanks. I spoke to all five of them and met four over the weekend. Trilok and Gurudatt told me that they didn't want anything. Alok/ Deepika, Preethi/ Gaurav and Nandita were all happy with what they chose. It was a happy weekend.

Hi,

Thanks for including me in the list. Here is another post that may interest you: http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/how-to-run-an...

@Harshil: Well, I think the orphanage needs a few extra rooms more than they need my stuff, and my stuff won't solve any of their problems.

@Blue: Well, it's impossible to choose one person, so I have decided something similar, but less complicated. I have chosen the five people whose stories appealed to me the most and I have asked them to take whatever they want to. Whatever is left goes to the orphanage.