Dear Channel providers,

I am sure that all of you are complaining about piracy of your shows and content over the internet. In fact I won’t be surprised if you think the bit torrent technology is the scourge of all paid content models. Here is a suggestions -

If you can’t beat them, join them

Why don’t you start providing your premium content for download over the internet? Go ahead put your advertisements in them as well. Not only are you increasing your advertisement exposure, but also you are making money off the very thing which was a threat to you earlier.

The cool part is that even if your content then gets pirated, you are still getting the advertisement exposure. Isn’t that what you wanted?

My job at Illumine is to make a career enablement platform for individuals. To ensure that users once they come on the website wont get overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of the task at hand. To keep on coming back to the site, in order to enable their careers. No, not like a Naukri.com or a Monster.com. They have their place in their own regards, but that place is in matching the job seekers to companies, and that’s it. This is why it has to be different. The way the user will engage with the site will be different. In order to understand this “Customer Engagement” thing better, I decided to investigate further.

It is how the user engages with the idea of the portal, and all the ambience surrounding it. Yes we know that, and we also know how to measure it. Often at times great business use Customer Engagement either as a marketing tool or as a metric to measure the success of an initiative. All this gyaan was great, but it did not get me anywhere. I still had a design for the site to be made, and none of the literature around is talking about Customer Engagement as a Design driver , all of them are using it post execution to see the effects of an action/treatment. People talk about user centric design, is this similar to online CE? I am finding out!!

Today after a long discussion with our modelling team, I realized that to use CE as a design driver would mean to completely re-structure the portal that we are developing; and keeping the customer engagement at the center. I am sure that this concept is already there in all design paradigms, but then why do not I see this being practiced in real life? Great products have this built-in them – iPod, WordPress, TCP/IP, GMail, Books, I could go on. That’s why their fundamental design has not changed much. The way the user engages with the product remains constant, what changes is the technology, the look and the price . What do you think?

This is how Indian law defines Pornographic Content -

“Any content that is lascivious and that will appeal to prurient interest or the effect of which is to tend to deprave or corrupt the minds of those who are likely to see, read or hear the same.”

Who are they kidding? The lascivious and prurient I can still buy, corrupting minds?? Really?? So if it does not corrupt my mind (as if you can tell!!) then it is not porn?? Do we need to re-look at our IT Act and policies?

I say yes.

One of my colleagues in a presentation remarked – that the problem these days is not about lack of information, it is about visibility of that information! These days the sheer volumes of information has reached such an extent that one cannot make out the differences between relevant and irrelevant. How many times have you clicked “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google in the past month? The answer is zero for me.

The way Google has chosen to solve that problem is idiotic at best – they let you indicate the relevance of the search result for that particular term (you have to be logged in to your Google Account and search for checking this feature out). The problem with this solution is that I still have to search for the solution which is most relevant to me. Visibility of the most relevant solution is an issue. What would have been great, if Google could have taken the relevance out of my social circle (read Google Contacts) and shown my contact’s relevance to me as well!! So my social circle is defining the context of the search and they are doing the search for me; not Google.

Social search, is what I am talking about. The new paradigm now is not to show all the possible searches – nobody has time to go through 567,198 results, show me what is relevant to me. Know thy customer. Take an application like Twitter and Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck lets me set search through the Twitter community, that way, the relevance and context comes out through the users. That is the way of the future – we used to talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but now it should be Social Media Visibility (SMV).

No, its not about collaborative marriage over the web . Amol gave me this crazy idea. We were discussing the Indian SMS site, Vakow which enables us to push normal SMS into a web-based RSS/Atom feed. There are about a gazillion applications for an RSS feed. Well, this is just one such mashup between a practical application of Vakow and Google Reader.

Well to be honest, the title of the blog should not be Shaadi 2.0, but rather Event 2.0, but since we are using the my marriage as the event to cover, I decided to name the title so, well ..  and this one is more exciting na? So here is what we did.

1. Register on Vakow, get a username and have your phone number associated with that username, so that you can SMS messages to your Vakow id.
2. You are on track now, and you should be able to post a feed … now that your feed is set, we just need to integrate that feed with my marriage feed
3. Send me the RSS link, I will add it in my Google Reader public folder, and voila!! You can view the sample page here.

People who cannot attend the wedding in person can keep on hitting the RSS page for an up-to-date status.

I have posted earlier on Twitter as well, but this time, its for a more practical purpose. It is on how to use this web tool to market your site online, to get those readers/customers to your portal. Social media is a powerful thing, and using it to promote your product/service online at minimal cost is even better

So here are a few ways you can use twitter to tweet your way to more hits.

1. Have an RSS Feed on your site, if it is content based, eg. Crazy Engineers, put that RSS in Twitterfeed, and push out regular updates through twitter! Similar updates can then be sent to your twitter of your blog/corporate blog as well.
2. Once you have your twitter account setup and your tweets are flowing a-go-go, then you can have your social networking accounts like Facebook, to display the same tweet.
3. Take care not to over do the feeds, since your followers can get bugged with you. I know a few friends who have complained of me tweeting of what songs I am listening to and all that jazz, so keep a filter on those feeds.
4. It also helps if you are tweeting every once in a while by yourself, so you get a more human face. For eg. Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh is there on twitter, and he actively tweets about his daily routine. How cool is that, direct access to a firms CEO, can you be more customer-centric?
5. Use twitter for simple market surveys, qualitative and quantitative as well. For eg. You can tweet, “What do you think is going to happen to the Indian economy?”, the answers would be more than enough to put forth a blog post. Later, you can tweet that post url, and there is a likely chance that people who participated in your twitisurvey would also read your post
6. This latest in: Use twitter to resign!!

Try it out, give twitter a twhirl!!

Ever since we have discovered the internet, we have found this unending source of pirated software .. be it the latest games, operating systems, software, graphics packages, movies, music, what not. We simply download and use. Have we thought about how it is affecting the creator of that content? Not just financially, but rather, the thought of knowing that there exists a Prasad Ajinkya in the world who is knowingly using content/media created by that particular artiste/programmer. No, I have not thought so in the past, and certainly would not have thought about it in the future had it not happened to one of my close friends.

Today I was just browsing through Digit Magazine’s August DVD (the one that’s free). In it were different wallpapers that they had shared for everyone’s use. One of the wallpapers was this … Now take a look at IRIS-2005 flash intro, it has been painstakingly made by my classmates – Amit, Jhasketan and Sanchit. Jhasketan had drawn those figurines on a tablet, it was then imported into Photoshop, colors and effects were added, and then it was imported into flash. I saw the entire creation process right in front of me … these three guys put in days and nights on this. Try juggling that with a day full of lectures and quizzes, and it becomes a handful.

Now after 3 years, I see it being ripped-off, straight out. There are no acknowledgements mentioned, so that the thousands of Digit subscribers can unknowingly use the same wallpaper on their desktop without even saying a simple Kudos! to the three artistes.

Life is not fair. Shame on you Digit.

PS – Can you tell which is the original?

Related Links –

http://blog.dsignbeyond.com/2008/09/plagiarism.html

http://jainuine.blogspot.com/2008/09/plagiarism-by-digit.html

I am a Digg fan … or rather, I was one. Since the past month or so, I am reading about Sarah Palin. Finally curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to click on one of the links. Read her wikipedia entry, you might get some insight into her. Anyway, that’s not the point.

Today, I am going through Digg, to find out six articles about Sarah Palin doing the rounds on the same Digg page … blehhh!! There have been rumours that Digg is rigged, now its just confirmed. The stories are made popular only by a select few and their followers. Is web2.0 a collaborative content management system always going to be plagued by a few leaders and a throng of their followers? If that’s the case, then I see Digg as nothing but a PR tool. Sad really.

No people I am not referring to a new plumbing assignment or for that matter a new categorization of idiots!

Recently, I wrote a small post on Twitter, and how its micro-blogging utility is taking India by rage. The rabbit hole goes deeper as Alice (by analogy, that’s me!!) decides to plunge and find out where this world leads to. After Twitter, I came across a new web service + social networking utility that helps you keep in touch with what your friends are doing … a small friend feed of sorts. FriendFeed helps you keep track of your friends online digital imprints. A social engineer’s dream come true

But what really got my goose (or is it gander?) is that Friendfeed managed to coalesce a lot of my activities in one feed (Last.fm, LinkedIn, Picasa, GTalk, Blogger, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, et al). Thats one mouthful to say the least.

The coup de grâce is delivered in the form of Yahoo! Pipes … its a web platform where you can fetch content in the form of feeds, RSS, et al and manipulate it. I have yet to come to terms with how to go about setting up a pipe, the moment I do that, youll be the first to know!