Gautam’s Net

Wayne Turmel took a telephonic interview of mine, where he quizzed me about the current business scenario.

You can find the podcast here and here too at the Working Week podcast series.

Ellen is my brand new Twitter contact. I was checking out her blog and this post seemed very interesting if you are wondering how businesses can make use of Twitter. Go check it out:

Establishing a Twitter presence is as important as voicing your business over any media platform. Before you get started, brainstorm on objectives and decide what you want to achieve.

To attract customers, developers or other partners, search Twitter and TweetScan for key words, then check out some profiles, “Follow” and send requests to be followed back (see Ten Top Twitter Tips).

If you’re looking to build buzz and energy around a persona or product, keep your content fresh and lively: good enough that people wanted to share it—and they won’t with spam. Highlight milestones, meetings, news and ask your community to submit their own. Tell people how things are going with your work. Highlight use cases and showcase PR. Put an exec out there and build some buzz around that.

MCHammer does this well, working his celebrity, staying in touch with tech glitterati, and keeping DanceJam in the limelight while he’s at it.

If you’re interested you can check it out here

Clay Shirky writes:

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody
  And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
  (tags: attention blogs communication cities culture internet television web2.0 media)

Now you can add your own note to Posts and Articles you choose to share with your friends via Google Reader:

Click on the “share with note” link (circled in red in the picture above) under the post or article you want to share and add your own comment and share with your friends on Google Reader.

Got this mail from Jason Goldberg about new developments at s|m, where I am an alpha user. Would you want an invite to check out SocialMedian? Leave a comment below or send me an email at i@gautamghosh.net

First five members will get an invite to participate as a alpha user.

Here are just some of the new features shipped today.  (there’s too many to list them all – happy discovering all of them)

1. Auto-complete when adding sources.  Just start typing a source name →  No need to input the RSS feed name anymore (unless we don’t yet have that source in our database).
2. We’re now starting to group sources in parent-child relationships.  As an example, this will enable you to just add the source “BBC” for every BBC feed, instead of having to enter their feeds for each of sports, news, markets, etc.  This should be fully operational in just a few days.
3. There’s now an “About socialmedian” section of the site where you can learn about socialmedian the product, the story, and the company.
4. FAQ’s (see anything missing here?  Please let us know)
5. Clips are now counted like votes.  Whenever you “clip” a story, it’s like voting for it, saving it to your page, and telling other people you think this story is worth ready –  all at once.
6. We’re starting to tidy up the design a bit.  Check out your homepage and I think you’ll see what I mean.
7. We’ve renamed “Hot List” to be “My News Feed”.  My News Feed displays your personally relevant news based on the News Networks you belong to.  Every user of the site has a uniquely personalized My News Feed.
8. Whenever you take an action on socialmedian, we now post your latest activity at the top of your My News Feed.  Try clipping a story and then refreshing your home page and you’ll see this in action.
9. We’ve now RSS enabled My News Feed, My Clips, and all News Network Pages, so you can get a live feed anywhere of your personalized news (My News Feed), stories you have clipped (Clips), and the most popular and/or recent stories from any News Network.
10. We’ve done considerable work to reduce duplications in My News Feed.  You should no longer see the same story twice in your feed.
11. Every user now has a mini socialmedian profile that they can edit and link to your profiles on other sites.  You can check out mine here.
12. We fixed some minor bugs in the bookmarklet
13. One-click to create a new News Network on any topic
14. Edit and delete your comments
15. Terms of service
16. Privacy policy

Got this mail from Sumeet Kapur. Way to go, Sumeet! Congrats!

Dear Gautam
I am very happy to share with you that last Thursday, Global Groupware Solutions was honoured with the IBM 2008 Beacon Award for its Smiles ERM On-Demand Employee Relationship Management application in the “SaaS Innovation” category at a glittering ceremony in the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles.
We won this prestigious award from a field of over 725 nominations from around the world and judged by leading industry journalists, analysts, and IBM executives. (follow this link to read about it). IBM has done a small story on GGSL and Smiles ERM and I am taking the liberty of attaching it to this mail hoping you would find it interesting to read.
IBM Beacon Awards recognize IBM Business Partners for outstanding delivery of value to clients and innovative approaches to solving business issues. The “Software as a Service (SaaS) Innovation” category recognizes partners with solutions that are delivered as a service to end users and are innovators in the SaaS market who provide on demand offerings with an innovative pricing model that allows customers to respond rapidly to changing market conditions.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support to the GGS team and me which along the efforts of our team is the reason we could get this recognition and I hope that we will continue to get your support in times to come.
Warm regards

Sumeet

Read more about Sumeet and Poonam here.

Digital Inspiration is a popular technology website with more than 5000 articles, tutorials and how-to guides related to software, computers, and internet and it linked to our teeny weeny site

This was the story that Amit Agrawal, the DI author blogged about.

So for all the DI readers who visit this blog for the first time, welcome ! And I hope you’ll stay for some time and look around

• The strange existence of Ram Charan - April 30, 2007
  “Each of us has to be the best calibrator of natural talent of the people who work with us,” he says. “What are the three to five most crucial natural-talent items that each person has? It has to be specific and very clear and repeatable”
  (tags: business leadership succession guru consulting)
• Blogosphere latest hunting ground for headhunters, cos
  It must only be a trickle right now
  (tags: blogging jobs recruiting)
• kolb’s learning styles, experiential learning theory, kolb’s learning styles inventory and diagram
  (tags: learning training education knowledge models psychology business)
• madhukar and geeta
  Tees saal pehle. More popularly known as MadShuks and GSax
  (tags: personal)