Daily Archives: July 7, 2008

An author embracing social media

Jul 7

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I thought that Abhijit Bhaduri leveraging Orkut to get a community of readers to brainstorm on his upcoming novel Married But Available was a great thing.

Until I bumped into Ashok Banker, author of the acclaimed Ramayana series – on Twitter

He connects with fans (like me!) on Twitter and on Facebook, where he also shares excerpts from his forthcoming novel – Vengeance of Ravana

How cool is that!

Check his marketing philosophy from his blog:

The song belongs to they who listen.

If that sounds more like a line from a song lyric than a marketing philosophy, well, let me explain a bit.

It means that I don’t believe in promoting myself or my work to anybody who hasn’t already expressed an interest.

No forced conversions. No reaching out through mass media to people who aren’t aware of me, or my books. No book launches and media interviews. No public events. No advertising. No book promotions of any kind.

It’s upto the reader to discover me and my work on their own, over time, in their own way. It’s not upto me to choose how that will happen, nor is it my place to get out there and get in the faces of those potential readers.

In fact, I take the view that I only have so many readers at present. If that number increases, so be it. I’m content with whatever number reads my work already. I do not seek out anymore.

The song belongs to they who listen.

In other words, I’m like a guy sitting in my house, strumming my sitar, and singing the classical blues. If you happen to know me and my work and want to listen in, then I’ll welcome you. But I will not come out there on the street, into the marketplace and start rocking to rouse the neighbourhood.

You have to already want to listen to my ’songs’, so to speak, in order to hear them.

Posted in blogging, books, online, social media, thought provoking

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The staRs of tennis: Rafa and Roger

Jul 7

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What a match!

What a pair of geniuses.

We salute you Rafa and Roger, and are thankful that we get to see magic made before our very eyes.

As the Washington Post says:

A thrilling display of shot-making followed. In his four years as the world’s No. 1 player, Federer has grown accustomed to wielding his racket like a magician’s wand. His cross-court forehand is a wonder to behold, particularly when the ball skims the sideline just so and takes a sharp turn out of the court. Even Federer must marvel at his artistry.

But Nadal denied him that luxury so many times Sunday because he kept retrieving balls that would have been winners against lesser men and firing back winners in kind. Still, another tiebreaker was needed.

Nadal bolted to a 5-2 lead but played his worst two points of the match to give Federer a reprieve. After fending off a match point at 6-7, Federer soon found himself again in trouble when Nadal blasted a beautiful passing shot down the line.

Federer answered with a backhand passing shot even more beautiful than Nadal’s and went on to win the tiebreak and pull even at two sets each.

Posted in sports, tribute

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GMR opposes plans for Begumpet airport, why?

Jul 7

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Now this is news that’s in the “difficult to explain” category:

AAI finds itself locking horns with GMR Infrastructure Ltd, which operates Hyderabad’s new international airport, by planning to convert a portion of the older airport into a workshop for commercial aircraft, which GMR says is a breach of contract.

As per my view as a citizen GMR’s opposition to any flights from Begumpet was a bummer, but this seems too idiotic. Not that it will benefit ordinary citizens, in any way, but shows again how bull headed these firms can be, specially when backed by political clout.

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The weightlessness of the internet

Jul 7

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Article on the NYT about the unpublishing of posts on Violet Blue by Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing. I guess people notice it in blogs like BoingBoing because that means dropping off a huge Google Juice source into your site. The article however doesn’t explain exactly why Jardin took down the posts.

Very intriguing.

The issues here are clearly larger than the material itself, which amounted to at least 70 or so posts by one of the site’s contributors, Xeni Jardin, in which she referred to the writings of — or simply gave a shout-out to — Ms. Blue, who is the weekly sex columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle and a former friend of Ms. Jardin. (For the number of posts, I stand on the shoulders of David Sarno of The Los Angeles Times’s Web Scout blog, who has tracked the dispute attentively.)

But in this case, what looks like a personal spat has turned into a cautionary tale, one that reflects the odd and influential community that has grown around Boing Boing. The site, which began as a fanzine in the early 1990s, calls itself “a directory of wonderful things,” and its readers can appear particularly intense. Theirs is the intensity that comes from discovering that, indeed, there are other people who like to create detailed drawings on an Etch-a-Sketch or collect 100-year-old fantasies of what the future might look like or rage at the encroachment of technology companies and the government on personal privacy.

For all the damage to reputations the Internet can cause, perhaps the greater anxiety from online communication is the weightlessness of it all. The whole World Wide Web can seem like a hall of mirrors — nothing tangible, no binding, no watermarks, no notary public seals. Where, exactly, is it? How do we know any of it is true?

Ms. Jardin said she did not sign up for the heaviness of being a publication of record.

“It’s still kind of punk rock,” she said. “The part that still freaks me out is that it is such a huge thing. Part of what people love about Boing Boing is that I can post whatever I want. It’s super fast-moving.” She added: “The huge impact it has, the whole thing that makes it this thing, is that it is so lightweight.”

Posted in Blogroll, online, social media

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