Category: Digital

Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 20, 2010 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

I attended my second blogcamp today. Both have been in the School of Management building in the IIT-B campus. I reached here super-early and so managed to catch up on some of my reading (Ruskin Bond’s The Book of Nature). There seemed to be a strong creative vibe in the camp – especially with speakers on reviewing movies, doodling and fiction or with people who meddled in them. Hence, overall I enjoyed the whole experience.

The morning began with a session by Meeta Kabra, who wrote movie reviews on Wogma.com. Meeta began with sympathizing with today’s creators for receiving one word reactions for their work. She said reviewers must take the effort to provide constructive criticism of the work so that there is a possibility for the creators to learn and improve. The audience thought that maybe not everyone would understand the nuisances of cinema (Meeta reviews films) to provide such criticism and hence the restricted reactions. Meeta then asked for advice on how to handle abusive commenters. The general consensus seems to be that these be not posted at all. Some schools of thought believed that these comments may not be removed but should not be answered. Certain comment moderation was encouraged through various tools by the attendees.

The second session of the morning was done by Harpreet Singh on sketching experiences. He blogs at sketchingexperiences.me. He started off with his aim to get at least 5 members of the audience into sketching by the end of his talk. He was of the opinion that diagrams and drawings were catching the eye of people in this era of information overload. These were simple and easy to understand in a single glimpse as against reading pages of text on some topic. I am not overtly enthusiastic of diagrams but do believe that it has its usefulness.

The next session of the day was by John P. Matthew who writes a personal blog. From an end of the day perspective, John’s session seemed to be presenting ideas that didn’t seem to sit well with the audience. He began by speaking about Google PageRanks and blog monetization to an extent. He then spoke of his experience of using the blog for activism and having used his blog to make money and also make good friends. His school of thought urged people to take blogging as a serious activity and blog at a daily pace. This pushed some of the members of the audience to ask the question of quality suffering because of quantity. The result seem to be mixed with people calling for differing rates of blog posts. I, personally do not set any particular target for the number of blog posts per day. That’s just too much discipline for me.

The next session by Tarun Chandel, now a photoblogger, seemed to contrast well with John’s session before. His talk basically asked the blogger to begin the blog for a purpose. He stressed that by “walking that extra mile” while writing a blog post or posting a picture or the cartoon/diagram makes a difference. He believes that having a good workflow, a well thought out structure works better for the blogger. He says these are worth the time and the effort because one adds his name to the blog post. Commenting on the trend of multiple platforms available for content, he suggested their wise use.

I particularly enjoyed Tarun’s talk because it seemed like a return to the roots in this time of confusion in the world of media today. I was also meeting Tarun for the first time after the last blogcamp, which is when I last met him.

The next session, post a small drinks break was by Srinivas, a travel blogger on #SrinionTour. Srinivas has the idea of going around South India on a shoestring budget of 10,000. He hopes to visit 19 locations in 15 days. He hopes to create a buzz around his trip by using social media. I am guessing it is do-able and connectivity is improving in South India. Srinivas’ trip would be the real test, of course. I have started following him both on twitter and on his blog.

Sonesh Prakash spoke next on his comic strip. Oddly enough he used Facebook Notes for the same. This is odd to me because I differentiate between a blog and a social network. He is the creator of the comic strip that has two characters – SoBo chick and Suburban guy and uses them to generate a comic strip to comment on various issues. He demoed two tools – StripCreator and Pixton. Interestingly, he then moved on to his trips to Sikkim and Kerala and shared pics from there. He came across as a very curious person to me, in a rather good way.

The next session was by Aniket who blogs at flashfiction.in. He began by talking of how he began a multiple author website on writing fiction, short stories and poetry. He clarified for me the idea behind syllables in poetry. He further spoke about how he started his multiple author website and some of the friendships he has made through blogging. He seems to be talented with his voice as well as he was asked to introduce in multiple voices!

The next session was by Sampath Iyengar who is a corporate blogger. His session was built on a series of questions to the blogging community. The answers he received urged him to separate the corporate and personal identity blogs. He was urged to use plugins to pull content from blog to Facebook. Tarun, answering his question expanded on his comment on wise use of platforms. He suggested that social websites like Facebook are liable to change as was the case with Orkut and there was also an unclear copyright protection problem while using such platforms. Whereas, on your hosted server, the content remained with you, by and large.

Harish Iyer spoke next on using blogging to encourage activism. He worked primarily in the area of raising awareness about sexuality and child sex abuse, having been subjected to the same himself. He is openly gay and has spoken about these issues in open fora. He states that his humorous attitude towards this has helped him handle society’s reactions to his sexual preference while also being able to talk about such a taboo subject. He also allows Chandini the use of his blog to connect people with the resources with the people in need. I am a little bit confused since she also seems to have her own posterous for this.  She also spams (forwards emails but she uses spam as  a smaller word for this) people to get this done.

Manoj was the last speaker of the day. He spoke of how he got into blogging after being bored by the assignments offered by media houses. He also talked about his experience of going around the country during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections raising awareness about social causes and the various NGOs working for them. His latest effort is called Canary Trap, where he hopes to provide access to documents which are only stated in the media but one never gets to see in print.

After lunch, Moksh Juneja opened the floor for discussion on the monetization of blogs and some of the “ethical” practices that could be used for such monetization. The question was whether or not to provide a realistic review of a product/book/anything if paid. The consensus seems to be to ask upfront the type of request the company providing such an offer is making. Some members of the audience also thought a disclaimer would help decision making. Moksh managed to put me in a delicate spot by asking why it was so difficult to get a Wikipedian to create content for money. To me, it seemed odd that people would pay money to people when they could edit it themselves and also the fact that Wikipedia patrol would quite easily catch such instances. All I could manage was something on Wikipedia edit principles and to answer “no” when he asked whether I would edit an article if provided with all resources required to make a Wikipedia article (note: this would not make it a good Wikipedia article). The conversation then veered towards the blurring lines between journalism and blogging. Members of the audience shared pointers on how to select content in an era of perceived mis-trust in main stream media.

I was not able to live-tweet the event after a point because of both lazy battery charge and poor network availability. My thank you to the organizers for putting up a great event!

The outting of the Tata DoCoMo GPRS service means no blog post until it is activated. Currently, writing this via email.

Yesterday night I wrote this on my twitter feed: Transparency without
an interpretation of what you’re seeing is stupid.

I got to this point listening to a YouTube video on danah boyd
speaking at the Personal Democracy forum last year. Her speech was all
about how transparency must be combined with data literacy and
information interpretation skills for it to be effective.

The point is even more true in India and when you add on the
complexity of language and level of education, this becomes even more
important and difficult. It also becomes more important since the US
Government says India is the example in open government to follow. We
have to identify and let people who adopt our open government
initiative understand the limitations and adapt.

One solution to this is information graphics made popular in recent
times by websites such as informationisbeautiful.com. These are easier
to convey to an adult population with partial literacy. Imagine how
people handed a huge file would feel when they were afraid of even a
school text. Infographics on a single page with an email id and a
phone number which tells you details of the infographic is more simple
to handle.

However, not all information can be put up in terms of infographics
and it is for the IT and design guys to take up the challenge of how
to convey information already made transparent to people who need it
the most and who may be illiterate or cannot pay to access such
information. The people who do access this information also need to
learn about how to use it and how to interpret it.

Although the Government of India has started putting out information
it hasn’t pushed for its usage like the US or UK. But Indians, being
Indians have started utilising this data. I have started finding blogs
that have started linking to this data and who have used this data to
make infographics. A few media outlets also use this tool very
effectively to emphasise their story. This data provides possibility
for a coder, provides the need for data literacy for the transparency
activist and calls for creative display of this data from designers.

I have been seeking ways of recording my experiences online since
2006. This was the year when I thought I had to record stuff and
things I did in my life. I  had started recording on an offline diary
and notebook since 2000. I had also burned them in 2007 out of
frustration.

After burning it, I felt better temporarily but realised what huge
implication this had only on September 26, 2010 after I also disposed
off stuff in the after 2007 era. My blog is the only document left of
this era of mine other than stuff on social network sites and twitter.

It was here that I found the means provided by social network sites,
blogs, twitter and photo-sharing sites inadequate.

Also in 2007, I stumbled across www.stryder.com. This is one of the
strangest websites I have seen that the author classifies as ‘weblog’.

My friend, Kirk Kittell as well began the organisation bogey putting
stuff in MediaWiki, Gallery, WordPress, Drupal and populated his stuff
on multiple sharing websites as a safety.

My legacy way of handling this would be longform writing. My slightly
advanced way was writing about it on my blog. In between, I used
Twitter, Tumblr and Notepad as various ways of recording stuff. None
really satisfied me.

I like blogging but more as a way to provide a complete picture and
not as a way of describing an evolving thinking process. I like to see
the blog as a post-event condensed report rather than a note taking
and structured thinking method.

These are my unpolished thoughts.

I have been watching and adopting various social media networks since
2005, when I joined hi5! I immediately moved to Orkut and this is
where I built my first social network. When Facebook opened to India
in 2006, I moved there as well and did invite my school friends there.

I have been watching social networks to try and leverage that to help
my space plans. Although I watched social networks, I just didn’t get
to the part about leveraging social networks but did build a cool
space organisation. I just stuck to making my colleagues in the
organisation friends, first on Orkut and then on Facebook.

Till date, I feel more comfortable leaving a scrap on Orkut than
posting a ‘hi…hello…how are you…fine…ok’ thread on Facebook.
Events like fraandship requests and bad press pushed people out of
Orkut and onto Facebook.

My college friends stayed on Orkut initially and then moved to
Facebook when peers told them being on Facebook was considered cooler
and because many girls moved on to Facebook.

The fraandship requests originates from settings where people have
come on to a social network platform and didn’t really know what to do
and just extended their Yahoo! Messenger experience onto the social
network. I think Orkut really helped polish many of the people there
who then carried the rules into Facebook.

I still remember scraps on Orkut about: not posting a scrap in your
own scrapbook, not trying to friend people you do not know and
expecting introductions when you add a person as a friend. These were
then also circulated among the offline channels – mainly through SMS.

As it has grown, social networks in India have also transformed
offline meetups because of a segregation in the kind of people who
hung around in each of these spaces.

The fraandship thing came as more of the rural and lower tier towns of
India came onto Orkut and began trying to make friends in the city
they planned on moving to. Urban and middle class Orkut users made fun
of this and proliferated this across initially to humiliate people who
didn’t use proper spelling or grammer in their introductions of
friendship requests. Later this was used to reinforce the fact that
only known people are welcome as friends.

This also co-incided with the offline hang out culture. This shifted
as the more well to do kids hung out at the Cafe Coffee Days and
Baristas whereas the middle class and the lower income group kids hung
around inside of college canteens and wada pav stalls. Slowly,
Baristas and Cafe Coffee Days realised that more money could be made
inviting the middle class in as well and they moved to lower prices.

Funny enough, this coincided with the time that the bulk of Indians
moved onto Facebook and this network reinforced the coffee shop,
McDonalds and pizza culture more.

We’re in an interesting time in social networks in India – at a time
when the crowd in Orkut has started moving to Facebook. Mainly because
brands have been using these to push prices down and also using the
network to hold and provide access to events. The Orkut experience has
made this crowd wiser and has moderated them. But, also a new
generation is coming directly onto Facebook than through Orkut. Some
of my friends have started seeing the ‘fraandship-like’ trend showing
up on Facebook as well. I haven’t seen it either on Orkut or Facebook
other than on other people’s scrap book.

Facebook also slowly pushed us off the ‘introduce yourself’ habit of
our Orkut days by not providing access to the wall without being a
friend in the privacy settings. More people are now also not using the
‘add a message’ option that appears when you ask a person to become
their friend.

The real thing to see now is how such a closed network like Facebook
will teach new comers on the unwritten network rules. I see this
happening in the offline world and some people say Facebook is very
complicated and Orkut has become complicated but is now resembling a
ghost town.

Today, I started scrapping on Orkut again. Watch this space as I post
more of my social network watching here.

I missed out on posting things asap in January, so trying to cover some lost ground here. This is mostly from memory, so there are bound to be some errors.

A Tweetup is an offline meetup of people who use the service called Twitter, generally organised and publicised on the same service. It is open to everyone using the service. A Science Tweetup is an offline meetup of people who tweet about science or are generally passionate about science and technology. Rather than having the tweetup at a restaraunt or a coffee joint, I thought a science tweetup which is in the scene makes more sense than having tweetups in restaraunts. Thus the  idea of holding the first Mumbai Science Tweetup at the Nehru Science Centre occured and was accordingly held on January 3, 2009.

Having the venue at Nehru Science Centre has it’s short comings. While the Planetarium is too famous, the Science Centre is not that well known. The Science Centre is located about 2-3 odd kms from Worli Naka on the route to the Mahalaxmi Railway Station. The Centre was under renovation for sometime but has come out of it with some pretty cool exhibits and experiments. The idea of the Centre is to allow the general public to understand science not through theory or vague mathematical equations, but actually experimenting with what’s happening and giving a simple description of the same in English and Hindi.

Only two of (@pradx and @deltarx) us turned up for the first tweetup, which is not bad and is much better than a one person tweetup. All that matters is that both of us love and are passionate about science and we had a thoroughly wonderful experience at the Center. I really hope more people join us in the future perhaps after reading this. A big mistake that I made was not to charge up my mobile phone before getting to the Center, which essentially meant that I didn’t get many of the photographs that I thought I would. Well, I can always go back there on a later date :).

The major attraction of this tweetup was to be the newly opened dome theatre at the Center. The theatre is really cool, surrounded by a timeline photo exhibition beginning from the big bang and moving forward in time as we go towards the theatre entry. The seats were simple and comfortable (you don’t expect better seats @ Rs. 40, do you?) and the show was called the Serengetti. The experience was awesome and there were some giggles during the lion-lioness uncensored sex scene. The sound could have been better but overall it was a nice experience. I wouldn’t mind giving the experience a 3/5. As we come out, we catch up on the time line and walk out as human beings begin to populate the continents.

Since there were only two of us and both were aerospace buffs, we decided to spend max time in the Aerospace exhibit in the -1 floor. I just can’t speak enough of this exhibit and the part it played in my early love for engines and rockets. The climax of this exhibit for me was at the Space Mission Control exhibit. They had linked up the computer to the live on-board feed for IRS-P3 (orbit, orbital visualisation, temperature and such parameters).

We subsequently went for lunch in the Centre canteen and then went through the exhibits called Sound, Light, Prehistoric eras, Hair, etc.

I will try and post a link to images as soon as I upload them on Flickr or perhaps somewhere else on this website. Will update this post accordingly.