Dina Mehta: Blogs & Blogging

New Links

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:38:27 GMT

Unfortunately, links to categories, pictures uploaded and permalinks to posts will be broken here, as Radio Userland has closed down.

New Blog URL - http://dinamehta.com/
Subscribe via RSS 2.0 - http://dinamehta.com/feed/
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Comments feed - http://dinamehta.com/comments/feed/

Moving on - New Blog

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 06:56:59 GMT

This is my last post on this blog. Radio Userland has served me well since I started blogging in 2003. I will post more details on the transition, at my new blog - for now I just wanted to make this announcement, and provide the new url and feeds.

New Blog URL - http://dinamehta.com/
Subscribe via RSS 2.0 - http://dinamehta.com/feed/
Subscribe via Atom - http://dinamehta.com/feed/atom/
Comments feed - http://dinamehta.com/comments/feed/

The new blog will also be called Conversations with Dina - it's just a new blogging platform - but the same old blog! I do hope you continue reading and feeding it.

My old blog will be archived at its old url (http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/) and I will keep the archives going. Stuart, who has worked out the platform for Conversations with Dina on Wordpress has done some neato hacks - one that I love a lot is that the search function will not just search the new blog archives, but also my old Radio blog archives. And he has managed to transfer some of my posts over too. That's so cool!!! Lots more needs doing there ... and that will emerge I'm sure.

Mosoci

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 16:59:31 GMT

Its been quiet here too long ....... the result of many many shifts. A new home, getting things to work smoothly, much travelling, transferring from a PC to a Mac, not being able to figure out how to get my Radio blog easily onto a Mac (Paolo has very graciously offered to help after I left a comment at his blog)....

And mosoci β

Mosoci is more than an idea - it is a beta platform, an emergent plan. It is jazz, bricolage and serious play. It lets us play a little music where chaos, creativity, diversity and complexity are all welcome. It fulfils our desires and needs which are driven by the fundamental experiences of our souls, to live and work in an emergent, globally connected community.

What it is not, is a formal traditional organization. We hope the lifestream we have built at the Mosoci blog demonstrates this. We want it to be more than just the two of us. Stuart spells this thought out really well:

"We know we would not be doing this without everyone that has read our blogs over the last few years. Social Media built the platform for our collaboration and the sense that our network and community would support, participate with us and help us grow. Now it is beyond an idea and yet it is still being formulated. We certainly don't want to end up as just the two of us. Today though we are happy to feel like we are in a constant state of beta. That's the zone where it is a real rush.

Thank you for your support, praise and interest. Our blogs and blogging will evolve just like our other social media activities are. For example we are really enjoying bringing our bookmarking into the feed. For now our tweets are there too. That may be overwhelming. Then it may also be helpful. We'll let the readers tell us.

It is born out of our curiosity, passion and deep belief in the strength of social technologies to make a real difference, our willingness and drive to share, learn and grow allowed us to experiment with and use those very technologies to communicate and collaborate on several projects over the years. More details from Stuart:

"Much happens today by chance. Things also emerge and we find ways to jump on them and adapt. Over the years Dina and I have enjoyed telling parts of our story. We first met in an online forum. I set her up blogging ìConversations with Dinaî with install instructions over an IM chat session, long before voice and video connections were possible. Skype also helped to revolutionize our collaboration and connectivity. Open channels between India and the US made collaboration around Learning Journeys, research, and just links and interests possible. Working in India for most of the last year, attending some conferences together around the world and we knew we were at the point where where 1+1 makes more than two.

Mosoci is the platform of our collaboratory around the interests we love, are passionate about and to reinforce the direction and learning we need to go in. We wonít be successful without our network and our community and the power of social media. Blogs, wikis, forums, twitter, bookmarking have enabled who we are today."

You may ask, what does Mosoci do? Simply put, a) we immerse ourselves in research and deep dives, b) we facilitate change and help re-frame value for organizations. The time and opportunity to conduct and deliver research and strategies in new ways is here. We constantly push the boundaries with emerging social tools (blogs, wikis, SMS, RSS, social networks, beta communities), with clients when and as appropriate. We want to take this practice, this method of working, along with others who are doing some excellent work in this field, to the whole world.

Let's create that map together, in the hope that the map will bring forth the features of the territory. We want your comments, perspectives, and just plain old honest help and advice to make this a success. We are open to suggestion and really donít want to stop at just a few of us.

It would be great if you would jump in on the conversation at Mosoci and add Mosoci Feed to your reader. We'd love your feedback and suggestions.

Travelling to the US and UK

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:28:59 GMT

I will be in the US from July 18th to 27th - am attending meetings in Cambridge MA on the 19th and 23rd. Have some free time over the weekend July 21-22nd. Am meeting up with Yazad who touched base with me on Facebook when I mentioned I was going - and looking forward to meeting him on Sunday. Would love to meet up with bloggers and other folks in the Boston area who are interested in the social media scene or in qualitative research and ethnography or just want to hangout and yak!

I will also be in London for a few days on my way back - July 29-31st where I am going to hangout with friends. Again, would love to meet anyone who's free on those days.

Do drop in a comment here or send me email to dina(dot)mehta(at)gmail(dot)com if you'd like to meet up.

Framing the context for blogging

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:19:46 GMT

Had an interesting interaction with an FMCG Client for whom we are setting up some presentations and workshops around how they can take their brands into the social media realm. I sent a client a detailed note on what we could provide, and she forwarded it to one of the marketing guys who felt it is exciting, but perhaps too focussed on blogging and not enough on youtube!

I dashed off a response to the person who is leading this effort that she must frame this workshop for her organization, only then can she get buy-in. It is one thing for us as consultants to deliver on the content, but because it is such a new field here, and because of the tremendous hype and buzz around it, there are many misconceptions; the most salient one being that blogs are individual personal spaces.

My response to her:

Please frame the workshop when you send it out internally - some thoughts on that ... assure them we will talk about youtube and many many many more such services like flickr, twitter, podcasting, facebook etc. All these are microblogging applications. And we will do a whole session on facebook - which is the latest 'hottie' and is a platform where users are encouraged not only to create their 'user-generated' content, but also build new applications bottom-up.

I think there is a mismatch here in what your team understands about what blogging is - and what it actually is. Most non-bloggers seem to refer to blogging as merely writing a diary. But that's not complete, nor does it do blogging any justice. Blogging is the act of publishing content online in a space that is yours - usually chronologically ordered. It could be videos, audio, short text messages, photos - all forms of multimedia. It could be in your own space where usually you use a text-driven blogging platform, and to which you can add plugins for a multimedia experience, or it could be within a social network space - like youtube, twitter, etc

So, in the presentation unless they understand what blogging really is - and what influence bloggers have, I think we will be doing the social media space no justice at all. Moreover, it is bloggers that are the early adopters, analysts and consultants in this space --- unless they had built it, it would not exist. Much the same in the potential for products and brands. They are the new influentials - and they have the potential to really evangelize or rant big time.

This is not just an international phenomenon - a recent study in India revealed that 85% of active internet users claimed to read blogs regularly! This is their growing influence. Today most news channels in India have a list of bloggers they call upon on general stories they are covering - to get the buzz on what's going around on the web. When Sunita Williams and her safe return to earth was the big thing on TV, I was asked by a TV Channel to participate in a show on it - I turned it down, as it was not really relevant to either blogging or my areas of interest - but that's a different issue. A lot of civic and political action is now being mobilized through mobile phones and online. Many of these use blogging platforms for their causes, and build large communities around them by taking them into Orkut and Facebook.

Rising Voices

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 04:13:04 GMT

Global Voices Online has announced the first five citizen media outreach projects to receive Rising Voices microgrants.

"The overwhelming response is a testament to the global enthusiasm for citizen media that stretches from Southern Chile to rural Nigeria, from a village in Mali without electricity to urban Mongolia; from an orphanage in Ethiopia to a center for disabled HIV/AIDS patients in Kenya. The list goes on and on, but what all of the project proposals have in common is a desire to enable their communities to tell their own stories, to write their own first draft of history, to document their traditions and culture before they are washed away by the tides of globalization."

Congratulations to all those receiving the grant - I really believe this is a huge step for blogging outreach programmes!

User-Generated Content - Just more 'Us vs Them'?

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:30:52 GMT

Bloggy thought three. Something I was mulling over for a while, even shared in a completely inarticulate manner with Rajesh yesterday, who by the way awarded me with the Thinking Blogger Award. He shared with me some links that report on the recent IAMAI Web2.0 conference, with the comment - "am getting a bit restless with marketers"! Then I got a call from a journalist, who wanted to discuss 'unconferences' - and I took off on her a little and told her how I dislike the term - any activity that is prefaced with an 'un' makes me feel not-so-nice about it. Anyways, it also reminded me about another phrase or term in the social media realm that I generally dislike ---- user-generated content and I started my rant on her!

I particularly dislike it when I hear mainstream media and corporate organizations get a high on the phrase 'user-generated content'. In India, many times, its shortened to UGC (the only UGC I know of is the University Grants Commission!) and it bugs me no end.

I dislike it, especially when, in the background, I hear their minds ticking away the rupees they can generate, behind all this buzz and excitement around the term. When they have not really embraced it themselves.

I dislike it when they distance themselves from it - it's something other people -- oops users do. How many of them have actually generated content themselves?

I am happy with adopting the term when I am talking about content that is created by users of a service - so there is user-generated content on Youtube, or on blogging platforms, or on wikis. But I dislike it when marketers, PR agencies talk about the 'potential' in harnessing user-generated content for their brands, products and services through advertising messages on the user-generated content spaces or sites, and then believe they are really using social media in their strategies. Am not knocking advertising based strategies - I just feel they are skimming the surface of the true potential in participating in the conversations, co-creation, community and collaboration that occurs when there is user-generated content.

I think they have it wrong, when they feel that getting onto the user-generated content bandwagon is a quick-fix for their social media strategies. Inherent in the phrase is a division, the notion or assumption of 'us vs them'. They have got to see themselves as co-participants and partners rather than marketers or advertisers who are 'using' user-generated content as another media opportunity.

I simply loved Toby Bloomberg's rant at Unilever which so well illustrates what I am trying so hard to articulate!

"So I really want to see that ad. I really Need to see that ad. What do I do? Do I search for Lux? Do I go to the Unilever website? Nope. I head for YouTube and sure enough here it is! It's a must watch. Oh and the Unilever Lux site? Good I didn't head that way, my coffee would have turned cold looking for any mention of the campaign. Anyone for integrated marketing?

Questions To Ponder
Does a marketing campaign have to be "social" to be successful?
Is traditional advertising dead?
Is there room in the proverbial marketing mix for the good old 60 second TV spot?

Diva Marketing Thoughts
Marketing 101 tells us to hang where our customers hang. For some the "tube" means television and for others it means YouTube. And for many people it means Both.

While there were quite a few Neon Girl videos on YouTube, I didn't notice a Unilever Neo Girl YouTube Channel. Unilever you missed an opportunity. Actually you missed several. Never too late to get into the game. Would be a good idea to consider especially if a sequel is in the works. Work it right and you might have the next Lonely Girl."

Bonus link: Here's Jon Udell on why he dislikes the term per se.

Does your company have a social media strategy?

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:43:54 GMT

I was driving back from a meeting when I had a few bloggy thoughts ... long drives in traffic and beating rain tend to do that to me! It was a good meeting - regular (I actually said that!!!) qualitative research project among IT students and professionals to understand motivations that drive them to join certain sorts of organizations in a highly competitive field, to figure out a strategy to draw them to my Client's organization. As we were discussing the research, I suddenly felt - wow - this is the perfect case for a social media / new media strategy ---- you have young professionals, in the IT industry, probably heavy users of the internet, a captive target audience that must be familiar with blogs, social networking sites, youtube and the like! When you think of motivations and drivers for this segment, how can you not think of The Influentials, who help them frame their opinions. Am waiting eagerly for my copy which is winging its way here currently. It would be neat to figure out who or what they are in the project I am doing. So somewhere midway in discussing sample definitions, I broke away and asked my client - do you have a social media or blogging strategy - you need one! She was interested I think, particularly since one of her marketing objectives is to build a powerful corporate identity in order to attract the best talent.

Now am hoping it's a qualitative research +++ project!! Am beginning to believe any organization or brand that is targeting an audience that is 'online' must have a social media strategy. Social media is in-your-face today, no web user or surfer can really escape it.

Google has my past - and my future

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 06:34:55 GMT

Google is not merely moving towards "owning" the internet, its also beginning to "own" me.I had a friend over this weekend, and I was setting up a blog for her on Blogger. I had to sign out of my Blogger account to set her up. During the process, I wanted to check my mail, and clicked on my Gmail tab in my browser - and I was shocked to see that it opened up her Gmail account instead. Should have expected it - its logical - but it disturbed me. It's convenient, it's quick - but I want the controls and the ability to decide which ones I want auto signins for and which ones not.

Say, if I have Google Reader running - and I have signed out of Gmail -- if someone else tries to log into their Gmail account - they can read my mail. Or if they want to check their scraps on Orkut - they get to see mine instead. Google Maps can show pictures of your front door and look through your window - very cool - yes - but it makes me uncomfortable too. Although I need not worry as I live in a city where its going to be very difficult to get everything 'on a map' as there is so much chaos in the planning.
They have my presence info (limited tho) through Gmail and Gtalk, they have my social network on Orkut, they dish up ads in my Gmail which make me feel a little uneasy about privacy. I have been doing many studies recently with youth, and when I ask them how they use the internet - the response is Googling, Orkutting (note - not search and social networking) and chatting - Gtalk hasn't yet managed to become a verb!

In countries like India however, where for the large part, computers are shared at work and home - this could become a problem. Not everyone has the know-how or the presence of mind to set up different logins and user accounts at boot up.

Look at Google's acquisition over the years - they are buying up the best really. And our lives are enriched and simpler as a result. I love using many of these and it makes my life better. But yesterday's experience with setting up my friend's blog got me thinking in the longer term - and I kept pondering over - what cost?

Eric Schmidt , Google's CEO was quoted in FT. Do I really want my computer to tell me what I should do tomorrow, or what job I should take?

"Asked how Google might look in five years' time, Mr Schmidt said: "We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'"

See this video, although a little dated - it looks forward to a Google world in 2014 - EPIC. Robin Good has a transcript:

"On Sunday, March 9 2014, Googlezon unleashes EPIC.

Welcome to our world.

The 'Evolving Personalized Information Construct' is the system by which our sprawling, chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered and delivered. Everyone contributes now - from blog entries, to phone-cam images, to video reports, to full investigations. Many people get paid too - a tiny cut of Googlezon's immense advertising revenue, proportional to the popularity of their contributions.

EPIC produces a custom contents package for each user, using his choices, his consumption habits, his interests, his demographics, his social network - to shape the product. A new generation of freelance editors has sprung up, people who sell their ability to connect, filter and prioritize the contents of EPIC.

We all subscribe to many Editors; EPIC allows us to mix and match their choices however we like. At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world - deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before."

With the recent acquisition of Feedburner, Google just bought over access to not just us, but our readers as well. They even acquire the internet in year 2017!!

Google has my past, and it's rapidly 'taking over' my future. My actions today, in the present, are building the tracks for that future. A dystopian Brave New World, or Utopia?

Should I really care? Does it bother you at all?

What's the future for youth on Facebook?

Wed, 30 May 2007 14:46:46 GMT

So everyone is talking of Facebook. My Twitter is abuzz with it. My aggregator is bursting with blog posts around it. The social media blogworld is freaking out in it. Even my 79 year old aunt who sent me an add as friend invite! Reminds me of the old days when we all moved from one social networking site to another. This one's different of course - its more than small pieces loosely joined and the potential is immense with the opening up of their platform. Widgets and plugins around VOIP, presence, twitter, music, video being created with a frenzy. A great platform play. I like this play - although I haven't done much with it yet.

Still, I can't help wondering, with all the attention it's getting and with this invasion of geeks, social media analysts and older folk like me, how the youth on Facebook are going to react! Ironically, they are the 'older' Facebook users - we are the newbies. Will they see us as an intrusion? Will they build their own walls now that it's less of a gated community? What might those walls be? Will they revolt, as they did last September when they felt their privacy was compromised by the addition of new features? Their definitions of what's public and what's private is different from ours. Will the more geeky among them, who would like to build on the platform read the fine print and get put off? Will the opportunity for marketing and advertising that it's going to encourage put them off? Or will they embrace this change and build their own worlds on the platform? Will there be a massive shift from Orkut and MySpace into Facebook?

Hmmmm. Interesting to see how this one progresses.

What is a blog?

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 12:56:15 GMT

a publication? a tool? a social tool? a conversation? a community space? guess again ---- it's a person! Jeremy Wagstaff makes a simple statement on blogs:

"A blog isn't a publication. It's a person"

Special on Youth and the Internet

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:15:25 GMT

Here's an excerpt from an article I did for Tehelka's special on youth and the internet, on much urging from Shivam, who put an apt title to it - The Mirror of Change - This is Who We are Becoming.

"For those completely immersed in virtual worlds such as Second Life, the seduction of intimacy combined with anonymity does not mean they do not share the joys and sorrows of their real worlds. My bet is that they do. "Pet", a very close friend and a colleague who worked with a team of online volunteers when the tsunami struck in December 2004, got me looking at Second Life with new eyes. He had been feeling trapped in his body for a long time, and when he got onto Second Life, it helped him become more comfortable with his feelings that he was a woman trapped in a man's body. The beauty is that Second Life was a tool for "Pet"to figure out who she really is and how to work it out for real. Today, she has friends not only in Second Life, but also in her physical world with whom she can be herself. "Pet" has shared so much of her period of transition and angst with me, that I feel I know her intimately. Being a geek, she also helps me with my websites. I trust her as she trusts me. I know she is very real - there is nothing 'virtual' about her, even though I have never met her.

While I may never have seen or met "Pet", there is depth in our friendship, and solidity. I know, for some people, that is hard to accept. I'm often asked questions like, how can you feel connected to someone you've never met? How can you trust someone you've never seen? These concerns are understandable given the newness of this medium and the flow that determines these sorts of relationships. Oh there are dangers too - the pretence borne out of anonymity, the addictions, the spam and scams, the paedophiles, the pornography. And still, when I meet up with blog buddies all over the world, how can I explain the amazing level of comfort I feel!

I single out blogs here as throwing up a whole different social system than do virtual worlds and social networking sites. Detractors say, online you can be whoever you want to be and nobody cares. That may be correct, yet, if you try and fake things too hard, you most always are found out, and can be verbally beaten. My belief is that people tend to act more like themselves online than they like to admit. It is much more difficult to hide away who you are when you are blogging. I've found myself revealing things on my blog about myself that I would find difficult to talk about face-to-face. Ugly things too.

And yet, I found myself trusting myself as I began trusting people I met through this medium. There is a fine line between the public, private and secret self, and the boundaries blur sometimes. At others there is a conscious effort to keep them apart. In a physical world, our lives are compartmentalized, you have different sets of friends for different needs, and meet in different physical spaces as a result. My blog is one space where I connect with friends, potential clients, strangers, acquaintances, even spammers and trolls. It is entirely up to me what I want to share of me and when, at my blog. And, I have found, the more I share, the more others do. It's just an extension of basic human needs for connection and community."

This issue is carrying a special on youth and the internet. I see some bloggers I know like Dilip, Rashmi, Neha, Patrix and Shivam of course, who have made some neat contributions there - and as I glanced through the articles, I felt Shivam's done a good job of getting a mix that does not perpetuate stereotypes the media usually portrays netizens to be.

Bloggers Code of Conduct - Please NO!

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:22:24 GMT

Heh .. Johnnie .. I'm with you in feeling ranty! As a response to this, a stopcyberbullying community is nice, comments policies and guidelines are ok if you believe you need them, but a Bloggers Code of Conduct???

What will it achieve - perhaps nothing. What will you do if someone violates the bloggers code of conduct - delete their comments, report them - that's something you can do without such a formal code isn't it? Who will enforce this Code of Conduct across blogs? Will bloggers that do not share this 'code of conduct' be ostracized? Will not this 'moral' responsibility grow to have legal ramifications? Will spammers and trolls and death threat issuers from non-US countries be prosecuted? Will you be able to stop them? Will you only encourage people to look for different and more sophisticated ways of piling on their vile - it is after all a human condition, and not a blog condition.

It seems to me, culturally, it is a very North-American thing to think up. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love some aspects of North America and have met some of the finest folks there - but this operating out of 'fear' is one aspect I have written about earlier, that I find goes beyond protection. Perhaps it's the phrasing of it that gets to me - 'Code of Conduct' implies rules and regulations, implicit in this is that there is only one way ahead. I don't like that. It will make us guard our words. It will give credence to the power games played out in the blogworld by providing yet another weapon to divide those who have it and those who don't. It will foster a culture of fear. In the worst case, it will breed litigation, insurance, liability.

Why formalize something we're doing anyways - if you're proud of your space (your blog in this case) you'll protect it the way you feel best. Banning anonymous comments for instance, is a personal choice - in my case, I have deleted comments that are vulgar, lewd and allude to physical threats. The others, I prefer to debate with. If others do not wish to, ignore them or take the 'fight' to your space, or theirs. There is a strong self-regulating aspect to this medium, and the recent events are proof, with different angles and facets to the story emerging.

My biggest fear in having a 'formal' code of conduct is it will take some of the 'human' out of the blog. It will raise entry barriers to participate in blog conversations, where few exist. It may even force more bloggers to shut down all conversations in comments, because a few are violating their freedom to comment. It will defeat the self-regulatory and self-correcting nature of this medium. One of the delights of blogging is it so reflects human behaviour - it gives us the space to share freely our humility, our pride and our infallibilities, our opinions and counterpoints, our failures and successes, our rituals and dreams, our conflicts and resolutions. It lets us debate and converse with others freely and intuitively. It may reflect our professional views, but it is as far from 'corporatization' as any medium is today. Will not shared standards and practice bring about 'corporatization' in some form or other?

There's my long rant! Unlike Johnnie's pithy post.

Shubhangi

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:58:03 GMT

I've known Shubhangi for almost 15 years. We worked in the same company then. We still do. She's been my mainstay at Explore Research and Consultancy, ever since she came on board way back in 1999. I've never known her to panic, feel out of control and never once has she met any of my requests (however absurd they may seem) with anything less than a smile and a "we can do it". She makes my life so easy really.

Tremendously talented and always looking out for something new to do - yeah - she does yoga, is a full-time mum, rides bikes, paints Tanjore paintings, is an expert in Japanese - and now a fantastic photographer. Match that with her deep understanding of humanity, her strong sense of what's right and not, her ability to question life and you find a precious gem. She has her feet firmly on the ground - and a heart of gold.

Recently, she discovered Flickr - go check out her awesome pictures there - each one has such depth and tells a story. The image in this post is by her - and one that I feel reflects who she is perfectly. She's also discovering the joys in sharing herself as she has so quickly built a community around her images. And now she's blogging and learning the ropes - I am so thrilled about this - welcome huggggggs Shubs. For long, I have felt she hides herself away - not anymore I hope :)

Lets Stop Cyberbullying

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 18:46:43 GMT

I am shocked at the venom and death threats against Kathy Sierra - it is sick, mean, even anarchical and evil, totally unethical. My first reaction was disgust and dismay and I have the greatest sympathy for what she is going through - but I find myself as appalled at the knee-jerk reaction of hate going around about a set of people implicated in her post - its not doing much good I'm afraid. Truly *Evil* minds whoever they are in this case, feed on such things.

I feel Mitch Ratcliffe's post is a really balanced take on the whole thing, especially this from Mitch - "We are further from that moment of truth now, however, because the silence of mock outrage reigns."

There are many conflicting thoughts in me right now around this issue. The woman in me is enraged at what Kathy is going through - and yet am not sure its a 'woman' thing at all. Lots of the American blogworld , esp at the A-list level, is fairly obsessed by how few women are really respected in Tech - this is evident by the endless debates on inviting women speakers at conferences. And yet, apart from BlogHer I don't see much happening to change this, as I see the same set of women speaking over and over again. The outrage against what's happened to her, is possibly greater because Kathy happens to be a woman. Are we perpetuating this gender divide by making it a woman thing - am not sure.

As a blogger, and one who has been around since 2003 this sort of stuff has been around. [link via Doc Searls]. Hate is just simply bad. Cyber bullying is bad. That's what we need to address. Whether against victim or accused (note here - I make a distinction between accused and convicted). Whether its against an A-lister or a Z-lister. Whether against man or woman. Its a reflection of a society gone badly wrong. Only the social system within which it exists can correct itself. In this case, blogs. Blogs and bloggers often reflect mob-like mentalities - some call it the echo chamber - and while there are many positive aspects of this - we must guard against the negatives.

I've had all sorts of threats and quite a bit of hate mail - I found the best thing is to simply ignore it and it usually goes away. I'm glad Kathy brought it out in the open though, its an issue that needs to be debated and addressed - and still I wish she hadn't made those really serious and clear accusations against specific individuals until after all the investigations by the authorities were done. Blogs are so powerful and the internet is an unforgiving place - entire reputations can be ruined thus.

We had an incident, not half as offensive as this, but the fallout was pretty severe, in the Indian Blogosphere - where a guy who was plagiarizing content from blogs was really beaten up by Indian bloggers - and I got tons of really bad hate mail for calling it Mob Justice and a witch hunt - although I will say this once more, that I would never condone plagiarism. - check the comments out there - these are only those that I let through. There were tons of mail and other comments that crossed my line of acceptability and were really lewd, hateful and full of threats. I ignored them and deleted them. And they went away.

Censorship and more regulation is not the answer - has it ever really worked where the internet is concerned? Andy Carvin has called for a Stop Cyberbullying Day. That's the sort of action that makes sense.

Kathy Sierra's an amazing blogger. I hope this horrific nightmare passes quickly for her . I do hope her real 'attacker' is caught and is punished. I also hope she gets back to blogging and shares as openly, the results of the investigation. Her silence will not do much good. Her voice is important for the blog world. Even half-way around the world in India.

Tags: cyberbullying , Kathy Sierra, stopcyberbullying

Will Blogs Kill Focus Groups?

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 08:03:30 GMT

I was thinking back on my last post ... and asking myself will blogs kill focus groups? I hope not, as that will mean I am out of business as a conventional qualitative researcher :).

And I think not. Because, while both can be research tools, the differences in the nature of these tools is intrinsic to the conversations they foster.

Because, especially in a country like India, a large portion of the 'consuming' population is still not online.

Because, often the focus group is treated as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Many times, focus groups and quantitative surveys are hijacked by internal client politics, and researchers are not really given the freedom to be creative. A simple example, advertising agency has created two ad concepts, marketing manager likes one, VP marketing like the other .. in two days flat, select the winner doing a couple of groups! QADR again.

Because blogs are conversations on the other hand, between customers, often between marketer and customers - they are emergent and may go off on tangents, as they encourage the telling of stories. Which sadly not all focus group moderators encourage especially when the client is breathing over them from the viewing room. Or because they just don't work hard at getting to the true heart of the matter. Which sadly, some clients feel are inconsequential, especially when they are just 'hearing' what they want to hear, to justify either their position or their boss's.

Because its easier to 'trust' what a researcher recommends based on physical evidence of focus groups (tapes, DVD, transcripts), rather than trust her ability to foster or analyze blog conversations.

Because many times, focus groups are intentionally set up as a conversation between the moderator and 8 respondents - we even call them respondents and not participants! Whereas blogs are conversations across people, where both the questions and the answers come from participants.

Because focus groups are more controlled - usually recruited purposively, with stringent demographic and psychographic criteria, controlled by questionnaires and field supervision - more a perception really, as practitioners we know there is no absolute verification method, and enhanced by one of the largest criticisms against focus groups - that the participant may not always be honest, as there is peer pressure that affects the expression of real behaviour and feelings.

Because blog conversations are viral on the other hand, and often there is no way of 'checking' back on the demographics. Its difficult for an 'outsider' (read marketer who isn't into blogging) to trust this conversation then, although some smart marketers believe, "bloggers' unsolicited opinions and offhand comments are a source of invaluable insights that are hard to get elsewhere".

I think I have sufficiently confused the issue .. which one is better at an absolute level as a research tool - I don't know. Still, I don't think blogs will kill focus groups. I see blogs as playing a large role in supplementing and complementing the information or data gathered around a certain subject. They are ongoing focus groups in real time. I want to see more use of them in research methods. Nielsen BuzzMetrics and other blog monitoring services seem to be doing just that, but they are not cheap. Some call Technorati the focus group of the web. Others like AC Nielsen ORG MARG are using blogs to validate regular market research.

"Based on our findings of our regular market research on the fashion series models of Nokia and insights on youth, we tried to validate it with the qualitative research conducted through the content found on online blogging sites and discussion forums," said Anjali Puri, director, Winsights AC Nielsen ORG MARG.

What do you feel? Are blogs ringing a death knell for conventional focus groups?

Focus Groups,Qualitative Research Market Research, Research Methods,Blogs

Social Media - Low Cost Qualitative Research?

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:31:03 GMT

Maggie Fox has a neat post on How Social Media is Changing Everything

"If you've ever wished you had the budget for a focus group, now you do. All that's required is reaching out to a couple of key individuals and asking them if they would be interested in testing your product or process and letting you know what they think, or posting about it, if they like.

Blogs in particular and social media in general can offer incredible insight for a relatively small investment (your time is another matter!). When I speak to clients about investigating a corporate blogging strategy, I often refer to it as "low cost market research", something Iím sure weíd all like to see a little more of!"

Belonging to the qualitative research industry, this resonates big time with me. Blog Influentials, in July 2005 had called blogs the 'market research of the future'. Again, way back in 2005 I had said:

While nothing beats face-to-face contact, blogs can be a great space to have conversations with customers - Scoble does it every day. In other cases, customers are the ones encouraging marketers to engage in conversation - SkypeJournal is a great example of heavy users of Skype providing constructive feedback both positive and negative, observations and ideas. They're even writing poetry in the form of a Skypku :)

Are marketers listening and engaging in dialogue? Maybe. Maybe not. Are marketing departments afraid of this? I think they are.

Blogs may be one such tool available to us - there are so many more that can reveal and understand the motives and the process of emergence in conversations as they manifest in conversations between marketers and users. I met Jim McGee in Chicago last year and we had a lovely discussion about how blogs might change the nature of market research and how the notion of oral culture in organizations might help explain the relatively slow take up of blogs in the firewall. From his post after our meeting :

"In the marketing research context, blogs are a disruptive technology. Instead of having to generate data by way of surveys or focus groups with whatever artifacts the process introduces, blogs provide direct visibility into customers. Instead of having to connect potentially artificial samples back to the actual market, now you have to filter real market behavior, interpret it, and make sense of it. That presents two challenges to market research functions. First, market research staff have to develop new skills. Second, management of market research needs to spend some quality thinking time what to do with access to this new kind of market data.

The opportunity that blogs introduce into the marketing research equation is to create the opportunity to identify and run multiple micro-experiments in the market. Those that succeed get the resources to scale, those that fail to generate some useful data are quickly shut down. There are challenges, of course, especially given how quickly ideas spread in a connected world, but that should be offset by the speed with which experiments can be identified and run. Worth thinking about."

Almost a year ago, I had recruited participants for some usability testing focus groups through my blog. Am now working with some clients, where we are building news aggregators of target audience blogs. And involved currently in a project where we are evolving a sms-blog research interface as a research tool for participants, in the Twitter convention. And we even have proof of concept now .. a recent article in the Economic Times talks of how blogs are boosting sales of bikes. Keeping track of blog conversations replacing traditional market research survey methods! Giving rise to a new breed of blogo-pologists and the field of netnography!

"What started as platforms to share passions and frustrations of bikers are now being tracked by corporates to fine-tune their offerings. Instead of tedious market surveys and data crunching, companies now get reviews within hours of product launch, courtesy blogs. ìThe first review of our latest Pulsar was on our table within three hours of its launch in Chennai thanks to bloggers,î Bajaj Auto VP (marketing-two wheelers) S Sridhar told ET. A dedicated team at Bajaj Auto now regularly tracks discussion-boards and review section of blogs and online biking groups and provides feedback to companyís marketing and product development group."

Much better than having professional respondents in a conventional focus group or unwieldy questionnaires which are filled up so superficially isn't it?

Tags: market research, marketing research, qualitative research, ethnography,social media,blogs,blogging,focus groups

ROI on Blogging - Enterprise 2.0

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 07:25:08 GMT

Jon Husband of Wirearchy and Lee Bryant of Headshift, have recently put in a lot of thought on Enterprise 2.0 ...

"Will we see more written about what will probably come to be called Management 2.0 ? No doubt. Will there be massive struggles with this new set of conditions and ongoing resistance to coming to terms with these dynamics ? No doubt. Will resisting and ignoring and denying work? Maybe for the short term, but these new conditions are not going away ... and I posit that the issues engendered by linked interconnected bottom-up activities will necessitate significant amount of unlearning and re-learning, notably in the enterprise setting." Jon Husband

And Lee, building on Euan and Dion Hinchcliffe's recent posts on Enterprise 2.0 writes:

On the technical level, the integration challenges are non-trivial:

identity / Single Sign On (SSO);

internal application integration;

legislative obligations for data retention, privacy and audit; and,

availability.

But the integration of people, practise and (dare I say) process is even harder, with challenges such as:

devolving responsibility and promoting a DIY culture;

encouraging people to grow their own internal and external networks;

stimulating conversation and debate by overcoming fear of exposure; and,

for many people, simply overcoming the idea that any form of online communication beyond email is "not part of their job."

Related to these, is this neat post by Hugh Macleod on Corporate Blogging calling for "humanification" and "smarter conversations". And Britt Blaser, always sharp, talks about the People Law trumping the Power Law - I see this relevant to the conversation as well, as enterprise needs to realize the value in People Power.

I'd like to add another dimension to this conversation, which was triggered by presentations and comments I heard at the IAMAI Digital Marketing Summit last week in Mumbai. All pointing to the fact that there is immense potential for web 2.0 or social media (call it by whatever name you wish) in Marketing. In particular, I liked what Ajit Balakrishnan of Rediff had to say - here's the gist ... I may have missed a few words:

"Bloggers are our new gatekeepers of information. Journalists are hesitant to write up stories, unless bloggers are already talking about it. We get real news from the bloggers -- everything else is a press release. Smart marketers need them"

Rajiv Dhingra, who it was a pleasure to meet, summarizes the summit:

"The conclusion was similar to all the previous discussions and in fact this is to be noted - Marketers are now asking other media and medium what is the ROI!

...and thus concluded the IAMAI Digital Media Conference 2007.

I wish there were more marketers and especially FMCG product brand managers who had attended this conference because itís the offline world which needs to know that it is time to start switching online."

It's encouraging to hear marketers talk of blogs and social networking and building communities online, however, like Rajiv, I heard many unspoken doubts on Return On Investment (ROI) from such engagements. Its a question I raised at the summit. Is the industry doing anything to develop metrics to measure impact? Are they talking to bloggers about it? Simple answer - NO.

I know ROI is an obsession with marketers, and we would fail in our jobs as consultants in this area, if we did not address them. We've done the first part of our jobs by getting the words 'blog' and 'online communities' into the lexicon of marketers. They have some sense of what these can do. We can talk of benefits of corporate blogging, evangelism, influence on brand perceptions, using these tools to empower your customers to become your marketers. We can hold their hands on how to set these up for their companies. There's been some good thinking by Charlene Li at Forrester in October 2006 on ROI of blogging.

But do we have a model in place yet? Are we giving them more tangible, quantifiable metrics, the equivalent of or alternatives to GRPs and cost-per-clicks? Are we doing enough, in the area of showing them ways to manage risks involved ? How are we helping them 'market' social media internally to their VPs and CEOs who often tend to be older, more rigid, more in fear of giving up control.

Leaps of faith aren't always easy to achieve from organizations without any estimation of how it can affect bottomline. Bottom-up or top-down, as much as we want 'them' to speak our language, 'we' need to speak their's too. I was chatting with Veer and Rajiv at the summit, and I do believe it is time to get bloggers and advertisers/marketers together into a discussion on how this can come about. This isn't just an India issue, I know many of my blog buddies in other parts of the world are grappling with these concerns too.

Any takers? Suggestions?

Update: [link via Dave Winer - Nicholas Carr talks about two studies that provide some data on adoption of six prominent Web 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging. "Although Forrester didn't break out adoption rates by tool, it did say that CIOs saw relatively high business value in RSS, wikis, and tagging and relatively low value in social networking and blogging." Read more at Nicholas Carr's blog.]

Social Media Today

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 08:07:45 GMT

I was invited to be a part of the Social Media Collective, but I've been a lurker for a bit and not blogged there yet. Then I haven't been blogging much here either :(. The google group for the collective has lots of good conversations going. Note to self .. wake up Dina!

Twitter Tweets

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:08:57 GMT

Social discovery, presence, "party-line", RSS for people with not much to say, potential for use in saving lives during disasters, publish on the go, ambient intimacy (link found in a comment at Ross Mayfield's post on Moodgeist, Skype and Twitter IM Overlay], the future of presence, push technology, keeping track of yourself and friends, a false sense of "I'm connected", microblogging and Twitter-only blogging, group or public IM system, swarming and smart mobbing, blogging on 'crack' ..... these are some of the words I've been seeing associated with Twitter in many blogs.

Om Malik links to WebWorkerDaily which has come up with a list of eight ways Twitter can be useful professionally. More mashups and applications such as Twittervision and Twittersearch would be useful. Here's a wiki on Twitter with a listing of comments and views, user stories, mashups and applications, complaints and wish lists too.

I wanted to share some of my feelings on Twitter .. and how for someone like me, I'd like to use it. This post isn't intending to join the hate it or love it debate, rather, to explore and share ideas on what applications and areas Twitter could be used for.

Yet I find myself hesitating to put up too much there, and I began asking myself the question, should I? Like danah, I feel perhaps it takes a certain type of personality to use it. While I enjoy reading updates from some of my closer friends, I find myself wondering whether people would really be interested in what I am eating or doing or feeling at different points in time during the day. My close friends may be, and its making me re-evaluate and 'select' and 'choose' friends more carefully than I do with other social networking sites. For fear of spamming those that aren't in my close circle.

I'd love to have layered messaging at Twitter .. where my messages can be sent out to a few folks, likewise, I receive messages from a few too. I couldn't be bothered to set up private groups for this .. I'd like that control with me.

I'd also love to be able to bring it into my own space, my social network, my own blog, rather than use it as a stand-alone service. I'd like to marry content I publish along with the 'what I am currently feeling/doing' stuff, rather than scatter them across URLs.

Twitter for me, unlike blogs is not so much about conversations. Its more about keeping in touch, or as Liz Lawley says, its about stories told between updates. Then, I do get these updates on the presence or status messages of my close friends on what they are doing, and where they are on my IM clients.

Although I come from an SMS-friendly culture, I had to turn off Twitter from my mobile phone ... I was getting too many updates there at odd hours of the night, and I often found myself not even reading them. Its also a pain to delete them all.

Then there's a practical problem .. I'm not sure how much I would be charged for an outbound Twitter SMS from India. So I find myself preferring using the IM client.

Still it has a strange fascination for me. Like Andy, I feel it could be a powerful tool during disasters. Its also got the potential to increase sociality in groups of people working together. .. a virtual office or project space.

I also see it as having lots of potential as a research tool. Set up a private group, get real-time voices on a subject or topic. In fact, I'm currently launching into a qualitative research study with a client where we are experimenting with an SMS-Blog gateway to collect real-time updates and answers to research questions among a segment of youth ... and a private group on Twitter would have been just ideal, except the participants would be unwilling to pay for international outbound messages. I'd much rather get responses from participants in real-time, and within the framework of where they are and what they are doing than a cold questionnaire or a forced group situation. Add MMS to it, and you get much richer data. More agile and much cheaper than doing ground ethnography. With the potential to get large numbers in too for statistical validation for a quantitative research exercise.

I'd love to know, what areas or applications you feel it would be useful for?

Speak Out

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 04:49:22 GMT

On International Women's Day this year on March 8, The Blank Noise Project is once again, collecting stories in another blogathon. From their announcer post ...

"This is an attempt to understand how different women ( across age groups/ cultures/ communities) have dealt with street sexual harassment in their everyday lives. Male bloggers are encouraged to share stories of women in their lives and how they have dealt with street sexual harassment. Non bloggers are also invited to participate- email us your story. We will upload your email at www.blanknoiseactionheroes.blogspot.com. You could also be an agent- the one that collects stories of confrontation/ of heroism from your mother, grandmother, cousins, domestic workers, people in your office, the vegetable vendor, the woman bus conductor...anyone! To confirm your participation, announce the event on your blog and email us the link right away!"

Last year, I had shared my own experiences with eve teasing and harassment. Do share your experiences on March 8, and spread the word!

Live from Asia Source II

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 08:50:02 GMT

I've been quiet here, but have been blogging a lot at the Asia Source II blog. Its been fun facilitating the Open Publishing sessions - I've learnt so much myself! We've had huge challenges with connectivity - 120 of us sharing a 256 kbps modem; trying to get Plone then Drupal working and finally resorting to Wordpress for the live blog! Rather than writing it entirely, I've got lots of folks from different countries and tracks sharing their perspectives. Lazy me :)

What's the blog about ...
This blog is meant to capture the colours, flavour, essence and spirit of Asia Source II in Sukabumi, Indonesia. We'll be sharing our discussions from the sessions, lots of fun stuff, some serious FOSS wisdom, and even some poetry. We'd love it if you jump in and add your perspectives to the many conversations and exchanges we will have in this space. The Asia Source II wiki will have more detailed content and reports.

Here's one of my early postings there:

We're working in military tents!

There are four learning tracks for the morning sessions. Three of the four groups are working in military tents, fitted with 8-10 computers. The uber geeks have a classroom, where they can lock up all their cool gizmos like wireless transmitters.

Here's what Track 1 on Open Publishing had as their objective for the Camp Blog they are running as one of their projects:

- to create a lasting online documentation of the camp

- to capture the 'spirit' of Asia Source

They've been blogging, learning how to resize and insert images today, tomorrow they go podcasting. Fun!

Go over to the blog and join the conversations there!

Off to Indonesia for AsiaSource - II

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:24:04 GMT

I'll be in Sukabumi, Indonesia for the next ten days, at AsiaSource II. It really is going to be a camp, and am excited to be living fairly in dormitory style - takes me back to my college years! Its also an opportunity to meet an entire new set (for me) of folks doing some excellent work in the social media area in South Asia and South East Asia, as this is the first time I'm attending a conference in the Asian region.

There are four main learning tracks:

And the Afternoon Sessions promise to be really interesting.

When Sunil, who I met at the Global Voices Summit in Delhi, invited me to be a facilitator for the Open Publishing and Broadcasting track, my first response was how will I help - I'm not a geek. He then assured me that he was looking for someone who is a user .. and for someone who can help people explore benefits of the social and community aspects of this media. Apart from all the geeky stuff I am looking forward to immerse myself in, some of the conversations I'd like to encourage in this track are around:

risks in open publishing and managing risks
why organizations should adopt social media
role of social media/open publishing in disaster relief
communication, community, collaboration brought about by social media
open publishing is not just about blogging/wikis ... it is also about keeping track of conversations - session on RSS, trackbacks, social bookmarking, technorati, digg etc ... the entire ecosystem around blogging

I'd love your suggestions on other topics in this area you feel would be good to cover with NGO's and Small and Medium Enterprises. Do drop in a comment or email me.

I hope to blog my experiences while there!

Technorati tag: AsiaSource II

Brand 2.0 - Lessons for Marketers

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 07:36:21 GMT

Everyone seems to be talking about it. Nice to see these perspectives in the context of brands and products. I read this at Brandchannel today:

SelfLead - the emergence of the sovereign citizen - by Ray Podder.

Excerpts:

"What if anything and everything you owned, knew, thought, created or used was negotiable at any point in time? What if you could sell off your junk, get compensated for your opinions, or lend, borrow and bet without the need for banks or governments? What if your creative product had a larger audience than corporate networks? What if your lone dissident voice couldnít be silenced even by the rich and powerful?"

"At first, it may seem strange to think that you could be on the same level playing field as a multinational corporation, but just consider how business and customers co-exist in networked spaces. As of now, we both get our basic queries and network trend data from the same place. Pending the Net Neutrality power struggle and censorship issues of the moment, the deeper resources of the Internet will likely become available to everyone as well. Given the probability of that reality and the other factors previously mentioned what do we do to use this shift to our advantage both as individuals and as companies?

Enable the empowered. Marketing is no longer about messages. Itís about motivation. If you want to motivate the new sovereignty, reach them by the tools they will use to refine their participation power. That means be available as choices for personalization on start-page like environments where choosing your brand of service is a self-defining action. For example, if you deliver travel services, then the new sovereign citizen is both your traveler and your travel agent. If you sell art then the new sovereign citizen is your art promoter, using your art in experiential ways to define their personal spaces."

And here's another paper found at Brandchannel from Dec 2006 - How To Crash The Consumer-Controlled Party. And Not Get Thrown Out .... (pdf file)

2006 ...

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 17:29:45 GMT

.... has been a great year for me in many ways. Rob, in a recent post, wonders:

"2007 - When enough people leave Plato's cave?
I wonder - Will enough people leave the cave and experience the sunlight to cause a Tipping Point in 2007? Will Life 2.0 take hold? I think so!"

I think so too - and its not just me - I think I had left the cave a few years ago. The nice thing is I see I am not alone in the sunlight - and people from all spheres of life are beginning to see. Clients, friends, family, acquaintances and so many unknown faces that are beginning to bask in the same sunshine. I have been guided by some, have guided others - and still found my own little spot.

This year has brought a certain convergence in my 'traditional' qualitative research work and blogging and social media. More of my research work is in the area of tech and social communication - mobile phones, software development - and I've been able to use my research skills and marketing experience in bringing about workshops on how brands and companies could build communities through conversations that empower their customers to infact become their marketers. And, as in the last few years since I began blogging, much of the new and exciting work is coming in because of my blog connections. I really am looking forward to engaging in more of these conversations and I've already got some projects lined up for 2007 that are exciting.

Looking back on 2006, I thought it would be nice to do a recap (even just for myself) on how its unfolded - and give thanks for all the people I've had the opportunity to meet, and for the projects I've worked on this year, the conferences and unconferences I have attended.

It started off with the Brand 2.0 workshops I conducted with Stuart - thanks Vamsi from Starcom and Rajeev at Western Union for trusting us and giving us this first opportunity. More Brand 2.0 in 2007.

I attended BlogHer earlier this year in San Jose - a wonderful experience.

Thank you Liz Lawley - for inviting me to the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium in May.

I've also been so fortunate to be part of a pure Open Space Meeting coordinated for NPR by the amazing Rob at the New Realities Forum in Washington DC in May. The agenda was set completely by participants - if I remember right, there were more than 300 participants. However, it had a core theme - a very clear objective - and was really well-organized in terms of a lot of care taken in figuring out the venue, the rooms, making it easy for people to navigate through the free-flowing structure, and run by a real maestro in Johnnie Moore, who Rob describes as "an exemplar of calm courage and astonishing presence" which is a really perfect description of Johnnie. Thank you Rob - and Page and Dana from NPR, for allowing me into this amazing space you have created and for trusting - we hadn't met face-to-face until then!

I was part of a large team that helped organize BlogCamp India in August - here are my reflections

The other area that my blogging has taken me into is activism of sorts - which started in December 2004 with the tsunamis blogging efforts - and this year, we formed collectives and groups to battle internet censorship and help out when we had the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai. Here are some links: MumbaiHelp blog and wiki. The Bloggers Collective was formed and we fought against blogs being banned, against censorship, and demanded our right to information.

On research projects, I've done some interesting work for Unilever this year - have spent many days in rural India, facilitated a creativity session for one of their product groups, and I think (I hope) managed to sell them the idea of doing Brand 2.0 workshops :). I'd also say here I have thoroughly enjoyed working regularly with Pat and Lizzie at Social Solutions Inc and Gerald Lombardi at GFK-NOP through whom I've enjoyed working with Dean Gaylor, Chai Ki Lim and Sharon Asker at HP, who had come down to India. Also through SSI - I've done work for Kraft.

Some of my new clients this year - Nicole-Anne Boyer, a colleague from Worldchanging got me to do a learning journey and a few sessions with a bunch of French retailers here in Mumbai. Smita Pillai and Sanjay Gupta of Vistakon for whom we did a study, where we merged approaches from ethnography and more traditional motivational research. In November, Stuart Penny and Jude Rattle from Flow Interactive UK contacted me through my blog, and I did a small study on cell phones for them.

Its all paid really well - and most importantly has been a lot of fun! Thank you all for making this year a really fun and productive one.

For me its also been a year of change - with joys, frustrations and disappointments too. Many many thanks to my family and friends for supporting me through a really busy and somewhat difficult year.

End of mush :)

Looking ahead to 2007:

More Brand 2.0 workshops where I'd like to involve more collaborators and facilitators. Am currently talking with Euan Semple about a possible series in April this year in Mumbai.
A fall-out of the Global Voices Online Summit and a meeting with the awesome Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala- has resulted in the setting up of a pilot outreach programme in rural India where the objective is to get a person from a village to prepare a story about any aspect of life in his or her village every day (25 days a month) and post it.
Developing further on my series of cultural insights and trends
A consulting gig for an MSM publication in India that would like to go Web 2.0. This would include research as well.
I'm going to be in Indonesia for 10 days beginning Jan 20th to facilitate the Open Publishing Track at Asia Source II - Free and Open Technologies for NGO's and SME's. This is an initiative of the UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme.

As I bring in the New Year at my place in Khandala ... I count my many many blessings :). A very Happy New Year to all.