Guest Lecture on Future of Blogging & Twitter

Posted on May 8, 2010 by Kals

A week back in my office, when I was busy doing the testing for one of my applications, an email popped up which said

FUTURE OF BLOGGING AND TWITTER

Guest Lecture by KIRUBA SANKAR

This caught my attention and I was so eager to attend this session. I was just curious to know what the content would be under this topic. If someone can really forecast the future of this blogging and twitter, then he must be a magician! I finished all the testing tasks, putting off the documentation work after the lecture; I started towards the seminar Hall.

Before writing about the session, let me give you a small intro on Kiruba. Well, he is the CEO of Business Blogging, Board Member of Rang De, Founder of F5ive Technologies and Columnist of Business Standard. So he has so much of titles in his pocket!!

I found two of my friends waiting outside and three of us joined the crowd and settled in a comfortable place in the hall. Without much delay, the session started. As usual there was this introduction by one of the MC and there the Collar mike occupied a comfortable place in the suit of Kiruba Shankar who enlightened us with the world of Online Social Media.

He was obviously different from the umpteen number of guest lecture folks, who used to come and start the session right away. He was trying to make us comfortable. In the hall in which we were seated, we have a computer monitor in front of every seat in the audience side, behind which many of the folks found a comfortable abode for the session.

He rightly caught the mind set and asked us, “So this hall is well designed for a lecture is it? Dim lighting, spacious hall and a monitor to hide your face so that you can sleep happily throughout the session, isn’t it? Can someone please switch on the lights please, so that I can see all of their faces?”

I liked this attitude of his. He was so concerned on everyone and he wanted everyone to listen. I obviously became curious.

The ice breaking session was really fantastic. We were made to mimic and jump as a duck and were asked to do becka-becka-becka loudly jumping!!

After the audience is set, there went the first question,

1. How many of you out here have a blog?

A few of the hands rose in the air and few were down. There came the next question.

2. Why do you think, you don’t have a blog?

He was expecting an answer from us. Since many of them had blogs, there was less probability of getting an answer. At last one guy from the crowd spoke, “I did not see any need to have one”.

One more reply was, “I do not get any comments in my blogs. Nobody reads it, so why should I simply right something?”

After some interaction with the folks, he gave an example of a three legged stool of sticking to some decision.

A stool with a single leg cannot stand.

A stool with two of its legs still cannot stand.

A stool with three legs can stand with a decent balance

A stool with four legs can stand well with a good balance

Similarly, to start blogging, think and come up with solid three reasons. Why should I start a blog? Ask this question to yourself and find three answers. If you are able to come with an answer, then stick to it and start blogging. Daily spend an hour to write down things and put in blog. Maintain it for a few days. Even after doing that, if you feel dissatisfied, then you can just leave it and stop blogging. You need not get back. That is perfectly fine!!

Tip: Start blogging

Then came the next question

3. How many of you have a personal email id apart from Gmail and Yahoo?

Again there was only one hand coming up. Then Kiruba gave his Gyaan on email ids. He said, “I’ve an 8 year old daughter who has an email id. She uses that for her personal use. So what makes the difference between you and her?”

This question made me really ponder on the topic. He says, “First of all, stop using all the Gmail and yahoo emails. Buy a domain first and get a email ID in your name. Something like yourname@yourname.com. Like suresh@sureshgopi.com. This gives you a dignity in the social media and it silently gives all people out there, a hint to look into your website that’s sticking after the “@” symbol in the email.”

He also asked us not to use wordpress and blogspot and other free blog hosting sites for blogging as we are just promoting their product. It is wise and professional to have a website or a blog in our name. So every time you send out a communication or an article in the Newspaper. You can attach the email ID and in turn that will carry your website name as well. This may increase traffic to your website and also it gives a professional touch to your online presence.

Tip: Have a personal email ID in your name and a personal blog in your domain name. Use it in your blog, Official communications. It will be really good to see your name and domain in the recipient inbox.

“How to promote your blog?” was another question in which various ways of blog promotion were discussed. Few of those were, putting the blog link in email signatures, clipping it along with the article that we publish in the newspapers. Yea, we can send in articles to the newspapers, which may appear in the editorial or in the supplementary columns. Even using it in the text messaging was one of the options.

Then came the discussion about how blogging has helped him and many of his friends, to come up in the life. Just a dedicated maintenance of the blog and constant content update will help one to reach unimaginable heights. It will help you a lot in the professional front.

The discussion steered on how blogging can lead to negative effects. He again narrated two incidents on how blogging has led to many problems. It seems he has written an article about the tamil actress Trisha scandal video that was in the circulation spree sometime before and that article which he wrote in his blog, came as the first result in the Google Search results. So when the cyber crime guys were into the hunting spree for the source of that video, his blog hooked up in the investigation as the article carried around 400 comments below which raised the page ranking and he was asked to report for an enquiry as it came in the top Google search results. Later he had to negotiate with them and explain them that it was just a blog and a small article that spoke and discussed if it was the real actress or it was a morph. Later he was able to come out of the issue without any problems. Thus simple things like this may create unexpected problems.

There was one more narration of an incident about Club Mahindra. The incident was about a single blog which devastatingly ruined their sales and revenue. That’s when it struck him that blogging is a powerful tool which can change anyone’s life. He also spoke about the problem he faced when he blogged about one issue about credit cards. The learning is that, anything we blog about, first thing we need to do is to get the data correct after verifying and validating for its correctness and credibility and only then it has to be put in blog.

50 cents about Twitter

Twitter apart from being highly informative and gives a “being-connected” feel, it can sometime pose menace to you. When people post twitter updates in their timeline saying I’m going to Bangalore, in airport now, going out of station for a week etc it can pose threat to your family. When you have put all your address and phone number in the website, any Tom, Dick & Harry can pose as your friend since he/she knows everything you do. The person knows your profession, what you do and where you go and where you are up to currently and all such information. Thanks to the social networking sites which gives anyone a full profile of yours and this gives an easy way to loot your house and not only that, anything can happen when you are away from Home. It is interesting to post updates about every activity you do. But it is wise to use it appropriately and usefully. So better be careful than sorry.

Kiruba recommends us to try podcasting, audio blogs – like you can record your voice describing about anything under the earth and post it in your blog. Normally we used to sit and write. In audio blogging or podcasting we can broadcast our thoughts, experiences etc visually and in voice. I’ve to admit that it was a scintillating session.

Then it was a question-answer session. So one guy shot the question, “Well about the future of blogging and twitter…”

“haha..errr..Well to my knowledge, twitter won’t last for more than five years. But in those five years, how to use all the social media to enhance your online presence is the point you need to focus.” This was his reply.

I guess, I’ve discussed most of the topics that were presented in the session. Though the session did not cover anything about future of things as such, but it did give an insight on the pros and cons of blogging & twitter. Moreover this topic is vast and it cannot be covered in the 1 hour time frame. I’ve kept the details short here since I want to keep this post a bit short, and so I’m concluding the post here.

Overall, this was the only session I was fully awake & interactive amidst all the sessions that I attended in my office.

Do drop in his site & find more details about Kiruba Shakar here in the About Me page – http://www.kiruba.com

Last but not least, He tweets here @kiruba

Thanks for the wonderful session!

Nostalgia !

Posted on June 28, 2009 by Kals

I donno why now-a-days I become so nostalgic!

There are lots of factors which are governing me these days. One of them being longing for olden days again. The childhood ecstasy is lost. What have I become today? A 23 year old male, who can earn a decent 5 digit salary, by being himself busy all time from Monday to Friday. The possibility of taking some time off, from the hectic work schedule is only a weekend happening. So, what is that we have gained by being an adult? I get very less time for my family. I find less time to go out. I do not get any time to splurge in the non digital thing out of my cubicle.

Well, lots of things are in list that I cherished the most. The train travelling, for instance, is one of the most lovable one in my list. I’ve not been to railway station for quite a long time. It is obviously my work schedule that imprisoned my freedom. From the dusk to dawn, I keep fidgeting with the chunk of code that governs the so called Mainframes. I reach home at night and then have something for my tummy and then sleep. During college days, I used to frequent to Chennai for holidays. Those platforms, announcements, Higginbotham book stall, the trip charts are few things that kindles the past memories even today.

We used to get lots of holidays during school days and college. When we leave for our relatives’ place, I love those platforms were you see swarm of people ranging from a small 1 year infant, 18 year girls who are more concerned about the few inches of cosmetic that encroaches their face, those romeos who would show off their styles in front of a group of girls, those strict fathers who are more worried about their son’s/daughter’s marks in the coming semester examination, a sick old lady who expects from a newly married son, to see her grandson to play with her soon after they come back from honeymoon. And there are more in this list too. I always loved to practically feel the Doppler Effect whenever the super fast express approaches and leaves the station.

“The Doppler effect (or Doppler shift), named after Austrian physicist Christian Doppler who proposed it in 1842, is the change in frequency of a wave for an observer moving relative to the source of the waves. It is commonly heard when a vehicle sounding a siren approaches, passes and recedes from an observer. The received frequency is increased (compared to the emitted frequency) during the approach, it is identical at the instant of passing by, and it is decreased during the recession.”

It’s like I have lost something in life. I donno something keeps pricking me. Corporate life has given me glass doors, Air conditioned work place, and ergonomically designed cushion chairs, free coffee, large food courts where you get thing you wanted, Smart card based Identity Card with which you will be able to enter areas only into which you have been given access, security and most importantly Money. But what it is that I’m losing? Sleep, Rest, Peace and friends and something more

Those days were like you had lots of time and lot more friends. Now it is totally different. We have lot more time for work but very less friends. You should appoint a weekend for meeting up. You leave home by the time people are yet to wake up and reach home by the time all would have dozed off. The next day again the same routine and it goes on and on and on. Why all this?

I hated exams but now, it was something tolerable. I wanted to get back to those times which were spent with someone who you do not know before – the times, when you expect a new roommate in your hostel, the time when you pass a sheet of you exam paper, during the internal examination and both of you pass, the times when you go for dinner together with friends and share the happening of the class, the times when you do group studies for the next day exam, the times when four or five spend together in one’s room during a weekend, chatting all day and sleeping all over the floor with 4 to five alarms set.

Is it the life’s play to the human beings, which makes us long for the past, than to live in the present?

We always say that, those good old days were memorable, cherishable and all those adjectives which makes them long for the past. We listen to jungle book song and say, “wow..that was a good old song,..”. We have it as the caller tune and boast about it. We listen to old songs and say, “those were oldies melodies”. We still keep those old clocks with pendulum and hesitate to buy a new one. We still keep the old model mobile with keypad in its very bad state, with all those numberings scrubbed and display scratched and we say, “It’s the first mobile, I got”. We still say “Madras” instead of “Chennai”. I do understand that it gives a sense of belongingness, but why is it that the present is so uninterested at times?

Why don’t we like the present? Is it because, it is bitter at times? I certainly do not have answers for these questions. But one thing is sure. Unless, you feel comfortable yourselves in the present with your surroundings, you won’t be able to love the present as it is. Only when you get peace and happiness, you will be able to appreciate the present. Only when you get time for everything, you may pat the present and say, “Good Boy”.

I’m trying to make myself comfortable with the present. Hope, I’ll get peace and happiness in whatever I do. I do not hold grudges to accept this. But the Nostalgia is always there.

There are also people who always think about the future and they forget to live in the present. We study hard in 10^th standard to get into good school for 11^th and 12^th. We study hard in 12^th to get good marks in the board examination. Once we get into a good college, we are asked to study hard to get into good company. Once we get into good company, we struggle hard to save money for the future. We struggle hard to get a good bride to our Home. We get things in loan; build houses in loan, irrespective of our inadequate earning; we pay the dues in EMI, so that something big will be left behind for us in the future. We get married, have children, then we need to save things for their education, and then we need to worry about their education, college, and…

Excuse ME. Gimme a Break. Pleeeeeeeeeese !! Life is a vicious circle

But what is the ultimate requirement? Are we living in the present? We forget that, we are attaining the future every second and we should be able to live in the present and think about the future, without subjecting ourselves to agony in the present. But people are so afraid of seeing themselves in the near future with nothing in hand, so they always strive hard to preserve things for the future in spite of their tormenting life in the present.

Well, in this way, few minds longs for the past and forget about the present. Few minds which always think about the future and forgets to live in the present.

Let me make few things clear….

Always live in the present.
Do think about the future, but do not take actions that will put you in restriction in the present
Always, olden days may look beautiful, but it has nothing to contribute for the present. So don’t waste time thinking about the past all time.
Live your life truthfully and peacefully in the present. Do think about future occasionally
Cherish each and every moment of your life. After all, you don’t know what next!

One SMS I received long back, which tells about life….

“Life is a strict than a teacher.

A teacher teaches the lesson and

then keeps the exam. But Life

Keeps the exam first and

then teaches the lesson !!!!”

Really True !…..