Saurabh Garg on The New New Thing

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Apart from helping people connect and interact and collaborate on things, Internet has actually democratized information. People can now upload their thoughts in any form (text, audio, video, mashup), tag them appropriately and watch the entire world discover it and take it forward.

You no longer need to be a celebrity or a rockstar or a politician to attract crowds as long as you know the right forums to voice your opinion.

The beauty of the medium is that the response is immediate. You will know in an instant if your idea holds merit and if it excites more people. You will get instant feedback. You will get in touch with people who think the way you think and you can now collaborate.

Any quick and dirty opinions?

Today I bribed my way in India.Alltop.Com. An awesome achievement I must say considering that they list only the best of the best. Off the 100 odd resources there, notable inclusions are Gurcharan Das, John Elliot, apart from regular ones like pluggdIn, Mutiny.in, WebYantra etc.

And I guess its about time I wrote about Alltop.

WhatIs Alltop?

Started by Guy Kawasaki (former Apple Fellow and author Art of the Start, bio), Alltop aggregates resources from mass niches around the world and displays them on one page. So they have innovation.alltop.com, cricket.alltop.com, marketing.alltop.com and a lot of other mass niche categories (complete list is on their homepage). They like to call themselves a magazine rack (I tend to disagree though).

Infact, just yesterday Dan Roam (Art of visual Thinking and author The Back of Napkin), posted his interpretation on Alltop here. He says that Alltop does the filtering for you by using human editors and recommendations (as compared to Google where all results are available in raw formats and you are left with tedious job of sifting for content you want to see). More details on Guy’s blog here.

So how does it help?

If you are a cricket fan and are looking for cricket related blogs and news listing, rather than using a Google search, you can head on to Cricket.Alltop and browse what real people are talking about cricket. Instead of using a feed reader and subscribing to 100 feeds on cricket, all you need is to point to a browser and you will have all the top news and websites on cricket on one place.

In effect Alltop helps you identify the content that you might be interested in and would reduce the search time and cost (read my earlier post on search cost here) for you.

For a blogger, Alltop becomes a platform where the blogger will find audience that he wants to target. For example if I write about entrepreneurship, I want VCs, startups, prospective hires to read my blog rather than any other netizen. On Alltop, as a publisher I am sure I would reach the right people.

Overall, the website is usable and solves a problem for both readers and publishers

More on Information and Search

As it is very commonly said, if the information is important for me, it will find me. From blogs I read to people I interact with to my contacts, I would most probably have contacts who know me well enough to pass on information of my liking to me. Alltop does the same thing. It becomes my default information source. However some tweaking needs to be done to become the complete information source but I am sure team Alltop are working towards refining this already.

What else is noticeable about Alltop?

1. Appeal to Ego: Alltop massages your ego. Take me for an example. I used to use Alltop to find content when I was bored. But moment they added me, I am now an Alltop evangelist. I am spreading word about it. And if you can get early adopters as evangelists, nothing like it.
2. Viral Effect: Just because it massages your ego and says that you are amongst the best, you start spreading the word. You post about it on your blog, you update on twitter and you talk to your friends about it.

Questions to team Alltop

1. Can one blog be a part of two sections? Say India and Entrepreneurship? Yes you can be a part of two or more. (Tip: Gautam Ghosh is part of three (HR, Careers and India)
   
2. How about further dividing categories? Something like Marketing.India.Alltop?
3. Are there plans of creating an iGoogle like website where people sign up and see only the feeds that they want to see? (Alltop already does this but using AJAX and cookies). Will this is be too far from the Alltop idea?
4. What is the business model? Where would alltop make money from? Inline advertisements? (there was some mention of selling ads but dont have the link. Can someone give the link)?
5. UPDATE: How about a social network for people features on alltop? These are the ones that are known to have a better than average opinion on things. If these guys got together, I am sure interesting things would come out of it.

Ideas in this post

1. Find an offering that caters to mass-niche.
2. Reduce the search cost for your target audience.
3. Let the users spread the word themselves. Make them evangelists rather than you doing the hard work.

What do you think of Alltop? Do you find it useful? And please note that my opinions might be colored :)

Prof. Michcael Wesch, probably best known for his Youtube vids on Information R/evolution and The Machine is Us/ing Us delivered this awesome lecture/vid titled Anthropological Introduction to Youtube at Library of Congress. More details are available on his website at mediatedcultures.net.

In this lecture he talks about few very powerful ideas including

1. Impact of youtube on society and impact on the participants
2. Participant observation as a tool for anthropological research
3. Youtube vids permeating across time and space
4. Loss of context on youtube vids
5. Anonymity of watching vids on youtube
6. Talking to a camera rather than talking to a real person
7. The very first youtube vid featuring Jawed
   

He also talks about few Youtube memes like

1. Charlie bit me (first introduced to me by @Sheetal_Kini via this update)
2. Lonelygirl15
3. Numa Numa (the meme that started it all)
4. MadV - One World (surprisingly I hadnt seen this earlier)
5. Freehugs

Here are my notes from the vid. Please note that these would be incoherent and probably would not make sense to anyone but me. The text in ( ) is addition of my thoughts to what Prof. Wesch has spoken.

1. Most youtube vids are created for less than 100 people
2. Youtube is a medium for self immersion - people use youtube when they are enjoying themselves and they dont care
3. The web is no longer about information or data. (At the very core, it is about linking people. Sharing of information and collaboration happen because people collaborate.)
4. Web allows people to collaborate across space and time.
5. Web is about user generated content creation, organization (delicious), filtering (alltop) and counting (technorati).
6. Web is an integrated media scape with user at the center. Most of the youtube users are between 18 and 34.
7. Remixing is as big as content creation itself. About 15% of vids are remixed versions.
8. A lot of videos are addressed to the youtube community itself. (I lost the number when I was watching but this is very important for me at least. When am addressing something to the community, I am actually fulfilling my primal need to belong to a group and being together with someone. On the Internet I am alone and yet part of a group. Any new Internet meme has to address this.)
9. More individual we become, more we want to belong to a community.
10. All the youtube users are addressing an invisible audience.
11. You dont know when, where are they watching you. You dont know the context in which they are watching you. The context collapses.
12. When you are on youtube, and you create your videos, its like everyone is watching and yet there is no one. (You actually give permission to random strangers from across the world to watch you).
13. On the other side, when you are watching, you are anonymous when you are watching someone (compare yourself to the Big Brother from 1984. You are in control and the other person would not even know that you are watching him)
14. When you are watching, you are distant from people. And hence they are relaxed and there is no social anxiety. True emotions thus are discovered.
15. (Comfort of crowds - Everyone else is doing it and I dont mind doing it myself)
16. (Internet puts a wall between real you and physical you. Actions in real life are carried out by the physical you and you are accountable. One the other hand, behind the Internet curtain, you are not accountable for your actions and you can be yourself. You don’t mind doing things on Internet that you would not do in real life)

And these notes obviously sparked a lot of new ideas. Overall a good video and again must see (like other notes on my blog).

What do you think? Did I miss something? What are your thoughts?

In this EconTalk podcast, Hal Varian, Chief Economist with Google speaks about Search amongst other things.

He says that search is about two things. Precision and Recall. He then defines precision as “off the number of documents retrieved by a search result, how many are relevant” and recall as “off all the relevant results, how many were retrieved”.

This is my opinion is very important aspect. Before we take on a problem to solve, we need to have the exact definitions in place.

He also spoke about co-evolution of technology and users. He said that any technology and its adopters evolve rapidly with time. He took examples of cars and extended it to search engines.

He said that users are getting more skilled at entering search queries. This helps both user and the search engine in delivering results that are high on precision and recall. And thus making the experience better for the user.

This probably explains why most of the user-dependent (user generated, network effect etc) businesses remain in beta stages for long times (gmail is still in beta). Till the time both (business and users) evolve and are mature enough to help each other, system has to remain in beta.

Lessons? Help your users evolve. Give them tools of the trade. They would need some hand-holding to learn initially. And then they would need the freedom and independence to play around with the system before they start making effective use of the system. And same goes for the system as well.

Please note that the definitions might not be exact (since I took notes while listening to the podcast), but the essence has been preserved. Link to podcast.

BookExpoCast.com has this podcast where Jeff Bezos talks about Kindle and then Chris Anderson (Wired Mag, The Long Tail) speaks to Jeff about publishing industry, Kindle, Amazon and Blue Origin.

The podcast is very very insightful and here are my raw notes from the podcast. Please note that these are raw notes and I scribbled them while listening to the podcast. I might have mis-understood and/or mis-interpreted the podcast but there are so many gems of wisdom that it would be a crime to not post them here.

I am breaking them into sections.

On Amazon

1. Amazon was founded in 94. (I read later that Jeff Bezos created the Amazon business plan post his road trip across the country. I am planning to take one myself end of 2008. May be I will have some ideas too :D)
2. When he was founding Amazon, Bezos had more than 40 meetings with 22 angel investors to raise USD 1 mn for the seed.
3. Bezos also said more likely someone knew about the publishing business, less likely were they to invest in Amazon.
4. One Amazon customer has bought more than 1700 books. WOW.
5. Things like Super Saver on Amazon saves time and money or both Amazon and end customer. This helps them save by exploiting economies of scale and scope. They can ship two orders together faster.

On Kindle

1. It took more than 3 years to develop Kindle.
2. Kindle is a device that allows people to get books that they are looking for. And the ones they aren’t looking for. Serendipity and accidental discovery of interesting books plays an important part of Kindle experience.
3. Kindle uses electronic ink. This is different from text that we see on a computer or LCD screen
4. While designing Kindle, the Amazon team wanted to capture few essential features of the system that they were making redundant. Things like book like form, ability to take notes, underline things etc.
5. Other important things were weight of Kindle, ability to read in sunlight, efficient on power-consumption.
6. The annotations and markings are stored on the Amazon servers. These are later searchable and can be accessed from anywhere.
7. Kindle wanted to make it easy for the customer to browse the books and eventually buy more titles off the store. (The streamlined the book buying experience by integrating the buy button on recommendation engine and then not charging customer for the download separately. The cost of the network/download is bundled with the price of the book)
8. Bezos made sure that the popular titles, including the ones on the bestsellers lists were available on Kindle right from day 1. This is important so that the customer who have spent about USD 399 on buying a device are not disappointed.
9. Someone sent a comment “it is about the message and not about the medium” - when they were comparing reading physical books with Kindle. (This I think is very important. We can make thousands of industries redundant if we focus on the delivery of the message).
10. Interesting statistic. About 6% of total Amazon book sales (by volume) now come from Kindle. Kindle customers buy as many physical book as eBooks. This was a surprising for even Jeff Bezos.
11. The grand vision for Kindle is all books ever published in any language anywhere in the world made available to you in less than 60 seconds. Which in my opinion is as large as a PC on every desktop. Kudos to Jeff Bezos for this grand a vision and ACTUALLY making it come to life.
12. He actually got CEO of Simon and Schuster on stage to talk about Kindle and how it is making it easier for publishers. (This was probably to address concerns of publishers - since the publishers have to first make the books available in electronic format).

On Future of Kindle

1. Amazon sees Kindle as more than just an access device. They are already talking about experiments like never-ending book and collaborative writing using Kindle.
2. Bezos envisions Kindle as a toolset for publishers and readers. He further talks about giving both publishers and customers these toolsets and let them surprise everyone else with their discoveries and inventions (I am reminded again of Jan Chipchase and his research).
3. Its also about finding the right readers for publishers. If you are a student in Iceland looking for books on biological traits of Saharan camels, you can only find them on Amazon. Or Kindle. Kindle thus acts as a platform where a publisher can find his audience and vice versa.
4. When asked if Kindle is already redundant with faster cellphones and other access devices, Bezos compared it with cameras. Every mobile phone has a camera now and people still buy smaller cameras and SLRs and other photography equipment. (I am sort of confused at this one. I think cameras AND Kindle both might get redundant at some point in time.)

On Bezos himself

1. Jeff Bezos is bald. :D (And so am I.)
2. 4 kids. 8.6.3 and 3. :D
3. “You do not choose your passions. Your passions choose you.” Awesome quote by Jeff Bezos, when he was asked about Blue Origin. Bezos says motto for Blue Origin is Step by step ferociously and he says they are in an industry that helps humanity get into space.
4. Bezos says at one point in time that planetary alignments were needed to Amazon what it is today. Is he superstitious? (Am sure paparazzi would be snooping :D)

Other things

1. Jeff Bezos talk about a concept of “me time”. A time that you spend away from everyone including your family, co-workers etc. This time is typically spent bathing, exercising, traveling etc. A Kindle gives people something to do in this “me time”.
2. Awesome insight into way humans understand interactions. Humans are storytelling animals and we like narratives. (Actually wrote about branding as storytelling few months ago but I never developed the concept further.
3. What about used books? Is there money to be made there? Everyone wants to read books and doesn’t really want to pay for the book prices. If there was a website to regulate that? A pre-web2.0 era website is doing that in Delhi. Is their merit in buying that website out?
4. You make money when you help customer make the purchase decision. This was in response to someone asking if negative reviews are bad for the business. All reviews actually help make the purchase decision. Negative , positive doesn’t really play a role
5. On elastic compute cloud, the idea was to convert the huge fixed cost for customers into onDemand variable cost. (I wrote about onDemand economics for my Berlin School application)

The best part about any great conversation is the quality and quantity of ideas that stem out of there. For me, these are the things that I think have the potential to be businesses.

1. I think the Techcrunch Web Tablet probably stemmed out of the Kindle idea. And even though the commercial production and distribution might be years away, they want to stake a claim on the idea before anyone else.
2. How about doing something on the old books market in India. Especially in all the engineering colleges in India, the content remains same and thus there is a large chunk demand. And then obviously there is the long tail.
3. Search cost plays an important part in getting the buyers and sellers together. I wrote about Search Cost way back in Feb 08 and I think its about time I revisited that.
4. Purchase decision is an interesting thing to think about. My day job involves working on this purchase decision for some of the leading brands in India and there is so much that I learn everyday. Need to post about it. What if there was a tool that everyone trusted and assisted in purchase decisions?
5. The entire idea of making fixed costs redundant has been in existence for a long time. Things like outsourcing and contracts actually do that. But doing it to something as fundamental as network, access and storage is sheer brilliance. Airtel did that with their network in India and do far have reaped awesome rewards off it. What else can converted into variable costs? Brain power? Processing? Coding?

If you are listening to the podcast, please share your thoughts. And apologies for such a long post. I did not realize that I have taken these many notes.

Credits
Image: Gizmodo.com

Ashish says that you “enable communities” and I think you “create” them. And since it’s a serious challenge to my understanding of social behavior, let me defend my position.

By the very definition,

a community is a group of individuals who are brought together by force or they come together because they share a common interest.

Classic examples are community of slaves working on erecting pyramids and users flocking pluggd.in because they are interested in start-ups in India.

Keywords in the definition are group, individuals and together. A group that is useful to the individual and together the group and the individual make it worth sticking to.

When I say that you create communities, it implies that you bring all these people together (by force, by coercion, by advertising, by showing them advantages of being a member, by hook, by rewarding participatory behavior or by showing that everyone but you is a member, or any of million other ways). Once there is a group, you share ideas and vision on what could become of this group if everyone participates. And when they start participating and everyone is in sync with the collective vision, the group become a community.

For a community to thrive, there needs to be a connecting thread – a reason for members to believe in. A selling proposition. An answer to “Why this community” question. This reason can again be provided by force (if you don’t work, you will be killed) or by prestige associated by just being a member (I am member of AsmallWorld.net – are you? I have access to GMail – do you have it? Etc.).

Second part is that the community as a whole should be useful for the members. No one would want to just give and not take anything in return. People don’t join communities. People join groups hoping that the group would be useful to them. Moment a group becomes useful for individuals, or that user, the group transforms from a group to a community.

When you are starting a community, you HAVE to bring together people. You will have to hand pick people who are committed to this binding thread with or without the usefulness of the community. These are the people whose actions would make the community useful for subsequent members. In case of pluggdin, for example, Ashish would have started writing about start-ups in India. He would have posted the link at relevant places, would have sent emails to friends and family who are interested in start-ups and slowly and gradually people starting coming in. He thus created a community. One member at a time.

On the other hand when you talk about enabling a community, you assume people already know why they are there. You assume that they

1. know what is common between all of them.
2. know why are they not a directionless herd.
3. know what is purpose of their group.
4. can see a larger picture.
5. know how is group useful.

This all might happen in an ideal world and I refuse to agree that any heterogeneous or even homogeneous group of people can answer all the above-mentioned questions. And if you are just enabling the community without holding their hand, telling them what to do and what actions to take. In my humble opinion, they will be as lost as kids in the topless bar :D.

And with this your-honor, I rest my case.

Regards,
Saurabh Garg
www.saurabhgarg.com/thoughts

P.S.: And I agree that your group/community should be empowered enough to recommend and make changes. They should be empowered to remove things that they don’t like. They should be empowered to freely add on to the community. They should be allowed to explore. They should be given the tools to be themselves and create new things for the community. :D

Image Credits: Sifah via Flickr.

External Links

1. WSJ: Why Most Online Communities Fail - via elan2

What started as a random message on twitter, has now spiraled into something larger.

I sent this message on Twitter asking if anyone would like to co-author a book with me using Twitter and Web as medium. Idea was to use Twitter as a communication medium to write a book. I did not have a clue what the book would be on. What the title would be. What the storyline would be. How would we collaborate. I just wanted to see if people would want to participate in this experiment. And yes, in less than an hour, 5 people had replied.

Siyab, SimplyArun, kv, Asfaq and gsik agreed to be a part of the experiment. We soon exchanged emails and figured how would be go about it. I shall keep updating this once we flesh out the details.

Keep tuned.

UPDATE ON 13 Jul 2008: Setup a wiki to help Collaboration. PBWiki Link
UPDATE ON 13 Jul 2008: Setup a blog. Twitter Book Blog

Image Credits: Flickr

I have been really tired off the these copy paste blogs, “social media consults”, opinion leaders who are widely quoted in media. Something has to be done. The buck stops here.

This page is now officially the most useless page on the Indian Web scene because I would aggregate information about most boring and useless things on the Indian Internet. These people just add noise to already cluttered world of web and need to have a serious relook at what they do.

Please send in your recommendations here.

Inspired by work done by Phonethics, I also thought I would create some characters. And some lives. Here is the first draft.

Koncious Kapoor

KK is our typical metrosexual Indian. He belongs to a very small time in UP and his is the first family to have stepped out of their town. They hence have an elevated status amongst their peers. Kconcious Kapoor has studied in a boarding school and although he has a modernish outlook towards life, he is still conscious of his background and upbringing. Like any typical young Indian, he wants to get rich quick, become famous and is really scared of facing an audience.

Khoob Bai

Everyone knows that KB is 35ish, claims to be 25ish, looks 30ish and is 45ish in real. She does everything including cleaning utensils, scrubbing floors, acting as the informal communication channel between young lovers, delivering gossip and obviously peeping on personal affairs of her employers. She knows more secrets than the FBI, CIA, RAW, The Mossad, MI6 and KGB combined. And she keeps dropping hints about her (in)famous access to information. She promises her loyalty to everyone but she is loyal to only one thing - money.

Totaram Sharma

better known as Sharma Ji in his colony and Sharma Babu in his office. He is a struggling middle aged government employee who has been a clerk since last 30 years and has seen two salary hikes and one promotion. He is a perpetual landmark on his office canvas. All the kids in his colony hate him for his never ending cribbing about noise and ruckus that these kids make. He has two teenaged daughters that add to his agony in life. He is also known for speaking for hours without making any sense at all.

Toofan Kumar

is in a perpetual state of hurry. He is rushing for something or the other. He even talks as fast as he walks. Folklore has it that he was last seen relaxing when he was standing in the visa queue to US of A. He thinks that world today is full of opportunists and he needs to do something about it. He feels very passionately about all the popular social causes and actively participates in debates around these. Motive is not to save trees or prevent child abuse but to pave a road for his political dreams. And of course the visa was rejected.

Happy Singh

is a typical surd. Happy go lucky, content and hungry - all three at the same time. Thanks to his beard, no one knows where his smile begins and ends. Or if he is smiling at all. He is on the heavier side and has an insatiable appetite. Every time he sees a cow, goat, chicken or any other animal of edible quality, his hunger pangs strike him. He is still single with no immediate plans or chances either. His family lives in Ludhiana and thus he has all the money he needs to live comfortably without working.

This has potential to become a huge business by itself. Not on the lines of what Phonethics is doing but something else. Keep watching.

I have been blogging for over 4 years now. I have been asked why I blog numerous times. And obviously I have give piece of mind to all those people. I have also met and interacted with a lot of fellow bloggers and I have realized that there are basically 4 kinds of bloggers.

1. Conscious Bloggers: People who really want to make a difference – not only in societal context but also in terms of business, way people use technology and other things. They are very focused in their approach and make sure they are attuned with the latest in their respective industries. More often than not, they end up becoming an influential voices in their respective fields.
2. Copy Cats: Because having a blog is cool, there are people who want to be cool and who would want to follow fads, they blog. Most of these blogs are abandoned within a short span and end up contributing to the Internet Junk. The lesser said about these people, better it is. Saves times and energy and content on Internet
3. Money Mongers: People who want to make money using their blogs (inspired by TechCrunch and other such blogs). They would start by posting everything and anything under the sun. They would blatantly copy things from other popular bloggers and will submit their blogs to search engines and aggregators at a feverish pace. It is very unlikely that they would ever make money with their blogs and will end up frustrating themselves. Some who are smarter, would on the course realize that blogging with an objective of making money would not work and they change course and obviously end up successful.
4. Confused Souls: People who don’t know why they blog but they anyways do it. The idea is not to make money or to get famous. The idea is to find an audience for their thoughts. Only gratification comes in the way of comments from their friends and other random visitors that have stumbled onto these blogs. They often have interesting things to say but due to the lack of recognition, they are lost in the noise. They are like the needles in the haystack that if identified could be put to good use.

What kind of blogger are you?