Showing posts with label Blogging and Admin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogging and Admin. Show all posts

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Launching a photo blog

I’ve decided to launch a photo blog and would be looking for your support and encouragement as usual.

The URL is:
http://photos.enidhi.net
The site is already up and running, with few posts containing some pretty good (so I think) photos. Have a look, I assure you, you won’t be disappointed. Already available posts are: “Cute Squirrels of Agra Fort”, Assembled vehicles of North India, Photos of Agra Fort, photos of our pet cat and photos of Kondapur weekly bazaar. (the last 2 have been moved from this blog) As I’m sitting on hundreds of photos, I aim to spend 10-15 minutes and publish new photos everyday (if not possible, new photos every alternate day guaranteed)

Even before the formal launch of my blog, few readers, Ranjana, Sujata and UTP have written their comments already at this new blog. Probably they saw it through my blogger profile. Thanks to them.

Please consider linking to this blog. I’ll be happy to reciprocate.

The logic and motive behind a new blog:

  • I’ve been clicking too many photos of late-hundreds of them. Though as much as 50% of those clicks are eventually discarded, few are really good and will be worth sharing. Felt a dedicated blog would be of more value.
  • In near past I did dedicate some posts to photos in this blog. Most of the other cases I published slideshows. But the response was not encouraging-maybe it’s not a good idea to have a jack of all blog. Let me move photos elsewhere…
  • I don’t want to flood this main blog with photos. As I try to restrict the number of posts to max 15 per month, stuffing too much photos may seem odd and may dilute the quality of the blog.
  • I don’t want to lose traffic to flikr and other photo hosting sites. Also would like a better control over my photos. Blog seems best.
  • Maintaining a photo blog is relatively easy. Publishing a new post takes only few seconds to a minute of two, if internet connection is good. No time spent on typing long posts. Someone rightly said, a picture is worth thousand words.
  • Those readers who don’t have time/interest in reading my regular blog posts can subscribe to this photo blog and visit once in a while to have a look at some new and refreshing photos.
My other initiatives-Moneytalk India finance forum and Ad Critics blog aren’t going great, but not that bad either.

Friday, July 04, 2008

Lazy 2 read?-Just listen-Let me read out my posts 4 u

If you’re lazy to read my posts, I can read out my posts for you.

The new widget you see below (or on top right sidebar) will readout the contents of the post, so that you can turn on the speakers, listen to my posts while doing some other activity-say working out or ironing or cooking or just lying on the bed.

If you're unable to see anything below, flash player (or the lack of it) might be the culprit



Basically it is a text to speech conversion utility. The accent is decent enough and the utility works just fine, with over 95% accuracy. It skips Indian language texts and struggles a bit while pronouncing Indian names. (It calls me Shrinidhi 'Hand' not 'Hande') Also you won't know if there's an image/hyperlink. Otherwise it is just too good.

Saw this in Nikhil's blog and instantly realized that this was what I was hunting for all these days. This utility is from blogbard.com. (Founded by Manoj B) You can create one for your blog or just login with Google credential and it can readout any feed in your Google reader.

It doesn't allow saving the speech as mp3. If that was provided one could copy the file into ipod or other mp3 players and listen at their conveinence. Right now you'll need an iTunes account for that.

So now on, no more complaining "too busy to visit your blog". Don't strain your eyes anymore. Let your ears takeover.

Give your feedback: Is this useful to you? Or too busy to listen as well?

Similar: Mobile version of this blog: http://m.enidhi.net/

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Onewebday, bloggers meet and other updates

This post shares information about some events and other miscellaneous updates

Direct Jump:
Onewebday * Enguru Kannada bloggers' Meet * BlogCamp kerala * Other Updates

One web day

Has internet changed your life? Did being active online made you achieve/secure/experience something which you couldn’t have accomplished offline? In case you have some strong story to tell explaining how internet made a difference in your life (or your community or someone you know closely), try sending your entry to
OnewebDay.org. They have a contest (contest details) running wherein entries are solicited from people around the world on the topic just mentioned and top 100 entries will be featured during Sep 22, 2008, when the organizers are organizing “One web day” and also in One Web Day Journal. This one web day is a recently started concept- more about it in Wikipedia


ಬಾ ಗುರು! ಕಾಫಿ ಕುಡಿಯೋಣ!!
Enguru Banavasi Balaga, A kannada community is holding a coffee meet for its readers, this Sunday, 6th July. Attend it if possible.
ಎಲ್ಲಿ?: ಬಿ.ಎಂ.ಶ್ರೀ ಕಲಾ ಭವನ, 3ನೇ ಮುಖ್ಯರಸ್ತೆ, ನರಸಿಂಹರಾಜ ಬಡಾವಣೆ, ಬಸವನ ಗುಡಿ, ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು 560019

ಯಾವತ್ತು? : 2008ರ ಜುಲೈ 6ನೇ ತಾರೀಕಿನ ಭಾನುವಾರದಂದು

ಯಾವಾಗ? : ಬೆಳಗ್ಗೆ 10.00ರಿಂದ 12.00ರ ವರೆಗೆ

more details:
http://enguru.blogspot.com/2008/06/blog-post_22.html


Bloggers’ meet on a house boat.
I guess it is first of its kind in the world. Bloggers’ meet on a moving houseboat. Kerala tourism is sponsoring a unique barcamp in God’s own Country. A set of 100 odd invited bloggers would spend a day in a big houseboat in the backwaters of Kerala. Kenney Jacob and other volunteers are coordinating the event. If you’re interested, register here :
http://www.contactvirus.com/blogcampkerala. (shared key: Godsowncountry) 

The date is Aug 16th (Saturday) and location is Alleppey (Alappuzzha) Kerala. (Participation and lunch free, courtesy Kerala tourism, but no sponsors for travel and stay expenses of outstation visitors yet) Photos of the houseboat and other details here

I’m missing several meets of late. There was a meet in Bangalore this June 8th hosted by Kannadasahitya.com, but I was away held up in Mysore watching Yakshagana by Saligrama Makkala Mela in Infosys Campus. The same day evening Chennai Bloggers meet was held at a hotel in T Nagar, Chennai, but I was few hundred kms away, driving back home in a Skoda Octavia. A Wicamp was scheduled in Wipro Campus Chennai, but this was held on a Friday afternoon and I had other priorities at work. Have to see if I can make it to this Houseboat meet. Will be missing the enguru meet as well, as I’ll be somewhere in North India at that time. Manipal bloggers’ meet and a Kannada bloggers’ meet arranged by Pranati were the one I could attend during recent past.

Other updates:
Received a mail wherein someone thought I am really Chief Blogging Officer of my company and asked me for a job! Wish I was an entrepreneur and could hire that person…Had to say sorry, but forwarded to few contacts for possible considerations

Receiving several mails of late, asking me to link/visit certain blogs/sites or requesting me to blog about certain things-Gives a feeling that you’ve grown a bit popular…Will do justice to such requests to the extent I can, but some had to be rejected. Sorry folks.

Few fellow bloggers,
Raveesh and Shande celebrated their blog anniversary recently. Best wishes to them. Some of my readers- Manoj Bhat (who is also a contributor at my Adcritics Blog), JOJO, Rohit, Alok B have launched their own blog recently. Welcoming them to the world of blogging and wishing them all the best.

Also have a look at my Blogroll/Link Love section. Have added lots of links in near past. Have a missed anyone else? Bring to my notice-will try to cover in next round up. Some more people have said they will start writing their thoughts down or sending their writings to me for a review etc-yet to see them in action. 

There’s a major update to my iMint cards post-please spend a moment and read it.

That’s all folks.

Monday, June 30, 2008

June 2008-Quick recap of posts

Can’t believe half of 2008 is already history!

The month was great-Me fulfilling a long pending wish of a long drive, Karnataka home minister commenting on my blog, both Desipundit and BlogBharti linking to my Self drive rentals related posts (Thanks 2 Nikhil and Mridula) , me trying my hands on poetry and more. 


I’m travelling out of Chennai almost every month since past 4 months and the trend is likely to continue for next few months. (Thanks to my Boss at work for necessary leave approvals!) Here're quick notes on posts published during June 2008, for the purpose of not so regular visitors who may wish to have a high level view of all posts.

Most popular one was the Chennai-Mysore Self drive post wherein I wrote about the 1300 kms date I had with Skoda Octavia for 3 full days. This post also has lots of photos. This post is complemented by a complete guide to self drive car rentals in India.

A poem I wrote out of nothing also attracted lots of eyeballs. Hon’ble Karnataka Home Minister Dr. VS Achar writing a comment in my blog did create some hype.

Ups and downs of my blogging, and the tale of few abandoned topics were the kind of personal posts this month.

The post on Saligrama Makkala mela performing at Infosys Mysore and post on Upadhya’s tender coconut opener were least popular but managed to attract one comment each (other one is my reply)

The post “What to gift for a 5 year old kid” was read by the parents of the kid to whom I was hunting the gifts for, and they knew full details of what I was gifting, even before I landed at their home.

The warm up post wherein I said I am dating a Czech beauty was taken a bit seriously by Sandesh, who somehow didn’t comment on any subsequent posts.

Ending the month with a review of i-Mint reward scheme and this summary of posts

Read Summary of posts for May 2008

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

A tale of abandoned topics

There were several topics in my mind which I was considering blogging about, but have abandoned them later due to various reasons. This post is a quick intro to few such topics which would have appeared as a post in this blog but unfortunately didn’t/couldn’t.

 1 Blogging vs Movie making

                I thought of comparing blogging and movie making, and highlight the similarities. (for example, a. it is difficult to give hit movies all the time and similarly it is not practical to expect each post to be very popular, b. Each movie is released with lots of expectations and hope. The cast and crew await public response eagerly after release-same with blogger-he eagerly awaits what his readers may say on the latest post…and few more such observations)

                But scrapped the idea because I felt that reasons are not strong enough to associate blogging with movie making alone. Almost everything in life is equally challenging-the new project at work, a new tournament, the next academic year-almost everything involves anticipations, hope, expectations. Right?

 2 Posts that were overhauled completely

                Whenever required I keep refining my contents. I don’t do a publish and forget job. Several posts have undergone multiple updates-some typical reasons for update are: correcting syntactical/factual error, adding additional information/image, refining the content for SEO purposes/better readability, linking to similar posts and so on. Most of the time changes will be quite small, but nevertheless, regular readers, who read my post within a day or two of its publication, often miss these updates. I can’t ask readers to read the whole post again because I’ve revised it, nor it is feasible to list every small change.

                But some posts have undergone major changes since its first publication. The post on Skandagiri was first written as an experience account. But since it started attracting visitors looking for tourist information about the place, I split the post into two sections-experience account and tourist information. The legendary Club Mahindra post has evolved a lot over time and is a lot refined and mature now, than what it was initially written. In post navigation, excerpts from interview with Club Mahindra executives, disclaimer, 2008 membership price list etc were provided over a period of time. The BMTC Volvo post was constantly updated to include latest available timetable information, route info etc. In some cases the comment written by readers were so relevant/informative that I absorbed them in the body of the post (with due credits of course-like this post) and more

                 Was thinking of publishing a post listing those posts which have undergone major revamps, but dropped it, because such posts (posts listing summary of posts , best of 2007 and the likes) were never popular in this blog. Reading once is itself a big task- don’t think anyone really cares to read it second time.

  3. Journalism and Investment experience part 2

Have written earlier about my teenage journalism experience and investment experiences. Some points which were left in those posts-was planning for a part 2. But have covered most of the points in few recent posts (the SBI one and this post), so had to drop the idea of part 2

 4.  Reliance-Digitally fooling everyone

                Reliance seems to be obsessed with the term “Digital”. Way back in 2002, when Reliance launched its mobile phone service, with that legendary LG handset and a scheme wherein user had to pay some Rs. 24k over 3 years, Reliance used to call those ugly handsets as “Digital Multimedia handset”. If you’re able to visualize those handsets, just think, if those handsets were “Digital Multimedia handsets” what would they call today’s Nokia N95, iPhone etc? Only Ambani has to tell what is so digital and what was so multimedia in that handset. The advertisement those days used to show an image of K3G, a popular movie of those times, giving people an impression that they can watch movies like K3G in the handset if they buy them, which was purely misleading.

               Their current ad again speaks about Digital Voice clarity. As per my knowledge no mobile operator is using analog technology for telecommunication. So thought of blogging about this. But a quick chat with Jayasimha, a telecom engineer, revealed that CDMA is supposed to have better voice clarity than GSM. With that concluded that the case is not strong enough for a post. (This post was planned for our Ad Critics blog)

 5. Tourist places

                Have visited several places during past 9 months-Places around Mysore, Coorg, Mumbai, Manipal and more (and Many more trips lined up for near Future!) Wanted to blog about places like Dubare elephant camp, Talakaveri, Talakad, Shivanasamudra and more, but lack of unique content is holding me back. Have some photos and some basic tourist information, but these are already available on internet and since I have no unique experience/extra information/observations to share, not sure if writing a typical post-“went there-saw that-it was nice-came back” would add much value.

 6. Grand Theft Auto-Vice City Game review

Long back I’d reviewed this game from Rockstar Games and published this review in Mouthshut. Republished this in March in my blog but recalled the post after few days because of these reasons: a. With GTA 4 making record sales and rocking all over,  it’s a bit too late to talk about Vice City b. When I read my own review, after few years since it was originally written, felt that it could have been written in a far better way than the plain vanilla description of the game. Didn’t have the time to refine the contents and decided not to serve an uninteresting version to my readers.

 Do you think any of these topics deserve to be detailed and independent posts?

 That’s it in this episode. Now can you tell me the supreme irony of this post?

Monday, June 09, 2008

Karnataka Home Minister Dr. VS Acharya comments on my blog post

Yesterday Morning I was in for a pleasant surprise-Was checking my mails in gmail and saw a comment from Dr. VS Acharya. (for my Coco Fresco Hyderabad post, wherein I had described a new approach adopted to promote tender coconut) The name sounded familiar-went to blogger profile and subsequently to his blog. 


As suspected, it turned out to be the blog of the very person who had taken oath as Cabinet Minister along with Karnataka CM Mr. B S Yadyurappa a week ago and was assigned the portfolio of home ministry less than 24 hours earlier. (He was minister for Medical Education earlier).

Never expected politicians to be tech savvy and have a blog. (Do SM Krishna, known for his IT friendliness, has a blog? No idea.) But then, Dr. VS Achar is a doctor by qualification and is one of the few highly qualified personalities in the political corridor. His bio data in this post

I feel honored to have such high profile visitors to my blog who stop by and leave a comment too. Here's wishing Dr. Acharya all the best for his tenure as Home Minister of Karnataka and sir, we're hoping to see some real improvements this time...

You can read the person blog of Dr. VS Acharya here. Photo sourced from his blog.

Note: Its official- In an interview with Vishveshwara Bhat, editor of Vijaya Karnataka, VS Achar speaks about his blog. Image here (refer last question). So this is authentic enough to believe that the said blog is of Home minister

Thursday, June 05, 2008

Dating a Czech Beauty

Deal all,

I am currently away from Chennai dating a Czechoslovakian beauty. Keep watching this blog for hot pics and juicy updates. Assuming nothing goes wrong, I am scheduled to date her 3 days and 3 nights.

But then, please don’t start dreaming or visualizing bad things-hold your breath for a day or two for details.

Secret revealed: Full details in this post

Other updates:

My book review of Chetan Bhagat’s “The three mistakes of my life” has reached top 15 in Google when you search for keywords related to “the 3 mistakes of my life”. It took just 10 days to reach this position from infinity.

Cross posted my “12 reasons why MLM companies go bad” at Churumuri (A popular news blog moderated by Journalist Krishna Prasad)-Within couple days comment count has neared half century-You can read the comments here if interested.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Ups & Downs of my blogging

This post shares few ups and downs I faced during past two years of my blogging:

1 The MLM Supporters

Any talk on network and multi level marketing will be potentially controversial. When I wrote couple of posts on MLM (12 reasons why MLM cos go wrong * QuestNet reopens as Lotus marketing in Srilanka * Amway Inside story * An analysis of MLM companies) as expected there were lots of comments which criticized my stand. But then, I received couple of communications wherein someone sent detailed arguments and wanted to meet me in person and explain why & how their business is genuine and legitimate. Few wanted me to attend their presentations to understand the business properly. One thing common among these people was that they agreed that a particular company (Amway or QuestNet etc) are scams but insisted that their company is genuine and legitimate.

I am not sure if I want to take the discussions offline. I have an opinion, based on certain observations and analysis, which I publish as a post. Few will like it and benefit from it, some more will not agree and ignore it and rest of the world will not even notice it. That's the way it is-we need to accept that. To a reasonable extent I can respond to comments and provide clarifications, but beyond a limit it gets too much. Certainly I can’t afford to spend all my time and energy convincing the world that I am right. When someone doesn’t agree and insist that I change my stand I may have to ignore them and move on. Sorry folks.

It may not be bad to make friends online and take it offline. But not all will have good intentions and some due diligence will be required before trusting an hitherto unknown person and chose to meet him offline. For this reason I had to reject certain friend requests and requests from unknown people to meet me in person. When Club Mahindra suddenly invited me for their Coorg Trip for travel bloggers I had to do considerable ground work before accepting it. Sometimes it is like suspecting too much, but can't help it. Protocols are to be followed.

2. Me not an expert

I may not be an expert in most of the topics I write upon. But some readers believe otherwise and send in questions and concerns-Sometime it feels good that people are approaching you for help, sometime feels bad that you’re not able to help them (not knowing what to help or time constraint etc). Tried my best to help those who sought it, while had to ignore some.

a. One person sent a mail (with his resume) saying he is a student of hotel management and wishes to work as an intern with Club Mahindra. I have no clue what made him think I could get him an internship at Club Mahindra. Though his resume was written in such a bad English I sent it to Club Mahindra executives.

b. Someone else said she invested 30 k in reliance mutual fund and hasn’t got any communication in months. I had nothing specific to console her but assured her that probability of fraud seems very less in this case and after a quick discussion with a friend advised her to check with her broker or call reliance office to get her portfolio number. Never heard again from her-hope her investment is giving good returns now.

Many others sought help buying a laptop. (Because of this post) Responded them to my best knowledge-Haven’t received any feedback how many of them went by my suggestion.

The Club Mahindra post went beyond control-Many commented saying they feel cheated by CM and asked me how they can come out of that mess. I do not have any control over CM and there wasn't much I could do about it. Wherever possible I pointed them to other comments where readers had shared similar concerns and were considering their options, including legal ones.

3. Journos Contacting me

One Russian Lady, Reshatova Anneta approached me early last year [Read her comment here] who wanted my help in some article/report she was preparing. She said she works for russian company HR- media (www.hrmedia.ru). I verified her identity and couldn’t find anything fishy. I spent around half a day of my time and gave her the information she wanted. (Her article was something related to employment and empowerment of women in India) . This effort from my side proved to be a total waste-never heard from her again as to what happened to that article-probably it was rejected by her editor/boss or it was used for some internal purpose or she decided not to bother me once she got what she wanted.

Another lady, who identified herself as ABC (name withheld) from Hindustan Times, contacted me from Delhi regarding timeshare holidays. I gave my opinion as to why I felt investing in timeshare might not be a good idea and she promptly asked “What else people should do?” Think I didn’t give a convincing answer to her- I said something like “People can invest their capital smartly and  using the returns take one time holiday which gives lots of flexibility” Probably it didn’t convince her. Never heard again from her as well.

Few people sought my permission to use my club Mahindra articles for their newspaper/magazines-(like this comment for example)I generously permitted, but never heard from them. Thinking of it, a newspaper cannot easily quote a personal blog. If I were an editor, I would never rely on information sourced from a personal blog, because unlike a blog, a newspaper cannot easily criticize a company in its articles, unless the newspaper has enough evidence to survive a defamation case and be ready to lose advertisement revenue from that company. Also business articles seldom publish links to personal blogs-(Swati did that once [read it here] and for reasons not known to me, her column got stopped thereafter) So for all these reasons I guess those who wanted to quote my blog in their articles couldn’t do it.

4. From ideas to reality

In this post I suggested that public toilets in India can be made free (by recovering operating expenses by showing ads). A group of people, headed by Abhishek Pandey, under the umbrella of ‘soon to be registered’ NGO called Dream India projects (DIP) came up to implement that idea in Delhi. They made some good progress initially but since past one month or so there’s been no updates on that. Hope that project becomes a reality soon. Details in this post

5. Prizes that never came

Won a contest in Mouthshut.com January last year and was supposed to get return air tickets as prize- Never got that till date. (Last year abandoned pursuit after a set of email follow ups) [Details in this post]

6. Lucrative offers 

Once upon a time my Club Mahindra post used to come right below Club Mahindra official website (image in this post).(Now the position has dropped due to a set of reasons, including smart counter SEO strategies from CM, such as registering dozens of websites with club mahindra in its name). During those days I have received several offers where some people wanted me to either a. write a positive article about their company and make it come on top or b. write a negative article about their competition and make it come on top. Nothing great about those companies either-people who approached me identified themselves as "representatives" of the company. I had to reject such offers because those were not my purpose of blogging. Can’t write good or bad just because someone is willing to pay me. 

7. Stupid acts

Some of the activities I did during initial days look stupid now-During early days I didn't know if Vijaya Karnataka (a kannada newspaper) is available online. In one of the Kannada blogs I wrote a comment asking for URL of ’s website. The link was available in their blogroll or I could have even googled it-but these simple things didn’t strike me that time…

Wrote comments leaving by blog URL behind and then wondered why the blog owners deleted it…

There're some more incidents like this which I can share. Will do that sometime soon...

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Summary of Posts-May 2008

This post gives a quick summary of all posts publishing during this month. Thought this might help those who don’t visit on a regular basis

12 Reasons why MLM companies go bad

Lists a dozen reasons why network marketing and MLM companies won’t usually last a long term. Be sure to read this post to understand what all goes wrong with these companies.

Book Review-The 3 Mistakes of my life-Chetan Bhagat

Gives quick outline of the storyline, tell you some logical and factual mistakes I found in the book.

Event blogging experience

An experience account of me live blogging at WebInnovation Summit in Mumbai earlier this month

Me and SBI

SBI had denied me student account during my engineering days-Recently opened an account with that bank and this post is a recap of old memories.

Raising money from VCs

Excerpts from a talk given at Webinnovation08 Summit giving an overview of challenges involved in finding a venture capitalist for your startup

Manipal Visit updates

Lists few new updates which I missed in an earlier post about my participation at MMSC 08

Airfares-the cheapest one

Explains that none of the travel websites are giving cheapest air tickets and one should buy directly at airline website for lowest fare.

Mumbai Visit-Quick notes

A few notes from a quick Mumbai trip I had earlier this month

Rice-in its most nutrient form

Few quick lines on importance and usage of Ganji

Puducheri Visit updates

Few updates from the Pondy visit I had earlier this month with JNVC batch mates

2nd anniversary of my blog

A quick reminder to everyone including myself that this blog has survived for 2 years and rolling...

Monday, May 26, 2008

2nd anniversary-Belated anniversary wishes to my blog

While talking with Raveesh today realized that I have missed second anniversary of this blog. On May 22nd this blog completed 2 years of existence. In one my earlier posts this month I had written about the upcoming birthday but forgot on the celebration day.

Better late than never, belated 2nd happy birthday to my blog...

Here's the first post that was published 2 years ago. Two years of blogging was great experience-Given that there're bloggers around us who are into blogging since as early as 1998-2000, me still an infant in this arena. Nevertheless blogging did take me to couple of places (Coorg, Manipal and Mumbai) and allowed me to have an online identity for myself. More than 200 people visit this blog daily with couple of them leaving their comments behind. (This is relatively smaller number compared to blogs that get thousands of hits every day-still I am happy with this, given that I don't spend much time on this and haven't made any serious promos-for past 6-9 months avg visitors per day is between 200-250-Not crossing that benchmark-don't know why). enidhispeaks.blogspot.com had reached a PR of 4 but lost it after moving to own domain. Waiting for next Google PR revision.

Because of my posts on network marketing etc I am sure there are quite a few souls angry with me as well, but I have also made some very good friends through this and have leveraged the potential of blog for real life benefits, though there weren't any significant income from it (such as by ads).

Thanks to each one of you for your readership, comments and encouragement. Looking forward for your continued support.

Related: Post written on first anniversary * Ups and downs during my blogging

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Event Blogging at WebInnovation08-Experience

It was a good experience attending webInnovation 08 at Mumbai this week (8th May 2008). Live blogging the event was even greater experience.

Live blogging was a good new experience for me. Enjoyed every bit of it. But there were some challenges too- the conference room didn’t have any power points where I could charge my laptop. It is impossible to live blog whole day on battery- I had two of them- a 4 cell one and another 6 cell one, together I could manage for half a day and by charging during lunch time I could extend life of laptop for some more time post lunch. Still, if Hotel could have provided electric sockets (which I asked but they said they don’t have) it would have been good. Tata Indicom Plug2Surf was performing decently during initial hours but post lunch the connectivity was very bad. Because of these limitations and because the fact that I had to take down notes while speaker is speaking, I had to sideline several activities like approving comments, editing/improving posts etc.

Below: Myself with Kaushal Karkhanis, fellow event blogger.
Shrinidhi hande with Kaushal event blogging at Webinnovation08About the event: As I was a sponsored delegate probably I am not supposed to speak negative, but don’t want to suppress my observations. Participation was good, but many speakers were from companies that had sponsored the event. That happens with all the events- you can’t deny 10-15 minutes of presentation time for companies who have shelled out lakhs of rupees to sponsor the event. But a delegate who has paid Rs 7000 is, in all probability, won’t be interested in attending advertisement sessions of products/services being promoted by the sponsors (as the information will be available on the company website, why should one pay to attend such sessions?). Nevertheless, most of the sessions were good-the one on raising VC money by Bikas Birai of iViZ, on demysitifying the web 2.0 by Amit Somani of Google India, about email marketing by Dominic Powers were personally interesting to me.

Don't know what happened at other 2 tracks. In this event there were three tracks- Business, Technology and Enterpreneurship, all running parallelly. Since I cant be in 3 places at once, I chose to attend Business track. Don’t have much idea what happened at other 2. There were supposed to be 6 event bloggers (me one of them) but I guess only 2-3 turned up. Only Myself and Kaushal live blogging and Siddig live twittering the event. As 3 tracks ran parallelly, any delegate is guaranteed to miss 2/3rd of the event. If organizers can arrange for transcripts of the talks given by other speakers to all delegates it would be good.

The event didn’t get much visibility in print media- I was in Mumbai airport next morning and couldn’t notice event reported in any of the leading papers- DNA, Indian Express, Free Press, BusinessLIne and Asian Age. Infact Yahoo launched its new gen search features "GLUE" in WebInnovation 08 event [details] but they held a press conference in Bangalore to release this news, so all papers reported this launch, but without any mention of the webinnovation08 event. Would have been good if Yahoo could hold the press con in Grand Hyatt, Mumbai (where the event was going on)

Shrinidhi Hande with Kiruba Shankar at Webinnovation08 MumbaiMore photos of the event
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/webinnovation08

I spent most of my time listening to speakers at the Business Track, noting down key points and publishing it as a blog post next moment. Now I feel it would have walked around and interviewed few people as well. Will try this next time.

Right-with Kiruba Shankar at the event-He giving admin rights to us so that we can approve comments that were pouring in on the event blog site.

I wish to thank Kiruba Shankar and other organizers for this opportunity (of contributing as an event blogger). In fact I was answerable to two stake holders in this-The organizers of Webinnovation who invited me with a complementary registration for which I was required to live blog the event and another stakeholder who has provided travel and accommodation, to whom I had to take back some value out of the summit. Hope I will be able to meet their expectations.

The conference bag sponsored by WebEx was good.

Be sure to watch this video on start-ups

Event ended a bit ahead of schedule and I could go for a drive around Mumbai City.


Update: I mailed Kiruba seeking some feedback on my work, so that I can identify where I can improve next time. Seems he is too busy to respond. It doesn't feel good when you're denied some basic feedback on your work.

Related: Manipal Media Students Convention * Mumbai visit-Other observations

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Pondy Trip, QN, Liveblogging & Other updates

5 days since my last post may look like a long time considering I have been publishing new posts every alternate day so far. Have lots of stuff to blog about but running on a very tight schedule. So compromising a bit and giving quick updates.

Quick JumpPondy Trip | Questnet Scam update | Live blogging @ webinnovation.in |

Enjoyed a one day trip to Pondy and surrounding areas covering MatriMandir at Auroville (an under construction spiritual township some 15-20 kms north of Pondicheri (130 kms from Chennai)), Puducheri (Pondy) and Mahabalipuram last Saturday with Krishna Shastry, Gulshan Raj and other classmates from JNVC. [Related: JNVC memory snaps] The places we visited were nothing great (in fact many were disappointed as Pondy and Auroville had nothing exiting to offer and it was evening by the time we reached Mahabalipuram) but had some great time with old school pals- all are doctors and IT professionals now. We also sang lot of songs we were taught during JNV days. The best thing I enjoyed during the trip was me driving the Tavera for about 60 kms. (A review on this vehicle by me can be read here on Mouthshut)

Photos of this trip are available as a slideshow below. (Trouble viewing it? Try http://enidhi.slide.com/)


Branding tender coconut
Observed that some coconut vendors in Pondy have started branding the tender coconut they sell, by attaching a sticker to it. To me this looked like a cheap and useless imitation. A detailed post on this I have guest authored at Churumuri blog. Read that here. I think it is a good idea to guest blog in other blogs once a while. Your regular readers will be seasoned to your way of writing and may blindly agree with whatever you say. Also well known friends may hesitate to give negative comments. Guest blogging at other blogs bring whole new set of readers and gets new new perspectives and also some sharp criticisms. Some nice debate has already triggered there...

Wanted to write part 2 of Manipal visit but that is still pending. Some updates are too small to qualify as blog post, so posting them at my twitter account-you can keep an eye on my twitter page for quick updates.

QuestNet International and its members in troubled waters
Chennai police are cracking whip on Quest Net, a multi level marketing company which has spread its tentacles all over India (mainly among IT folks) and many other countries, spreading false hope that everyone can become rich by buying coins and referring others to do the same. Now several victims who were lured to invest in this pyramid scheme coming out to lodge complaints against QN. We need to see if law enforcement agencies can do something effective to stop this kind of companies. I had written earlier about this company in this post but due to time constraint unable to keep track of the latest developments. Mohan BN is following this development effectively and closely in his blog. Keep an eye on his blog for latest happenings on Questnet scam. 
May 17 update: Mohan used to follow this story closely but recently has deleted several posts related to this issue. I don't have great expectations from the police investigation, but the negative publicity is going to make it very tough for QN to sign-up new people. May be they would go for a name change again-let us see.

Live Blogging at WebInnovation.in Summit, 8 May, Hotel Grand Hyatt, Mumbai
Leaving for Mumbai this evening to take part in a one day summit on Web 2.0, called Webinnovation.in. Taking '1 minute manager' for inflight reading. With the complementary registration offered by the organizers I’ll be live blogging the event on the event website. I enjoy journalism (read my journalism experiences) and live blogging will be akin to live reporting. I am sure I’ll be able to enjoy that. Keep an eye on blog section of event website for my live blogging posts.

Each of my trips generate enough content for atleast 5-10 blog posts but not sure when and where to write and publish them all…

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Few updates & some random pictures

Poll: The poll I ran to find out what kind of contents my readers like has given results which I had suspected. Majority of you liked personal observations and experience accounts, followed by Business posts. Thanks to each one of you for casting your vote.

Unable to comment? Send it by mail.

Many of you conveyed your inability to write comment here as blogger is blocked. In case you wish to write a comment but unable to, send a mail to admin at enidhi dot net. I will manually publish the comments.

I have created a twitter account sometime back. If you wish to follow me, you can do that here (Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where one can give quick updates about anything) (links to LinkedIn and orkut profiles are available in sidebar, if you’re interested)

The legendary Club Mahindra post, the most popular one so far in this blog, has scored 200 comments (includes about 80 comments from me, written in response to other comments). Last time when the post crossed 100+ comments I did an analysis of the comments [read that here]. That post didn’t receive much of response so not planning to analyze the comments again for 200 posts. Will consider at 250-300 comments

Even the quarterly summary of posts I used to do doesn’t appear to have any takers. Do you find it useful? I feel once in a month summary of posts, written on the same month, will be more appropriate, as this post will be available in the archive of same month. Any thoughts/suggestions welcome.

I feel the sidebar is getting crowded. Need to simplify the same by removing not so critical elements- which one do you think can be removed without a second thought?

May 22 will be 2nd anniversary of this blog. 3 weeks to go.

Installed second life client and logged in for the first time… Realized that it can be extremely addictive and time consuming, if taken seriously. Decided to stay away from it for now.

The mobile version of this blog was not working for sometime and is up now.(http://m.enidhi.net)

Some random photos taken in near past

Flower vases
Yellow water melon. A bit uncommon.
Happy journey ! ! !
Pineapple that grew in our garden

Saturday, April 19, 2008

MMSC Manipal 08 - An Experience account

Quick Jump: The journey | Betrayed by my Laptop | Talk on podcasting | My talk on Corporate Blogging | MIT Men's Hostel|

Answer this question: When you were in college, probably you might have hated your hostel and now as a professional are used to travel around the world staying at star hotels at your company's expense. Now tell me, given an opportunity, wouldn't you love to go back to college hostel and spend few days in college campus?

I am currently spending time at Manipal, an educational hub in coastal Karnataka, attending Manipal Media Students' Convention-MMSC 08.
Manipal Institure of Communication, MIC
This is a 2 day event conducted by students of Manipal Institute of Communication, involves unconferences, workshop on podcasting, expert talks and more. I am here as a sponsored delegate and gave a talk on corporate blogging.

The journey-
The west coast express was extremely punctual and arrived at Mangalore at 5.15 AM, but it took nearly 3 hours to reach Manipal from there-I boarded a direct bus to Manipal waiting outside the railway station-despite having bus full of passengers, they (bus crew) waited for 25 minutes near railway station, 20 minutes at Mangalore service bus stand and finally left Mangalore little after 6 AM. Next time I would walk across the town hall and catch a bus which has just left the stand.

Volunteers of the event were extremely professional- They did follow up periodically after I confirmed participation and I was received at Trinity Circle (or is it Tiger Circle?), Manipal and escorted to MIC hostel, IXth block. The room was pretty good. Going back to hostel and living in a campus for few days is like college days revisited. It may not match a hotel in terms of luxury, but the environment of so many students around, is a good experience- I am sure you can imagine those days and I don't have to explain. The energetic students of MIC, headed by Ragamalika (incidently its her birthday today) were quite punctual and professional in handling their responsibilities and event management. This was my first visit to an institute as a delegate (the inter college events I had attended during college day-I was treated as a student, so that was fine) and I was given a respect and significance for which I am not used to. I am not used to being called 'Sir', 'Sir' and other formalities. However the care and warmth these students poured on the delegates was great. I will cherish it for a long long time.

We headed to chaitya hall in Hotel Valley View in MIT's college bus, which reminded me of the yellow maxicab we had in JNVC, with Udayanna as its pilot.

Betrayed by my laptop
Once we settled in the venue, I realized that my laptop's wi-fi is not working. Last time I had connected my lappy to internet via wi-fi was in August at Hyderabad-now when I wanted it, it was just not there...Probably a hardware problem have to get this fixed. Without net connectivity, it is almost useless to carry it-doesn't serve much of the purpose. I wanted to live blog the event (as a preparation to next month's WebInnnovation.In which I will be attending and live blogging) but this idea was spoiled by my laptop and I got a feeling of betrayal.

Good thing is, I could shut-down my laptop and focus on the session, while many others were busy checking mails and chatting while someone was speaking on stage.

But then, it is also good to stay off-line for few days once a while, by force, if not by choice. Let me accept it- world is NOT going to turn upside down, if I don't check and respond to my mails for few days. I did check my mails once through someone else's laptop but obviously I can't borrow it for hours to live blog or for other purposes.

A session on podcasting by Aditya Mhatre of theindicast.com was useful and gave us a good idea of what podcasting is and how to go about it. For the uninitiated, podcasting is recording audio (interviews, discussions, talks) around a topic and allowing your readers across the globe to download and read it from the convenience of their phone/ipod/computer etc. The idea is good, but I am of the opinion that while anyone can start blogging, podcasting is not for common man, at least not yet-the time and effort that goes in may not be worth it, unless you manage to get really exciting stuff to air on. We also did a workshop n podcasting-recording our audio conversation and uploading it. During this, we got a chance to check out the TV studio and audio room of MIC.

Was expecting to see Kiruba Shankar conducting a workshop on podcasting but he had to pull out of this as he had to attend Club Mahindra's Cerebrate.In in Goa.
speaker list
Annie Zaidi spoke about blogging and journalism-as I am interested in both, her talk was very interesting to hear.

The interior of Chaitya Hall in Hotel Valley View where the event was conducted was poorly lit and my entry level digicam was quite ineffective in taking good pics (unless it was a close shot). So I haven't taken much photos. Some photos uploaded by other are available here 


Shrinidhi speaks on corporate blogging
My turn came at around 3.30 in the afternoon to speak. The synopsis which I had submitted and accepted by MMSC was on corporate blogging hence I kept the same topic for the talk. Luckily, the remote control of my laptop did work properly and didn't put me in another embarrassment. I had conducted a session on blogging internal to my company but this was my first public talk after I started working. A bit of excitement, a sense of guilty feeling that I could have prepared better, but the presentation went on smooth-without any disturbances-technical or otherwise. I talked about the need and advantages of corporate blog, both internal and external, what it takes for a corporate blog to be successful, how one can measure ROI on corporate blog and so on. I got an honest feedback later that the topic of corporate blogging was more suitable at a business event than a gathering of media students. I should have thought of that-but since my synopsis was on same topic which was accepted, I didn't think of a second topic. Also I should have focused on making it more interactive-few points to take home for me. (Please note that I was just one of the 40 odd speakers during the event, though I was lucky to get a timing in second half of first day.)

I could meet many interesting people during the event- Siva of Internet Society, Chennai