Indian Idol – Why zero sum game?

I am hooked to Indian Idol this season as well but what causes a lot of uncomfort to me is the fact that Indian Idol ( and all other singing talent show in so many other languages)  is a zero sum game. There are many forces driving such a show – discovery for new talent, reality induced TRP leading to pricey ad inventory, mobile based revenue stream but none of these reasons I think are causal enough for it to be zero sum then why is it  hit driven ?

Someone told me markets will all save us

Well how can that be look what markets gave us.

There are massive failure of institutions at large, the pinnacle of which was these events that unfolded in the financial sector over the  weekend.

While it is a well known fact that communities/networks become unstable at large scale ( we have seen it in ample in the past) and does not work as it is a vulnerable resource especially when open leading to control be taken over by opportunistic vested interests  (Soviet/China etc are testament to that).  Whereas markets despite its problem of information cascade, herding was hailed as the saviour of all ills of the globalized countries but that too failed us leaving us all wondering which is better a institutional system of making a sustainable living.

Maybe it is time that revolution itself needs a revolution as this revolutionist points out.

Chrome – what abt it ?

I have seen the tech media go crazy about Chrome’s release last week but I don’t  get what it is about. Installed Chrome over the weekend and gave it a run, certainly it has a small footprint and runs faster,  it is based on webkit and has some key features as Firefox blah blah but not did not find anything that stands out remarkably as yet.

As has been with many cases with google in the past, it is not what it is shown/done so far but what it will do with that is going to do with it that makes me hugely hopeful.

So let the browser wars begin, I for one grew up in the tech industry hearing folklores about it and it is good to see it unfold infront of the eyes.

MoMo Monsoon

Our regular monthly event take a slightly larger form this month , dubbed as MoMo Monsoon it will be held as a day long event.  With the help from many kind souls in the community have been able to assemble some fantastic panels and put together some wonderful topics.  As I blogged before this is a great year for mobile industry and we would be discussing some relevant topics from an Indian context.

For all those who complained that can’t make to MoMo on Monday, well here is the chance as this event is on the coming saturday.

May MoMo summary, Livemint article

Since recently I have written few articles for what is called Tuesday Post in LiveMint. The most recent one was the summary of the most recent MoMo event.  You can find the article here.

Pecha Kucha Bangalore

    Pecha Kucha is an event being organized tommorow at CKS, looks pretty interesting. I am hopeful that I can gain/learn something from it. Taking a risk of hoping that it would be worthwhile I am planning to be there.

The Speakers: Abhishek Hazra MEDIA ARTIST & DESIGNER Dominic Dube ARCHITECT & DESIGNER Hans Matthew MATHEMATICIAN & CRITIC Kiran Venkatesh ARCHITECT Yashas Shetty MUSICIAN & INSTALLATION ARTIST M K Raghavendra FILM SCHOLAR Kiran Subbaiah SCULPTOR OTHERS TO CONFIRM

The Venue:
Center for Knowledge Societies
CKS House, 4004, 100 Ft. Road,
HAL 2nd Stage,
Bangalore- 560 038, INDIA
V: 91 80 41254373
F: 91 80 25350181
E-mail: rukshana@cks.in

V ‘Naresh’ Narasimhan of Venkataramanan Associates & Aditya Dev Sood of the Center for Knowledge Societies are pleased to invite you to PECHA KUCHA BANGALORE #1 29.09.2006 @ 20:20 Hrs. For further information please also have a look at the website for this event: www.pechakuchabangalore.com Please confirm you attendance by 25.09.06 by emailing; rukshana@cks.in To stay informed about upcoming events, add you address to our mailing list, send an email to the same email ID with the subject ilikePKB. To never hear from us again, make it ihatePKB. Location Map:

Why no Blogcamp reflection post

      A friend asked me why I did not do any post after returning from blogcamp while I was so excited about the event before it had happened. I did not have time to do a post is only a tiny  part of the reason that I did not blog about it, the real reason being that there was nothing much for me to really blog about. The presentation/talks were very boring to me, people were talking about blogging about their pets & cats and how you get more readers and stuff like that. It is not to say that these conversation’s were not significant in their own sense  but they were of absolutely of no utility to me.  There was some  discussion on how new media is changing the existing media order but much of that meme has been dead beaten elsewhere in the world about 2-3 years ago. Nothing new or nothing that is specific to India.  One of the most ironical that I found was that there were reporters who were reporting the event, including Shailaja of GigaOm. I would have rather liked her to  blog about it and not report it.

The only Interesting points about media 2.0 that I heard was from Jace and that I guess is because he is trying to read this Folks out here (India) have woken up to the new media but seem to be living the new media revolution without knowing what are these fundamental changes that are happening. I thought that I am a technologist (coming from a technical/geek/nerd world) and what the hell do I know about media and I should STFU and listen & learn from the those that are better educated at me but I was very disappointed.

Well it is not that it as bad as it may sound from the above. Value add for me was meeting with interesting people many of whom I had only virtually met. As a result of going to blog camp I follow a lot more blogs which I would have not otherwise done.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/ (Dina)

http://labnol.blogspot.com/ (Amit Aggarwal)

http://withinandwithout.com/ (Neha)

http://ouchmytoe.rediffblogs.com/ (Jammy)

I learned about a cool thing called the live writer which has made writing a blog a great experience now , thanks to Amit for introducing this to me. As in his words “this is one product that MS has got it right”. I got an oppurtunity where I could test a little bit of video blogging with N70

One thing that I should mention is that I am extremely impressed with the organization of blogcamp (best organized of all unconference I have ever been to ) and a  special mention goes to 20 or so organizers of blogcamp. The kind of umnbounded energy that was displayed is highly admirable. There is much folks from bangalore or hyderabad can learn from these guys. A special mention goes to kiruba as well. Now one would say that this is an unconference and is created by all the participants then why a special mention to kiruba.  That is because be it conference or an unconference you need someone who can be act as a catalyst help core group perform all the necessary action to make things happen and kiruba was one helluva fantastic catalyst Hope someday he does a guide to organizing unconference post some day.

I have decided to more selective in the events to attend.

More video blogs

Another problem that I faced is that Jahshaka, the free ( as in beer as well as speech) editor ( also can be thought of as the audacity for video) that I am using seems to be crashing whenever I try to edit a video ( don’t know it could be a problem with mp4 video )

Veer’s session on mobilelogging

Sunil Gavaskar sharing his perspective on Podcasting.

Jace on what is blogging

Video on blip.tv

I thought that blip.tv was eons ahead of youtube as a video blogging platform but looks like that is still not good enough to be usedAgain very insightful on how to think about blogging.

Others live blogging blogcamp

There are so many tags that people are using that it is so confusing right now as to which tag to use to search for other bloggers who are live blogging.It is kinda of going against the whole purpose of having a tag. Couple of tags that you might want to try out to search other bloggers blogcamp , blogcampindia, indiablogcamp, blogcamplive, Following are a few bloggers who are live blogging right now

Kingsley2
Ranjith

Sunil Bajpai

http://maxiblog.wordpress.com/

Kartik Kannan

Neha Vishwanathan

Bothack

Scribbler

Rajesh Segu

update : picked this from the wiki here ( better way than technorati)

update2:

Xplore

Joy of Innovation

Rohan Pinto

Bhuvan