Vinu’s Online Cloud

Akshay, or lecercle as I knew him from Flickr before, has called for a bloggers meet today tuesday 31st January 6pm! I am excited & I hope to make it there. Will be slightly delayed but will try my best The destination :

Cafe Coffee Day

Shop No. 14/15, Gagangiri Premises Building, Ground Floor,
Carter Road
Bandra WEST, Mumbai-52

I don’t know the route but I should be able to find it thanks to this lovely link from Akshay again - Mumbai Navigator - check it out, its awesome! I found out I can travel from my house to workplace by Bus route 70!! Nice job IITB folks Now wouldn’t it be a lot easy to just overlay that onto the map of bombay and get a rough visual overlook? something like a google maps! Rather - overlay it on top of a WAP browser i.e mobile and bang! .. wow thats some service I would pay for!!
Other folks who have given links to spread the word:

Dina Mehta (whom i met at Digital Summit!)
Indsight
Saket (name thru Trivial Matters)
DesiPundit

Meet called by Scott, Winksite and of course do look at the metrobloggin Mumbai website. I think Mumbai or Bombay I still call it is the 40th metro on the list! folks, correct me if I am wrong. Lets get more pro-active and put Bombay on the bloggin map. And yeah, if possible, a Indian BloggerCon !! next year this time?
ps: most of the info from Akshay’s site Trivial Matters. He does a lovely photo documentary type bloggin of mumbai! I am sure, he should try for a national geographic position or something. Atleast, he is developing a lovely portfolio!

And lastly, I took this photo at the Digital Summit - can you guess who are sitting there??

Its Dina Mehta with her laptop (onto the right) and Kiruba (left) - the topmost A-list blogger in India??! Here is a list of top 100 India Bloggers for your help if you want to digg more! Anyway, I didn’t realise that it was kiruba when i clicked. I was just taking a snap of Dina (live blogging here in this photo) whom I had met the day before.

And yeah, I of course had the pleasure of meeting Kiruba the next day in my office thanks to Veer - Mobilepundit and Rajesh - Emergic (and I hope to be meeting Atanu soon too!). Kiruba and I exchanged ideas of making a podcast - it has not materialised yet but any takers kindly join the bandwagon (comment to this post).

Enough of blabbering … hope to meet you all there. I shall be to grab a cappuchino around 6:30 to 7pm. Anyway do call me at 9867-980887 if you wanna have a chat anytime. Hope to see ya all. Sayonara for the night!!!

This week has been simply amazing in terms of “live” sports. All the TV networks in India have done an amazing J.O.B!! Literally one could watch L.I.V.E at almost all hours of the day and night! And the variety … wow don’t ask! Unlike the US its not just football, basketball or baseball!! And yeah, I am talking of content from all over the world!
Cricket:
early morning (via ESPN courtesy channel 9)- live ODIs in Australia of the tri-series between South Africa, SriLanka and Australia
late morning to evening (Ten sports) - live Test Match: India vs Pakistan

Tennis:
Grand Slam: Australian Open (Star Sports)
Some amazing LIVE matches, to name a few:

• Baghdatis vs Nalbadian
• Mens doubles Final - unfortuantely Paes and his partner lost!
• Mixed doubles Final - Bhupathi and Hingis won!! yupee!

Of course, Federer won today! He one level above everybody currently. But it was nice to see some competitive matches! Unfortunate that Mauresmo couldn’t really get the satisfaction of beating her opponents in the semis and final. But hey, she was all prepared.

Hockey:
Live hockey league on ESPN

Soccer : Live European and English Premier league late night on ESPN

Given that I am working now, I was able to enjoy live matches only on Thursday, Saturday and Today!! But hey that was cool. Just watching the highlights at the end of the day was more than satisfying.

Checking the content out on Indian TV in general, I somehow feel social media is atleast a nice decade away (atleast in India)! any takers on this debate?? Does anyone think, mass of people having other things to do also can take up this entire media empire??

I have been collecting articles to answer “Why do people blog? or Why should people blog?” Before the blogpost materializes (hopefully by somtime next weekend) I thought I shall make a quick stat check of my clout ‘online’ :D! and guess what I ain’t that bad!! This blog is currently not doing that well I know there are two readers atleast on bloglines who have them on their blogroll. And somehow on a average I get 15 views per day! which is not bad. But one look at the graph and its pretty disappointing :-). Onto some graphics:

Here is my online ego meter reading not bad uh?? I come up on the first page of a google search for my name twice - not at all bad for starters!

Looking further into my wordpress stats (figure below) - the spike in the middle is when I circulated my post regarding mobile industry in India. But then, the bumps on the curve are everytime I write a post! Otherwise i do get hits from search engines. My engineering background says that - the top points of the graph look like an exponential decay! And the half life is around 10 days … in short if I want a good sustainable audience, I should come up with good articles atleast once in 10 days with a bit of general writing here and there and yeah, some amount of self circulation!

Next, is my flickr status. Many people, rather bloggers, discount flickr as a blog platform! Its has been a strong and easy Photoblogging experience for me. I wonder why photo blogging is sidelined a lot by people. The ‘writing’ blogosphere considers themselves an elite group! Believe me most of the times a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures are the best form of expression. Flickr is addictive and the members in flickr are really cool! Damn, I am paying money for using flickr and I am also an evangelist for the service. Its one of the coolest apps I have used in my life. Close to 20 people I know are using flickr due to me! (ps: I do a good job at convincing! I have influenced two people to buy macs last year ha ha…)

Coming back here are my flickr stats:

I have had close to 21,500 views this year which I feel is amazing. I am just using flickr to experiment. I am treating my flickr account as a way of making a photo diary, so that I can come back later sometime this year or in my life to - say or see or feel - this day last year or that year kind of thing. I started out using flickr for mobile picture blogging. I loved it. I have a small groups 2.0 idea using mobile picture blogging + flickr + yahoogroups in my mind. Will share the idea soon. Meanwhile check my tags on flickr by clicking on the following tag cloud. I haven’t tagged lot of pics on my flickr account due to privacy reasons. In a way, my pictures are public but difficult to ‘digg’ :). Ahem, remember difficult not impossible!!