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The Delhi Blogger Meet and Tweetup

Saturday 9th May was the 29th Delhi Blogger Meet at the Maximum Store at Shahpur Jat, Delhi.

It was arranged by the inimitable Twilightfairy and Mojosanjay (if you don’t know their real names then you’re obviously not a part of the Delhi Bloggers Bloc 😀 )

The guest was Sam Miller, author of “Delhi: Adventures of a Megacity“.

Some of the other bloggers and twitterati who landed up were Sidin Vadukut, Mayank Dhingra, Saad, Deepak Shenoy, Kishore Bhargava, his wife Jyoti, sister Mala and his son. Others also included P.Jain, Ankur Banerjee, Aayush Soni, Honeytech, and the big twitterati  Vijayandra Mohanty. Some people we missed were Rajesh Lalwani, Palinn and Bhawna Sharma.

Some interesting points that got discussed were:

  1.  A common theme that emerged was that we all seemed to be spending much more time on Twitter and neglecting our blogs. The point that emerged was that twitter was a great medium to just share links and reply to people while a blog was a better place to bring out longer thoughts that needed to be mulled and reflected over. updated: I actually quoted this US recruiting blogger who posted that twitter is a stream of thoughts and context setting is impossible. If one replies to my tweet in the next couple of hours I can get the context – later than that I am unable to figure it out. Remembered due to BombayAddict’s post on the related topic.

    So Twitter is great for context free conversations.

    Blogging for setting the context and presenting a cogent logical argument. 

  2. A concern was expressed by some people that with so much virtual relationships were real world skills going to be lost – were people focusing too much on electronic medium that ‘higher’ things like reading and conversation were suffering. I disagreed with the premise, quoting Clay Shirky’s book – and saying that engagement of any level is better – than say being focused on passive consumption.
  3. Vimoh raised the point that medium like twitter enable him to have conversations with people on broader and deeper issues than the ones he ends up having with real world friends – which tend to be mundane. Guess I should have repeated this tweet of mine here. 
  4. Some others shared how twitter has been a useful tool for reporting out things like earthquakes and terror attacks.
  5. I raised the point that tools are irrelevant beyond a point. One can move from network to network and keep connecting with the same and new connections. Sairee, a friend from Ryze network was there, and though she’s not blogging and tweeting we’re still connected via facebook. 
  6. Sidin shared how he’s going to track the mood of the nation via twitter once the election results come up on 16th May! 

I guess after that snacks and cold drinks and samosas landed up which made everybody get up and indulge in one on one  and network in smaller groups.

Overall it was a fun evening.

Going back, these thoughts came to me:

gautamghosh skills a digital life builds: multi-tasking, audience analysis, meta-cognition, reflection, engagement with larger social processes

gautamghosh if you let technology control you instead of vice versa don’t blame the tech. Blame your own lack of control1 day ago from mobile web

gautamghosh skills a digital life builds: multi-tasking, audience analysis, metacognition, reflection, engagement with larger social processes1 day ago from mobile web

On the Delhi Tweetup

On Saturday evening I was faced with a little dilemma. The Delhi Tweetup organized by the Delhi Bloggers’ Bloc was scheduled at the same time as Abhijit’s book release function. While the former was at Nehru Place, the latter was scheduled at Select Citywalk Mall, Saket.

Like the naive DALHIite I assumed I could get to the Tweetup and then drive down to Saket. 

How could I have been such a fool. Apologies Mr. Bhaduri, but the devilish Delhi traffic put paid to rest any such plans I had.

However, the tweetup was great ! 

It was the second such occasion for me (the previous one being in Mumbai) when I got to meet people who are online friends.

So there were people like prolificd, twilightfairy, mojosanjay, arjunghosh, vimoh who I’ve been interacting with for some time and others like jeetblog, mayankdhingra, simplyarun and kumar_rahul whom I got to know also.

There were quite a few other people, and interestingly they were still not on Twitter. 

Was asked to kick off the session , and I guess I rambled a bit about social media, conversations and how the quality of conversations is most important for any social media enthusiast. I took the creativity model of “divergence and then convergence” to draw a parallel that any information overload has to be funneled the same way, diverging to get a diversity of opinions and then converging – according to each user’s capacity to filter and get value from those conversations. Of course, the name of Scoble cropped up and I also talked about Gauravonomics as people who can monitor immense social media ‘rivers of feeds’ and also to keep engaging in real conversations also. 

I guess it’s a skill that some people develop over time. 

My invitation for the group was to be sure what is the value they are looking for from Social Media. Whether they are looking to be at the edges of their own chosen areas. And we talked of cool web 2.0 jobs as well, like Editors for Tweeting, as Penelope Trunk blogged recently she can’t tweet about investing and sex in 140 characters without an editor! Of course Monetization came up too – and stumped me. Only one person tweeted that the talk was cool… so I really don’t know if I did well at all 😀

Mayank Dhingra talked about the startup he’s co-founded, Kwippy and how it looks at microblogging from a conversational perspective, and the things they have done to build a community there. I got myself an account today and it seems promising. 

Priyanka a.ka. Twlightfairy talked about her personal experience of having her Flickr picture being plagiarised and used by Times of India and their refusal to believe that they had done anything wrong! The discussion evolved into the complex definition of copyright laws and the power of big media houses and of course the Indian judicial system’s non-enabling role. The story had a kind of happy ending with Times of India agreeing to compensate her for the commercial use of the picture and also printing a corrigendum yesterday.

Rahul then talked about copyright and the linkage with early times of the web and where we are headed now.

It was becoming a little late for me and I had to leave his talk midway.

It was a great experience and am already looking for the next occasion I can get to meet the gang again.
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