Gauravonomics Blog

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The facts first.

In February 2008, Lancashire detective constable Richard Horton started writing the anonymous NightJack blog, which shared an insider’s perspective on policing and politics in a small English town. By January 2009, he had a daily readership of about 1500, but grew tired of the blog and stopped writing. Then NightJack won the prestigious Orwell Prize in March 2009 and his readership went up to half a million visitors a week.

When Times reporter Patrick Foster found his true identity by triangulating the digital trail he had left behind, Richard Horton deleted his blog and asked for an injunction to prevent the Times from revealing it. Justice Eady rejected the plea. The Times revealed Richard Horton’s identity in an expose and Richard Hortonhimself wrote a piece in The Times explaining why he had started and deleted the blog.

For more details see Daily Mail, Financial Times, BBC1 and BBC2.

It’s important that we begin by trying to understand the complex moral ambiguity in the curious case of NightJack Richard Horton.

Leading Indian blog community BlogAdda recently did an interview with me.

We talked about the use of social media technologies in the 2009 Indian elections, about our crowd-sourced election monitoring platform Vote Report India, about my approach to social media, and about my new social media analytics company 20:20 Web Tech.

In response to a question on how I promote my blog, I mentioned that the directionality needs to be the other way round. If positioned well, your blog should be able to promote you and your ideas.

I also said that the most gratifying aspect of blogging is being able to develop an idea in public over time. I first wrote about social media outsourcing more than one year back and now my series of posts on the subject has led to 20:20 Web Tech.

My advice to a new blogger? Use your blog to learn, share what you have learned and build a reputation. My blog, for instance, has led to a fellowship, a teaching gig, numerous speaking opportunities, a few book chapters, and now a company.

You can read my full BlogAdda interview here.

The IndiBlogger.in State of the Indian Blogosphere 2009 report, co-authored by me, was featured in Indian daily Indian Express recently on a story on blogging in India.

This is also the first news story on 20:20 Web Tech, which isn’t bad, given that we just started.

I can’t find a link to the story online, but here is the full text of the story —

Indian Bloggers’ park stormed with 15 percent more posts during election period

PRANAV KULKARNI

PUNE, MAY 20

The sensitivity of the latter is such that after almost every important phenomenon that takes place across the sphere, the blogosphere is stormed with posts and comments that trigger open discussions, views, debates and forums. According to a national analysis conducted by Gaurav Mishra, co founder 20:20 Web Tech and Vote Report India and Renie Ravin of Banglore-based IndiBlogger.in, the postings on the Indian blog world witnessed an increase of over 15 percent in the month of May- thanks to the ongoing Indian Premiere League fever and the most sensitive- election results.

Renie Ravin of IndiBlogger.in recently shared some interesting data with me from the 7895 blogs that IndiBlogger.in crawls. IndiBlogger.in is a vibrant community of Indian blogs with some excellent features like a topic-wise directory with ranks (IndiRank) and a meme-tracker (IndiVine).

I have put together the highlights in an IndiBlogger.in State of the Indian Blogosphere Dashboard –

You can also have a look at the full State of the Indian Blogosphere report at SlideShare –

Here are the highlight of the report –

- More than three-fourths of the blogs in the IndiBlogger.in community are written by men.

- The top five languages are English, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Telugu. 92% of the blogs are in English. Renie believes that Indic languages are under-represented in the IndiBlogger.in community, but the distribution between various Indic languages should be representative.

- The top five cities are Bangalore, Chennai, NCR, Mumbai and Hyderabad, which together account for almost three-fourths of all blogs. The city-wise distribution should be fairly representative, but the metros might be over-represented in the sample because these blogger may be more aware of IndiBlogger.in.

I was quoted recently in Indian daily Mid Day on a story on Alliance Francaise students blogging in French.

However, Internet professional and avid blogger Gaurav Mishra thinks that the trend of blogging in foreign languages is not a wise one. “In other countries, people blog in English because they want to reach out to the rest of the world. We already blog in English as a default, why would we change that,” said this author of gauravonomics.com.

Aastha approached me to ask if I was seeing a trend towards Indian bloggers writing in foreign languages. I said “no” and even did a sanity check by asking my friends on Twitter if they had come across such blogs (they hadn’t). So, I told Aastha that there is no trend here and she’ll be better off doing a story on how blogging is being used in classrooms. But, journalists sometimes stick with stories they are working on, even if those stories don’t exist.

In any case, I have also been slightly misquoted in the story. Here is my original quote.

Aastha: So do you think if this trend catches on, about Indians blogging in different languages, could it be of any help?

Introduction: Freedom of Expression in the Indian Blogosphere

The Indian blogosphere is abuzz with discussions on freedom of expression after the Supreme Court refused to throw out Shiv Sena’s defamation case against 19 year old computer science student Ajith D (TOI).

However, the Indian blogosphere’s reactions to the controversy are mostly based on reports on the incident in Indian media and the quality of this reporting has been very mediocre, with few details and little background information. As a result, bloggers are reacting to incomplete information.

So, before I do a roundup of the Indian blogosphere’s reactions to the story and share my own views, let me first present the basic facts.

Shiv Sena’s Tradition of Violent Protests

Let’s start with Shiv Sena itself. Shiv Sena is a far right political party in Maharashtra that built a strong base amongst the Marathi community in the sixties based on its militant ideology that Maharashtra belonged to the Marathi community and migrants from other Indian states should be thrown out. Starting from the mid-seventies, the Shiv Sena shifted its focus to a strong pro-Hindutva (and anti-Muslim) ideology, a shift that solidified in the mid nineties, when it became an integral part of right wing alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Tim Johnson in The Washington Post reports that Vietnam’s communist government has taken several steps in recent months to curtail blogging in the country.

These include giving police broad authority to move against online critics of the government, banning obscenity and debauchery, punishing bloggers in court, and putting pressure on Yahoo! and Google, who host the most popular blogging platforms in the country.

Out of Vietnam’s overall population of 88 million, almost 24 million people regularly use the web and they have been quick to use blogging to circumvent the state media’s tight control on news. Much of the discussion, often based on stories from foreign media outlets, is frequently critical of the government. However, after a period of relative freedom, the authorities have started to limit the freedom of the country’s vibrant blogosphere.

While Western media loves to focus on censorship in communist countries like China and Vietnam, I am seeing a tendency to impose controls over what citizens can or cannot do online across a range of countries, from United States, Australia and United Kingdom to India, using some of the same tactics. Perhaps, the internet has become too much of a public sphere for most governments.

The UK foreign secretary David Miliband maintains a rather interetsing official blog.

Chris Morris from BBC has an interesting account of David Miliband’s recent trip to Amethi with Congress general secretary (and heir to the Nehru-Gandhi “dynasty”) Rahul Gandhi –

Excitement builds during a stop at a mobile phone shop in a nearby town. The owner says 80% of local people have a mobile phone.

“He’s exaggerating,” Rahul Gandhi admits, “but the numbers are growing fast.”

This shop alone sells between five and 10 phones a day.

The foreign secretary wants to send an e-mail, to write on his blog. “It’ll cost you seven rupees (£0.1),” Mr Gandhi says, and the money is secured.

But sadly the line is down… the blog will have to wait. The mobile revolution is having a huge effect in rural India, but connectivity takes time.

On his own blog, David Miliband talks about the mobile revolution in India –

We stopped at an internet café in the middle of nowhere - I wanted to do a blog but the dial-up was not fast enough. But the mobile phone revolution is reaching here - the shop was selling 5 - 10 mobile phones a day, and although there are 850 million people on less than $2 a day, 8.5 million new subscriptions per month is eating in to the backlog.

One of my seven social media predictions for India for 2009 was that social media will play an important role in the 2009 Indian general elections.

Young people in India are more engaged with politics than ever in the aftermath of the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack and this engagement will carry through to the 2009 elections.

I believe that we will see an unprecedented amount of online debate on the many problems facing India and even specific political parties and candidates. We will also see a serious “get out the vote” campaign to get more young people to go out to vote. We will also see some politicians experiment with social media tools, hoping to replicate the magic of Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign. The Lok Sabha elections for 2009 may even produce India’s first tech Prime Minister.

I think that we saw the first tentative steps in that direction when BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani started a blog yesterday (via Soumyadeep).

The first blog post talks about how he has seen election campaigning change between 1952 and 2009 and explains his reasons for starting a blog –

At the beginning of 2008, I had set three blogging goals for myself –

- Write 100 posts with original content
- Increase my subscriber count from 250 to 1000
- Increase my Technorati authority from 200 to 500 and enter the Technorati top 1000.

Here’s how I have done against these three goals –

- I have written 287 posts in 2008 and 115 posts in December 2008 itself (69 of these are from my hyperactive linkblog category), and I like most of the posts I wrote last year. So, in terms of both quantity and quality of posting, I’m quite happy with what I did in 2008.

- Between the three main feeds I offer on my website, I have 1020 feed subscribers. So even though my feed subscribers are fragmented across three feeds, I have achieved that goal too.

- My Technorati authority is 292 and my Technorati rank is 11064, so I have missed my target of entering the Technorati 1000 by a big margin.

More importantly, by blog resulted in a big career change in 2008, as it led to the Yahoo! Fellowship and a teaching gig at Georgetown University, apart from several media appearances and speaking opportunities.