Gauravonomics Blog

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Someone asked me recently why I write about social media and social change.

I write about social media because it’s a multi-layered phenomenon that can lead to significant social change in terms of how consumers engage with businesses and citizens engage with civil society organizations and governments.

I have talked about the four layers of social media in my 4Cs of Social Media Framework.

The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The fourth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.  Read More

Here’s the introduction to my Georgetown University course on Social Media in Business, Development, and Government (PDF and PPTX) –

Social media technologies are disrupting power equations between consumers and businesses on one hand and citizens and governments on the other hand, especially in the context of emerging countries. Therefore, it is essential that thinkers and practitioners in the areas of business, development and government understand the use and impact of social media technologies.

Through readings, guest lectures, and case studies, the course will provide students the conceptual understanding of the power and philosophy of social media. The course will specifically focus on how social media is changing media, business, development, and government in fundamental ways, especially in emerging countries in Asia and Africa.

The course will also help students gain practical facility in the use of social media tools. More importantly, students will learn meta skills like how to learn to use new social media tools, how to use filters to make sense of social media, how to curate news and knowledge and how to engage in an online public debate.

Here is a detailed syllabus: Google Docs/ PDF/ DOCX.

Cross-posted at my course blog.

Gabe Riviera at Techmeme puts together a list of the 50 biggest stories of 2008 and it’s all about Google, Yahoo. Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.

I didn’t blog about even one of these stories, and, in retrospect, I would have blogged about only one story: Google indexing its one trillionth URL.

I’m not saying that these aren’t important stories, just that they are too mainstream to be of interest to me. I want a Techmeme for stories about how social media and mobile are changing media, business, government and development. Does anybody know where to look?

A few hours at the Indian consulate in New York induced a rare rant from Seth Godin –

Many of the chairs are broken, leaving sharp steel platforms on which to crouch. And there aren’t enough chairs, broken or not. The signs are confusing, the two clerks are protected by a sheet of glass a full inch thick (which is twice the thickness of a typical bank’s) and the little machine that dispenses deli-style tickets is broken.

When Seth Godin is in India, which he is presumably going to be, someone should take him to the US consulate to check if getting a US visa in India is a more pleasant experience than getting an Indian visa in the US. I have a suspicion that the visit will inspire another, even more spirited, rant from him.