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Quick Summary: Check out my first podcast on Indicast where Aditya Mhatre, Aditya Mishra, VeerChand Bothra and I discuss why startups need workaholics and why mobile will drive web 2.0 usage in India.

My First Podcast on Indicast

I had a great time last Sunday recording my first podcast with Aditya Mhatre, Aditya Mishra, VeerChand Bothra (tweet) on why startups need workaholics and why mobile will drive web 2.0 usage in India (tweet).

All three of them have extremely rich backgrounds, resulting in an extremely vibrant discussion —

- Aditya Mhatre is India’s leading podcaster at Indicast (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- VeerChand Bothra is at the center of India’s mobile boom, as MobilePundit, as organizer of Mumbai Mobile Mondays and as VP at NetCore Solutions (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Aditya Mishra is deeply involved in the startup ecosystem in India through his work (he has the fancy title of Entrepreneur-in-Residence at TCS) and his role as the organizer of BarCamp and Kickstart (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

Michael Parekh picked up my ‘Oneupmanship in the Indian Sky’ post and wrote an interesting post about advertising as conversation -

Not a day goes by where we don’t see high profile bloggers get in each other’s faces, creating drama and soap operas, by saying what they really think, and letting their emotions hang out.

So the question that naturally follows is, why SHOULDN’T this be true for advertisers online?

It’s a radical thought, and I love radical thoughts, but I don’t see corporates using advertising as a conversation tool anytime soon, for the same reasons corporates rarely use CEO-blogging as a conversation tool (and, yes, I have read Naked Conversations). To participate in a conversation, you need to know that the conversation is bigger than yourself, you need to listen more and talk less, and you you need to be ready to admit that you don’t have all the answers. Corporates are not very good at any of these things.

Advertising (and CEO-blogs) will begin to become more like conversations when the three billboards in my previous post look like this -

Jet Airways: “A BIG ‘Thank You’ to all our competitors: you made us change!”

Tim O’Reilly’s draft blogger code of conduct was picked up by New York Times but has been the subject of much ridicule otherwise (Techmeme).

Robert Scoble takes the best dig at the logos -

Something tells me the sites with the ‘Anything Goes’ logo will be more interesting.

Heh!

Update - Tim O’Reilly responds to the criticism.

In response to Robert Scoble’s call to test Technorati Search vs Google Blog Search, I decided to search for Sanjaya and Shyamali Malakar (something I have been doing frequently anyway) -

- Sanjaya Malakar (without quotes) has 9988 results on Technorati (including 588 results from blogs with a lot of authority) versus 16437 results at Google Blog Search

- Shyamali Malakar (without quotes) has 517 results on Technorati (including 51 results from blogs with a lot of authority) versus 420 results at Google Blog Search

While the results from both Google Blog Search and Technorati don’t look like spam, I personally prefer to use Technorati because it allows me to filter results based on the authority of the blogs.

The verdict then? Based on number of search results - inconclusive. Based on usability - definitely Technorati.

By the way, it’s that time of the week again when I write a Sanjaya Malakar post. This week, I have two or three up my sleeve, and I’m not even counting this one.