Gauravonomics Blog

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Many of you might have noticed that I’m linkblogging again.

In the last few months, I have been doing most of my linkblogging on Twitter. However, often, I have found myself wanting to quote an excerpt or add a comment that just won’t fit in a 140 character tweet (or two). Also, I was seeing how useful linkblogging could be at textually.org, Putting People First and SocialMedia.biz.

So, last week, I hesitantly decided to start linkblogging again, by highlighting interesting news related to social media, social innovation and internet culture in 200 words or less. These posts typically have a link to the source on the top, followed by a one or two paragraph excerpt and a one or two line comment.

You’ll find that I have a strong bias towards news that is weird, or related to mobile, Twitter, or the BRIC countries. You’ll rarely find any news related to Google/ Yahoo!/ Microsoft/ Facebook; you should head to Techmeme for that.

The week of linkblogging has been great fun. The LinkBlog category already accounts for a fourth of my traffic and, in fact, represents an increase in my overall traffic. Similarly, the item use on my RSS feed is up by at least 25% and almost half the readers are clicking through to the original source.

The Social Innovation Camp in London sounds interesting (via Chris Heuer via JD Lasica) –

From a Friday evening to Sunday afternoon we had over 80 talented developers, designers, social needs experts, mentors, facilitators and those with business, marketing and legal skills to help accelerate seven early-stage ideas for web-based tools to change the world.

We set them the challenge of building seven social start-ups in less than 48 hours and let them loose.

But this weekend wasn’t supposed to just be about winning or making a back-of-the-envelope idea a reality.

Social Innovation Camp is also about practically demonstrating just what web-enabled people-power can do to change important things. All of our seven ideas are about building platforms which allow people to organise things better for themselves using digital tools.

I like such idea to reality in 48 hours unconferences, and this one even has a social innovation theme. Let’s do one in Mumbai when I’m back.

I’ll be speaking about my off consumption experiment at the Mandala NYC event on October 16th.

Mandala seeks to –

transform the cultural conversation to one that has meaning and depth

– by organizing “performance parties” that provide the context for meaningful conversations.

Do read about the previous Mandala events in August and September and do check out the profiles of fellow speakers — relationship coach Michael Jascz, artist Steven Hirsch and green energy guy Jonathan Colby.

By the way, my belief in serendipity was reinforced when organizer David Friedlader invited me to speak at the event. I’m attending another event in NYC on the same day — The Feast Social Innovation Conference –

The Feast will gather 150 of the world’s leading creative mavericks, entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, radicals, and innovators together to inspire action to change the world. Anchored in innovative ideas with a focus on action, The Feast will take a cross-disciplinary look at digital answers to global problems, social design solutions and successful triple-bottom line business models.

If you are in NYC on October 16th, do drop in to one or both of the events.