Welcome to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my combined feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss a single post. Thanks for visiting!
Now that my blog is my work for the next nine months, I thought it will be useful to redefine the focus of my blog(s), both as a guide to my readers and to myself.
During my tenure as the Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University, my official fellowship blog — How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies — will be my main blog. In my daily posts on the blog, I’ll mostly focus on how social media will be used differently in BRIC countries as compared to US/ EU, but also riff frequently on the broader theme of how international values apply to the development and use of new communications technologies in BRIC countries. From mid-September, I will start hosting a weekly podcast with thinkers and practitioners from the social media and social entrepreneurship fields, and from mid-December, I will become involved in inviting and editing contributions for a crowd-sourced paper (or e-book) on how global values shape communications technologies. So, my fellowship blog will demand most of my time and energy and I would urge you to subscribe to it in a feed reader or by e-mail.
As many of you know, I am in month six of my year long off consumption experiment. The experiment involves buying only the bare necessities, and nothing but the necessities, for an entire year, with the intent of immersing myself into the subculture of people who have chosen to define their identities by means other than buying or owning things.
As many of you know, I have been recording my experiences during the year in a blog called ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’, because, well, I am the marketer who went off consumption.
I have decided now that it’s time to say goodbye to the marketer who went off consumption and focus on other stories, on other people who have stepped off the work-watch-spend treadmill, or asked themselves difficult questions about identity, or chosen to define themselves by means other than buying or owning things.
So, I’ll continue to write the blog, and I’ll continue to tell my own stories, but the blog won’t be about me anymore. The focus of the blog will shift away from reality TV mode to immersive journalism or ethnography mode.
I have no patience for the stuff in the dead zone, the items that are too slick to be real, but not slick enough to be a marvel.
Seth Godin’s advice is that if you can’t make it really slick, you should make it really simple.
My advice is that even if you can make it really slick, you should make it really simple.
First, let me say that I agree with Seth Godin — it only works if it’s really slick or really simple; all the in-between stuff is mostly mediocre. So, yes, if you can’t make it really slick, you should make it really simple.
However, it takes more time and effort to make things really slick than to make them really simple, and if both really simple and really slick have the same effectiveness, why not go with really simple?
I am a big believer in this thinking and you will notice that both my website template and my daily vidcast are so simple that they are perhaps too simple.
I recently announced that I’ll be spending some serious time this year working on MobiChange, a social entrepreneurship venture that will leverage mobile social networking for mobilizing social change.
I have been doing some research on how to use social media for social change and I believe that a truly powerful social 2.0 initiative needs to be –
1. Mobile, because most of the developing world still doesn’t have access to computers.
2. Scalable, because standalone events/ initiatives can only have limited localized impact.
3. Self-sustainable, because it won’t last unless it pays for itself.
I haven’t done a vidcast so far because I didn’t have the right camera, the right microphone, the right editing software, the right studioesque setting. It’s a little ironic, then, that I’m finally doing my vidcast when I don’t even have a laptop, or a room I don’t have to share with someone.
I record my vidcast on my Nokia E71 mobile phone, during the few moments I have the room to myself either at my office, or my hostel. Then I upload it to YouTube from my mobile phone itself, whenever I have access to a fast enough wi-fi connection.
I see my vidcast as a lesson. To do something we really want to do — write a book, make a movie, start a business, travel the world — we need fewer resources — time, money, energy, gadgets — than we think we do.
So, what is it that you really want to do? What is stopping you from doing it? Think about it. Maybe, you already have everything that you need.
The interesting twist is that I’ll record, edit and upload my vidcasts exclusively from my Nokia E71 smartphone. So, the vidcast is also an experiment in what is possible and what is not possible with mobile technology. Stay tuned.
