Why 42% of India still falls below the international poverty line?

Why 34% of India is still uneducated?

Why we have a national crime rate of 167.7%?

In search of these answers I tend to agree more with George Bernard Shaw when he says Democracy is a government of the fools, for the fools, by the fools than Abraham Lincoln’s original thought where he says Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people.

People are core of the democracy but collectively can they form a better government? I doubt. Albert Einstein had once said, "two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe". True. On a large extent people are stupid. They are emotional. They are jerks. Most of them are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings. They are simple careless. They don’t care. And, if they don’t care you can’t expect them to make a collective wise decision.

In Democratic India, we have seen prime ministers whose names were not known to more than 50% of the public – till the time they became prime minister. I wonder – what kind of democracy is this? Our current Prime Minister doesn’t even bother to go to public and fight an election. He is happy with the blessings of monarchy – which again increases my doubt over the form of democracy we have adopted. 

We have a democratic state like Kashmir, whose problem is getting bigger and bigger. None of the democratic institutions are able to solve this. We have a democracy where more than one million people across 10 different states are fighting against government since past two decades, and our democratic institutions are helpless. 

If we go back in history and see the origin of democracy we’ll find the traces back in India. The place was Vaishali, a city in North Bihar which came into existence around 4th century BC. The famous King Nabhaga abdicated the thorne due to an accusation about Human Rights violation. The city then declared itself a Democratic Republic (Prajatantrik Ganarajya) – first democracy of the world.

The point which I want to make here is – we [Indians] have seen various forms of government in India and democracy has never been a successful form, at least not in last 2500 years of known history. I would not like to comment as what should / could be the alternative but I would surely recommend a revisit to Indian History. Every nation has its own culture, own way of living and own way to govern. We need to understand our way of democracy or rather say government. In stead of blindly following global form of democracy we need to rely more on something which we have learnt from our past.

I know this subject can’t be discussed  in just 500 words. It needs lots of study, lots of facts, lots of brainstorming. Though, I would just like to trigger a discussion which can help us to think on various spectrums of this topic. 

Submitting this post to “Mera Bharat Mahaan” contest of Blogadda and Pringoo

Recently  I was working on a formula for deriving most influential users on social media. This formula was intended to work across sources [Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Digg, Reddit, etc]. The challenge was not to find people who are influencing others but to find how much influence they have. This was little tough when we had to measure it across sources of various nature. Nevertheless, the formula was constructed and we used it at ContextMine. Once this feature was added to the application, I tried to test it. The first thing I did was to find out who is the most influential user for keyword “Social Media”. I was amazed to see the output. It was showing Pete Cashmore and TechCrunch. You can get the list of most influential users for your own keyword here. 

Moving further, I tried to research little more on this subject. I came across Twitalyzer which publishes The Most Influential People in Twitter. There are so many other reports on Influence of people in different aspects of life. There is an article on businessweek about The 25 Most Influential People on Web.

 
Few questions which may drag attention on this entire discussion are: Do we really need to know who are influential? Does that really impacts my business? I would say – No, this is not required but Yes, it does have impact. We must have this information and how to use it, should be our call.

There is an another thought. Jonah Peretti, who the New York Times called the "viral marketing hotdog”, says, Influence is overrated. He further explains –

We all love the idea of “influentials”—those hyper-connected, ultra-respected thought leaders that can make your product reach the tipping point. But have you ever actually met an influential that can repeatedly and consistently make a product go viral? Probably not, because the latest science and real world experimentation shows that “influentials” don’t really exist, that viral growth is partly random, and that riding a wave is much easier than creating it.

If we consider this thought – nothing is constantly influential. It changes. It acts randomly. The viral effect can be an outcome of a trivial incident or a trigger. But, if we can measure the influence – can’t we use it? Reason may be different. It may be random. But, can we deny the importance of this information? Probably not. Though, how to use this measurement may be a matter of personal / organizational thought process.

Looking for your views.

On a similar note, Getting Real talks about the importance of Done.

Decisions are temporary so make the call and move on

Done. Start to think of it as a magical word. When you get to done it means something’s been accomplished. A decision has been made and you can move on. Done means you’re building momentum.

But wait, what if you screw up and make the wrong call? It’s ok. This isn’t brain surgery, it’s a web app. As we keep saying, you’ll likely have to revisit features and ideas multiple times during the process anyway. No matter how much you plan you’re likely to get half wrong anyway. So don’t do the “paralyis through analysis” thing. That only slows progress and saps morale.

Doing it correctly at first go is important, but strive to make it perfect, adds extra burden. The importance question is – do we really need to make it perfect? Can we ever achieve zero defect stage in our product development life cycle? If not – then why to prolong our normal flow to consummate that extra piece of quality?

When things are looking like a never-ending-process, we need to think. We need to revisit our plan and see whether it is really required to continue? Or, we can consider a logical end and move on. Sometimes, theoretically or rather say emotionally it doesn’t look like a good solution but it actually works. STOP at a logical end and START working on other modules always helps in a long run.

Product Development is a journey which requires STOP n START multiple times. We just need to understand when is the time to call them.

In IT, we have been using aggregation in various forms. Drudge Report and The Huffington Post started the news aggregation while lots of other RSS feed readers started aggregating syndicated web content. These services played a big role in taking the web content easily to million of users who didn’t have time to browse websites one-by-one. After the social networking boom the next round of aggregation started in the form of Social Networking Aggregation. Lots of products / services were launched to cater this need. The new era on Internet is the era of Social Media. It has become the numero uno reason for browsing internet, surpassing the previous popular reason, porn. Plenty of social media sites are running and by each passing day it’s getting crowded more n more. Tracking each of these services is tough, hence, we need another form of aggregation, Social Media Aggregation.

Websites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Digg, Reddit has their own distinct features. Different set of people use these websites for different reasons. As a marketer I get a tough time when I try to track online presence of my brand across all these websites. In this scenario I would love to have an aggregator which can monitor all these social media websites and give me a consolidated report. ContextMine is one of such tools which does this aggregation. This market is also diverse in nature. For example, there are specific search engines to search content / messages floating on real time web. Collecta is one of those search engines.

Aggregated data which is contextual and real time, gives a real feel of your social reputation. Marketing professionals are already planning to utilize this domain, and owing to this need, there are plenty of services ready to cater. It would be interesting to watch out this space going forward.

One of such marvelous magnetism was shown by Shane Warne. Leadership is the ability to get extraordinary achievement from ordinary people. When Shane Warne got a team of ordinary players, he had the same thing in his mind. He proved that a leader can make things happen, and make them happen in a BIG way. Rajasthan Royals became the first IPL Champion and the key was the passion of Shane Warne. He portrays the basic rule of success. At the end of the day, It’s not the name but the work that matters. In an intense competition where everybody is relying on reputation – you can concentrate on your work and by-product success, will automatically follow.

Second stupendous charisma to watch was Adam Gilchrist. Jealously is normally treated as a bad feeling to have, but in some proposition it gives a better result. That is exactly what happened with Adam Gilchrist when Shane Warne’s team became a champion of first IPL. The battle of ego, expertise between Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist has always been a news. You can read about it here, and also here. So, the point here is – in certain scenarios you perform brilliantly because you want to prove yourself better than your competitor. The jealousy can compel you to achieve success.

In a tremendous pressure, there could be only two outcomes, either a diamond will emerge or it could be vanished with no reigns remaining. Fortunately MS Dhoni emerged as a diamond from IPL 3. He proved the notion that if you handle the pressure well, you can achieve the desired results. Expectations can lead into performance. And, the high expectation everybody had with Dhoni was converted into a high performance by mighty Indian Captain. Chennai’s victory in third edition of the league is credited to exceptional leadership skill of MS Dhoni, which blossomed even under formidable pressure.

Along with this, there are many more lessons to learn from masters like Sachin, Kumble, Ganguly. Let’s hope to see some great achievements going further.

In my last post, I talked about the power of information and how relevant information is still not a reality in web world. Taking that discussion forward, the next question is, if search engines are not providing relevant information, who does?  The answer is nobody does it at this point of time. But, there are many players who are working on this model, including Google. In third quarter of 2009, Google launched its real time search engine. While launching this new search they stated.

Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world’s information, and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices you use to access it.

Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.

The point is, real time information may not be very popular but it’s relevant. There are many other players who are eyeing this market. Recently I was looking at a service socialmention. They have an interesting way to show search results. Along with real time search from across universe [that’s what they say]; they also show strength, sentiment, passion and reach of the searched object.

There is another service called whostalking. They have a different approach of showing search results. They categorize it with source. They have options like “Twitter”, “FriendFeed”, “Plurk”, “Wordpress”, etc. You can search your results from any of these sources.

If you look at many other small search engines, you will find they all are doing something innovative. They all are trying to grab a share of this emerging market. They all know – The Search Business is still open.

Information is power, true, but everybody doesn’t need everything available on internet. Digging into relevance, contextual information is the next step one needs to perform. Google, Yahoo, etc gives all the information you want for a specific topic but 90% of these results are not very useful. Also, they lack to provide categorical search.

For example, if I search for India in Google, it shows 42 billion results.

Do I need all of them? No – they all are not useful.

Then, how to get useful information out of it?

Can I have categorical information – something like, Sport, Politics, Business, etc?

When I search the same in WolframAlpha I get the knowledge related to India. Again, there’s nothing more than few statistical information. I tried this on search.twitter.com and all which I got was real time talks about India.  The point which I want to highlight is – they all are good in their own domain but users still don’t have lots of flexibility when it comes to internet search.

Going back to information – Internet is a major source. It has all the data we want but we do not have any tool to get relevant data out of it. Search Engines, Yes, they claim to crawl almost everything on Internet but that includes lots of junk data as well. They bring everything which they can. They can’t understand the context of search. Proactive search is something they simply don’t care to provide.

Recently we saw how Facebook surpasses Google as the most visited website on Internet. What does this mean? People are relying more on recommended information than searched information.

Does that give a signal of how Internet search is going to emerge in future?

Yes, it does. We need more social search than static search. We need to involve context with our search results. It could be in the form of region, interest, source, gender or any other broad category. We also need to provide this flexibility to users so that they can get data as they want. They should be able to configure their own search results.

Google is a giant in this business but going forward the power would shift to those who can provide relevant search, contextual search.

One of the blogs at computerworld starts as “Remember back in the day when we worked from 9-5, nights and weekends were reserved for friends and family, and never the twain shall meet?” It further says that “Now that an estimated 23% of American workers telecommute, many use online social networks as a way to stay connected to co-workers and colleagues. Those who are chained to a company desk often use (or sneak onto) Twitter or Facebook to stay in touch with friends outside of work.” It’s a clear indication that the way we network with people is changing. There are many tools which supports our growing demand of less time and more connection. This can be termed as the birth of new social connection, widely known as social media.

Ever since humans started getting the feel of civilization they started living in group, amongst people. There were several changes in the way of living but the basic nature of socializing never changed. It adopted new forms, new mediums and new flavor but essence remained same. Even today when we all feel the crunch of time we love to interact with friends, colleagues, families.

There’s a long research going on the need of socializing. Even the least of social people cracks under the pressure of bearing too much time alone. Why does that happen? What, scientifically, goes on inside a person’s body when they are alone for a prolonged amount of time, forcing them into insanity?

Why we crave to express our thoughts, emotions and ideas? Almost as if we crave to blossom our being among community. Why do we experience loneliness? Why is it that one cannot find contentment, joy, and happiness remaining alone?

These are some tough questions. Human beings have in evolutionary terms always been a ’social group’. Without having access to other humans or cultures we cannot be human. Language, cognition, emotion, self are all closely intertwined with other people and shaped through numerous interactions from birth throughout adulthood. A very large part of our brains for instance, is mainly concerned with social interaction. Sociality is a defining feature.

The word “Six Degrees of Separation” is associated with an experiment of Stanley Milgram. Milgram was a famous American social psychologist. When he was at Harvard, He conducted an experiment called “Small World Experiment”. This experiment was a combination of several small experiments of social networks across USA. Milgram’s experiment developed out of a desire to learn more about the probability that two randomly selected people would know each other. This was one way of looking at small world problem; other alternative view was to imagine the population as social network and try to find out the average path length between two nodes. Milgram’s experiment was designed to measure these path lengths by developing a procedure to count the number of ties between any two people.

There are many critiques of this experiment and there are several experiments done after this. Though, Milgram’s experiment still tops the list. When we see these experiments in the context of marketing we realize that connecting to people is not that though. We just need to learn few basics like –

How people are connected to each other?

Factors which influence people?

Who are connectors?

How to become a connector?

Difference between Marketer and Connector?

When we take these basic to social media we get few more question.

How Social Media operates?

How Social Media influences people?

Role of connectors in Social Media?

Social Media as a Marketing Tool?

I’ll try to touch each of these questions in my series of posts on Social Media & Connectors.  Suggestions / Views / Comments are most welcome.

A new trend called real-time search is getting popular on web. FriendFeed, Facebook and others have already started using it but two key players which are doing some real serious business in this area are Twitter and Scoopler. The idea behind Scoopler is to search entire web in real time. This would be a key concept for all future search requirements. We need to keep an eye on this. Check out one example of real time search here.

Stephen Wolfram says, “Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine with one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.” Few experts claim that it should not be treated as a Google killer though going in details of this discussion gives a different view. Check out an article on this here.

Google still dominates the search engine market though the monopoly is not going to last for a long time now. Let’s hope to see some more innovative concepts.

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