SAST Wingees

Unsung Blogger of the Week #9

This week’s featured blogger [Or is it vlogger] is Richard. As an American in Berlin, his blog provides that unique perspective. [I was travelling all week last week, so coordinating with bloggers could not take place, so I am one day behind schedule. Sorry].

The text of the email interview with Richard follows:

1. Please give a brief profile of you and your involvement with blogging.

I’m an expat Californian who’s always dreamed of living in Europe and had the chance to make it come true. I’ve lived for 15 years, mostly in Berlin and Vienna and have loved every minute of it. Especially now, that the States is going to hell in a hand basket. Don’t want to be there now. I work as a translator, English teacher and am now doing an online course in Marketing at UC Berkeley (my alma mater).

I started blogging in April this year and just got more and more into it. As you can see, I don’t have much text and just want to share my experiences in pictures/videos with the world. I see and experience so much here in Berlin that I thought this would be a great opportunity to let everyone know how great it is here.

On to your questions:

Mostly with blog directories such as videoblogging universe, vlog directory, fireant, and vlogmap. But a lot of word of mouth, although most of my friends are not very tech-savvy and I still spend a lot of time explaining to them what I’m doing.  

I’m just trying to show my life here in Berlin, so I can’t really say I have a technique quite yet. I have noticed that the films I make with my best friend, Julie, are quite the hit. But she’s stunning, so no wonder.  

Personally, I love the Folsom Street episode, but it hasn’t got that much attention. Also, I was so happy to have the chance to film inside a dance club (back in the club, etc.).  [Cool  stuff. I liked the back in the club one -Ed.]

Well, locally, I can recommend Berlin Blogs [Main page is in German, go here for Berlin Blogs in English  – Ed.], and back in the States, you have to watch http://www.digave.com/videos/ As an avid bike rider, it’s a dream come true.

All I read are text books and video editing manuals, lately.

Breakthroughs – How Great Companies Achieve Them

I had the privilege of listening to Bill Davidson on the topic of
“Breakthroughs – How Great Companies Set Outrageous
Objectives and Achieve them“. It was an excellent presentation summarizing the book by the same title. The presentation was absorbing, energetic and thought-provoking. The identification of the Customer Experience as one of the key areas for achieving Breakthroughs using the Country-Wide Credit case study will remain etched into my memory forever. Brilliant. I subsequently read the book as well. Overall, its an excellent book. As is typical of such books there are several interesting case studies on companies like American Standard, ADP etc. Bill has detailed a well-formulated framework for accomplishing breakthroughs. Some observations:
1. Bill praises Focus as one of the key aspects of Breakthroughs, but contradicts that with case studies like Vons, a pioneering retailer that first implemented checkout scanners and
went on to diversify into direct marketing businesses.
In my experience also, I would say, most of the success
has come within my organization when teams were focused on something. However, I think Focus should not be at the expense of Peripheral Vision. Think about what would happen if Apple
focused on Computers and did not introduce the game-changing iPod that has put Apple back on the path of dominance. What if Big Blue focused on computers and missed the boat on Solutions/Services which now forms over 50% of IBM’s revenues. Perhaps a better model is Clayton Christensen’s brilliant
2-pronged approach of Deliberate and Emergent Strategy.
Focus is important in the Deliberate Strategy prong but
experimentation/innovation is important in the Emergent Strategy prong. Christensen describes this approach in his book Innovator’s Solution. A must-read book. Although this is Christensen’s second book on this topic, I found this book to have a better, sounder framework than the first one.
2. I also liked another observation that Bill makes about
Clayton Christensen’s idea of creating a separate and independent
organization to work on breakthroughs as a flawed
approach. Bill calls this the Exogenous approach (nice usage). Eventhough, I consider Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma is probably one of the all-time great management books, I share the same opinion as Bill on this aspect. I found that Christensen’s usage of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) Browser and IBM’s PC as case studies in support of the Exogenous approach is fundamentally flawed. In my humble opinion, Microsoft’s IE and IBM’s PC were the biggest strategic blunders that a market leader could make, not because of the introduction of the products per se which they had to. The blunder was a direct result of the manner in which they chose to do it, via a separate and independent organization. More on this later.

Leveraging the Wikipedia for Semantic Tagging

I had already written about the phenomenon of folksonomy. Of late, I find myself reaching out to the Wikipedia to define a particular term in my posts. Instead of just saying Jehangir did something, by linking to the Wikpedia page on Emperor Jehangir, I am clearly defining the term. In the semantic web context, I am making an assertion – The Jehangir I am referring to is the Moghul
Emperor Jehangir. I began to imagine – why not treat the Wikipedia as a Tagosphere and let every one link to the Wikipedia page to define the term. This would be the ultimate Semantic Tagging system because no one need wonder whether the Turkey in someone’s post is the country or the bird (this is the classic semantic web example). From here, someone could do a backlink analysis for the terms in the Wikipedia and construct conversation clouds with the Wikipedia term as the anchor. This could be another method of discovering conversations taking place in the Blogosphere. To test this idea, I created a user page in the Wikipedia and
cut/paste the entire list of tags from Del.icio.us/Popular. I
enclosed every tag by “[[” and “]]” which is the Wikipedia
notation for links within Wikipedia. If a particular link does
not have an article associated with it, it turns red – another
Wikipedia convention for articles that need to be written.
I repeated this experiment a few times on different days and
found that except for 2 or 3 tags that appeared in red, all other
Del.icio.us/Popular tags came up as valid links – meaning that,
articles existed in the Wikipedia defining those tags. Taking this one step ahead, Blogging tools could automatically
create links to the Wikipedia to reduce the Blogger’s efforts.
All this may further increase the traffic on the Wikipedia site.
I would think Google or Yahoo or Microsoft or AOL could
probably host the Wikipedia free of charge on their massive
infrastructure in return for the PR benefits and other
intangibles. References:
1. Matt Biddulph at hackdiary has done a fascinating project
on “giving structure to flat lists using the Wikipedia and Yahoo API”. 2. Russell Beattie talks about a similar idea. For some reason he
dismisses the idea of Wikipedia being the tag repository but wants a separate one he calls Tagopedia. 3. Wired News ran an article about an interesting project where the entire BBC news site for a day was updated to include
links to Wikipedia for every proper noun in the news. 4. Adina Levin explains the concept of conversation clouds
(possibly the originator). 5. James Tauber talking about using the Wikipedia as a URI service. 6. David Galbraith on the semantic web.

A Wingee is running for a good cause

B. Aravind is running in the Silicon Valley Marathon scheduled to
take place on October 30 under the aegis of Asha. Asha focuses on basic education in the belief that education is the
most important ingredient in bringing about socio-economic
changes. Asha channels its efforts into India where 1/3rd
of the children are deprived of basic education. So far, Asha has supported more than 385 different child education projects spanning 24 states in India. In terms of project
funding, almost $4MM has been disbursed to these projects
since Asha’s inception. In 2002 alone, Asha chapters
raised and disbursed more than $1MM to over 200 projects. The
other good thing about Asha is that there are no administrative
costs at all due to the fact that it is entirely run by volunteers.
Definitely sounds impressive. Aravind says “I came to know about Asha a year back. The
data astounded me and made me realize how lucky I am to have received my education. I strongly believe in the tangible and intangible benefits of education, and I was fascinated by Asha’s complete focus on education. The coaches from Asha told me that they will help me run a marathon. I have been running for a little more than one year, and have completed 2 half-marathons in that time. I am planning to run the Silicon Valley marathon on October 30. I have gone through my fair share of injuries, and I am looking forward to that date with some nervousness.” Wingees and readers, let us all donate as much as we can and support Aravind and wish him luck for a successful run. For donating online, please go to Aravind’s member
page.  Donation guidelines –
$1 per mile = $26.2, $2 per mile = $52.4, $4 per mile = $104.8.
Any other amount you are comfortable is also okay. If you would like to mail a check directly to Asha, please make it
payable to “Asha for education” and in the Memo field write
Aravind’s runner id “2005TA88”. Please note that ASHA is a registered non-profit organization
under 501C3 in the USA and all donations are tax-exempt. (
Tax id 77-0459884).

Unsung Blogger of the Week #8

This week’s featured blogger is “Selva” Selvakumar Ganesan. He runs  a very interesting group blog called Scientific Indian which focuses on science topics. His blog has been around since March 2004.  He also coordinates a round-robin blog digest called Scian Melt – a designated blogger collects interesting science-related articles and posts them as a digest on their blogs. I had linked to one of the Scian Melts last week. The text from the e-mail interview follows. Make sure to read what Selva considers his second best post. If you are not still convinced, consult Carl Sagan. 1. How do you publicize your blog?
If a blogger writes for publicity he/she is in for a bumpy ride. Word of mouth works very well in blogosphere. Making sensible comments at blogs you read helps. Good fun at the blog gives a reason for folks to come back.

2. Which techniques have worked for you and which ones have not?
The technique of writing colorfully. Every month a post about male and female sexuality works very well. If these subjects are also the ones you enjoy writing about, more merrier it is. Never preach.

3. What do you consider as your best posts so far? Please include 3 at  the most.
None. Here’s my second best:
http://thescian.com/blog/index.php?/archives/545-Identifying-The-Bullshit-around-us.html
[Of course, Selva is being modest. He has written several interesting ones such as the one he wrote on “Did the Eclipse Cause the Earthquakes”. – Ed.]

4.   What are your Top 5 Unsung Blogs ? (please include only those that are not in any Top 100/500 lists).
One I want to mention: http://shallowthgts.blogspot.com/

5.  What are your current book recommendations ? (1 or 2 is
sufficient).
Great Physicists