Greek Complexity

Sprint "gets" blogging

A few days ago, I received an email from Sprint, the US phone service provider. They have started something called the Sprint Ambassador Program, in which they offer a bunch of freebies in return for, well, nothing. Here's what they wrote:

We recently launched the Sprint Power Vision (SM) Network and want to provide you with the full experience, at no charge. Sprint Power Vision Network enables customers to download data at faster speeds and experience new data products.

So what's the deal?

As a qualified participant, we will send you one Sprint Power Vision phone and provide you with six months of all-access service (at no charge). You’ll have access to the Sprint Music Store(SM) live TV broadcasts, gaming and more.  Yes, you will also have unlimited free calling and data service.

So what's the deal, I echoed in my own head. Is this a scam? Is it just spam? All they wanted in return was "your candid feedback (you decide how much and how often)".

One reason to think it wasn't spam was because the email implied that I was being invited to participate because the Sprint Ambassador team had visited my blog, and that I had been shortlisted as a result. Moreover, the email was sent to an address (blogfeedback [at] murli [dot] net) that is only available on my website and which has to be manually copy-pasted into an email. Spambots haven't harvested it so far. And combined with the fact that the email was addressed to me personally (firstname-lastname), I was fairly sure that this wasn't spam.

To find out whether it was a scam, I shot back an email of my own.

Thanks for your kind offer. I'd love to participate in the program, except that I'm not based in the US.

I may be in the US later this year and I'd be more than happy to participate then if that's possible.

In response, not an auto-reply, but an actual person. Wonder of wonders.

The upshot was that I can't participate in the program (because I'm not a US resident) but that's not the point of this post.

I found many things impressive about this entire exchange:

• I have never written about Sprint on my blog.  But I have written about telecoms. Looks like Sprint searched for blogs related to telecoms and shortlisted some bloggers to receive invitations to join the program. The very fact that they're taking blogs this seriously is impressive.
• That alone would have impressed me. But then their offer wasn't a traditional big-company marketing tactic either. Lots of freebies and not much asked for in return. (I thought Starhub did a very good job in recruiting trial users --like me-- for its i-mode launch in Singapore, and Sprint trumped even their offer.) Looks like they understand bloggers better than most people would credit big companies for. Look at the result: I haven't even taken up their offer and yet here I am blogging about them. Zero cost to Sprint and God knows what the dollar benefit has been to them so far.
• Last, the whole email exchange had a human touch to it. An actual person at Sprint (not a bot) took the pains to find relevant blogs, read through them, then manually search for the names and emails of shortlisted bloggers. Someone also responded personally within a matter of hours to my email, even though it was probably about 10 pm when I wrote to them. I think the human touch is particularly important for bloggers -- many of my compatriots are merciless in their criticism of form replies.

Well done, Sprint.

If any other bloggers received similar invitations, I'd be interested to know what their experience was like.

Guess which phone company I'm going to call first if I ever move to the US.

Blogging -- the lazy way

Cue excited voice-over

New on this site! del.icio.us allows this blogger to easily post new content to this site on a frequent basis!

Just check out "On Murli's radar" on the top-right area of this blog to discover new worlds of entertainment, knowledge and enlightenment! Or click here to subscribe via RSS!

Updated everyday!

End voice-over

An experiment by Nova Spivack

Nova Spivack of Minding The Planet wants to know who's reading his blog. Since I've posted a link to this post on his site, he'll find it and post a link back to my site. An interesting idea!

Following in his footsteps, if anyone links to this post, I'll post a reciprocal link as well. If you do post a link, please send me a TrackBack and/or register on Technorati so I can find you. Thanks!

Nova Spivack of Minding The Planet wants to know who's reading his blog. Since I've posted a link to this post on his site, he'll find it and post a link back to my site. An interesting idea!

Following in his footsteps, if anyone links to this post, I'll post a reciprocal link as well. If you do post a link, please send me a TrackBack and/or register on Technorati so I can find you. Thanks!

Podcasting via cellular phone

From AlwaysOn: A radical way to Podcast :: AO.

Sify, india's largest ISP provider, is launching podcasting in India. as a matter of fact i would say they are introducing India to podcasting. Other ways are ok like recording the audio on a portable device or on your desktop PC. But think of people being empowered with a simple thing like their mobile phone. People can call a number given by the local mobile operator. The mobile number responds with an IVRS and on saying a particular word, you can start recording yuor podcast. This is uploaded on your server space. This is a great idea that empowers people at no additional cost for trying this service.

I don't know whether "no additional cost" means "free" (in the pilot stage). That would be very interesting.

Where does one draw the line with syndication?

This blog is not a high-traffic website. Nevertheless, there are some interesting sites that pop up in my referrer logs every now and then (and the fact that this site isn't high-traffic allows me to explore many of these interesting referrers).

One such referrer is a site called Stuff On Demand. But unlike other blogs, this blog simply posts the entire content of my RSS feed and other RSS feeds. No original content of its own. To the casual observer, it would seem that Stuff On Demand is the original author of the content on their website, although it must be said that the website does provide a citation.

Stuff On Demand isn't the only site on the web doing this. Far from it. My blog alone, tiny as it is, has popped up on at least two other such websites. I imagine the effect is magnified for other bigger blogs.

Now, let me ask: is what they are doing wrong? Or conversely, is what they are doing desirable? Is there any way in which to stop people from doing this? Or can one encourage this somehow? Is there a happy mean?

I think the answers depend on who you are and what you hope to achieve by putting content out there. I know some bloggers dislike this kind of syndication.

For the case of my own blog, my objectives are simple -- learn from others, get some exposure, think and write better, and use the blog as an extension of my memory. Directly monetising my content or trying to corrall users into my website is of little importance. So I don't mind the fact that my blog is being reproduced on websites elsewhere, even if it seems to the casual reader that a particular piece of content belongs to someone else's site and not mine.

Apart from the fact that I don't care about monetising what I write, only about building my reputation, there's one other reason I am indifferent to this kind of syndication: websites that automatically post other people's blogs on their own websites usually use RSS to grab content. In my particular case, I have limited my RSS feed to only show a small excerpt of each blog post. Of course, this doesn't stop someone from copy-pasting my blog posts onto his site, but that would be horribly inefficient and not really scalable.

But there's another reason I would encourage people to go ahead and copy-paste my blog onto their websites (as long as authorship is properly attributed; see here), and this reason is a matter of principle: many people much smarter than I believe that the music industry for one is foolish to try and shut down P2P. I have made some smart-alec remarks of my own which aren't particularly flattering to the record companies. Now having taken that stand, it would be hypocritical and intellectually dishonest of me not to apply the same lesson to my own content. After all, syndication is analogous to P2P distribution and content is content, never mind whether it is in the form of music or blog postings. So syndication is just another way for me to reach an audience.

And even if I felt comfortable being hypocritical, that still doesn't address the point that I myself preach -- that P2P can be beneficial to content authors. If I wanted to be hypocritical that would be fine. But if I wanted to give myself a raw deal by not taking advantage of the very phenomenon that I advocate to others, that would be pure foolishness.

So, Mr Stuff On Demand Administrator and others, I hope you continue to consider my blog worthy of mention on your site. Except that I wish sites like yours would increase the visibility you give to the original post authors and make it clear that the content is not authored by you.

More on the music industry

Mark Cuban believes that the music industry is insane.

Forget about piracy. Forget about whether P2P is a good distribution model.

He has a very simple point to make: why don't the record labels target the people who have the money and inclination to buy music instead of persisting with trying to prevent penniless youth from swapping music? In other words, he says, they're looking at the wrong demographic. They should stop expending effort on time-rich-money-poor consumers who search out the nooks and crannies of the Internet for free music and instead look at the time-poor-money-rich for growth.

Business doesn't get more fundamental than that.

His advice:

Hire someone from Starbucks who understands selling music to demographics who are happy to buy the music they want in a setting they enjoy.

Link: The definition of insanity.. The Music Industry - Blog Maverick - www.blogmaverick.com _

[As an aside, you can see that this post has zero input from me. I'm simply pointing to Cuban's blog. In that respect, I found it interesting that I seem to be doing exactly what he talks about in another post on his blog, about bloggers forming "incestuous networks" to increase their search engine rankings -- but let me say this, I have nothing to gain from pointing to his blog. In fact, since his blog doesn't seem to support the TrackBack feature, his blog won't even contain a link to my blog!]

Scratching my head about Google

What a stupid, stupid idea:

Google has plans that will dramatically improve the results of internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search terms.

This means that articles carrying more authority, say from CNN or the BBC, can be ousted from the first page of results, simply because they are not as recent or as relevant to the keyword entered in the search line.

"More authority"? I don't know if there's a communication gap or whether Google really intends to implement the "authority"-linked search algorithm detailed below.

[Google's] database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.

Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.

Questions that popped into my head when I read the article (and the reason why I label this idea stupid):

• Where does a system like this leave bloggers?
• Can a top-down system like this truly cover all sources?
• Doesn't a system like this create possibilities for abuse? Or, at the very least, a perception of bias?
• How scalable can a system like this be?

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong!

Link: New Scientist Breaking News - Google searches for quality not quantity

Great blogging quote

Jonathan Schwartz, COO of Sun Microsystems quoted in the FT:

The idea that a senior executive could do their job without a blog is like saying they could do it without e-mail. I'm sure they could, but they would be less effective.

Link: FT.com / Industries / IT - A blog reveals the mind of Sun (subscription required)

New RSS feed

If you're using RSS to read this blog, please point your feed reader to my new RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/GreekComplexity. I also have an RSS feed for my Flickr photos: http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=80439303@N00&format=rss_200

If you're not using RSS yet and haven't decided what reader to use, I recommend FeedDemon. FYI I don't get paid if you buy the software. :-)

If you're not using RSS yet and don't know what it is, this page provides a good introduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

Why blogging is good for your career II

Follow-up to my post the other day about blogging being good for one's career: Charlie O'Donnel is planning a book --yes, an entire book-- on blogging as a career development tool. Being a true-blue blogger, he's posted a draft outline, chapter synopses and all, on his blog and asked for feedback. Do take a read and perhaps add your comments.

Update: Forgot to mention this but Charlie is himself a great example of how blogging can help one's career. He recently moved from GM's investment arm to a venture capital firm called Union Square Ventures (whose founder is a blogger as well). Both Charlie and his employer say that his (Charlie's) blog played an important role in the move.

Link: Trackbacks with Good Intentions and Five Things I Believe About Blogs as a Career Tool