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!

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.