Tag: TCS

  • Social Collaboration eg.

    My friend via Twitter, Prem, (twice over, because both his handles are friends :D) got me thinking on ‘Social Collaboration’ ever since he wrote this post, attempting to define the term as used by its vendors. Despite a good discussion in the comments, a definition proved elusive. Though I began to agree with Prem’s assessment that ‘social’ was redundant, Gautam’s post on it did offer an interesting line of thought –  that ‘social collaboration’ was emergent. He illustrates it with an example too. This was vaguely similar to one one of the ways in which I had tried to define the phrase, before I gave up. Here are the attempts.

    The first was by tying it to the idea of a ‘social business’ (not the wiki one, but the Dachis group version), where 2 or more businesses collaborate on an objective that may be larger/ unrelated to their individual objectives. Obviously, this is more utopian than any vendor’s idea, so I dropped it.

    Which led me to the second attempt, where I thought  the tools of the (enterprise) social web would enable social interaction in various contexts and collaboration would be one of the products. (Probably like what Krish Ashok is building at TCS?) This would be around the premise that Gautam presented – even identifying the need would be the result of the social interactions and collaboration would follow.

    While on this, I was reminded of Google Wave, where each participant could ‘drag’ people into a conversation. There were several instances when I, as an initiator of the conversation, did not have any control over the quantity or quality of the participants or even the morphing of the intent. I was also reminded of the last paragraph of this post I wrote in 2008, when Yammer came into the limelight – “..a bridge between Yammer and Twitter. One service that allows absolute transparent conversations within the organisations, and another that allows brands and organisations to be transparent with its end users.”A one way channel did open later. If any collaborator could ‘drag’ in another collaborator from a social web outside of the enterprise’ social web eg. a customer from Twitter, could that be social collaboration? On a related note, I also remember another post of mine when I came across Memolane and wrote about brand-streams connecting consumers and the enterprise. A couple of days back Memolane released an embeddable version which it hopes will be adopted by organisations.

    Alternately/further, could it be like what happened right now – where neither Prem nor Gautam invited me to collaborate, but I did nevertheless, inserting myself into it thanks to having access to their thoughts, having a take (hopefully) on a thought Prem started and being able to connect it back to them. (forget Twitter, their blogs will have trackbacks) Even if they do ignore me and refuse to collaborate, my take would still exist, available to all who might be interested? That’s probably not what the sellers intended of ‘social collaboration’, but could that be what it evolves into?

    I don’t know, and that’s why for now, I have parked this aside. 🙂

    until next time, continue collaborating..

    PS: Bonus Read – How Cisco integrates social media into the organisation

    PPS: Back in a fortnight 🙂

  • Paper Capers

    Almost 2 months since we last discussed newspapers, so I thought its a good time to update. Rumour is that Murdoch plans to sue Google and Yahoo over news services. Fact is that he’s going to charge for news, something he’s been doing for a while with WSJ, and the ‘experiment’ is going to start with The Sunday Times. Others are set to follow his example.  “Quality journalism is not cheap,” said Murdoch. “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.“

    I, for one, am happy, because the keywords for me are ‘quality journalism’. Its perhaps a prelude to a shakedown, and the survival of only those who can adapt to a world with internet. With the width and depth of content available, the debate of ‘free vs paid’ has been going on for a while now. But perhaps the time has come to end it. Build the wall, and let’s see if people want to pay to enter. (that link is an excellent read, detailed and thought through, check it out) Opinions are bound to vary – and to be in extremes. Most people feel that it is flawed. Chris Anderson feels that at some point in the future, “maybe media will be a hobby rather than a job“,  Vivian Schiller, former senior vice president and general manager of the NYTimes.com, believes that “people will not in large numbers pay for news content online“, but there’s still space for an NYT to cut expenses and survive. Murdoch obviously believes he can get the audience to pay.

    Meanwhile, the Associated Press is planning to charge $2.50 per word if 5 words or more are quoted from its articles, with the help of a microformat. Not surprisingly, it has been widely criticised in several tones all over the web. Jeff Jarvis even has a post on ‘How (and why) to replace the AP‘, and illustrates the interesting concept of ‘reverse syndication’. Chris Ahearn, at Thomson Reuters, implores entities that are declaring war on the link economy to stop whining, and stands ready to help those who wish for an alternative to AP.

    Interestingly, Google had recently quadrupled its newspaper archives. (Locally, Dainik Jagran is now part of Google’s News Archive Partner Programme, and has a strategic deal with Google to help the group archive its bilingual daily, Inext) The average newspaper’s stance on Google is understandably ambivalent. On one hand, it is happy to get the traffic from Google, but its not happy that its only one among the websites shown, and the amount of content that Google shows. (that might prevent a reader from visiting the site) Sometime back, Google had posted its views and how, any publication can block search engines with a slight change in code.

    The reactions to this obvious ‘transition stage‘ for the newspaper industry has been taking many forms. Paywalls are boycotts are only one kind. Alternate methods of news collection like crowdsourcing+crowdfunding, public collaboration, (an interesting case, for more than this reason), nichepapers and ways in which journalists can use tools like Facebook and Twitter, are being discussed, as well as radical ideas like making the newspaper a gateway for particpative experiences, even as technological developments – touch screen ‘intelligent plastic’ roll up reader, and experiments from NYT (‘What we are reading‘) continue.

    While it would be easy to say that these are trends in the West, that are not very relevant to India at this stage, I’d still say that these are trends that media in India, especially newspapers, should be closely watching and learning from. A good read from Pradyuman Maheshwari at e4m on the same subject. While the Nielsen Online Global Survey on trust, value and engagement in advertising shows that newspapers are the most trusted form of paid advertising (in india), the TCS study on Indian urban school children show that they are extremely technology savvy and totally at ease with the web and social media.

    As stated in the TCS study “This societal trend has important implications for parents, educators, policy makers, as future employers as well as companies and brands that want to sell to tomorrow’s generation.” Some understand this, and have started experimenting with new forms of distribution. I just got  a mail asking me to check out Star Player!! The point is that one can never be sure whether the trends in the US will be replicated in India, though I’d say its more a ‘when’ question than an ‘if’, even though India’s version of the trends would be mutated, thanks to its own socio-cultural and economic pecularities. But it helps to be prepared. I read at Medianama, a few days back that the Hindu is taking Ergo, its 5 day a week publication aimed at young professionals in Chennai, online. Though the motive might have been cost saving, I’m sure it will be a great learning in understanding consumption patterns and figuring out revenue streams. I quite liked the site, powered by WordPress, with a very casual ‘About’ page, and covering some interesting stuff. It looks like an online news site, not the website of a newspaper.

    On hindsight, the collision was bound to happen. Newspapers, which subsidised news to the reading audience by making advertising pay for it. Google, which aggregated content, and served ads in context. They had to meet somewhere, and disagree on who makes how much. The concern areas for newspapers are manifold – news consumption has changed – quantitatively and qualitatively, modes of creation and distribution have changed, and Google has developed a much better advertising model. In essence, all entities in the publishing business have changed – producers, consumers, advertisers. Isn’t it inevitable that the publisher has to find a new business model? Newspapers in India still have some time on their hands, and some good tools too. With most publishing houses having multiple products that cater to specific audiences, they can actually experiment in different directions. It does cost money to create good content, the trick obviously is to figure out ways to minimise the cost and work out how much each stakeholder – reader and advertiser, is willing to pay for it. Now would definitely be a good time to start, unless you want to sound like the (as usual) hilarious Onion story – “Why did no one inform us of the imminent death of the American Newspaper industry” 🙂

    until next time, think about the link economy