What is your Knol?

A bad question to start the post for an interesting product :). The though came after a good question (rather answer) was popped during an internal quiz- "What is the unit of knowledge?"

An avid follower of Google myself, I couldn't even attempt the question (though my able colleague did). And thus started my pursuit of KNOL, a unit of knowledge.

For the late starter, such as I, Knol is an article written by experts. Just as the information on Wikipedia. These are authoritative articles written by experts. An interesting starting point is this article in Google blog which says- 100,000th knol published (wow, I didn't know that it was that big?).

Knol has been dubbed as the "Wikipedia killer" (Actually one of the polls on the web that I came across deems it otherwise. There is a huge loyality for Wikipedia). Now, coming back to Knol, the author who creates the knol, can accept or reject the edits made by the person writing the review. Sometimes it is also compared to Squidoo, which is also created by specialists (read authorities) and be rewarded for it. However, it has to go a long way when you compare it to 2.7 Mln content pages on wikipedia.

You can log onto knol.google.com and get a first hand experience yourself!

Go get yourself a knol :)

Cheers!

Slumdog Millionaire!

"Slumdog Millionaire" won 4 oscars (I saw the downloadable version of movie recently)...

Screenplay: Outstanding is the word, and also does the work of putting India on the world map. We have some great guys in this field (Anurag Kashyap, loved his No Smoking)

Picture: A westerners image of India- poor & hungry people. The movie has timed well with Arvind Adiga's "The white tiger", which is also about the poor destitute India. Maybe here we would want a richer picture of India, demonstrating our progress.

Director: Hats off to Danny Boyle for the film. Super camera and shots. I have seen "Trainspotting", and that is a brilliant film as well.

The last one was for Music. It was great to see AR Rahman, SRK and Anil Kapoor on the stage, a proud moment for India (I'm sure Gandhi would be similarly exciting, but I wasn't around). I hope that it wins at least 4 Oscar from here. Man, you should have seen Anil Kapoor on the stage, he was so pumped up!.

So, why is a movie description featuring in DIgital Marketing blog? I was driving today and while I was reminiscing of these proud moments for India, I also remembered one discussion with an international professional. "Indians don't blog; don't express their opinion", he said, "And that is
the reason why though in the west social media is the new buzzword, in India it has a long way to go."

Consider this...

1. I searched for Slumdog millionaire (from India) a few hours ago, I found only 15k results on Google

2. Blog search in Hindi was more dismal- only 7 results.

3. The reach as a media vehicle (comScore calls these as the conversational media) for blogs is good- Orkut.co.in (12.5 Mln Unique Visitors & 40% reach), Bloggers (8 Mln Unique visitors & 26% reach), wordpress (3.5 Mln Unique visitors & 11% reach). However, actual blogger community is still very small; a rough estimate would be about 50k active bloggers. An old article but you might get some information here...

We might be world's largest democracy, however it seems very few of us have opinions to share. In US elections, Barack Obama was able to move a number of youths through his social media influence. Compare this to our Indian politicians, who don't even have a website to their name. I did find Lal Krishna Advani's blog on the net, http://blog.lkadvani.in/ (it wasn't working that's another story). The sad reality is none of us believe in expressing ourselves and that this opinion will make a difference (come on!)

However, there is a silver lining, blogging is becoming big. Aamir Khan (http://www.aamirkhan.com/) has a blog. I had heard that even Amitabh Bacchan had started blogging, however even after 10 minutes of persistent search I couldn't find it. Akshay Kumar also seems to have a blog (http://akshaykumarblogs.blogspot.com/2007/11/akshay-kumar.html), but doesn't look genuine.

Blogging has started in some way, but has sto still reach the tipping point (borrowed from Malcolm Gladwel :). We still have to go a long way beyond clicks and click through rates and ROIs. Blooging, I believe is the true word of mouth marketing.

FYI, here are some interesting feature on "Slumdog Millionaire"

J Ramanand:
http://passionforcinema.com/arrahman-not-just-madras-bombay-or-dilli/

Rk: http://passionforcinema.com/slumdog-millionaire-kamaal-ki-story/

BomBay Bitch (she does a great job of hammering down our own industry): http://www.bombaybitch.com/site/and_the_award_goes_to___/

Pray with me for Slumdog's oscar win!! But before that please watch the movie; it is releasing on Jan 23rd 2009.

BTW, have you seen the Google's new favicon (small icon in your browser), it's great.

Cheers!

Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook 2008

The other day someone sent me Asia Digital Marketing Association (ADMA) Yearbook, the second in the series. The association collects data from all the digital sources- Mobile, portals, e-Commerce sites. agencies, technology solution providers etc. The report gives a general picture of the region, with specifics of online population, their activity, marketer's budgets and also illustrates trends. It is pretty comprehensive (don't hesitate to email me at dushyant.prakash@gmail.com if you need the copy).

The generals excerpts (India)...

- 5.3% of India has access to Internet

- Overall internet users 46 Mln with 32 million active users (Dec 2007 figures). Compare this to China(210Mln), Indonesia (25Mln), Australia (15.5Mln), Malaysia (13.5 Mln).

- Amount of time Indian Internet users spend online is still low (14.8Hrs/Month), compared to regional average (21.2 Hrs/month) and global (26.2Hrs/Month)

- Google (18.6Mln Unique Visitors) and Yahoo (17.7Mln Unique visitors) are the top two sites in terms of site visitors. Among the home grown sites, Rediff (8.4Mln Unique Visitors) is at 4th position, Times Internet (6.3 Unique Visitors) at 5th and Naukri (4.1MLn visitors) is at 9th. (comScore, March 2008 Data, Age 15+ and work computers)

- More than half of all Indian active online users (51%) mainly use the internet to send mails. 20% of the users search for information and 13% for entertainment (which is grown from 8% previously)

The report does a good work to compare the statistics across the region. The report however doesn't consider the other essential facts about India, such growing E-Commerce activity in all respects- Travel, banking and retail. Also has no information on online advertising in India. Maybe the next report will be more impressive (to highlight India's achievements)

Cheers!

Gadgets Ads et al...

It has been a while that I have put a new article on my blog. Pretty much, last few months everything was happening, and unfortunately was regular work which took lot of time. The realisation dawned upon me when I was going through the LinkedIn profile; now you can add tools to stay connected (You see I'm not that proficient user of Facebook). I found it a great way to stay connected.

That brings me the to the discussion of Content Vs The Gadget. How does one get access to a thousand of browsers out there- through content (traditional) or gadget/tool (Hmmm...)

Computers are getting personal and so are the the website. The scope of customising the websites to your taste and preference; There is a huge scope of customisation.(Though I belong to the old generation, who use the website as it is, but I'm sure the techies and the young new generation is adept at this art). I have seen my nephew customising his Google and Yahoo home page and close friend using Google reader to get himself updated with the latest happening. Small little gadgets does a save that extra effort that you might otherwise require to source the content.No wonder Google is promoting these dinky units in a big way. These can be rendered in multiple formats- HTML/Flash, can have live data feeds and can be placed on any web page, including iGoogle.

So for marketers, we might not yet bid Goodbye to the old world of CTR optimied, Geo and IP targeted ad units, but we would want to utilise the Gadget ads in a ever increasing way. comScore, the leading third party digital Media audit agency has reported and increase in popularity of this new offering.

This is a list of interesting gadgets/applications...

Coke bubble application
Fidelity instruments Market monitor
Southwest Airlines- Ding (my favourite :))
Target- The widget allows you to search Target products from your desktop
Acuvue- wink application

Here's another great article that I came across on iMedia- Creative Primer on Power of Brand Widgets.

Cheers!