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The entire Slideshare team was down at the Feroz Shah Kotla (Delhi’s cricket stadium) to watch the DLF IPL League match between Delhi Dare Devils & Bangalore Royal Challengers. This was a three hour expedition for us, venturing out into the circus that is the IPL 20-20 league. Except three of us, all the other team members were witnessing a live stadium cricket match for the first time, so there was palpable excitement & anticipation. Here are some snaps ..

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Incidentally cameras have been banned from the stadium during IPL matches …hence all snaps are courtesy our mobile phones.

Just wanted to drop a quick note here that SlideShare is being hit by DDOS attacks. In fact, this has been happening since last week, and the website has been off-air intermittently during this period. We had been debating internally, whether or not to go public with what’s happening behind the scenes. We decided to come clean as we owe an explanation to our users for our recent outages. Techcrunch broke the story today and the post captures the events fairly well. As one can make out, their seems to be a highly orchestrated attempt to punish the website for having content, that in our opinion is well within the rights of free speech of our users, and does not violate our TOS in any way. Having experienced this first-hand, I can add (to whatever TechCrunch has reported) that all this appears to be part of a well oiled machinery to control internet content. The repeated surreptitious attempts to coax the passwords with obviously untrue stories, the daily dose of take down notices, email spoofing, calling on the office telephone with a threatening demand for the account credentials!

Frankly, given our current traction and focus, we were under-prepared for this kind of an incident, so it has come as a rude shock. But we are getting back to speed (although the site is again experiencing problems as I write this blogpost) and getting prepared for further problems… stay tuned…. will keep you posted.

A couple of weeks back, I gave a talk at Nasscom (New Delhi) titled “How organisations can harness the power of Web 2.0?” This was attended by some 25-30 folks from Nasscom’s member companies. The presentation was focused on the marketing & social media aspects of Web 2.0, and the kind of opportunities Web 2.0 is throwing up for companies, irrespective of whether their own work is co-related to it. Amongst the audience were a few techies, but the majority consisted of budding entrepreneurs and marketing/PR folks working in mid to large sized companies.

I feel the following are four distinct way in which Web 2.0 can impact any organisation (and not necessarily technology companies).

- Advertising / Brand-building through social networks & communities
- Social Media/PR through blogs
- Direct Sales (through advertising or lead generation)
- Mediated Market Research

And as the slide deck (below) will show, there’s a fair bit of activity happening in India on those fronts.

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Enterprise 2.0 is another big area where Web 2.0 can have signficant impact on organisations, though it is internally focused on productivity gains through the use of tool/platforms that Web 2.0 has spawned.

Check out the video from this event (its bulky and takes a fair bit of time to download)

EmPower is a global research & media services company based out of New York & Bangalore. They are conducting a research study about the extent & impact of Internet-based social media (blogs, wikis, podcasts etc) in India. This must rank amongst the earliest research exercises at understanding the consumer behavior in the social media space in India.

As part of the research, EmPower has created an online consumer survey which needs to be filled out by users. This is a short survey and takes app 4-5 minutes (I took it myself). Can I request the readers of this blog to spare a few moments and help them gather some meaningful & actionable data.

Here is the survey link (you can also click the image below to access it)

Want to join the team that is building SlideShare? We are recruiting ROR hackers & geeks to join our New Delhi based team.

Working at SlideShare can be a hugely rewarding experience. Building social software is a whole lot of fun: the technical challenges, the high-involvement nature of the work (how often can you show your friends & family what you did at work last week?), the fast changing internet landscape, and the constant feedback from users, make it a different ball-game than the usual technical work.

Benefits include:

- Experience with cutting edge open-source technology
- Working with a team of bright, enthusiastic people in a “No-BS” environment where you can focus on creating great technology that is used by millions of people every day
- Competitive Salary
- Generous Stock options

We are recruiting for the following positions:

Server side hackers

If you’re a open source junkie, and love hacking Linux systems, deep algorithmic work (search, recommendation engines, etc), SQL tuning and optimization, and modifying open-source code to your own twisted purposes, then you might be a good fit for a position with our server side team. Experience in scalability of large webapplications is an advantage.

Front End Developers

We’re looking for web-savvy hackers who know JavaScript and Flash and PHP, and can use them to full effect in creating amazing web applications. Prior experience in application development in a internet firm may be an advantage.

Technologies/Platforms

We work on ruby on rails, linux, freebasd, debian, Amazon S3, MySql etc. Candidates not having experience in ROR can apply- if you have worked earlier on PHP, Python, Perl etc, thats fine as well.

Send resumes to ‘amit AT slideshare DOT net’