Category — Technology & Business

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.

What words can’t describe… A stunning set of Taj Mahal pictures that somebody put on SlideShare. This made my day today!

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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)

I couldn’t resist blogging these two slideshows that have been uploaded to slideshare. A great tribute to India’s stunning run at the T20 World Cup. Enjoy! (the first one has the Chak De India audio as well)