Blogcamp Kerala to be held on a houseboat!

Blogging and backwaters? What an unlikely and exciting combination. Kenney Jacob mailed me to let me know that the Blogcamp Kerala would be held on a houseboat!

The first Blogging Unconference event in Kerala called BlogCamp Kerala
2008 is scheduled to be conducted on the 16th of August 2008 at
Alleppey, Kerala.

The event is hosted by the Kerala Tourism, who
has provided us with the venue for the event. BlogCamp Kerala 2008 has
the unique distinction of being the first BlogCamp in the world to be
conducted in a Houseboat.
More
information about the event are hosted on our official site http://www.blogcampkerala.com

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Geni.com adds video sharing

Geni, the place you can make family trees and invite family member to join and connect and to continue building the trees has added video sharing capability now.

According to an email they sent me :

Do you have a collection of family videos sitting on a shelf? Do you use a webcam to chat with distant relatives? Videos are a great way to capture special events and communicate with your family, but until now, they’ve been hard to organize and share. From baby’s first steps to wedding anniversaries, from family reunions to family interviews, now you can use Geni to organize and share your family videos.

Geni’s new video feature offers:

• Free, unlimited uploads
• Fast, simple upload process
• Videos are private to your Family

Adding videos to individual profiles and events adds another dimension to your family history. Your Family will be notified when you upload new videos, so they can view the videos and add comments. Uploading a video is easy, so get started today!

More details here. Sounds quite cool.

Technorati Tags: geni, video sharing, features

SocialMedian to go to public beta

Have been an alpha member of SocialMedian for sometime now. Got this email from Jason Goldberg recently:

I wanted to give you a personal heads-up that socialmedian is going to be moving from private alpha to public beta as early as next week.

Thank you again so much for being a socialmedian Ambassador and for your ongoing help, support, and patience with our alpha. I hope it has been fun for you to participate in.

If you would like to blog about your experiences using socialmedian alpha now, that is fine. Or, you can wait until the site is beta as then your blog readers will be able to check out socialmedian without an invite code. I’ll be sending out more details about the move to beta as we get closer to a firm date. We’re working hard to get the feature set done. The beta will include several feature enhancements in addition to removing the invite requirement.

If you are already on S|M You can follow me on socialmedian at http://www.socialmedian.com/gautam

MediaDeluge has a very good description of what Social|Median is

Technorati Tags: socialmedian, jason goldberg

The HR carnival is up at…

The HR Capitalist: Bucky Covington, SHRM and 36 HR Bloggers – Headlining the 39th “Carnival of HR”…

Own and publish metrics so folks know you’re attempting to measure what you do – First up, if you don’t measure yourself, someone else will !

Technorati Tags: hr carnival, hr capitalist

Why Ashok Banker chose to go offline

Well I had posted earlier on how Ashok Banker’s presence gave readers like us an opportunity to connect directly. He recently commented on the post:

My joining Twitter was not as a means of ’social networking’ but simply an experiment in a new form of writing. As you probably saw during the brief time I spent Twittering, I was more interested in the technical challenges posed by the limitation of 140 characters, rather than networking. The same applied to blogging and other online means of communication and self-expression.

Due to the attention focussed on my microblogging and blogging, I’ve since chosen to go completely offline. I’ve shut down my blog, Twitter feed, Friendfeed, etc, and am going offline indefinitely. Just thought you should know since it now makes this blogpost irrelevant!

I was dismayed and commented back:

that’s a radical decision you’ve taken, however for your many fans who feel connected to you thanks to these media I hope indefinite does not mean ‘never’

And he (I can only guess it was him) responded:

Hey Gautam, well, that’s the problem. There shouldn’t be writers and fans, we’re all writers on such platforms and should be all equal. The moment there are writers and ‘names’, it’s a failure of the system. I’m sorry but after seeing the way most bloggers shamelessly abuse the medium to promote themselves and their work instead of genuinely writing something worthwhile, I realized that blogging and microblogging have also become tools to crass commercialism. The only way out for people who genuinely want to write and not merely self-promote is to remain unknown and invisible. Hence my deletion of my blog and my presence from all other social networking sites. If and when I do resume, it will be anonymously and the moment I have ‘fans’ or a ‘name’ that means its time to stop or move on again.

I just feel very strongly about these issues. In protest, I’m not using my name here.

I take my hat off to Ashok to stick so much to his principles, but I think he’s missing an essential point here. When we participate in social media – we are not primarily writers. Writing is an act of love for most of us, but we have different day jobs. However Ashok Banker will always be known as a writer primarily of the Ramayana series. It’ll be interesting to see if and when he comes back online in an anonymous avatar – whether people react differently to him – or whether his quality of writing will stand out without the weight of his reputation.

Technorati Tags: social media, author, writing