On the Delhi Tweetup

On Saturday evening I was faced with a little dilemma. The Delhi Tweetup organized by the Delhi Bloggers’ Bloc was scheduled at the same time as Abhijit’s book release function. While the former was at Nehru Place, the latter was scheduled at Select Citywalk Mall, Saket.

Like the naive DALHIite I assumed I could get to the Tweetup and then drive down to Saket. 

How could I have been such a fool. Apologies Mr. Bhaduri, but the devilish Delhi traffic put paid to rest any such plans I had.

However, the tweetup was great ! 

It was the second such occasion for me (the previous one being in Mumbai) when I got to meet people who are online friends.

So there were people like prolificd, twilightfairy, mojosanjay, arjunghosh, vimoh who I’ve been interacting with for some time and others like jeetblog, mayankdhingra, simplyarun and kumar_rahul whom I got to know also.

There were quite a few other people, and interestingly they were still not on Twitter. 

Was asked to kick off the session , and I guess I rambled a bit about social media, conversations and how the quality of conversations is most important for any social media enthusiast. I took the creativity model of “divergence and then convergence” to draw a parallel that any information overload has to be funneled the same way, diverging to get a diversity of opinions and then converging – according to each user’s capacity to filter and get value from those conversations. Of course, the name of Scoble cropped up and I also talked about Gauravonomics as people who can monitor immense social media ‘rivers of feeds’ and also to keep engaging in real conversations also. 

I guess it’s a skill that some people develop over time. 

My invitation for the group was to be sure what is the value they are looking for from Social Media. Whether they are looking to be at the edges of their own chosen areas. And we talked of cool web 2.0 jobs as well, like Editors for Tweeting, as Penelope Trunk blogged recently she can’t tweet about investing and sex in 140 characters without an editor! Of course Monetization came up too – and stumped me. Only one person tweeted that the talk was cool… so I really don’t know if I did well at all 😀

Mayank Dhingra talked about the startup he’s co-founded, Kwippy and how it looks at microblogging from a conversational perspective, and the things they have done to build a community there. I got myself an account today and it seems promising. 

Priyanka a.ka. Twlightfairy talked about her personal experience of having her Flickr picture being plagiarised and used by Times of India and their refusal to believe that they had done anything wrong! The discussion evolved into the complex definition of copyright laws and the power of big media houses and of course the Indian judicial system’s non-enabling role. The story had a kind of happy ending with Times of India agreeing to compensate her for the commercial use of the picture and also printing a corrigendum yesterday.

Rahul then talked about copyright and the linkage with early times of the web and where we are headed now.

It was becoming a little late for me and I had to leave his talk midway.

It was a great experience and am already looking for the next occasion I can get to meet the gang again.

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