Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Tedx Mumbai – A Twitter Analysis

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Tedx Mumbai was an independently organized TED event that was held in at BlueFrog, Mumbai on 3rd April 2010. Unfortunately for me, the event was held on the day before Easter, and so even applying to attend was out. Around the same time I was dabbling with a Ruby Script to automatically collate tweets matching a few keywords and tags. So I thought, let’s collate all the tweets from the event and then see the event from the eyes of twitter.
Some frantic coding later, my script was live on my server and I was set. Or so I thought.
The very next day, halfway on the way to work I realized that I had forgotten to setup a script to monitor the hashtag for the event. Out came my new Android phone to the rescue!! I managed to access my server, through Net2FTP and then copied the existing script and modified it using a web based editor and set up the script using my control panel, all from the phone. Whew!!
Net result was that I was setup, but about an hour late, so I missed out on a few tweets. I let my scripts run for the entire day as well as the next. What follows is an attempt to make some sense of the many voices out there. I do hope this bit of random craziness, gives you something interesting to read. (more…)

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Posted in Coding, Events, Social Media | 2 Comments »

What we can learn from Nestle (or not)

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

I’ve had an interesting back and forth debate with Sanjay Mehta (@sm63) on twitter on what lessons we ought to learn from the recent Nestle social media debacle. For those who don’t know the story behind the Nestle debacle, here is a brief snapshot of what I have understood from various online accounts:

Greenpeace bought out a video that showed the effect that palm oil cultivation (a key ingredient in the chocolates that Nestle makes) has on the ecology and how it’s leading to a shrinking habitat for the orangutan. The video, which was up on YouTube, showed the KitKat logo (a Nestle product), with words “Killer” instead of KitKat. Nestle, citing trademark violations, had the video pulled down from YouTube. Greenpeace then turned to its army of twitter followers to help in hosting the video elsewhere on the Internet and the video went viral. All this also attracted attention to Nestle’s Facebook Fan Page, where Greenpeace activists turned “fans” were already launching an assault on the brand. A number of people started posting comments using the morphed logo with the words “Killer” as their avatar. This led to Nestle putting out a request to people to stop “violating” their trademark. A couple of high handed comments from the Nestle people managing the fan page ensured that this snowballed into an all out assault. People joined up as “fans” just to put in their 10 cents on how much they hated Nestle and how Nestle shouldn’t have asserted their right to their trademark. In the end it seems that Nestle has one big great PR screw-up in the hands. (more…)

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Posted in Social Media | 5 Comments »

Is Re-Tweeting a copyright violation?

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

I’ve been pondering over this issue for some time now – Is Re-Tweeting someone’s tweets essentially a copyright violation at some level? As far as my understanding goes, as a content creator you essentially own the right to your content as soon as you have put pen to paper, or in this case published a tweet. Of course, by tweets I mean those random quirky thoughts that get posted and not the rampant link sharing that twitter is fast devolving into.

So, if by tweeting your thoughts, you automatically own the copyright to the tweets, doesn’t re-tweeting in some way violate that? Of course, the argument against that could very well be that we tweet so that others can re-tweet. In essence, the giving away of some copyrights could even be argued to be implicit to the very act of tweeting. (more…)

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Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

The Rise of the 419′ers – Video

Friday, February 5th, 2010

As promised here is the video of the talk (Must say I look terrible ;) ):

Social Media and Crime from SMC Mumbai on Vimeo.

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Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

The Rise of the 419′ers

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

I gave a short talk on the prevalence and propagation of 419 scams through social media at the Social Media Club meet yesterday. The talk also covered a few examples of about how the police were leveraging social media. The slides from the presentation are there below:

I know the slides don’t make much sense, so watch this space for the video for the event. I promise I’ll post that soon.

Also those of you that did make it to the event, please do feel free to comment and let me know what you liked or didn’t like about the talk.

Update – 24 February2010

Following a complaint by PhotoSadhu, I have modified the presentation to not include his photographs. I hope this satisfies him.

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Posted in Technology | 4 Comments »