(GeekTalk / Techno-Babble :: Yes I know what slideshare is and how it works etc. Firstly, this is from a keynote presentation and secondly, just one slide, why bring flash into the picture?)
So what's that all about?
Our target for the start-up exercise was to generate some traffic for our page (Mobile markets across Asia) on the wet-paint wiki. Lets quickly go through left to right:
We decided posting a link in the 'external links' section of a relevant Wikipedia page might be a good place to start (Apparently getting it up there is easy, making it stay is a different story.)
We also sought the opinions of experts in the mobile realm (the little red dude in the image). Sashi contacted some of her profs. from school. hmmm, maybe I should get in touch with Ajay and bully him to contribute something ... working on the Sahana project does in some sense qualify him as an expert. Anyways, I digress.
Three, we target forums by posting articles and questions to engage the crowds. Well fairly straight-forward and self-explainatory.
Finally we sought to put up links on the other (country specific) pages to our page, only to find the data was already distributed across the sections effectively achieving the same goal.
Although not represented on the slide(s), we also have a facebook group, ut we quickly realised that would take more time (love and care) to reap results, and since we were planning on changing the direction of content on the wiki, we didn't work on it too much.
This brings us to the golden clock, keeper of time. Which is to represent that we realise that it takes some time for "ground to swell" if you aren't giving them something ground-breaking.
The images towards the right represent who we envisioned we would be quantitatively and qualitatively be measuring our progress. Do go check out statcounter.
Tip of the post [Mac Only]: RSS feed readers work well for most part for most feeds. But sometime you don't really need to read the whole feed (eg. Twitter updates, Facebook friend feed etc) and all you need is to be updated about the event, and if you miss it, puppies don't die. This is pretty much like different levels of importance one may assign to her/his emails. In which case these feeds might fal under the BACN category. Here's an alternative way to peruse the RSS feeds.
Get growl (system-wide notification application) and something like proxi to check the feeds and you can setup non-intrusive updates from whichever feed you like with your choice of frequency. You even get to choose the notification image if you so desire. Examples:
So these small blue boxes with updates from facebook, twitter, lifehacker etc popup in the upper right corner of the screen and go away after a while non-intrusively giving me an update. If I find the update interesting (eg.: the LifeHacker article on sleep) I can just click on it to take me to the article. If I realy just want to dismiss the box, I can mouse-over to get an 'X', clicking on which will close the box.
This has lots of advantages like filtering of the feeds based on content etc and when used in conjunction with Yahoo pipes, it can be an extremely useful setup.
I realize that both the tips have been for macs, but hey! What can I do? I am a mac-head! =)
Random thing I did this week: I ended up voulenteering my services for converting the legal text of the Creative Commons Singapore licenses into the xhtml deed pages you see on the CC website. I also setup DDM1, but more on that later.
Final words: 8:30 classes are a crime against humanity.
