b r a n t s

The world seems to have loved the Old Spice guy horsing around. Even though the campaign had been around for a while, (via Surekha) the last couple of weeks took it to a completely different level, with the Old Spice guy (actor Isaiah Mustafa) sending unique video responses to people who had blogged/tweeted/written to him  [...]

Sometime back, I had read a post on Inquisitr very interestingly titled “Let’s bring some reality to this social media game“. Although my expectation of reality was slightly different from what the post delivered, I still found it a good read because it dealt with an issue that I have thought about several times. We [...]

The Twitter discussion last week with Surekha and Karthik, was mostly about attribution, but it had another facet to it – privacy. Last week, a childhood photo of mine was shared on Facebook, I promptly untagged. Thankfully Facebook still allows that, though I wonder for how long. But it made me think. Does the photo [...]

What makes the evolution of the web more interesting is that in whatever small ways, we all are drivers of the changes that are happening. Seth Godin wrote a thought provoking post sometime back on the evolution of a medium, in which he points out the end result of banality.
On Twitter recently, Surekha, Karthik and [...]

Shashi Tharoor. Sachin Tendulkar. The connection is not just the initials, but also VISA. Get it? So, anyway, Tharoor’s tweets (again) created a minor ‘controversy’ and I observed a few interesting tangential stories.
Tharoor’s boss commented that such issues ” should be sorted out within the four walls of the two ministries”. So there [...]

While there have been many negative reactions to the way the media handled the recent Mumbai events, I came across a few interesting ones that were a direct attack on the brands involved.
One is a Facebook group demanding that Barkha Dutt be taken off air. At the time of writing this, I can see 1666 [...]

…and as the world watched with bated breath, Twitter said ‘no deal‘ to Facebook. The primary reasons cited were the worth of Facebook stock (which was a key component in the payment) and the fact that Twitter wanted a shot at building revenues. Now that the deal is off, Mashable has a take on who [...]

Rupert Murdoch recently stated that the doomsayers predicting the end of the newspaper industry are off the mark. According to him, online readers also need news form a source that they can trust, and that’s what newspapers have always been doing. He agreed though, that newspapers would have to change from the ‘one size fits [...]

Would you pay for Twitter?’, a very good question, asked by Walt Ribeiro, at his blog. It made me think, and I came to the conclusion that I’d pay (though it all depends on the price). Apparently, I’m in a majority. There’s possibly no ‘pain’ that Twitter is addressing in my case, unless I count [...]

Last week, I read an article that gave the ’share of the pie’ picture of different media in India. As expected, print is still king, though TV is fast catching up. Internet is still fighting to touch 2%. Meanwhile, something else i read quite sometime back says how an online video ad gives an 84% [...]