This month will see an embarassment of riches for Indian alpha geeks. Not one, not two, not three, but FOUR barcamps are scheduled. This weekend it’s barcampbangalore2. Coming up on december 9th is barcampdelhi2. And finally, barcamppune2 and barcamphydrabad3 is coming up on the 16th and 17th of December.
I’ll be at the Delhi (duh) and Pune barcamps. I don’t think I can make Bangalore or Hydrabad(I’m checking to see if last-minute air tickets are available though).
Since we helped organize the first barcamp in India earlier this spring, there have been more barcamps in India than in any other country besides the US.
Month: November 2006
Uzanto geek / usability party in Delhi this Friday
Uzanto is having an open party at our Delhi offices this Friday evening (December 1st). Nothing formal, just a chance to eat, drink, and hang out with peoples in the Delhi metro area that are into tech, usability, and/or the local startup scene.
Be there or be square! You don’t need an invitation, just rsvp on the wiki, which also has our address, timings, and other administrivia.
Rashmi interview with Guy Kawasaki, Mike Arrington
At the “art of the start” conference last week, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch was interviewed by Guy Kawasaki about “How to Get on TechCrunch”. Michael basically said that you shouldn’t use words like “revolutionary” and “web 2.0” to describe your site: it’s too generic and doesn’t carry any information. He cited slideshare as an example of a good pitch (our pitch was “YouTube for Powerpoint”). Rashmi was called up onto the stage to talk about the “TechCrunch effect” and the effect it had on slideshare.
Here’s the video of rashmi being interviewed. The funniest part is when Rashmi mentions that people upload sermons to slideshare. Guy responded in a deadpan voice “well, God does have 30% market share”. Worth watching!
Web site monitoring service recommendations
Can anyone recommend a good website monitoring service (doesn’t have to be free)?
I need sms and email alerts, the ability to send alerts when response time goes up or when a page contains particular text, and a minimum of false positives.
So far I’ve tested the following freebies and found them lacking in one way or another:
site247 (false positives: otherwise would have seemed the best option)
Mon.itor.us (tests only once a day. Very confusing interface)
Montastic (way too basic)
Next up for evaluation are the following paid services: if anyone has any experience with these, or has other services they think I should try, post a comment below!
siteuptime
websitepulse
alertra
doc-com monitor
internetseer
hyperspin
webmetrics
hosttracker
siterecon
watchmouse
11/15 Correction: mon.itor.us actually tests much more often than once a day.
Interview in Indezine
Indezine (a web magazine for presentation professionals) has just published an interview with me.
Here’s an excerpt:
The most inspiring thing to me about SlideShare is the number of teachers that are using SlideShare to share lessons and lecture slides. I love the idea that we’re helping teachers do the important work of educating the next generation!
Interview in business 2.0
Business 2.0 has published an interview with me answering some questions about Slideshare. My favorite quote:
What we’re seeing, though, is that PowerPoint and other presentation formats provide the ability to create narratives and do user-generated multimedia that goes beyond traditional PowerPoint for a talk or business meeting. For example, lots of people are uploading photosets or stories or video game screen shots.
Slideshare: new social features!
We just rolled out a whole bunch of new features on Slideshare. The writeup is here. The biggest new feature is that we now have a way to save your favorite slideshows, and optionally tag them.
Lessons learned from the first month of Slideshare: part 1
Slideshare.net has been online for almost a month, and we’ve learned a lot about running a large-scale social sharing website in that time. The first few days were frantic, but we’re settling back into a rhythm now. This series of posts will try to capture some of the stuff we learned through this experience.
jonathanboutelle.com 