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Here’s the introduction to my Georgetown University course on Social Media in Business, Development, and Government, including the syllabus –

Here are the original PDF and PPTX (with links) files.

Cross-posted at my course blog.

I’m a big believer in the power of participatory media, and believe that citizen journalism and citizen activism will play an increasingly important role in business, development and government.

However, even for a die hard enthusiast like me, it’s almost impossible to ignore the reality that participatory news media has an interesting two way dynamics with legacy news media. Participatory news media (still) derives most of its legitimacy from legacy news media, even as it progressively hacks away at the power of legacy news media.

Consider this. Legacy news media — newspapers, television channels, and wire agencies — are still doing most of the first hand journalistic reporting. Bloggers, at best, have taken some stories that were “under-reported” in legacy news media and amplified them, sometimes through background research, so that legacy news media is forced to pay attention to them. This is especially true of online citizen activism.

Even in cases where bloggers have committed “acts of journalism”, and broken stories from a developing crisis scene, often in the form of photos or videos, such acts of journalism have relied on lagacy news media to reach the mainstream.

Rajiv Dingra at WATBlog has a great recap of the social networking space in India in 2008.

The highlight, for me, is the war for the #1 spot between Facebook and Orkut. Orkut introduced the OpenSocial applications platform and replicated several Facebook features, offered themes, and provided regional language and mobile support. Facebook also added key features like chat that are likely to become popular in India. As I showed in my analysis of search trends for social networking sites in India, interest in Orkut is stagnant, while interest in Facebook is growing, even though the gap between the two is still significant.

The other social networking sites in India positioned themselves on content, instead of social networking features. BigAdda and Ibibo focused on entertainment and positioned themselves as quasi blogging platforms by getting celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan and Ravi Shastri to blog for them. However, as I showed in my analysis of search trends for blogging platforms in India, unlike blogging platforms like Wordpress and Blogger/ Blogspot, which have shown slow but consistent growth, the interest in Ibibo and BigAdda has fluctuated significantly, probably based on whether they were running big ad campaigns at the time.

Sarah Lacy on personal branding –

One of the advantages of the Internet– the relatively low barrier to click on something– is an advantage for building brands and gaining distribution online, but it’s also a disadvantage. People flock to you as a side-show, but don’t actually want to invest real dollars to support whatever you are doing.

I’ve got an inkling that this multi-year trend towards brand-this and brand-that in the business world may be in for a rude awakening.

I’m not saying brand doesn’t matter. I’m just saying it doesn’t matter the way it seems like it should on paper. In the last year, a lot of college kids or journalists young in their careers have asked my advice on becoming a brand, and I’ve told them there’s no quick and easy hack to get there. It takes time, long hours, and consistent work of merit in your field. Brand that hits people fast, usually doesn’t last… The other thing I’ve told them is to know what they’re getting into chasing the brand dream. No one tells you how hard it is to maintain it and to stomach all that comes with it, once you establish it.

On December 27 2008, Israel launched a series of air strikes, known as Operation Cast Lead, against targets in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 400 Palestinians and injuring more than 2200 over the week (Wikipedia/ NowPublic/ Mahalo/ Global Voices/CrisisWire).

The Israel-friendly Help Us Win blog (Facebook/ Twitter) says that “the war is not only on the ground - but also in the international media” and encourages Israel’s supporters to “tell Israel’s side of the story” and “ensure that the international coverage of the Campaign Against Hamas is balanced”.

In fact, the Israel propaganda machinery is in full flow to ensure that everyone gets to hear Israel’s side of the story. The Israel Defense Force has a blog and a YouTube channel, the Israel consulate in New York held a press conference on Twitter and summarized the discussion on their Israel Politik blog, and the Likud prime ministerial candidate Benjamin Netanyahu is active on both Twitter and YouTube.

CNN quotes Israel consul of media and public affairs Davi Saragna on the Twitter press conference –

There’s widespread agreement that online and mobile tools played an important role in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Driven by the fear of a widening technology gap between the Democrats and the Republicans, many conservatives are discussing how the Republican party can use technology to reinvent itself.

Rebuilding the Party proposes a ten point action plan to strengthen and modernize the Republican Party –

Winning the technology war with the Democrats must be the RNC’s number one priority in the next four years. Barack Obama and the Democrats’ ability to build their entire fundraising, GOTV, and communications machine from the Internet is the #1 existential challenge to our existing party model.

The technology gap will not be solved by funding multimillion dollar white elephants, but by unleashing free market competition among trusted entrepreneurs and volunteers who want to help the party. We must look beyond conventional political approaches to the Web, learning from technology hubs like Silicon Valley, and being unafraid to be the first in politics to adopt the changes in technology that are revolutionizing the consumer market.

At the beginning of 2008, I had set three blogging goals for myself –

- Write 100 posts with original content
- Increase my subscriber count from 250 to 1000
- Increase my Technorati authority from 200 to 500 and enter the Technorati top 1000.

Here’s how I have done against these three goals –

- I have written 287 posts in 2008 and 115 posts in December 2008 itself (69 of these are from my hyperactive linkblog category), and I like most of the posts I wrote last year. So, in terms of both quantity and quality of posting, I’m quite happy with what I did in 2008.

- Between the three main feeds I offer on my website, I have 1020 feed subscribers. So even though my feed subscribers are fragmented across three feeds, I have achieved that goal too.

- My Technorati authority is 292 and my Technorati rank is 11064, so I have missed my target of entering the Technorati 1000 by a big margin.

More importantly, by blog resulted in a big career change in 2008, as it led to the Yahoo! Fellowship and a teaching gig at Georgetown University, apart from several media appearances and speaking opportunities.

Gabe Riviera at Techmeme puts together a list of the 50 biggest stories of 2008 and it’s all about Google, Yahoo. Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.

I didn’t blog about even one of these stories, and, in retrospect, I would have blogged about only one story: Google indexing its one trillionth URL.

I’m not saying that these aren’t important stories, just that they are too mainstream to be of interest to me. I want a Techmeme for stories about how social media and mobile are changing media, business, government and development. Does anybody know where to look?

Here’s some interesting data on search trends for blogging platforms in India using Google Insights for Search data for 2008.

Apart from the three main blogging platforms Blogger/ Blogspot, Wordpress and LiveJournal, I have also looked at social networking sites Ibibo and BigAdda that are promoting themselves as blogging platforms.

The data from 2004 to 2008 shows that the top three blogging platforms have shown consistent growth: Blogspot since 2004, Wordpress since 2005 and Ibibo since 2006, even as Both BigAdda and LiveJournal have failed to grow. So, Sampad’s assertion that blogging is on a decline in India isn’t really substantiated.

In the last twelve months, Blogger and Wordpress have shown slow but consistent growth, LiveJournal has stayed stagnant, while the search traffic for Ibibo and BigAdda has fluctuated significantly, probably based on whether these platforms were running big ad campaigns at the time.

In terms of relative search rankings, Blogspot is at #1, Ibibo and Wordpress are close together at #2 and #3, BigAdda is #4 and LiveJournal is a distant #5.

This data is inconsistent with the Alexa traffic data for India which ranks Blogger/ Blogspot at #7, Wordpress at #16, Ibibo at #58, BigAdda at #274 and LiveJournal at #282.

Here’s some interesting data on search trends for social networking sites in India using Google Insights for Search data for 2008.

Orkut is way ahead at #1, but stagnant, Facebook is #2 and rising, while Hi5, Ibibo and MySpace are far behind.

The data is consistent with Alexa traffic data for India which ranks Orkut at #4, Facebook at #11, Hi5 at #37, Ibibo at #58 and MySpace #73.

Looking at data from 2004 shows that Orkut suffered serious setbacks in mid 2007, when facebook started to take off.

The statewise search data shows that Orkut has spread even to the most remote parts of India. Facebook, Hi5 and Ibibo also have almost full reach, but they are more concentrated in specific states. MySpace is still to breakthrough into the Hindi heartland of India.

Also see my analysis of search trends for group SMS and microblogging services in India using Google Insights for Search data.