Krishna at the Book Expo America after three years, and back on the blog after two years!
I nearly forgot that I have a blog until I saw the hosting bill from the good folks at WordPress.com, where this blog is hosted. It is now over two years since I posted anything on my blog! That last post was only four lines and came five months after the post before it. So what’s the reason for this decline in blogging? Pew Internet’s study suggests it may be Twitter. Let’s see. My twitter feed consists of less than five tweets a month, many of them re-tweets. May be, it’s Quora. Unfortunately, no. I did sign up for Quora last year but never posted anything on it until last week. So in my case, the reason for this long absence from blogging has to be nothing but plain vanilla laziness topped with some procrastination.
I will leave the question of whether casual blogging will be replaced by twitter and quora, or not, for another day. Today, I can’t find a better place than this blog to post that I will be speaking at the Book Expo America later this week on the Digital Imperative for Publishing, at the behest of my friends over at Ninestars, a leading content transformation company. The talk will be at the IDPF Digital Zone, which is a forum for showcasing new products and services. It features lots of interesting talks on all three days of the conference. I’m on Thursday at 12:30 PM, for 30 minutes.
The last time I spoke at BEA, it was 2008, the venue was Los Angeles, and the title was Social Networking for Authors and Publishers. In the three years since, Social has permeated all aspects of our online lives. Facebook now has over 600 million active users. Websites like Groupon have given a new meaning to Social. Rapid adoption of smartphones is making the online world Social at an even faster rate. After all, we are more likely to have a phone than a regular computer with us when we are with friends. So I’m excited to be talking about Social once again. This time, I plan to narrow the scope of my talk to two of the more relevant subdomains of social – social commerce, using Bookperk.com, and social reading, using Appitude. Bookperk is a group-buying website for book lovers that I helped build, and Appitude is a startup building a social ebook reader that I advise.
If you are planning to attend my talk and have specific questions you’d like me to address, leave me a comment. I’ll try to include them in my slides.
