e Magus

No one will argue the fact that we all live in a networked world. You connected to me, connected to another, and another, and to the whole world. True? Well, not quite. Take a detailed look into this networked world; you will find that it is a chain of islands, with spaces between each other…. It is islands of online communities, groups, niche networks, etc… You realize that this online world (especially the social networking) is not one big homogeneous society, but a collection of different types of groups. But looking at our past we know that human advancement has been on basis of creating a homogeneous society… From being a small group of hunters and gatherers, to forming large communities, building villages, city states, empires, and to nation states of today… Now that we have the technology and the medium to create this homogeneous society, even if it is online, why do we shy from doing so? If we look back at the start of the Internet – it was a repository of information that can ...

As we approach the end of another year, there would be multitudes of new people who would have joined some social networking site or other. Well, there are dime and dozen reasons for the success of Social Networking Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Orkut, etc…. but is there any common thread or insight that binds the success of these SNS sites? We humans spend most of our waking hours in building and maintaining ‘relationship’. This behavior is embedded in our genes. The activity of ‘grooming’ in primates, a human child crying for attention, the activities we, as adults, do in our day to day life – like the friendly greeting to colleagues, the discussion over cup of coffee, meeting the client deadlines too :) - All these actions is related to building and maintaining relationships. One of the core objective of building and maintaining relationships is to create an opinion about oneself in others mind. The way we talk, what we speak, the way we dress, the way we walk, all communic...

A curiosity to know how many ‘active’ bloggers are there in India and a quick Google search gave me stats that are pretty old and seemingly unauthentic. A WATBlog article has a report dated 2007 mentioning that 14% of Netizens from India are into ‘active’ blogging. Here I’m assuming that by ‘active’ they would mean someone who updates his/her blog at-least once a month. On a safe assumption that we have now about 60 Million Internet users in India and the blogger universe average dropping to 10% - still it talks about 6 Million bloggers in India. In the same article reference to another and a much more older (2006) Government of India report says that there are about 40K active bloggers and with another 400K ‘not regular’ bloggers. A safe assumption that the number of bloggers being directly proportional to the increase in the net users would mean we would be having a universe of close to 1 Million active bloggers from India. The most interesting part of this article was the survey co...

My Facebook friends list has reached close to 140 (give or take 3 pending requests). One of persistent thought I have been having for past few days is the fact that the number of people in my social network is close to Dunbar’s number (148 appx) – my neocortex limit for maintaining stable relationship Dunbar's number (also known as the Dunbar number or the Monkeysphere) is a value significant in sociology and anthropology. Proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it measures the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". Dunbar theorizes that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained." You could read more about Dunbar’s number at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_nu...

According to Google Zeitgeist 2008, ‘Orkut’ was the most popular searched keyword. For obvious reasons, the last two days “Satyam” beats Orkut more than 2:1. Another interesting thing that comes to notice from Google trends is that though ‘Orkut’ is the most popular searched keywords in the top 10 cities… the volume index shows that Satyam is more popular… Safely we can assume that most of the searches for SATYAM are coming in from non-metros and other regions of India. Considering what is happening in SATYAM, not a great start for the new year… Just imagine a $2 Billion fraud, in a country where the Finance Minister calls a $4 Billion package as economic booster… Santosh