Chennai Social Media Club's inaugural session

Ever wondered what is this 'Social Media' is all about? Is it a medium to socialise? a place to follow and get followed (Twitter),Is it a place to connect (LinkedIn)? or to network and make friends,join fan clubs and communities(orkut, Facebook), and meet your schoolmates after a very long time and wonder How old you have become? Incidentaly I met most of my schoolmates almost after a decade or so, thanks to Orkut. Social media is fast emerging as the next big thing and is definitely much beyond all this.

Inorder to understand and share the immense potential of Social media, a bunch of enthusiasts (some addicts)have come together and started something called a 'Social Media Club', first of its kind in Chennai. In this club you will meet Social media practitioners and experts and they will in turn be sharing the best practices in Social Media.

Interested to know about Social media Club's formation and story so far? have a look here and here

So if you are a social media enthusiast, if not an addict, come and join here.On April 3,this Saturday,Club's inaugural session is scheduled.

The Event: SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING,a session by Mr.Ashok Krish
Head, TCS Innovation Lab - Web 2.0 at TCS

Venue:
Access Atlantech(SAE),Jayalakshmi Estates, 29/8,Haddows Road,Pin- 600 006.
Ph: +91-44- 2821 4045/2821 4227. see map


Have a look here and here to know more about the event

Social media Club's Twitter handle : http://twitter.com/smcchennai
hash tag :#SMCCHN
Facebook profile

Welcome to TED Tuesday. Artist Theo Jansen demonstrates the amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures he builds from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles. His creatures are designed to move -- and even survive -- on their own

Twestival Chennai tweetup

It all started with a change of venue, Amethyst did not give permission for the tweetup. Atleast for a while all were confused if not sad.


But better things were waiting for us, the meetup happened at Cafe Coffee Day @ Lloyds Road (Avvai Shanmugam Salai) and they were super supportive, kudos to CCD crew.


Lavanya Ravishankar, who organised the very first Twestival in Chennai talked about how 6 people,that too, all from IIT Madras turned up for the event. She gave an intro on Twestival


Kiruba Shankar,he has 8 or 9 times more followers than all of the rest combined, 54,899 and counting, was supposed to talk on how twitter helps social causes.As always, he made it an unconference and shared one incident that made him realise the power of social media


Almost 25 people turned out for the event,biggest so far in Chennai's Twestival tweetups.


Ramakrishna, Co-founder & CEO Rangde shared his experience on how Rangde, through their twitter handle clarifies various queries



Yes, we indeed discussed about celebrities active in twitter and concluded that Rahul Bose tweet all by himself, but Shahrukh Khan, hmm we couldn't find out. It was a bit shocker to know that Kim Kardashian charges a fortune to tweet and David Beckham a little less! If you are excited to know more on celebrities in twitter, have a look

Good show by Thomas, Krishvenkatesh and krishnanswamy who organised the tweetup!

and The Hindu's write up about the event

Mahabharata, what is not in it, is nowhere!

Part IV: Male pregnancy

This is in continuation of my series on The Great Indian Epic, The Mahabharata

If you missed Part I(War live commentary), II(Walkout) and III(Quiz)

There is this wonderful movie Juniorof Arnold Schwarzenegger,becoming pregnant and giving birth to a baby. Its quite interesting to watch a man getting pregmant and giving birth.In animal world,Sea horse take care of the so called female activity but if you look at Mahabharata, you come across a similar incident.

Once,few boys of Krishna's Yadhava clan dressed up a boy Samban, as a pregnant woman. They teased Sage Durvasar asking him if the child would be a boy or a girl. Enraged Durvasar cursed that a steel pestle would be born which would annihilate the entire YAdhava clan. Same thing happened and the steel pestle resulted in the downfall of the Krishna clan. One more plot confirming the fact that what is not in Mahabharata, is nowhere!

Image of the week


Oh no, don't get confused, the poster is to help the HIV affected ones!

Welcome all. Parag Khanna talks about the future of countries



!

Enjoy the TED talk

Social media club@Chennai

Chennai Social media club's second meetup@Access Atlantech was very engaging and productive


The club has taken so many concrete steps to kick start club's activities





Now the club's very basic purpose, as Jayanth Vincent put it, is to share the best practices in Social media

So whats the prog for the month of March? The club is planning to have talk on Social media marketing by an expert


If you are interested, do join the Club

The new hashtag for Social Media Club is #smcchn

Blogger blogger everywhere

Thats what I call the second Chennai Univercell IndiBlogger meet.


Bloggers at the meetup (foto courtesy:Ram)

Blogosphere
Techy bloggers, some blog for niche segements (what about a blog on surrogacy or interriors), some because s/he hates her/his teacher, some just to record the various events, one person lost a fortune watching stupid films and in order to take revenge on the Directors of those films started reviewing film, some true professional blogger with around 17 blogs,OMG!


I did some home work,printed this card, exclusive for IndiBloggers, so that I could avoid telling people again and again what my blog url is

Then we had interesting way of networking. Each one was given a chart that (s)he was supposed to wear, meet people and get their comments. It was fun.

Chain reaction? Bloggers desperately scrapping! (foto courtesy:Ram)


This is what I got! anyway good to meet lots of people, an afternoon spent wisely

Sry forgot to mention

A T-shirt to all, so we blog therefore we are!

by accident

by choice

Year 2005! Noted novelist in Malayalam literature Mr.K L Mohanavarma,his twitter handle my uncle asked me and few others to write some thing for the community souvenir


The Souvenir where my first writeup appeared!

I wrote about my childhood, my wonderful days and to my absolute astonishment, the writeup was included.Another wonderful thing about the writeup was I realised that I have a passion for writing. Later I found a platform to jolt down whatever I found interesting, blogging! and i became a blogger.It was a pure accident. The same writeup became the first post in my world

Then by choice I became an Indiblogger. A platform for bloggers. Now Indiblogger has organised a bloggers' meetup at Chennai this Saturday i.e 20 March 2010. Around 200 bloggers are expected. here are the details

And now am eagerly waiting to meet my fellow bloggers!

Restaurants from different places
Part three of the hotel series. Part I and II


Kalinga


Adyar Ananda Bhavan


Adyar Arthi Bhavan


Triplicane Ratna Cafe


California Kitchen


Chennai food centre


Madurai Kanappar

Daily dosage from the world of books!

" A Philosopher is a blind man in a dark night, in a dark house, searching for a black cat which is not there."

Anagoras, Ancient Greek

IPL season 3 is on and getting hotter, this edition of TED Tuesday Harsha Bogle, Cricket commentator, talking about rise of Cricket as a sport and a business in India, enjoy the talk

Image of the week


One day washing, three day washing, the washing expert!

Daily dosage from the world of books!

"If you want to continue your mental and emotional growth every so often you must surprise yourself by changing the pattern of your life and interest."

Arthur.C. Clarke

Chennai's First Drive thru McDonald's


Chennai gets her first Drive-thru Golden Arches, McDonald's at Velachery, here is how to reach


You enter and order!


Pay for what you have ordered!


Take a turn!


And you collect your packet and Exit!



Ronald McDonald, The Chief Happiness Officer, welcoming all


Ground floor. This outlet is fairy a big one, almost 3000 sqft!


And more seating and a party area on the first floor!very friendly staff. The only hitch. They play the same CD (Bryan Adams) almost all the time!Lets wait to hear more!

Restaurants from different places

Second part of restaurants in China with place(s) names, if u missed part 1, here it is


China town


Dindukkal Bangarau restaurant


Little Italy



Karaikudi restaurant



Bombay Talkies

Search for more is still on!

The curious life of James Cameron! one more Oscar season, and James Cameron is talking about his many Avatars in TED

James Cameron: Before Avatar ... a curious boy | Video on TED.com

Enjoy the talk!

Out of box car

Innovation in ads have reached new heights that sometimes, am afraid to say, the admen (and marketers) forget the basics

'Design' as Steve Jobs said "is not only how it looks but how it works". This morning (08 March 2010)with the news paper I found a car completely out of shape, worst thing to happen for an automobile right? worse still its a German car. German Automobiles are synonym for Safety


Probably as the tagline says "Made in India" did the damage?


Hope this ad will not affect the sales or the performance of the car