The machinery had to be built to do the job on a scale never imagined before. It took many iterations to get it right, and even then there were many breakdowns. Stohl, at first only believed he was doing his bit during the War. What was really going on became brutally clear not at face, but in a slow painful realisation. Literally face to face with the truth, there was no alternative but to go along. Either that, or die.

This stunning first novel, fiction but all too real, has page after page of technical detail of white hot crematoria that struggled to keep up with the overload of the last few months of the war. And each detail proves horribly riveting as one reads on and learns what it took to keep the mass murder going. Somehow all the minutia made it mare real, this time and place where killing was the job so many went to each day, just like one goes to the office.

Stohl tells his daughter and her family the horrible truth of those years in hell many decades later, and only because his dying wife makes him promise to do so. And with her, you too wonder whether you would be able to understand and forgive. Difficult, yet for the first time I at least begin to see it from another point of view.

A school kid named Jeff was in the gym lifting weights. Close by, also getting his daily dose of exercise, was Kim, one of the most popular teachers in the school. After they were done for the day, Jeff toweled himself off, picked up his things and cheerfully as ever said, “I’ll see ya tomorrow”, and left.

Two hours later, Kim got a phone call to say Jeff had killed himself. No one had the faintest warning.

A phase, but painful
Revealing very little on the surface, kids really know how to keep their inner world secret. But that doesn’t mean adults shouldn’t reach out to them – with or without a sign. Instead, parents often write off tell-tale signs or subtle cries for help as a “teenage syndrome”. They expect teenagers to be moody and mixed up and feel that the only thing to do is wait it out until the phase passes.

It’s easy enough to miss signs of distress or dismiss them as meaningless. But if they were that meaningless, suicide in children wouldn’t be going up as it is today. If they want to help, grown ups have to leave no stone unturned to be sensitive and caring. A child acting strangely or coming up with unusual misbehavior shouldn’t infuriate a teacher or parent, but alert them to check whether all is indeed well.

Helping hands at school
Teachers at a school far away in Ohio, learned this the hard way. At Hamilton High, the suicide rate among children reached an alarming level. When in a short time, four children killed themselves, the school decided they just had to do something to prevent this from happening ever again. Their efforts are documented in a film I saw recently – also called A Cry for Help.

We don’t have good enough figures for India, but according to this film, in the US nearly one in seven children consider committing suicide. And one in 14 actually attempt it and ore than once. Another horrifying statistic is that parents fail to pick up on the signs in 90 percent of the cases. As our own culture becomes increasingly urbanized and stressful, we have to face the possibility that we may have similar incidences in India.

The principal of Hamilton High said that he would not take responsibility for children committing suicide. But he would do everything possible to prevent it from happening. The school created a crisis team and they brain stormed and came up with a range of activities that they put into effect. One was to use a special sign, which would mean “I hear you” or “I understand you”. For a period regularly, they would put up painted hand signs on the doors of various teachers’ rooms. These “helping hands” meant that the teacher would be ready to drop everything to talk to a student. For one day each month, the team would get all kids to go through a set of exercises that helped them open up about their feelings. For example, anyone from a group who had ever felt bad at a negative comment about their appearance would “cross the line” to go over to the other side This symbolic move would help children feel less alone and talk about their experience. Another great exercise was “If you really, really knew me…” in which children would come up with something they never told anyone. In the film, a child said: If you really knew me, you would know that I never knew my dad. The school had other special days like “character day” or “challenge day” when they would use innovative exercises to get children to connect better with each other and offer comfort to one another.

While one may debate the amount of responsibility parents have over children versus how much teachers have, there’s no escaping that school can be ground zero for problems to surface. In our schools, teachers are overworked and underpaid. They have a huge number of students in each class and are hard put to it to complete their main job of teaching, let alone worry about their students’ personal problems. Still, I do believe that a warm and positive attitude could help immeasurably.

Preventing suicide
Dr Kavita Arora, child and adolescent psychiatrist working in Delhi, says that children are actually surprisingly open to help. They very much want someone to get them out of the helpless and the out-of-control state they find themselves in. Here’s how some of them describe how they have felt when in depression:
It’s like being tortured by your own brain.
A negative energy just compresses you.
I didn’t really want to die, but I just had to stop that feeling.
I felt I just had to get out of it somehow

Dr Arora says that in her experience, parents who are alert to their kids being in trouble, immediate take charge, even rallying the whole family round successfully. The children, desperate for help, respond. In particular, kids do well with a mentor or someone they feel they can confide in any time they want to.

Coping skills
Depression in children is probably not chemically different from that in adult, Dr Arora explains. They respond to the same medicines that adults do. But more than medication, it is therapy and the teaching of coping skills that helps children in trouble.  In fact, if we don’t give a child some inner strength, values, and coping skills at the most formative time of life, then any amount of physics, maths and chemistry isn’t going to matter and we, in effect, are failing them. Since kids who are prone to depression could experience it again in later life, it is the coping skills that will best prepare them. Children, luckily, are more resilient than adults and get better if help of the right kind is given at the right time.

Learning important life skills is even more important when parents are themselves having any sort of problems, either with their own depression, with each other, or with work and home stresses.

You only have to scour YouTube or other social sites to see the clues to how young kids are feeling, but rather than violate the privacy that is so important to them, the adults in their lives need to put their heads together to find creative ways of helping. Could there, for example, be a way to help online, where kids love to hang out? Along with being keen to ensure that children are living the lives parents and teachers expect, it’s important to give them solid life skills, warmth, security and the confidence that they are unconditionally loved and a helping hand when they cry for help.

It’s not possible to cut and paste solutions from the US into Indian schools, but have a look at the sources from PBS and the Cry for Help film and see if it can help shape ideas for use here. Should you have a child in crisis and need to get help for your child, try Children First at childrenfirst@in.com

For those of you who think of depression as an adult problem, or worse still, an adult weakness, here’s a shock:

Even infants can get depressed. Yes, it’s tough to imagine what a tiny baby, who hasn’t even seen the world immediately around yet, has to get depressed about, but that’s what has been observed.

As young as that!
What you would see on the outside, keeping aside other physical problems, is a baby who looks sad (with or without crying), doesn’t interact readily with people, and who’s slow to react. Alertness, curiosity, wonder, spontaneous bursts of delight, energy etc are muted. There are other signs, of course and because a baby can’t explain, it’s easy to mistake one problem for another. Still, mental health professionals believe they have identified distinct signs of depression.

Depression occurring that early lends support to the belief that the cause is a bio-chemical imbalance. That much-ridiculed “chemical locha” Bollywood likes to scoff at. It’s also been seen that the babies of depressed mothers are more prone to depression. Whether the baby picks this up from the mother, or whether this is the result of biological factors, is not fully understood.

Seeing the recent national focus on suicide in older children or teens, I thought it was a good time to examine depression in children more closely. Every parent needs to know more about this subject.

My secret world
To get an expert view, I spoke with Dr Kavita Arora, child and adolescent psychiatrist. As we chatted, I was reminded of my own niece who tragically hung herself from a fan when she was just a little girl in school. Pretty young thing with her whole life before her. The family was shell-shocked and at a loss to understand what would drive her to suicide. She hadn’t done very well in a physics exam recently, but was that any reason? I will never forget what her grandfather said: there has to be something very wrong with a society in which a grandfather must light the funeral pyre of his young granddaughter.

Only later did they find scribblings in her diary and notebooks that were clearly a cry for help. The problem is, on the surface, she really seemed no different from usual except for asking one or two odd questions about whether one could die from jumping off the roof of their house, and how one should donate one’s eyes after death.

And that’s the mystery of depression in children. It doesn’t look the same as it does in adults. Children have a secret world of their own to which adults are usually not privy. Even though we think we know them very well, there’s much going on in their heads that we are clueless about.

We like to think of childhood and adolescence as a time of carefree innocence and fun, a time when there are no “real” problems to worry about. But inside the teen’s head, there’s a welter of painful worries: Am I normal? Is this how I’ll always be? Who am I, really? Why do I not feel in control? Why do I look like this? Does anyone really love me? Because it’s a time of identity formation, the teen is very vulnerable. Depression on top of all this can be a frightening experience, often leading to suicide.

What is there to get depressed about?
Why the depression, I asked Dr Kavita Arora. “In children and even young adults, the circuitry of the brain is still being formed. We think that all the real growing happens by the age of five, but there is in fact a second spurt of growth in adolescence when neurons are firing and pathways are being formed.  This formative time is one of special tumult and confusion and it’s what makes depression in teens so qualitatively different.”

Parents, teachers and other adults around often react with incredulity, and even indignation when a child is said to be depressed. Dr Arora was telling me how parents will say well, the child was just fine a moment ago, off to a movie with his friends: how can that mean depression? But in truth, whether the child is at a movie or with friends, at home listening to music, talking on the phone or writing in a diary – you don’t really know what he or she is feeling.

Many signs
Dr Arora says that parents should trust their instincts and be very alert when there’s a change – any kind of change – in their child. Some children withdraw and curl up into themselves, avoiding social occasions and interaction. Others suddenly seek out other people almost frantically, and even turn clingy. There could be a sudden heightened activity and even thrill seeking or risk taking. Or there could be a sort of freeze on activity. The tell tale sign however is that it’s a change over the previous.

Physically, there could be a change in sleep and appetite. Sleeping too much or too little, hardly eating or pronounced binge eating – any extreme and any change from before should alert the adults around. Depression could also show up as inexplicable physical symptoms; anxiety could do the same. A noticeable drop in performance at school should be another indicator that you need to check out what’s going on. Losing interest in one’s friends, hobbies, or in school could also be signs.

The more drastic signs of depression are when teenagers get involved in gangs, cults, become bullies or go so far as to cut themselves.  Getting mixed up with drugs and crime too ,of course, could be linked to depression.

The stress is not the cause
Everyone becomes sad in response to unfortunate experiences, but with biologically based depression, the stress is not the cause – the biology is. The stress is the trigger. Being beaten up or bullied at school, having a fight with a friend, going through a problem in a relationship, being upset with one’s parents, not getting good marks etc, are all stresses, but what makes one child able to cope with it and another not? Dr Arora says that the role of the stressors is more important in children because they’re still forming their identity and personalities. An underlying tendency towards depression can be called to the surface when a child faces a stressful event.

In Part II of this post, we’ll look at what can be done to help children who are depressed and are quietly crying out for help.

I wonder whether we Indians realize how fortunate we are. The main problems that occupy national attention right now are whether a controversial author can or cannot come for a literary festival, the all-important question of the army chief’s birthday, and whether a bunch of stone elephants should be covered up with cloth.  Oh, and what Priyanka Gandhi is wearing for the campaign. Are we not blessed to have no bigger problems to deal with?

As I struggle to keep the television on and get a little dose of news, I can’t believe the way the media is making a meal of each trivial issue and milking it for all its worth. Yes, I get that freedom of expression is severely and scarily under threat. I also get that the handling of the date of birth fiasco will set a precedent. But I also think that the extent of attention being paid to these issues – perhaps to make for entertaining viewing – is out of all proportion to the criticality. “Has India Failed Rushdie?” Think about whether India’s failed its own ordinary citizens.

In contrast, someone who’s been raped and lies unconscious, unprotected by those who are supposed to protect her, gets a mere minute on the airwaves. Someone should do the math sometime and see whether the media is even close to reflecting the importance of problems as they really exist in real life. And whether they have some responsibility to do so, considering how they shape opinion. Or erode thought, I might say, by sheer dint of repetition.

Is there nothing wrong with a system in which Swapan Dasgupta and Mani Shankar Aiyar trade insults for great entertainment while we never get to hear a shred of world news? Even BBC seems to cover India in a real sense, more than our own television channels do. (Well, except Top Gear). We’ve become a self-absorbed country, focused on the most absurd little things, while problems bigger than all the elephants put together, threaten every aspect of our lives.

The name is most misleading because the results are ever so dreamy and surreal, and very satisfying, but the app is named for the toy camera effects it is said to produce.

Take a photo or pick one from your camera roll on any iOS device – and sit back. Just swipe to go through an infinite number of transformations to your picture. That’s all it takes, really, as you have no control and there’s no sliders and settings or adjustments. That’s sad in a way, but on the other hand, you have the effects served up to you as presets.

The effects are a play with light and color leaks, blurs and vignettes and just a touch of texture and borders. I often gasp at the change in my photo, which immediately turns into a finished product, sometimes looking like quite a work of art. Since I’m that fond of photo apps, I have this nice trick of taking a photo through multiple apps – and then finally polishing them off with Plastic Bullet (actually called Plastic Bullet 2). It’s nothing short of amazing. It has startling effects on a black and white photo too.

I use it on the iPad and take my time playing with photos, but anyone who uses the iPhone will love the look instantly produced and shareable on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Tumblr. Not Instagram, surprisingly. You can save to your camera roll, of course, and you can choose one of three sizes. And there’s support for hi res and large files, though I haven’t tried any.

Plastic Bullet is wanting in a bit of variety though. Technically, the effects are infinite, but they are rather similar. You may get page after page of transformations in which no two effects are identical, but definitely they’re all within one style and class and after five or six swipes, you’re likely to make your selection and be done with it. What I’d love is an infusion of new variations and colors, maybe through a hefty upgrade. Come on, Red Giant Software. While you’re at it, your photo gallery is not doing justice to the lovely results possible with the app.

A little pink flower wakes up with some light and color

Hello dancers, techies, friends, family…

I’ve neglected my blog for a bit because a) I’ve just had too much writing to do for too many publications and b) I want help with a template or some other solution to separate the technology from the dance from the documentary reviews from the cats! Will be experimenting with a few templates and hopefully I’ll find something that fits and lets people get right into the category they want. Once that’s done—I’m blogging again.

I’ll be stepping up my technology and social media writing and a ot of that will be echoed on this blog. But I also have tons of dance DVDs piled up for review and will get to them as soon as I can.

Plus of course I just want a place to talk about whatever grabs my fancy and interact with you all. Guest posts might be a nice idea too!

Mala

Technology will always be used for good and for bad. It’s time to address the real issues

By now it’s happened in many parts of our troubled world. People have communicated using technology, whether it be messengers on smartphones or social networking sites, and then gathered in crowds to act on their thoughts and emotions — sometimes for the good, and sometimes with devastating results. But hey, there were no BlackBerry phones in 1848, and the French Revolution still happened and th e kings and queens still lost their heads.

Today, as riots in London spread to other cities, the preoccupation of authorities and so much of the media seems to be with how Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry “triggered off” the anarchy. You mean nobody used land lines? And what about the modes of transport that we think of as progress? Didn’t they play a facilitative role?

Give them a reason and crowds will find a way to gather. “This proves that social networking sites have a downside,” says one publication.

Frankly, all this proves is that human beings have a downside! Human beings in power have a downside when they neglect smouldering discontent. Parents have a downside when they bring up children to think it’s acceptable to steal and vandalize first for a laugh. People have a downside when they believe it’s okay to do anything as long as their greed is satisfied. It’s hard times that caused the riots. And alienation. Also possibly the way police forces behave with young people. I saw someone on television describing the riots as the voice of the unheard. It could also be that it’s just outright criminal activity. Perhaps it’s a whole set of reasons to blame. Not BlackBerry, for heaven’s sake.

As the world innovates and creates easier and easier ways of doing things, invariably it becomes a victim of its own progress. That’s’ the price we pay for the species we are. How else do we even have guns?

With the arson and looting spiraling out of control, there’s talk of taking military action. There’s also attempts to get at the young people who have been posting the shockingly informatory messages with their call to criminal action – and so they should. But get the same time it would do well to realize that technology will always be used for good – and for bad. It’s time to address the real issues.

This article was published in Businessworld on 9th August 2011

Are you a big fan of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series? Are you tickled by the thought that the sexy Lady Gaga could be a man? Do you feel you’d like to help Japan in its time of need as it continues to be bombarded with horrific aftershocks and the frightening prospect of radioactive leakage? Well, there’s a scam for that.

Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone. I must admit that from day one I’ve been extremely wary of all those apparently-fun apps on Facebook that tell you whether your friends think you’re good looking, match a colour to your personality, tell you what your name really means, and so on. I’m even more suspicious of games, which thankfully I have no time for anyway.

But for all those of you who may be “addicted” to Facebook, where you make it a point to take every quiz and play every game that comes your way, here’s a home truth: Expert scamsters are leaving no stone unturned to make money by exploiting your habits, from hijacking your whole account and making off with it, to sending you event request, to enticing you into clicking to see an “OMG” video. These exploits are well-crafted and implemented — not like the clumsily-worded Nigerian scams of yesteryear (which nevertheless snare many victims).

Facebook users also readily take the bait. After the US, the people who fall for Facebook scams happen to be… you guessed it, Indians. That’s according to security firm, BitDefender, who used a free account-protecting tool called Safego to study Facebook scam-scape. In their analysis, they show how the hugest number of users get taken in by the “see who viewed your profile” line. This particular scam gathered 1,411,743 clicks. Offers of free iPads, shocking images, videos apparently featuring you, and even fake versions of popular games have been used as part of scams that spike the click through rate to get the scamsters money. Search for BitDefender infographic to see a visual of the stats.

Recently, a friend of mine kept claiming that her Facebook account had been taken over by someone. I was a little reluctant to believe her, until I discovered there were indeed enough instances where accounts were hijacked or recreated. The cyber-criminal sends out messages to the account holder’s friends about some kind of emergency and asks for money to be sent immediately.

Other scams work by using your interests and behaviour to get you to click on pages set up to use you to spread the scam further and further. The Twilight scam is a recent example. Go ahead and Like the Facebook page for security firm, Sophos. This is a good place to keep track of scams that are doing the rounds. In fact, if you’re tempted to click on something suspicious, go check here first. Sophos shows you, in a video, just how you’re clickjacked to a fake game page. The user is baited into allowing access to the basic Facebook account information and putting up wall posts. There’s also a survey which the user takes to add to the scamsters coffers.

Scams are being created so cleverly they keep abreast of the news and use what they know to make the content of their bait more realistic. There are many social media companies due for IPOs this year and this fact is being used to come up with scams on sales of unregistered shares. One trader actually tricked investors out of $9.6 million for fake Facebook and Google shares, news reports say.

Incredibly, according to Security News, there’s even a scam that says Facebook is closing down because it can’t handle so many accounts. Users who want to keep their accounts alive are lured to click somewhere or the other. Another crazy scam experimented (and did pretty well) with not using a celebrity or anything very dramatic but apparently linked to a video about how students are going haywire while a teacher is turned to the blackboard. “Teacher from behind” being the operative terms here. For heaven’s sake.

If only people would stop for a moment and think.

Facebook isn’t amused by these scams, as you’d well imagine. After all, how would it benefit Facebook if everyone were to get spooked and stop clicking on everything? All that hard work for nothing! Here’s what they say: “… (we have) a large team of professional investigators who quickly remove these (groups and pages that violate Facebook policies) when we detect them or they’re reported to us by our users. “Facebook says they advise people to be suspicious of anything that looks or feels strange online – whether it’s an unfamiliar link in a message from a friend who hasn’t contacted you in a while, or a promise of something valuable if you take a certain action or provide personal information. They suggest you keep in touch with the Facebook Security Pages and blog to protect yourself. Meanwhile, they’re working on ways of automatically removing scam messages.

Can’t be soon enough for those 750 million users!

As an inveterate lover of audiobooks, i know that they can be just as much a pleasure as their print counterparts. Audiobooks fit neatly into my life to stop me from getting bored in my car, give me company when I’m doing mundane tasks around the house, calm my nerves while I wait at the dentist’s, or to read to me when I want to give my eyes a rest. Okay, I made up the one about the dentist. I refuse to go to the dentist. But the rest is true.

For people with print disabilities, text-to-speech is a godsend. But every bit of information one encounters isn’t available in a navigable audio format. And that’s what the Daisy (digital accessible information system) consortium has been working on for decades. Its vision is a world where people with print challenges have equal access to information without delay or additional expense.Accessibility Daisy has members in almost all countries using its digital standards to translate data to digital audio. The challenge has been to translate to audio fast and prolifically enough. There has been virtually no choice in digital for those who need them. That’s where Open XML comes to the rescue. The Daisy consortium decided to make its technology and standards open so that anyone interested could develop it further. Microsoft, with a long-time interest in accessibility, stepped in. Collaborating with Daisy and others, they created an add-in for Word that lets anyone make a digital-talking file. And it’s as easy as saving a file; you opt to ‘Save As Daisy ’. With the most recent version announced for Word 2010, you get an entire menu and ribbon for it as well.

It takes no special expertise to create the digital audio file. You will need to be neat with how you create it — use the style options to make proper headings, footnotes, or whatever else you need. Put in captions for pictures and make sure there is no mixed and confusing formatting. That’s all. The remarkable thing then is that xml allows the document to be audio-navigable. It lets you know where you are in the file, even highlighting it in yellow, bookmarking your access and taking into account all headings and subheads. In a player, you can use buttons to really move across the document. This feature differentiates it from a regular, recorded, read-out audio file. Navigation is impressive and can be by sentence, page number, title, para, time increments and, in some devices, even by words. The hardware is available from agencies that provide Daisy books (see www.daisy.org) and the software is free to download. Daisy books can also be used on mp3 players and phones.

Of course, an electronic-sounding voice reads the audio. But, amazingly, listeners get used to this rapidly and even speed up the voice on players to consume content faster.

Although assistive technology benefits the target community, there are often great advantages for just anyone. With the barrier to the creation of talking books and files removed, there should be no reason why the quantity of information that is accessible in many different situations shouldn’t go up exponentially. The free Daisy add-in for Word and several other wizards lets anyone create audio files, in various languages including Hindi. This is exciting because it has huge potential uses for education and for spreading literacy.

In the US, it’s mandatory for textbooks to be available in the Daisy format. Requests for books can also be made if they are found unsupported. Copyright laws are dropped, reducing the barrier for generating text-to-speech even further. In India, copyright issues have not been resolved and we produce 0.75 per cent of books in Daisy formats. Voluntary agencies convert books where the government needs either to ensure availability or break the barriers to allowing anyone to produce educational books.

All the same, the Daisy Forum of India has 82 organisations involved in production and distribution of Daisy books. Several initiatives such as the production of all NCERT books in Daisy have been taken up. The HRD ministry is running a pilot project to produce university-level books in Daisy format in six languages.

You can use audio accessibility at work as well. Converting files using Daisy can, for example, allow a firm to work with people who have print disabilities. The format can be used as training material, to read out long reports or just as a different way of taking in information. As a writer, I might like to Daisy an article to see how it flows. A related add-in from Microsoft, STAMP, for PowerPoint lets you put in audio and text subtitles for video, captions — again, in multiple languages. These add-ins are available from version 2003 and Windows XP upward. Check them out at Microsoft.com/enable and fit them into your own business needs.

(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 09-05-2011)

It took being smacked squarely on the head with a revolution or two for the world to stop arguing with the huge fact that is social media. Skeptics have figured out that even if the social bubble were to burst, something has changed forever. What they’re slower to get however the transformation is happening to content online, even as we speak.

If you’re in the business of writing, or if you produce other forms of content for your company, consider the implications of these 15 changes shaping digital media.

1. Democratisation
In this age of social networking, everyone has a voice. And everyone uses it. Right from the start of the web, the internet has been a great equaliser – anyone can produce content. And they do. This democratisation has meant content-related industries have seen a disruption inside out. The consumption of content has gone up exponentially – just not in the old predictable ways it used to be consumed. Book publishers, music companies, television, newspapers and writers have all had to reinvent themselves in a world where they’re not the only content experts. The implications for anyone producing content are that they no longer have a handful of competitors. It’s you against ROW.

Facebook
2. Ownership In Question
Companies find they no longer own their logos, businesses discover that ideas don’t necessarily come from their swanky cerebral-stimulating air-conditioned innovation centres, and writers see their work sprouting up in places they didn’t expect it to online. Can a news site link to your blog and make it look like they wrote it? Can you use a photo someone seems to have forgotten online without it being theft? Can you put up a friend’s video on YouTube for all to see when he didn’t say you could? The social web has challenged and re-challenged content ownership as we once knew it. Most contentious of all is user-generated content. Does an article put up on Facebook belong to the user or to Facebook? Does a comment on a company’s page entitle the company to use it as they like?

3. Crowdsourcing
They call it “the wisdom of crowds”. Starbucks calls for great ideas on a special website – and it gets them. Lego puts design software up for download and asks its customers-to-be to use it to create new products, Harley Davidson makes a bunch of marketing material based on the participation of fans and the ideas they submit. Business publications crowdsource polls and surveys, the Q&A site, Quora, crowdsources answers from subject experts, and journalists crowdsource information for their writing. Never before was there such a wholehearted recognition of the fact that content doesn’t just come from institutions and organisations but from extraordinary ordinary people.

4. Aggregation And Curation
There was a time, not so long ago, when you had a producer and a reader-visitor-viewer-listener. There was no middleman. Today, many have entered the mix. Stopping just short of violating copyrights, aggregators create collections of content, providing a different search and see experience. As long as they have their search engine optimisation in order, aggregators come up right on top in search results, sometimes far more than the sites that contain the original material. Now, curators who filter and select content are taking up where aggregators have left off. Take a look at the special way in which LinkedIn is aggregating-curating content on its LinkedIn Today.

You Tube
5. Trending Topics
Once it was publishers who controlled what ended up as news or was widely consumed. Today it’s the crowd that decides what is trending and what isn’t. And it isn’t what you’d logically think should trend either. Recently, Rebecca Black, an American pop singer, put up a song called Friday on YouTube.

Getting 2.7 million dislikes, the song nevertheless has 137 million views as it went wildly viral, gaining Black global much notoriety – or fame, whichever way you look at it. Content producers can no longer take distribution online for granted but have to figure out the science of how to make something trend. If the content doesn’t “fly” on its own, they will need to push it forcefully into the social media flow.

6. Content Meets Apps
In the past two years or so, apps have created magic with content. Quite apart from apps made and branded by content producers (most major newspapers and magazines have them) there are others like Flipboard, Feedly, Zite, and others that serve up content from multiple sources all dressed up in beautifully designed pages on tablets like the iPad. On smartphones too, there are apps for all sorts of content, from videos and podcasts to games and newspapers. Even apps for movies are beginning to be available. Content makers can’t afford to ignore the reality of apps and will need to make sure they’re right out there where more content than they realize will be consumed. In India, where smartphones are internet access for the first time for so many, it’s all the more important to be part of the app world.

7. Nothing Without Interactivity
In the early days of the web, interactivity was limited to a being able to click around and maybe get a pop up or picture for your troubles. Games and Flash and subsequent technologies took interactivity to another level. Today, with tablets, interactivity enters another phase of creativity. At a TED talk, Mike Mattas demonstrated the first full-length book for the iPad and iPhone, Al Gore’s Our Choice. In this book, you can only pinch and zoom into pictures, you can pinch to fold and unfold sections, blow on the pressure-sensitive screen to make a windmill turn, see live infographics and get deeper and deeper into the content by touching elements. The software that makes this happen is up for use by anyone else who wants to. It’s interactivity like this that is making users expect an experience, not just a visit to a static website.

8. Sharing
How to make content share-worthy and get it to go viral has become part of the necessary strategizing of distributing content online. Plopping it online and leaving it to fend for itself isn’t going to cut it anymore. People spend time and effort thinking of what their communities will want to share (as opposed to read or view without necessarily sharing) and they package content to maximize the chances of sharing, whether that’s through Retweets on Twitter or posts on |Facebook, updates on LinkedIn, or anywhere else including plain old email. Much effort also goes into apps to make it easy, if not outright pleasurable, to share content with others.

9. Social Objects
As if it weren’t enough, content producers also have to create social objects of or around their content. Anything put out there must generate engagement and interaction. This is quite apart from pressing the Like button or even sharing the content. Meaningful discussion must combine with that to bring it up a notch. This isn’t easy to do and writers, film-makers and others are constantly seeking new ways of sparking off conversations around their content. The content has to become the reason people are coming together at that moment. In effect, content can’t be thought of without community engagement opportunities today.

Linked in
10. Recommendations Matter
The frantic race to get people to Like content has kept many social media marketing teams busy. The point of it all may not always be clear or fruitful, but the number of Likes and Recommendations has become a yardstick for content quality. Not to be left out in the cold, Google recently began rolling out their equivalent of the Like button, called Plus 1. On the professional front, LinkedIn upped its use of recommendations to move beyond personal testimonials for individuals to endorsements for companies and products. The whole business of liking and recommending has spread through the internet to become a part of the basic fabric of everything you do.

11. Instantly Measurable
Times were when you could remain blissfully unaware of what people really think of your writing, videos, photos or songs. And then maybe a couple of people would tell you and you’d hear what you want to hear. If you went about it more scientifically, you would have to wait for audience surveys, focus groups and ratings to yield their results. Today everything is instantly measurable. At least, if it’s linked in some way to social networking and not sealed off in a time-warped silo somewhere online. There are numerous tools to measure how content is faring online and these are not in the hands of experts. A URL shortener like Bit.ly will give you enough statistics – in real time. This means it’s tough to get away with putting out content that interests no one.

12. Accountability
It’s no longer enough to claim expertise and years of experience. The landscape online is a transparent one and it makes it essential to prove your expertise in your chosen field. For those producing content it means not assuming no one else can do it; not being complacent with mere presence or giving away too little. If you have ideas, concepts to convey, you need to back them up with specifics and with background content.

Twitter
13. Influence
It’s an age of influence online. That much we’re sure of. Ever since Twitter began growing into an “information network” where writers and others point to their work, one could see that some develop huge communities who follow, interact and spread the message – while others remain low key. Analytical tools give you influence scores, and some companies are even beginning to reward people with high social influence. See Klout as an example. For those pushing their content online, the moral of the story is that you need to be an influence in your field and you need to know how to develop and tap into other influencers. In India, as we know, politicians have recognized the importance of online influence and you’ll find the most unlikely individuals have jumped into social networking, gathering themselves quite a sizeable following.

14. No Privacy
One of the fallouts of consuming and sharing content online is that the entire privacy landscape has changed. Very soon, our definition of a concept that was once fairly straightforward, too will adjust to the changes. Suffice is to say that whatever content you consume is increasingly visible to your network of friends and contacts and this is a fact that has to be managed carefully. For content producers, the onus is to create content with which people want to be associated. Another challenge that touches on privacy is the fluid boundaries online between the personal and professional. Developing and maintaining a persona or brand calls for being several steps ahead of changes you have to stay alert to predict.

15. Four Screens, No Waiting
Smartphones and tablets add to computers and televisions to demand new, varied formats that go beyond optimisation and must provide a worthwhile experience. If an app just gets you to click to go to a website, users will soon move on from it. If an internet-enabled television makes it difficult for you to get to content easily, viewers will lose patience with it. The long and short of it is that users want their favourite content everywhere, on all their devices, in real time. On these four devices – smartphones, computers, tablets and television – consumption patterns have also changed in that users may want to either use a device in a focused way or multitask and consume on several devices at the same time.

Social media may have brought about sweeping changes to content and communication but it is still very much in flux. Changes are fast and furious as new technologies and devices come up. Already though, publishers’ digital audiences are beginning to match their print and broadcast audiences and just recently, at Amazon, e-books outpaced paperback sales. According to Neilson, television-watching just went down 2 per cent because of the shift to digital media. Anyone in any content industry must not only be thinking digital but must get ahead of the curve in all of the aspects of the changing face of content.