This post has been guest authored by Sudhindra Rao,a Digital Communications Professional who’s also an ardent Social Media freak.He blogs here and tweets here.Click here to know more about him.

Barack Obama has been elected as the 44th President of the United States of America.Look anywhere and you will find a lot of speculations,observations,analysis and debates over his elections campaign,as to how President Obama succeeded,how he used the communications tool called “Online media” effectively to bring in the change.

Barack Obama overcame enormous political obstacles to win.Obama and his organization were extremely disciplined & skilled in delivering Obama’s message across various platforms.

He planned for success rather than anticipating failure.He understood and embraced the power of a digital campaigning and assumed the posture of an activist.By doing so, he created a nation of activists, a true grassroot movement, for his campaign and his beliefs.

A look at the digital steps related to his campaign

In Barack Obama’s headquarters, young staff members continuously monitored, analyzed online voter data and targeted potential backers. They zipped one e-mail to an undecided voter and zapped a different message to a firm supporter.

Depending on the voter, they followed with Facebook reminders, telephone calls, text messages and, most important, house visits.

As some campaign workers built mailing lists and telephone trees according to political, professional and personal interests, others created the first groups and profiles on sites targetting youngsters to professionals to Senior citizens.

They also used BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com, AsianAve.com and GLEE.com – the MySpace and Facebook equivalent for, respectively, the African American, Latino, Asian and gay online communities. They have posted more than 350 videos on his YouTube channel, twice as many as Clinton, and his videos have been viewed nearly twice as often as hers. Obama has more MySpace friends than any other Democratic candidate, and he lists more Facebook supporters than all other Democrats combined.

His activist campaign attracted unprecedented involvement of people online by creating personalized experiences for supporters, allowing them to raise money, meet like-minded neighbors, use phone calls to interact, and get e-mails and SMS updates and calls to action. Anyone who disputes the idea that his was a true, online grassroots campaign, the first in American history, needs only to consider this statistic. JFK had 21,000 campaign donors; President Obama had 2.3 million.

Some Figures:

Web presence (Google):
Obama = 82,600,000 results
McCain = 63,000,000
George W. Bush = 42,000,000
JFK = 14,000,000

Facebook “friends”
Obama = 2,155,244
McCain = 578,651
George W. Bush = 0

YouTube Channel subscribers
Obama = 101,649
McCain = 25,439

Twitter Facts:
Obama : Following: 123,547, Followers: 119,539
McCain: Following: 5,239, Followers: 4,917

The Obama campaign boasts that more than 350,000 people have created personal accounts on My.BarackObama.com, 25,000+ have created blogs on the site; more than 20,000 have created their own personal fundraising pages with their own goals, thermometers to track progress, and follow-up tools; more than 20,000 offline local events have been planned using related tools on the site; and more than 6,500 active grassroots volunteer groups have formed in support of Obama with more than 200,000 members.

And all of that translated into an enormous victory Tuesday.

With this election alone and before any other decisions or actions, America has sent a very powerful message to the world and is changing its image dramatically.

Best wishes for this new era in America, this new era for the world.

Change can Happen!!!

(Inputs from various online Articles, News & Blogs)

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Sudhindra Rao

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This post has been guest authored by Sudhindra Rao,a Digital Communications Professional who’s also an ardent Social Media freak.He blogs here and tweets here.Click here to know more about him.

Global / Indian economic recession is one of the hottest topics among everyone today. As most of thepeople are weak in economics,all of them are wondering what exactly is happening and where are we heading towards.

As a result of increase in oil prices,foreign exchange is flowing from India. People have sold more shares in the indian share market than they bought in the recent weeks. This has added to the fall of sensex to lower points.

About three months back sensex was at 17000 to 18000 points. But now sensex points, the indicator of indian business and economy has fallen below 10000. Yesterday market fell 606 points!!

This is a clear indicator that indian economy is facing BIG problems.As a result,many companies like Jet Airways,TCS,Satyam and many others have laid off their staffs, the number of foreign tourists to india has dropped down, companies are cutting down compensations and perks etc.

So,is India moving towards ‘Recession’ ?

Inflation is rising due to high oil costs.

One day, Lehman Brothers declared themselves bankrupt. Employees all over the world were laid off. Many others followed – the list is still expanding.

Simultaneously, Home loans became more expensive and nearly impossible to get! The real estate scenario just got worse! Banks are now more worried about their customers defaulting.

Real estate prices have slashed, no one wants to even plan to buy property or even rent one expecting further reduction. Real estate suppliers have left their projects in between due to lack of demand. They have defaulted in paying interest on their debentures and honoring debentures in a timely manner. This has caused many Mutual Funds to suffer losses in millions.

Due to this poor situation in real estate and construction market, prices of steel and cement are crashing! Absolutely no demand ! Which means a lot of industries are suffering from the slowdown.

Aviation industry is sufering from severe losses! No traffic, high fare prices are all causing this industry to go under the covers.Kingfisher-Jet alliance and Jet airways staff shedding is the result….

With no demand, too many current employees cannot be remunerated with existing revenues. It is indeed a matter of concern, but companies cannot afford to suffer more! Even the cola companies weren’t spared! Recently a Cola company clodes their 5 major Production Companies.

Capital markets are moving towards crash. It seems like there is no tomorrow. FIIs do not want to invest. Finance Minister’s reassurances are of no use. There is panic everywhere. People want their money to be safe.

Banks refuse to lend money to other banks. Even though the government was willing to lend money, banks hardly took full benefits of it.

Indian startups are also facing tough times(VCs/Angels aren’t putting their money on startups so easily now).

The Indian Paradox

Inflation reflects high demand with plenty of money and scarcity of supply. On one hand,we’re facing high inflation, which is a sign of growth and on the other hand, we’re heading towards Economic recession. The worst phase of economics – stagflation. It is the worst paradox.

For instance, Iceland, one of the richest country, is bankrupt. A country that survives on imports, has only one day reserve for running the economy. This is global economics. We’re in deep trouble – we’re heading towards a massive depression which will not be restricted to USA only – it will hurt and injure every country and every individual hard.

Sudhindra Rao

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This post has been guest authored by Sudhindra Rao,a Digital Communications Professional who’s also an ardent Social Media freak.He blogs here and tweets here.Click here to know more about him.

Nokia finally unveiled its first ever touch-screen smartphone,5800 XpressMusic.

Powered by Symbian S60, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a music phone,better used to be known as “Tube” throughout its development cycle. It even had a cameo appearance in The Dark Knight.

According to Nokia,

“It will provide the best total music experience possible. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic will be among the first devices to support “Comes With Music“, Nokia’s groundbreaking service which offers one year of unlimited access to the entire Nokia Music Store catalogue“

Nokia 5800 has been launched under Nokia’s sub brand “XpressMusic” with no label of “N Series”. The phone boasts of an 3.2 inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels. Its also equipped with a 3.2 Mega Pixel Autofocus Camera with Carl-Zeiss Lens. With a 16:9 aspect ratio and 30 frames-per-second playback and recording, the device is ideal for VGA quality video recording and playback which can be shared online.

It also features Bluetooth with A2DP, GPS, Wi-Fi, an extension slot for Micro SD which can support up to 16 GB and a universal 3.5 mm earphone jack to be used with any ordinary earphones too with Built-in surround sound stereo speakers. Nokia 5800 XpressMusic supports Flash content, so that surfing the entire web is possible, not just pieces of it.

For a never ending music experience, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic also provides easy access to browse and purchase tracks from the Nokia Music Store, where applicable.

Nokia has introduced Media Bar, a handy drop down menu that provides direct access to music and entertainment, including favorite tracks, videos and photos. The Media Bar also offers a direct link to the web and online sharing.

With an innovative Contacts Bar,users can highlight four favorite contacts on their home-screen and, through a single touch, track a digital history of recent text messages, emails, phone logs, photos and blog updates.

The phone will be priced around around $390, unlocked and will come in shades of black, red and blue.

There’s even a complimentary 8GB microSD card alongwith.Expected to be available somewhere in Q4 2008 with a ‘Comes With Music’ edition to be rolled out in 2009.

Looks like Nokia is gearing up fast with a lot of variety to confront iPhone3G and T-Mobile G1.

For more details about this smartphone, visit here.

For more pics of the new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic visit here

Sudhindra Rao

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This post has been guest authored by Sudhindra Rao,a Digital Communications Professional who’s also an ardent Social Media freak.He blogs here and tweets here.Click here to know more about him.

According to Twitterfacts,(as on 21 Sept) number of twitter users has crossed a figure of 3 Million.

So, what else can we do besides posting on twitter ? How about doing some more interesting things with twitter. So, here goes the list…

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Tweetscan: Tweet scan is a real-time search engine for Twitter & identi.ca. It indexes the messages and lets you search keywords, people, tweets etc.You can download tweets,conversations and can even author with results via email.

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Twittermail: Once registered, TwitterMail gives you a TwitterMail email address, something like your_name@twittermail.com. Any mail sent to this e-mail address will be posted on your twitter account.

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Twitter Local: Twitterlocal allows you to generate RSS feeds to filter out tweets around a certain area. Just enter the area of interest and it will generate a feed URL and add it to your feed reader.

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Twitarcs: How about some visual treat? Twitarcs creates strange, interesting visual images on the term/keyword entered. It takes the latest 100 tweets for a twitter ID or term of interest and creates a list representation that has arcs connecting messages sent to the same users or that use the same primary term. You can click on the left side to load the tweets for a new user, on the right side to load the tweets for a specific term, and in the middle to visit the actual tweet.

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Twittearth:Twittearth gives you a 3D view of LIVE tweets from all over the world.It’s a great visual treat for your eyes.It’s sort of a Twitter’s analogue of Digg’s Swarm(see Digg Labs).

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Tweetbeep: Want to know who’s speaking about you or your company,blog or product on Twitter ! Tweetbeeps are like Google alerts which alerts you by sending an email when any twitter post contains a link or content relating to you or your blog/company.

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Twitter Grader: Twitter Grader evaluates your public twitter value. The Twitter Grader measures the relative power of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score.The service is provided by Hubspot

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Sudhindra Rao

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This post has been guest authored by Sudhindra Rao,a Digital Communications Professional who’s also an ardent Social Media freak.He blogs here and tweets here.Click here to know more about him.

AskOxford defines Flock as a noun meaning “a large number or crowd”. And this is the most appropriate name for a new social browser “Flock”.

Flock is an open source browser and would be more useful to bloggers and people involved in social networks or people who are web 2.0 savvy. Flock is based upon open source code from Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

Flock is equipped with lots of social networking tools such as integrated blogging, flicker and Youtube support, bookmark syncing with del.icio.us, inbuilt feed reader, can add social accounts like facebook, twitter etc

Flock Features

• It has built-in tabs  whereby you can add, see, contact, and interact with your social networking friends in Facebook, Digg, Youtube, Pownce, Twitter, Flickr
• You can have search through Google, Yahoo. MSN, Ask, Wikipedia, ebay, Technorati, Digg, Facebook, wink,people
• It has a in-built Photo uploader, Blog editor, web mail & Web clipboard
• It has a in-built feed reader, and a media bar, which instantly finds pictures, videos from Digg, Photobucket, Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, Picasa and more.

Look n Feel

Flock gives a great user experience and it looks like a beautified Firefox. The buttons, menus are neatly placed, with a good color combination and useful icons.

Other than the usual buttons,some new ones are:

Favorite : Single click to add in browser, Double click to add to Del.icio.us

RSS : To show the feeds available in the entered URL

Mail : To mail the entered URL

Digg : To dig the entered URL

Search: Search through Google, Yahoo, Ask, Amazon, MSN, Digg etc

My World

My world button takes care of your favorite feeds, favorite websites, friend’s activity (friends from your social network) & favorite media. You can have a look at once on all the four.

People Sidebar

People sidebar is a bar giving you option to login to your social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Plurk, Digg etc. Your friend are displayed as a list, with their recent activity and you can message them by just dragging dropping any image video to their names. and it gets posted to their profile.

Media Mini Bar

Using Flock’s Media Bar, quickly preview online videos and photos, subscribe to video feeds, keep up to date on your friends’ picture postings, search media files, send videos to friends with one click etc.

You can share media through the following sites: Youtube, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Photobucket etc. With each sharing site again divided in to groups such as technology, Business, News, Lifestyle etc….

Blog Editor

An inbuilt blog editor is provided where you can copy text, pictures and videos from anywhere on the web and instantly post them into Flock’s Blog Editor or directly into blog. You can also monitor, manage and post to different blogs.

When mouse is hovered over any image/video in any website, a small button appears, by clicking which u can submit the image/video to Blog or email it.

Webmail

Flock also has an integrated web mail feature in which Flock plugs into several Web mail services to make your web browsing experience as integrated as possible. Presently supported mail services are Gmail, Yahoo and AOL mail.

Summing it up…

“I have been using Flock for almost two months and i liked it. It gives me ease to check mails, blog posting, image/video searching, searching though a whole lot of websites, maintaining RSS feeds, my social networks etc. But as i mentioned earlier, its not for those who just browse internet for mails and general things.If you are deep into Social web and a core web 2.0 savvy guy then this is a ‘must-have’ for you……  Try it !“

Sudhindra Rao

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