Learn and Lead: December 2008

Looking Back at 2008 Blog Posts

Here's a 'Wordle' of titles of blog posts in year 2008.

What I Learned in 2008

Labels: Learning, The Big Question 1 comments

Learning Circuits asks readers to reflect on the year gone by and share what they learned in 2008.

I learned to shed my inhibition and fear of the online world (identify theft, spam, and most importantly, what will others think) and create a real digital presence on the web.

I learned how to make friends using the social web, through channels like blogs and social networking sites (Facebook and LinkedIn).

I learned to blog and interact with fellow bloggers.

I learned that it is not easy to get participation in online communities (not sure why I was surprised, having tried it in different avatars in the past).

I learned that it is great feeling when people I meet for the first time tell me that they read my blog.

I learned to shed my inhibitions to attend conferences on blogging and welcome opportunities to actually speak in conferences. I learned to blog about what I hear in conferences.

I learned how easy it is get a domain name and set up a website.

I learned to reflect and share my learning through my blog.

I learned about social and viral marketing and managed to generate a better response this year for my unofficial salary survey.

I learned from my fellow blogger how to gracefully agree to disagree.

Finally I learned that there is so much more to learn, and the more I learn the more I realize how little I know.

Here's a 'Wordle' of titles for 2008 blog posts.

Top 10 Blogs by Learning Professionals in India

Labels: Blogging, eCube, eLearning, India, Learning, Learning professionals, Lists 7 comments

Jul 2009 Update: You can find an updates list of blogs by Learning professionals and companies in India here.

Time magazine came out with an issue of ‘Lists’, publishing various top 10 lists for 2008. RWW has many posts on various top 10s of the year. Inspired I started working on top 10 blogs by learning/training professionals in India, about learning/training. I found it hard to find 10 blogs that are updated regularly (at least 1 post a month)!!!

Obviously I am not reading enough. So where are the learning/training professionals with their blogs about the profession? Do leave your comments with links to blogs by learning/training professionals in India.

Here’s my list of top 10 blogs by learning/training professionals in India:

Writers Gateway – Rupa Rajagopalan
Viplav Baxi’s Meanderings – Viplav Baxi
eCube, Collaborative Learning Environment – various authors
Speak Out – Archana Narayan
Designed for Learning – Taruna Goel
Random Ideas – Mousumi Ghosh

Here are the remaining who I wish would write more often:

The Emotion Called Trust

Labels: Behaviour, Blogging, CEO blogging, Corporate blogs, Life, Online marketing, Survey, Trends, Trust 1 comments

Continuing with the thread I started in my previous post Do you trust corporate blogs, and picking up from posts on Trust by Ken Allen and Tony Karrer, I came across Chris Brogan’s post Advertising and Trust. Chris wrote in response to Jeremiah Owyang raising questions about Chris’s sponsored post for Kmart. Chris does a great job at analysing and responding. In this process I discovered many posts that talk about trust and integrity of bloggers. Two posts that caught my eye were Lucretia M. Pruitt: What is Your Time Worth? What’s Worth Your Time? and Barbara Gibson: What is your integrity worth? I don’t follow blogs of Jeremiah, Lucretia or Barbara, but I had no reason not to trust them. They have an opinion that they are sharing.

When I come across blog posts that talk about other products, I take them as opinions of those bloggers. I am a gullible guy J. However I will not necessarily take business decisions (or even personal buying decisions) based only on one or two blog posts, and I don’t think that means I don’t trust blogs. It is definitely helpful when bloggers disclose posts to be sponsored posts. I follow RWW and they talk about their sponsors all the time. They also talk about other products and I trust them to provide a balanced view in their product reviews.

An interesting thing to note in the Forrester report is that people trust emails from people they know but don’t trust as much the social networking profiles from people they know. Hmmm…

Do you Trust Corporate Blogs?

Labels: Blogging, CEO blogging, Corporate blogs, Online marketing 3 comments

According to a recent Forrester Research report, people trust emails from who they know most and they trust corporate blogs the least. According to the report, only 16% people trust corporate blogs. I had written about CEO and corporate blogging sometime back and this report presents some interesting perspectives.

You can read posts that comment on this report at RWW and Rohit Bhargava’s blog.

What do you think? Do you trust corporate blogs? Which ones do you read regularly and why? It would interesting to get some views of corporate bloggers too.