Well the big sponsorship for the event was because Rediff was launching their product called blogshowcase targeted at the bloggers. Well blogcamp pune was the right place to meet those bloggers who would test out their product. The product is a combined effort of a startup called WATConsult and Rediff according to this piece of info.
The Launch presentation was given by Rajiv Dingra of WATConsult and Jasmeet Singh who is the VP of product marketing at Rediff.
The Initial talking and showing of screenshots was done by Rajiv and then after the first few slides and intro there were questions from the public and Rajiv told the audience that it would be good if the questions were held till last when the presentation was over. Once the initial feature set and screenshots were shown the questions started pouring in most of them were valid questions and were rapidly fired by some of the people in the audience.
The answers given to the questions were not satisfactory(not just my opinion many others felt this too) plus it was shocking to see the response of both Rajiv and Jasmeet of some of the criticism coming their way apparently they were considering their offering was god sent and bloggers will accept it with their eyes closed no questions asked. I was more shocked with the fact that Rajiv was also having a bit of a problem with criticism which is not at all good for a person in charge of a startup being open minded to criticism helps in survival in this fierce competitive world.
The problem with this product is that it adds to the problem of information overload affecting all us net junkies.
Personally there were lots of issues which were not good for the users of the service things like them using the content from the blogs onto their portal and with mainstream content. pulling stuff from blogs and putting it without modification does not work as bloggers tend to be colloquial in their writing.
Plus the fact that the meta content generated around your content was Rediff property plus it pulls your rss feed so if you give full post in your feed you wont as that will not get traffic onto your site so the question is will you maintain two feeds one for full post and one special one to submit to blogshowcase.
The Logic behind the entire product is you give us access to your feed and we give you an audience but the question is will be audience be willing to go through hundreds of posts everyday (it is a well known fact that most users just go to the Digg homepage only) the product will fail if not positioned properly for both bloggers and rediff users.
Well me being a blogger would not use the product why you ask?
Simply because my doubts about the product have not been cleared and also with the fact that if you sign up and once they crawl your feed and copy the content onto their servers and what do you know how they will use your content?
apparently Rediff is so dumb they didn’t even bother to put a terms and conditions page they just expect people to come there and submit their details with no assurance.
Overall from this launch I have learned some important lessons
- never launch a half baked product
- be open to criticism
- come up with better way of presenting to target audience
- research well to see if there is a market for the product
- always think about monetizing if you cant find a way don’t get into it
The product did not create any much buzz in the blogosphere also plus the main stream media also didn’t cover it much.
To read the blogshowcase teams blog read this they are trying to explain here how their offering is different from digg