MisEntropy

And in the centre, Mr.Atticus

With Sir Martin Sorrell on the left and yours truly, on the right. This was at the Atticus lunch ceremony that took place on October 3rd 2007 at Harry's Bar, St. Audley Street, London. The statuette was awarded for my white paper The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand-building incorporating long tail economics which won in the Branding and Identity category.

And this is a picture of all the winners from this year:

From left: Joseph Heath (Winner - Marketing Research and Insights Category), Erin Newby (Winner - Under-30 Essay), Simon Silvester (Winner - Atticus Grand Prix), Sir Martin Sorrell (Winner, period.), William Charnok (Winner - Advertising) & Iqbal Mohammed (Winner - Branding & Identity.)

The complete list of Atticus winners can be found on the WPP intranet and here. 

Atticus Award for 'The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication' paper

Open to professionals working in WPP companies around the world, the Atticus Awards "honour original published thinking in communications services."

And this years list of winners features one familiar name - mine! My paper 'The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand-building incorporating Long Tail economics' has been adjudged a winner in the Branding and Identity category.

Although I have won a few awards back in my days as a creative, this is one I have been working towards for some time. And one that I am absolutely proud of :)

The worst blogging mistake I made...

[This post is a part of a blog project compiling mistakes made by bloggers and what they did to overcome them.]

The worst blogging mistake I made was to start off many many more blogs than I could run - simply because I thought each blogging idea deserved it's own space and URL. In a short while I discovered that it takes quite a bit of time and energy to generate content and to get a steady stream of readers for each blog - and by spreading my limited resources across so many blogs I was not doing justice to any one of them.

But it took me some time, a great deal of perplexity and much heartache to challenge my assumption that each idea should have its own blog. I eventually realised that by combining the different ideas and content all under one umbrella blog (which then became my one personal multi-faceted blog) I could not only combine all my readers but also improve my Google Pagerank substantially.

And what's more, by strongly sub-branding each feature/series in my blog and labelling them distinctly I could actually sport these individual blogs-within-blog as separate blogs. At this moment I run three such blogs within my primary MisEntropy blog: ten things i didn't know until last week, the sentence and the aphorism factory.  I am also experimenting with other ideas that can become long-running series.

I'll probably come up with a few more ideas for blog series' - but it will take some convincing to persuade me to blog them under a different blog/url.

One exception to this rule, of course, is if you are blogging to establish professional expertise - rather than running a personal blog - in which case, you're better off not mixing your professional blogging with your hobbies and other eclectic stuff.

But for me this blog is an extension of the person I am - and therefore it is natural for it to encompass everything I am interested in, no matter how disconnected those diverse things seem co-existing under one blogging roof.

I've been tagged

I have watched this tagging thing spread like wildfire - from afar. And now thanks to Sharran Srivastava Sharran Srivatsaa, all of you will find out 5 things about me that I have kept well hidden until now.

1. All my pocket money in college was spent on photocopying chess books, articles and games. And when I ran out of pocket money, I used to copy books by hand. I still own two complete books that I have copied every word by hand.

2. I have an inexplicable fascination for China. I own 3 abacuses (or suan pans as they are called in Mandarin.) I am learning to play a Chinese board game called Go (or Weiqi in Chinese.) Sometime in the near future, I plan to walk a significant part of the Great Wall of China. And I am not even counting the Chinese martial arts flicks I love :)

3. I don't have the patience to read fiction. I have tried - I just don't seem to be able to.

4. I have directed a play - Woody Allen's 'God' - that was performed to a standing ovation.

5. I used to ghost write a column for a prominent Indian sportperson (who I cannot name.)

That wasn't half as difficult as I thought it would be. Now, I have to tag 5 bloggers who have remained untouched by the sweeping Mexican tag wave. Now that's difficult :)

And my tags go to : Manish Sinha, Meraj Hassan, Roop Mukhopadyay and Saurabh Sharma.