Saturday, February 10, 2007

Things at work continue to be quite exciting. We are now faced with what we are calling the 'portal dissemination' task, which is how to spread the word about the portal and get it to places where it can be used seriously. I have a fair amount of freedom and resources to decide and implement a strategy, so that's pretty cool for me.
Arghyam is also getting an opportunity to influence policy at a high level in the government, and though I am not directly invovled with that, I'm close enough that its fascinating and very exciting.
There are several details involved with working out the dissemination and some conceptual/philosophical type issues. Its also is a difficult thing for me to do, to keep trying to market or push something. However the hope is that that portal is valuable enough that it will sell itself. There is also a funny situation where we are spending all this money without a clear target goal, or an expectation of monetary return.

At any rate we definitely would like to see lots of traffic on the portal, so why don't you visit it . We're also very keen on feedback, so feel free to write to us from there.

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I spent a couple of days in internal turmoil as I tried to come to grip with the baby question. No resolution ensued. In a major mood swing, after that episode I've been feeling amazingly happy and balanced, as if all the parts of my life are balanced and working.

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey despo:
A couple of ideas on Marketing the Water Portal:
Can you find a way to make sure that the key words (water, portal, etc) are indexed such that the portal site is brought up when one searches on google or any other search engine?

How about trying to get a link created to the Indian water portal site from the UNESCO Water portal site?

You've probably already thought of these and more. In any case, just wanted to contribute my 1 cent :)

-Nandita

Anonymous said...

nice website. lots of stuff. i am no water expert but would venture that this must be very useful.
the meterological dataset is kicking!

VK said...

Thanks :-).
There are a bunch of techniques involved with getting Google to rank your site high -- yes, we need to do some work there.
I just added ourselves to the UNESCO water site. That was a useful tip !

VK said...

Adding to my previous response, we know some people at the Google office in B'lore and we intend to get them to help us pagerank the Portal.

To the second comment -- I'm impressed by your met. data comment.
a.) You've wandered enough around the portal to find the met. data application b.) you realize that the application kicks ass, which it does bigtime! There's hardly anywhere else on the web where you can find this kind of data, especially for India.

Thanks for the feedback !

Anonymous said...

Check this site out - you may already have done so - the Water Web Consortium - might help to contact them and get your portal listed...

http://www.waterweb.org/

-Nandita