Kiruba Shankar
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Photo by Kalyan Varma
Kiruba Shankar (born June 20, 1973) is a well known Indian blogger and podcaster currently (2007) living in Chennai.
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[edit] Blogging
He started his weblog, Kiruba.com on January 4, 2002. As of February 2007, his blog is one of BlogStreet India's top 10 list. The same site also ranks him as one of India's most influential blogger. It must be noted that BlogStreet includes only a select few Indian blogs in its directory and does not represent the whole of the Indian blogosphere. He won the IndiBlog Lifetime Achiever Award at the 2004 Indibloggies, a publicly voted annual awards event that aims at selecting the best amongst Indian bloggers.
Kiruba helped conduct one of the earliest blogger meets in India in 2002 and still continues to arrange for blogger meets in Chennai. In 2003, he was instrumental in organizing India's first national level summit on blogging in association with Anna University. Kiruba and a team of enthusiastic bloggers organized a BlogCamp in September 2006, India's largest unconfernce on blogging, podcasting, videoblogging and social media.
He founded http://www.ExtraBed.in, a community site where bloggers host visiting out-of-town bloggers. This wiki launched on January 17, 2007 and already had people from New York, Bahrain, Qatar, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkatta offering their extra bed. ExtraBed.in was featured on NDTV, India's #1 News Channel.
[edit] Speaker and a writer
Kiruba is frequently invited to talk about new Internet technologies by various companies and groups. He recently spoke at the 7th Annual Conference of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) at Taj Krishna, Hyderabad.
He is a columnist and a writer. His writings on Internet technologies have appeared on many leading Indian computer journals and newspapers such as DataQuest, Express Computers, DQ Week, ITSpace.com, CIOL.com, Economic Times and ChennaiOnline.com.
He has been a guest faculty at Anna University, a premier educational institution in Tamil Nadu and at Madras Advertising Club and Asian College of Journalism.
He was the chief organizer of Barcamp at Chennai, a highly successful technology unconference that was hosted on April 8, 2006. The event discussed various topics on Web 2.0.
In February 2007, he helped organize WikiCamp in Chennai, along with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.
[edit] Professional life
Co-founder of a Web development company, F5ive Technologies, he was earlier an associate director in a company named Sulekha.com.
[edit] Personal life
Kiruba is a marathon runner and has participated in the Chennai and Bangalore marthons. He is a cyclist and regularly cycles 22 kms to work. Kiruba is also an avid oarsman and has captained the Sify rowing team to three championship titles in the Merchants & Bankers regatta at the Madras Boat Club.
During the 2004 Tsunami, Kiruba was involved in the relief work. He setup a relief fund in coordination with other bloggers. His weblog had detailed updates with pictures and maps.
