MohanArun.com

I think all these browser developers from Mozilla et al they try to concentrate on the big picture trying to fit the browser for a ‘mass market’ (designing for the ‘largest common denominator’). They overlook little but significant things.

For example when you see a Flash ad and it interests you you right click looking for an option ‘Open in new tab’. It is just not there!. Also, when you have several tabs open and one tab starts playing music or sound there is no visual cue (at the top of the tab) as to from which tab it is coming from, so it can be attended to first (closed or otherwise). The ordering of items in the context menu is thoughtless. ‘Open in new window’ appears before ‘Open in new tab’. You want to keep only one browser window open. So theres no point in using ‘Open in new window’. most of the time, you want a link to open in a new tab. So, open in new tab should appear BEFORE open in new window.Further, if you press CTRL+H to view history, it shows a history collected from ALL Tabs! Isnt it supposed to separate it tab by tab, ordered by recently closed tabs first? The typical use case when you would want to see through your browser history is when you suddenly remember you have mistakenly closed a browser tab and want to see it again. There is a ‘Undo Closed tab’ in Firefox in the context menu you get when you right click on the tabs, but that only works if the site you want to visit is the most recently visited one in that tab.

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Social computing – why are people prosecuting ‘file sharing’ via P2P networks or thru other means. The people who are downloading music, movies and stuff probably wouldnt pay for your stuff any other way. These are mostly targeted towards East Asian countries where people can get their hands more easily on western stuff like Hollywood movies, American TV shows, etc. than the ‘entertainment’ shows from their own countries. Ultimately, by allowing file-sharing, you are helping to spread a word isnt it? By blocking and prosecuting file sharing, you are blocking the spread of a thought, idea or a concept.

That said, I think the desktop and the interwebs need to be more ‘closer’ but ‘controlled’. As a sample use case, I have several free ebooks downloaded over the years and stashed on my hard drive. I think these may come in useful to some people. I could upload this stuff to file sharing services allowing people to download them. But what if nobody cares about what I have uploaded? Then I would have wasted time and bandwidth uploading them. The solution is to arrive at a mechanism where you can share files from your desktop but without wasting time/bandwidth. The way I imagine it to be is like this: You would have a separate folder called ‘Shared’ where you can stash all the stuff you think might be worthwhile for somebody else. But no actual uploading will happen to a file sharing service. But somehow the index that ‘these files are available for download’ should be made available to the world. When the first person requests a shared file, the system should first ask for permission from the owner of the file, and allow ’scheduling’ also. Like you will be able to say, ‘My bandwidth is held up right now, I will make this file available to you in 24 hours’. Then the file will be allowed to be transmitted to the requestor, and at the same time, it will be ‘cached’ in the cloud, since if one person requested a file, it is likely that others will find it interesting also. The cache can expire in say, a week. If another person requests same file, cloud will deliver it directly, without tieing up the orignator’s bandwidth. This way, you will not be wasting time or bandwidth uploading files nobody finds interesting.

Microsoft Social Desktop in Research Labs addresses this. TechCrunch has covered this. When and how this could be included in an operating system, I dont know.

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Low bandwidth

Some problems are unique to developing countries, like the limited amount of bandwidth available. Youtube videos hiccup after every second or two. I get around this problem first by allowing it to download in full, hiccups and all, (while I switch to another tab) and then I use Replay link so the video will display from the cache, without hiccups. But recently another problem has cropped up. I sometimes view slides shared on Slideshare, and when I click on the “>” button to move to the next slide, it shows that ’round’ symbol meaning wait, downloading in the background. But then nothing happens. Why dont they put a ‘preload’ link in the slideshow so that, when clicked, the entire contents of the slide deck will download in the background, so it will be easy and fast to view all slides one after the other. They should also be putting the ’short url’ more easily visible so it will fit a tweet. Currently you have to click on ‘tweet it’ let twitter open, and then copy the http://slidesha.re/xxxx url and then replace THEIR text with what you really have to say and then share it.

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Book micropayment model

I dont understand what is the problem with all the people opposing Books.Google.com (”Google book settlement”?). Books are meant for spreading the word and for knowledge dissemination. Most books are never read, as people dont have time or inclination to actually pay for books and read through them because they know they dont have patience to read it cover 2 cover (like me). Instead, what I would like to see is micropayments for books. Or even a donation model. Authors can cut a deal with Books.google.com (currently the books available in there are all old and outdated). Like, on every PPC ad click when a user is browsing a book, the author can get a micropayment credited. Also, have you ever thought that, the information people are seeking for on the web, is deeply buried in books somewhere and the only way the information seeker will get to know about them, is via a keyword match? And if these books are not in the search index at all, how will knowledge disseminate? These book contents must be indexed in full, keyword and all, and on every hit from a search engine, the author can get paid via PPC click revenue sharing or via voluntary donations.

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If people are uploading files on file sharing sites like Hotfile, and these services want to promote themselves, they could make it easier. They could publish a ‘feed’ of ‘recent uploads’? Also why not ‘tag’ the files upon upload? like #music #ebook #movie #TVshow #software etc. So someone can browse directly category-wise on the file sharing site itself? (in addition to the blogs where they share the actual links to the file hosting sites)

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People like me dont have the capability to produce interesting/useful content that appeals to mass readership. What we can do is ‘content curation’. I think this could be useful to people when spreading a word. There is a difference in how you share content:

- Check out Tim’s Blog post – ‘The Economics of Free Markets’ sounds vague and general

BUT

- ‘3 nice points abt free markets are in Slides 34, 51, 39 here’ assures the viewer that, the sharer has, in fact, taken the time to go through the content himself, and further attaches a human side to it, pointing out what he considers important. This is how I prefer sharing.

I was thinking about types of content curation.

These are as follows

Types of content curation that would appeal to the emotional-social side of ppl
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BEST PRACTICE: BE SPECIFIC IF YOU CAN
Describe what you liked about it.
Describe what you feel was missing (what you think could’ve been added)
Describe what you think was important to you or to others (sth tht appealed to you)
Describe it in different words or from different perspective, thoughtfully, rather than saying something like ‘This is so nice, so good’ etc… All empty words easily ignorable.

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Dabbleboard is nice. You dont have to sign up, it lets you create a temporary url where you can draw immediately. This is how webware should be. I think what they could add is the ability to copy+paste a logo. Many time you want to put your logo (or somebody elses logo) on the whiteboard. But it doesnt allow copy+paste currently. Also, it could allow ’stencils’ or ‘templates’ of ready made wireframes or models.

Take a look at ‘Exploratree‘ OR The Startup Toolkit of how ‘thinking inside boxes’ could actually help guide your thinking/brainstorming down the proper lane.

I think Exploratree could use HTML5 canvas mode, like Startup Toolkit does, but it currently uses Flash. This is something like ’stencilled’ brainstorming – much easier than when you are staring at a whiteboard with nothing coming into your mind.

Exploratree is something which when you come across :

* Makes you want to love the people behind this
* Makes you want to save it in case it ever disappears frm the net
* You cant visualize thinking outside the box until you see this

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Why twitter is better than facebook, but poorly designed (Im talking about the UX – user experience of the web interface)

With twitter you can get to hear from people who wouldnt otherwise friend you (Will Bill Gates friend you on facebook?). With facebook, for somebodys updates to reach you, they must first approve you as a friend. Thus it promotes closed-circuit social thinking. You want more and different unknown people to connect with you on different levels, not constrain yourself with the people you know.

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What if- QR codes could convey images instead of textual data? Then you could compress art, cartoons and comics into tiny squares!

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Twitter and behavioral theory

I commented on this post How twitter has changed my life.

- It improves your information management and filtering skills. Your eyes get trained to read quicker, and the brain trains to make quick decisions as to whether a tweet is worth spending time on, or move on to the next one.
- It makes you constantly self-check if you are follow-worthy by the way you express yourself.
- It changes how you perceive the world – you begin to think if and how every minute real-world experience can be converted into an interesting 140-character text unit. You try to think from your followers’ perspective, whether they are going to find your message interesting or not (then they will unfollow)

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This is so true:

gau3

Friend: “Why are you Indians so good at spelling & bad at grammar?” Husband: “You’re asking why all your Bees are belong to us?”

Link to tweet

>50% of Indian (casual, unpublished) English is not only bad in grammar, it also leaves much to be desired in terms of coherence and flow. (If you doubt this, just read my other posts). I think it is racial genetics, or it could be because English is a second language?. I am not saying every Indian expresses his thoughts in English like this, because I have seen very good English writing in English language newspapers and magazines published frm India. It is just that most people’s English usage is with bad grammar and bad coherence/flow. (Like how I have dumped my thoughts above – it could use a complete rewrite).

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Came across this today

How would the US flag look with 51 stars?

So interesting and viral it is, the algorithm behind it is nothing short of amazing. To really appreciate the technology behind it, you need to play with different number of stars and see how the system ‘equitably’ distributes the stars in 2d space. It looks good with 20 stars or 30. If you think abt it, it lets you distribute a given quantity of likewise things in a given space, equitably. This could prove useful in areas like water irrigation, etc. where every plant will get the amount of moisture it needs…

I think this algorithm has good promise and potential, if it could also have, options to control the distance between one star and another star – allowing the distance to increase or decrease.

The algorithm could improve drawing – lets say you are preparing a Venn diagram for class. Assume you want to draw 3 circles that are placed equitably with even spacing. Rather than doing it by hand, you can simply enter a command, DRAW 3 CIRCLES. Then system will recognize the word CIRCLE and ask for radius. Once you input the radius, it will draw 3 circles where the spacing is distributed evenly.

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I assume most searchers are like me, expecting the machine to take over and ‘fill in the blanks’ of their search query, when they use wildcards in their search. For example, when I search for “social * marketing”. I expect it to match things like ’social media marketing’, ’social networking marketing’, ’social influence marketing’. Google does a pretty good job with this query AFTER you click on the “Search” button. But it doesnt do well when you havent yet clicked the “Search” button. (i.e., at the search suggestions stage).

Feed the search query “* marketing” with the intent that it would probably be able to formulate that ‘marketing is a broad concept and it has sub-types’ and be able to produce ’suggestions’ (the things which appear as you start typing the search query), as follows.

Social media marketing
Internet marketing
Viral marketing
Guerrilla marketing
Search engine marketing
interactive marketing
Email marketing

To make myself more clear, go to google and start typing “marketing *” (without quotes, of course), See the search suggestions that come up as you type.
Now clear the search query and type “* marketing” you can see it is unable to handle a wildcard when wildcard appears first!

One more use case: Type “plan *” in google and it produces search suggestions. Feed it “* plan” and it doesnt have any!
It could have brought up things like “business plan” “travel plan” “meeting plan” etc. etc…

Another area where Google can improve is “partial word match” in search suggestions.
To illustrate this, start typing the query “chris d*” It produces search suggestions where there is a space after d. BUT I expected it to produce something like “Chris Dixon” (cdixon.org) in the search suggestions. Start typing in “chris p*” and it doesnt produce “chris pirillo” whose site is more trafficked, and theoretically should appear in the list, but doesnt… I assume this is an as yet un-addressed area or am I missing something?

Start typing “bus* plan” and it shows search suggestions ‘bus plan’, but no ‘business plan’

Start typing ‘ire* travel’ it shows air travel but is unable to guess ‘ireland travel’ (at the search suggestions stage, but is able to produce search results for ireland travel).

One more thing I tried: Type in “Rss r*r” in Google, I thought it would be intelligent enough to produce a search suggestion “RSS reader”. Tried “Rss re*g” and I expected it would be able to find out that I am searching for “Rss reading”. Its not that this ‘wildcard matching’ technology isnt available as yet, go to ONELOOK.com and enter “re*g” and choose the option “Common words only” in the resulting page, you will find lots of words satisfying wildcard re*g. But semantically, with all those patents about intent-based search results, getting into the mind of the searcher, etc. I thought Google would know “RSS” and “reading” go together as a concept, whereas “RSS” and “reuniting” do not, so inputting “RSS re*g” should be sufficient.

Update: I came across this wonderful site that shows the theory behind search engine construction and operation.

Search User Interfaces It is a free online book.

I especially checked Chapters 4 & 6 (query specification and query reformulation) if they cover anything along the lines of ‘wildcard search input’. Seems this area, is un-addressed as yet. But as people get lazier, delegating more of their information processing to Google, if there’s scope for ’saving a few keystrokes’ people will take to it. Given a choice between typing ‘little red riding hood’ and ‘little * * hood’ wouldnt you want to type the latter instead of the former?

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The solution to feed overflow

If you are like me, you would have probably given up on RSS reading. There are simply too many sources you have subscribed to, and harder to keep up with them all. The ‘unread count’ is intimidating and the feed reading experience becomes stressful.

Several attempts have been made to simplify the user experience when it comes to feed reading. Such as ‘Feedafever’ , ‘Feedly’ ‘Spreadsapp’ ‘Feedlooks’ etc But these seem to believe in presenting ‘more information before your eyes at the same time’ in various ways. The result is you get ‘magazine-like pages’ mashing up data from several sources or different ways of representing the same data in the same visually-overwhelming way . I feel that is not the right solution.

Update: I think Feedlooks is a good idea, because it lets you view the feed item just as it would appear on the site.

I think RSS feed reading should use the icon GUI model instead of mashup model or treeview-listview model. You will have an icon for every feed you subscribe to, and when you mouse over an icon, headlines from that feed would appear as a popup. You will be able to scroll page by page with previous/next buttons.

Thanks to Dabbleboard for facilitating this freehand mockup. When you mouse over an icon it will pop up a window where you can see feed items. Every feed item should have a way of deleting the item once you have absorbed it and no longer need it. ALL feed readers I have seen so far, are not considering the fact that user will want a particular item to disappear. The only options which seem to be available are ‘Mark as read/unread etc.’ What if I want to DELETE an item?

I got the above idea after looking at WebTrendmap.

If you want to see the items shared by your friends, your friends will also appear as icons in your ‘feed reading dashboard’. When you mouse over your friend photo (like an icon) you will be able to see the items shared by them.

Eventually I think, all these ‘incoming messaging’ stuff can be consolidated into a ‘common dashboard’. Why has Google made BUZZ as a link in the left and GOOGLE READER as separate web app? Why didnt it make BUZZ as a separate website which you have to visit to read buzz? The answer seems to be that, google is betting on ‘convergence’. What if you could converge all incoming messages meant for you? The answer doesnt lie in cluttering up email inboxes with more links in the left that read ‘Buzz’ ‘Reader’ etc. but I think these things could appear like browser tabs. You will have tabs for ‘Inbox’ ‘Buzz’ ‘Feeds’ etc in your email inbox itself. The inbox is enlarging in scope. Inbox is likely to get social.

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Came across this piece published in TIME about immigration in America. Link.

Now I am not saying anything about this piece, but a few hours later I came across this set of tweets (and from others) condemning the ‘racist attitude’.

and this one

Tweet about @thejoelstein and @sepoy.

What I found particularly hypocritic about this episode is that, @sepoy is the handle of Manan Ahmed, who is a Muslim sitting in Berlin, a ‘white’ city, exercising his right to free speech on the internet, (with no fear of white retaliation), taking into account twitter is not blocked in Germany (unlike in Iran, a Muslim country). Certainly, ‘white’ Berlin and on the same lines, ‘white’ America, have been more accomodative of Islam when Islamic countries are not likewise open-minded? (Are there any ‘Christian’ or ‘Hindu’ Saudi Arabians just as there are ‘Muslim’ Americans or ‘Muslim’ Germans?)

Everybody knows (but do not say openly) that, Muslims with their own countries do not allow non-Muslims to immigrate into countries they call their own. (read: Middle East). As such, I think, Manan Ahmed has no right to criticize about ‘white racism in America’. America is certainly more useful to the world than other countries, in many ways than one, with or without racism.

Now you might call this an ad hominem. But the fact remains that, real racism is not in America. It is somewhere else.

It is also funny that, Arab and Muslim settlers in Europe are protesting against their host nations which are allowing them to be citizens (I am talking about protests against ‘burqa ban’). But when you ask these same people why you cant eat in public in a Middle East country during Ramadan, they will tell you, ‘this is a Muslim country man, if you dont like it, nobody is compelling you to be here’ or quote ‘Do in Rome as Romans do’. Try protesting in a ‘Muslim’ country against their religious laws. They will throw you out of the country (if you are expat). Yet these same people will protest against America and its ways INSIDE America (or inside Europe, for that matter). Will you term this ‘hypocrisy’?

There are countries called ‘Islamic Republic’s but there are no (as yet) ‘Christian Republic’ or ‘Hindu Republic’ or ‘Buddhist republic’ etc. I dont understand who gives these people the right to ‘earmark’ a (big) land area on the basis of a religion and then enforce laws which are blindly based on a faith and not laws based on experience or jurixprudence. The ‘powers that be’ are obviously showing favoritism towards Islamic religion. All I can say is that, just because somebody has power, influence and money, doesnt make them right.

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I came across this site CONJUGATION.com (similar to verbs-online.com). It lets you specify a verb and get all forms of the verb in past, present, future. If I were running a search engine I would allocate resources looking more into integrating this into search. For example, can a query for ’sleep’ match ‘he slept’ and ‘he was sleeping’?

Further on this ‘grammar engine’ I would also like to see a place where you can query superlative forms for an adjective. This will come in handy when you are writing prose. For example, I had a doubt if I had to write ‘As people get more lazy’ OR ‘As people get lazier’. Grammar is one of the areas that often need lookups on how other people are using words (’diction’). We always want to align our writing with ‘proper and current diction’. So what we need is also a ‘diction lookup’ engine.

We should allow the use of ’search modifiers’ in search queries (like ‘+site:’). These search modifiers would serve to alter the meaning of the search query, but will not be searched themselves. It will be parallel in design philosophy to ’switches’ in command line commands.This will come in handy as search progresses from ‘keyword matched results’ towards ‘concept matched results’.

Few examples of how this could happen:

sleep /verb:all (meaning search and match both ’sleep’ as well as the past form of verb sleep, ’slept’ and all other verb forms of sleep)

similarly, good /adj:positive,comparative,superlative could match good, better or best.

I know these above samples are poorly thought out. If you have a better idea, please leave comments…

Google could also improve in ‘pattern completion’. For example, I just remembered ‘comparative’ and ’superlative’ from my grammar education, but I know there are 3 forms of adjectives, and had forgotten about ‘positive’. So I entered into Google

‘comparative superlative AND ?’

And I expected it would give ‘positive’ in the first few search results. But it did not. But I know the technology is there. If you go to Google Labs’ Sets and input ‘comparative’ and ’superlative’ in two text boxes and click on ‘Small Set’ it shows you the missing ‘Positive’. I think they should probably integrate sets functionality. Then if the user is looking for ’something missing’ in a set of x items, and he knows a couple of items and uses some form of ’search modifier’ the missing items can be returned in the results.

Then further eventually I think word processors could evolve from word processors into true writing aids. How? By integrating diction lookup into Word, the most famous word processor, in the form of ‘concept completion’ based on usage. What I am talking about is like auto-completion in IDE’s but this will work for meaningful concepts.

Example:

Type ‘I must be (Press Ctrl+Space)’ it should produce results like in Google search suggestions. ‘I must be working…’ ‘I must be wishing…’

Suppose you type ‘I had a bad * yesterday night’ and press a special key to let the system autocomplete your thoughts it should produce I had a bad [dream?: time?] yesterday night’.

We could call this ‘diction autocomplete’. This way word processors would use the technology available already in search engines and grammar engines.

Some more ‘queries’ use cases from inside word processors that are good use cases to drive the merging of word processors and search engines:

I need the quote about ‘getting overwhelmed with information’ (The answer is : “Its not information overload. Its filter failure”). My brain is able to match it, but I dont see a reasonable way a machine can ‘understand’ this and connect the dots.

Another: Is it ‘a use case’ or ‘an use case’? (another query that I would expect a word processor to give the answer then and there)

Delegate the filter

Another thought that I wanted to write about is about information filters. Whenever you are faced with real time information flows crowdsourced (like twitter), you are going to need filters to drown out the noise. I think much work has already been done on the subject on heuristic algorithms that learn your preferences and filter information accordingly. A use case I recall is abt FeedScrub. It learnt which feed items you consider to be ’spam’. Now I want to drown all tweets about World Cup, Vuvuzela, Macintosh, etc without setting up ‘keyword match’ filters. I am not sure how far scientists have progressed with language heuristics which are not based on ‘keyword matching’ but ‘concept matching’ (semantic?). For example, take a tweet ‘Brazil plays Argentina 3-4 #bla bla’ it doesnt mention words ‘World Cup’ but I want to drown this tweet. I dont want to waste my attention span, and visual time reading this tweet and realizing it is talking about World Cup, realizing I dont care about it.

Eye commands

Another area that could possibly merit further study is ‘eye commands’. People produce real time information flows in never-ending infinite streams. But how many of these actually get ‘eyeballed’? How many tweets are actually ‘read’? You could put a ‘Read’ link in every tweet. But imagine clicking on ‘Mark as Read’ in every tweet you come across in order to give statistics to twitter as well as to the originator of the tweet. (how many ppl actually ‘read’ my tweet?) If your followers are following >1000 people say, do you think they are actually reading such tweets?

This is why we need eye commands (gestures?). I am not sure how the modalities could be worked out. But somehow there will could be a way to convey and record that you ‘eyeballed’ something, gave it the attention it so demanded, allowing its essence to permeate into your consciousness. It could be an ad, or it could be a unit in a real-time, crowdsourced information flow about multiple topics, all demanding time-sliced ’switched/hopping attention’ from subject to subject. (it could be a tweet, or if somebody creates a better real time information source collectively originating from people, the ‘unit’ of that information flow).

Imagine going through a bunch of tweets organized vertically like a ladder. Imagine you have an infrared-sensitive sticker that reads ‘5 X’ below your monitor. As you read every 5 tweets, you would move your eye over the ‘5 X’ sticker. Imagine if somehow your wearing special glasses able to emit infrared when you look at a particular spot. Then the 5 tweets you read would be deleted, and the next 5 would move up. You dont have to scroll, or click the mouse or anything; Creepy?

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Faced with the dilemma of having to decide whether I should continue to write ’stuff and nonsense’ on this blog, with a feeling that nobody is actually reading me, I just checked the analytics and found there have been atleast 2 readers who have spent nothing less than 02 min:48 sec reading one of my enormously lengthy previous posts.

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I think people think their blogs are supposed to cater to a ‘common denominator’ of readership in order to maintain their audience engagement levels. They try to form patterns, judgments and fixed opinions as to ‘what content works and what will not’. They try to fir information creation or content generation into a fixed formula. Chris Brogan writes in point 3: The post is useful to others, and not just about you. I am not sure about this. It should be interesting to read how personae interact with the world they perceive. I unfollowed @billgates because his tweets were not personalized.

Humans evolve by copying humans. I feel they would want to identify with how you perceive and react to external stimuli. It would be inherently interesting. The way others perceive the world influences how you yourself perceive the world. Accepting Chris Brogan’s point, ‘make your post useful to others, not just about you’ I imagine a twitter profile page where the twitterist is sharing nothing but links to other pages, with no personalization. Will it be interesting? I am not exactly sure… I myself follow @Flipbooks and all he does is share links and quotes.

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Just came across Leaked screenshots of a new gmail interface. The first impression that I got was that obviously professional user interface designers have been at work, and I cant complain. They have maintained what was working, and havent changed the major design philosophy. Only thing I can imagine is that as more time passes since the day you started using an email address, you would accumulate an awful lot of labels. Displaying all these labels like a menu is overwhelming. There must be a solution for this. What I would really like to see in gmail, however, is partial search. I forgot a compelling use case I had about why we need partial search in something like email which everybody in the planet uses.

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Have also read this piece about where Gmail is going. I liked this paragraph:

‘The company has also been researching a new model for Web applications that could speed up load times even more. In experimental builds of its Chrome browser, Google has started allowing users to install Web applications, meaning that the browser keeps a page for that application always loaded in the background. This means that the Web application always has up-to-date data, and is always just a click away. When the user types the URL for the application, the browser links the user to that preloaded background page, speeding up the time it takes to get to the service’

This is something that I had in the back of my mind since a long time ago. The design philosophy would be ‘keep a major portion of the application constant, and minimize the flow of variables.’ (transmit only as few bytes as possible). AJAX has the same design philosophy. 80% of what you see in Gmail after the web app has fully loaded, is constant, and 20% is the data that is being delivered based on your interactions with the system. By extrapolating the idea of AJAX, we could have things like ‘installable web apps’ something like Browser plugins. I am using gmail everyday. The same framework loads in full everyday, and with my slow connection, it takes time. What if I could ‘install’ the ’skeleton’ framework, and let the ‘blood’ of ‘only variable data’ flow through the connection. I also use Picnik often, and that app could also benefit, if I could install the groundwork in my browser. Currently it displays a progress bar as it loads the full UI and it takes time. I assume the Web standards need to accommodate persistence. Something like <persistable>,,, </persistable> – the parts which dont change often. For example, I visit the Dilbert site often to view the comic strip of the day. Everytime I do this, all the bytes that make up the page are transferred from the server to my computer. It would be better if only the .gif file had to be transmitted across the wire but I would still get the whole web page on my browser (just the way the page author intended to present it). I think Google Gears (offline gmail) was a step in this direction. But the first time I tried it my firefox kept giving errors and I removed it for fear that it would somehow make my gmail inaccessible. After all, inbox is the lifeline for most people. Who would want to risk losing access to their inbox?

I am thinking people would avoid installing a desktop app if they can load it online. The days of downloading a photo editor software just to retouch your photo are over. Instead, you would now use a cloud-based tool. Instead of *installing something  software that lets you write in a distraction-free environment, you could do it online. Just search for ‘google docs distraction free writing’.

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I once searched for ‘delicious firefox extension’ with the intention of using it for storing my bookmarks in the cloud. At that time, it wasnt available. Now there is a delicious firefox extension available. But I am still not using it. Why? It doesnt address my needs. What I expect from it is, as follows.

* I want to hit the ‘bookmark’ shortcut key, Ctrl+D, only once. It must then save the bookmark locally first (I dont trust the cloud, what if the service dies, and what if I forget my login info?) and also mark it for later saving to my online delicious account. With the delicious bookmarklet, you need to first hit Ctrl+D to save the bookmark locally first, and then click the bookmarklet to save it to your delicious account. If you click on it, you are generating network traffic – every time you book mark something, it connects to the delicious server and adds the bookmark. Isnt this inefficient? The bookmarks need to be batched and synced at intervals, where the syncing is triggered by the user, and doesnt happen automatically at intervals because I want to be retain control of when something uses my internet connection (because the net is slow here).

On the same lines, I was once enthusiastic about using online backup services to save the data that matters to me ‘in the cloud’. Now I am not so sure. I want to keep my internet connection free for other uses, more so because of the slow speed/bandwidth it has. I have invested in a 500 GB external USB drive which suits my backup needs well. I only hope they make more higher-capacity portable storage drives with smaller and smaller form factor.

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Came to know Firefox 4 has ‘tabs on top’. The address bar is different for each tab. This does seem like a good idea. But they have ‘Open in new window’ option coming above ‘Open in new tab’ in the right click context menu for link. How many times you want to keep open multiple browser windows on the same machine? Somebody fix this already!

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Semantic search by 2020?

Regardless of the Web 3.0 hype, search is not semantic… yet, I dont think it can be done in the nearly foreseeable future. Like, until the time a search query like this: ‘cable organizer that looks like a leaf’ is able to match this within the first few results.Not until something like ‘Tossing and turning…. Turning and tossing. Come on body! Just sleep already!’ comes up as a match for ‘insomnia’. Language heuristics has a long way to go…

Update: Always better to quote an expert.

Here’s a better way of putting it:

Update: Here’s something I found interesting on this topic – this is able to provide an estimate linguistic analysis/sentiment analysis of any piece of text you input. LIWC . But still, there isnt a current resource that I know of, where you input something like ‘I must be sleeping’ and it produces concept words related to *not sleeping, such as ‘insomnia’.

You dont have to remember to take your phone when you go out…

The idea is not new – there has been work done on this before – Chris Harrison – Skinput.

People would not want their fingers to become phones permanently. But scientists should be able to make transparent, removable and replaceable stickers/decals (like erasable tattoos) which could then be pasted on fingers and removed and re-applied as and when needed. If the decal had a screen then you would be able to browse from the palm of your hand.

Kenya stamp from my collection

Kenya Stamp

3 France stamps from my collection

3 France stamps

The availability, spread and reach of affordable always-on internet has led to some evolution in how we’ve handled the internet since the days of dial up. The most well-known, most widespread way people put always-on internet to use is by leaving their email client ‘always-on’. If you leave your computer switched on for any length of time, and if you also leave your internet connection on (for most people switching on the computer also switches on their net connection), you are highly likely to also leave some sort of communication channel open with the outside world (the world outside ‘My Computer’). This could take the form of : keeping your instant messenger client logged in, or keeping your email inbox page logged in (for most non-commercial email users, email means webmail, not the usage of an email client). I leave my gmail email inbox logged in as long as I am on the computer. It has become essentially second-nature. I find it difficult to visualize a computer without access to the knowledge network.

Transforming the worlds knowledge – from books to blog posts

Most books are like rivers or TV programs. They are meant to be read one chapter after the other, TV shows are supposed to be watched from the beginning to the end, like navigating a river starting at one point and going with the flow… You can get a better mental picture if you think that the usage of a river is not random access, but it is sequential access. But how was the river or TV program produced in the first place? Little droplets of falling rain water here and there (randomly), formed the river which we use sequentially. People made TV programs after exhaustively planning and rewriting a script, adding, editing and re-editing at several different places randomly (here and there). When you read book after book, you tend not to read another book until you have completed one ‘book on hand’. This pattern of information consumption has to change. Think of the way you were taught in school which contributed to how your knowledge evolved since the time you were at school. You had a chemistry hour, a maths hour and a physics hour (and more such hours). You were made to learn from those textbooks and lectures like consuming a buffet of assorted food items. You would attend a chemistry lecture in one hour, then you would attend a physics lecture the other hour. You still progressed in a linear fashion, chapter to chapter in each book (subject), but you made progress on several such topics or books at the end of the day. The only drawback was that the consumption was sequential – one chapter after the other, the order prescribed by the educational board’s syllabus.

This kind of sequencing has to go – ie., the days of the ’single textbook for the same subject’ has to go. Learning should be from multiple chapters authored by multiple people from multiple books. For example, if you’re studying chemistry, you could read about Carbon compounds from a particular author, then you could learn about electrovalent and ionic bonding from another expert’s blog. Take cooking as an analogy. You throw in several items, but these items come from different sources – from different farms, and probably from different shops or supermarkets.

Knowledge production is non-linear, so why should consumption be?

Different thinkers explored and contributed facets of knowledge in different subjects in different times. Think how you would copywrite an article or a blog post. You would first brainstorm or mindmap, probably on paper, listing all items you want to say or cover in the written piece. 99% of the time, your brain would recollect and recall the points you want to cover, in a non-linear way, you will recall points which you could say ‘here and there’. Even the speed of ‘information exploration & recall’ from your brain varies. Sometimes you get five points to cover one after the other in a rapid sequence, the next moment you feel stuck what other point you can cover in your written piece. As you start writing, more ideas may come into your mind. You would jot them down quickly as a couple words each – lest they disappear into the oblivion of forgetfulness. All human thought processes are non-linear and non-sequential, random-access if you could call it that way. This is the way knowledge has evolved and grown so far. There is only one thing in this world that is sequential access and cannot be random access: the passage of time, day after day.

The point I was driving at, is that, knowledge consumption should also be non-linear, non-sequential, and randomized, just as knowledge production and recall is. This is the way our brains have been wired to evolve in a ‘knowledge economy’, faced with the availability of an aquifer of knowledge in the form of the net. Knowledge is to be consumed in digestible chunks (akin to periods or lecture hours in school or college), and the consumption pattern needs to be non-linear (connect dots from different sources). We need to train ourselves how to consume, comprehend and act on information and the resultant knowledge in non-linear, non-sequential, lateral and divergent ways. Our brains must be able to jump from point to point in a multi dimensional knowledge cloud. An example would probably make it clearer as to what I have in mind. I have a set of small speakers in front of me. By looking at them with a didactic mindset, several points come to my mind: From physics (it has mass and weight), from chemistry (looks to be made of some sort of plastic), from maths (its volume can be calculated using formulae) and so on. So our brain somehow runs ‘SQL’ (query language) connecting the resulting knowledge dots in a non-linear, random-fashioned way. I believe the way we consume and disseminate information and knowledge should also be somewhat similar, if not exactly similar. ‘Short-burst’ blog posts seem to me like a good way to deliver these chunks of knowledge just as books are split into chapters for easy comprehension.

The practical point I am hitting at is that the days of questions like ‘reading comprehension’ in standardized tests, or asking for ‘essays’ for admission to colleges, should be numbered. I find my mind wandering after reading or writing five sentences in the same paragraph. (Read SFGate: As technology advances, deep reading suffers but that article is pessimistic) But the test expects me to concentrate for the length of the passage. This is somehow against biological principles of evolution. Our bodies are homeostatic, meaning our bodies continually adjust the body temperature in response to external stimuli. Outside temperature may change at a moments notice. Our body temperature adjusts itself almost immediately. So our brains also need to be expected to multitask, not concentrate. All of our organs are made to ‘multitask’, heart beats at the same time that blood flows, you can move both your hands and legs at the same time, the food you ate digests at the same time your heart beats, etc. But we are training our brains to ’single-task’ and switch from task to task. Multi tasking and multi channel thinking is good, not bad. Why because it models real world influences. Think of news. Does one news item happen after the other? News happens in real time, multiple news items happen at the same time. Think of nature. Water falls in a waterfall. There are many other things happening with nature at the same time. Water falls, grass grows, clouds move, earth rotates, and so on. So if we view nature as a ‘energy-balanced’ system we see nature is multi-tasking. So why should our brains be trained NOT to multi-task? Brains arent supposed to be ‘musical chairs’ where only one chair is vacant and there are hundreds of external stimuli demanding attention (running around the musical chair). We must be able to attend to several external stimuli all at the same time.

If your teachers taught you not to peek ahead and read chapters which the class has not yet reached in its linear progress (as in chapter 2 comes after chapter 1), then your thinking is ‘caged and conditioned’ for sequentiality.

Education should be non linear. Knowledge is like a giant piece of cloth with several threads showing loose-end. There will always be such loose-ends. Knowledge is work in progress. It evolves continuously. Knowledge is never finite. And knowledge evolves non-linearly, stretching its boundaries in several directions at the same time, like an amoeba does.

Related reading: see this Prezi presentation: Math is not linear.

The evolution of knowledge

Any process of production, natural or man-made, starts with ‘the smallest possible thing that could possibly work’ and then incremental growth and evolution takes over from there. Babies take 9 months to form completely. During this time cells divide, organs form and grow. Evolution takes time. Growth happens in multiple branches at the same time. (arms and legs develop and grow at the same time). Such is nature. So should our knowledge be. We could term this ‘Incremental Evolution’ or ‘Progressive refinement’ (’Iterative enhancement’ also sounds good). Think agile. Software is supposed to be made based on the principle ‘create the simplest possible thing that could possibly work’ then add feature after feature. Think how a house is constructed – first the bricks are put up in the right spots to create an enclosed space, then the bricks are finished, whitewashed, the floors are laid with tiles or woodwork, and so on, transforming the ’space’ into a ‘place for living’.

I always read textbooks this way – First iteration (skim read the whole book fast to get a general idea or overview), second iteration (read a little more deeper in random chapters but covering all), third pass (throttle the pace and concentrate more on specific parts, some parts are made to be read slowly, others meant to be glanced over quickly). This is very similar to the process of development of agile software.

Too much social?

Has the internet turned on the wrong exit on the information superhighway? The web was designed for non-linear and unconnected content consumption (you can explore website after website in a non-predictable, undefined, unstructured way). This is where its beauty lies. But these days it seems for most people, internet means checking email, facebook and twitter. They tend not to venture beyond a limited circle, and do not explore random new connections of unrelated content. They try to close-circuit themselves into my contacts, my friends, my colleagues and acquiantances and the culprits are social networking and social media – Stuff like Facebook. People’s time slots are all occupied with what they currently have, what people in their circle tell them, so much so that they do not explore new options due to lack of attention span and time. If not email, facebook and twitter, it is an RSS reader, keeping up with the same blogs you are subscribed to.

I see ‘view our facebook page’ and ‘follow us on twitter’ on most websites that I visit. Are people locking themselves into their social circles?

I have seen blog posts where a ‘recommended best practice’ for using twitter is to engage in conversations with other twitter users, i.e., they tell you you have to start many of your tweets with the @ symbol. I dont get it. Twitter is meant for broadcast, like starting an email with “Dear All,” not for one-on-one conversations. Those tweets you start with @ do not show up in your followers’ time lines. If I see a lot of “@” conversations on a person’s twitter profile page while trying to decide whether to follow him or not, I usually do not follow that person. The presence of so many @’s tells me you will engage in many direct one to one messages which will not show up on my time line – the primary purpose for which I am looking to subscribe to you is that you are likely give me a supply of interesting material to read, which is vindicated by the presence of so many @’s.

I wish I had a way to ‘collapse’ this para and hide it from the reader unless reader chose to explore this further since this is related reading but intercepts the flow of this piece if read linearly. If you want to explore random new web content visit the ‘recent’ pages of a good quality social bookmarking site (where people share links). Example Delicious Recent. OR visit Editors Picks listed on instapaper.com. OR a portal like Maggwire. These could give you pointers on ‘what the world is reading’. You might also want to explore site like Random Website or Stumbleupon.

Ranking a page based on number of links to it is wrong

Google’s pagerank algorithm is said to place a lot of importance (among 200 other ’signals’) on the number of other pages that rank to a particular page while ranking the page. This is like, you cant judge a person on your own, so you are asking other people their opinions about someone and allow those opinions to form your own picture. The algorithm should be able to judge the merit of a web page standing on its own – independent and individualistic. Other people on the web may or may not link to something even though it is quality stuff. What about high-quality new stuff being written everyday, that are too new to have gained links from other pages? Would their ‘quality’ and ‘relevance’ be any lower because they dont have links? And this ‘number of links’ signal has spurned a business of paid links, link exchanges, etc. where the big boys with influence, money and clout can get lot of websites to link to them without being detected. And then Google does this brouhaha about how ‘paid links are evil and will be ignored’ (even has a way to ‘report’ paid links). Well people are buying and selling links because your algorithm places an emphasis on links – change your algorithm, dont try to change the people. Judge a book by its cover or its contents, but on its own, not by how many other books cite this book. Judge a web page based on its innate worth or merit, not on the basis of how many other pages link to it.

Social media will always be secondary

You wouldnt turn on an information firehose unless you feel ready to face it. For me at least, I always check email first in isolation (i.e., without starting twitter or facebook). I assume 99% of people check email first before going to facebook and twitter. Why because it is *personalized (addressed to you as a person). So our inner selfish brain layer (the westerners call this ‘amphibian or lizard brain’ for want of a better adjective) assumes this is higher-priority than facebook and twitter updates (where you are one among many recipients, so it is of lesser importance). As I type this blog post, I have my email inbox open, but I havent yet logged in to twitter or facebook. I know I will get sucked in if I start on them. Once I have attended to all things urgent in my email, then I am ready to wander ‘beyond email’.

So whats next after email? There is a missing ‘B’ after ‘A’-email. ‘C’ and ‘D’ would be facebook and twitter which are ‘non-personalized broadcasts’. People broadcast or post in those sites, if they had something important to convey to you, they would send you email instead. This email’s level of personalization is unmatchable. The next level of personalization should be messages pushed to you personally, based on your personal interests or group identity. The way I imagine it, push is the level of ’semi-personalization’, the level after email’s ‘full personalization’. Availability of push would facilitate more (and hitherto unknown) connections between information producers and information consumers. The availability of a ‘push inbox’ will make users use this for lesser-importance notifications. Thus email will be freed up for the really important stuff, number of emails sent will come down drastically, and the world could be free of inbox overload.

Amateur porn better than pro-porn

And if you thought porn has no place in internet, you are missing out on a lot of good stuff. I also dont understand why people take upon themselves the task of moral policing for others, deciding what others should and shouldnt get to watch. Dont these people have something better to do for themselves?

Professionally made porn is airbrushed and photoshopped to look good. What I prefer (and I think most other people would, also) would be real world, non-photoshop, no-airbrushing porn.

Making money from file sharing

I remember the days of using WinMX as my P2P client of choice to download free music mp3s and music videos. Now WinMX is dead, and the evolution seems to be BitTorrent. I have never understood how BitTorrent works, it all seems confusing to me. File sharing can be done through sites like Rapidshare and Hotfile. You would buy subscriptions on these sites which allows you to download files others have shared. This is good. The quest for finding the monetization model in file sharing has found its sweet spot.

Social Gaming

I recently came across a study about how much gamers spend on virtual goods in their social gaming pursuits. Players spend on World of Warcraft, Second Life, Farmville, and so on. I have not spent anything on social gaming so far. These people must be having access to high levels of disposable incomes. But anything that makes money is good for the economy as money changes hands and rotates. You have put in effort creating social games, you get paid. Reward matches effort. All good.

Censorships will miss out on evolutionary growth in information management skills

Anywhere freedom of thought, speech and expression (within reasonable limits away from libel, scandal and blasphemy) is curtailed, people are missing out on stuff. Kids exposed to all sorts of stuff on the net from early ages would probably know how to categorize good from not-so-good better than their protected counterparts. A weathered rock is a better rock.

The world is not ‘rosy plum’ as made out to be by elite internauts

You only have to read popular twitterists’ (meaning twitter users) tweets. The world they paint seems surreal, out of touch with reality. Seems these people want to portray elitist pictures, splashing digital niceties and want to appear as such to an online world which they deem to be also ‘elitist’. It seems these people live in ivory towers as they try to concoct poetic tweets which they deem ‘worthy of propagation’. They write three sentences (roughly 140 chars) about how it rained in Delhi describing the experience with juicy adjectives that paint a bright mental picture of how Delhi (or ‘Aamchi’ Mumbai, whatever that term means – atleast this tweet is somewhat down to earth) is so hep, cool, lovable and elitist. They want to turn a blind eye towards real stuff like unconditioned roads with potholes overflowing with sewage at the first instance of rain. I imagine them driving expensive cars so are not really in touch with the trite frustrations one gets traveling in overcrowded public transport. Nobody wants to be seen writing about frustrations bound to occur when living amongst a population bursting at its seams. Nobody wants to be seen pointing out how the government wastes money. Nobody wants to say anything about frequent power cuts and how this is the result of short-sighted, misguided government spending. Nobody wants to be seen breaking the elitist mold when going on record. Nobody wants to post a picture in twitter about the uncleared garbage dump they see on the road but they would post pictures of nature tuning their verbiage towards poetic, esoteric, almost surreal wavelengths. Everybody wants to paint an all-positive, hunky-dory, I-love-this-city pretty picture.

Where are the personalized mundane trivia? Where is the ingredient of practicality?

Blogs could allow granular user interaction

As I was writing this post it occurred to me in several places that, other people should be able to add, edit and comment on the exact place where I wrote something, not at the end of the piece (as a comment). Somehow my original writing must remain, but people should be able to add their own related relevant material they’ve found elsewhere, may be links to their own blog posts, etc. These should be hidden initially with only an indication that there is a lateral road of information navigation available at this stage, you can choose to click and display it or proceed with your current reading pace.

What I wrote above could be of possible interest in these subject areas: #education #educational-technology #philosophy #existential-theory #theory-of-everything #digital-evangelism #knowledge-economy #digital-strategy. I wish there were subscribers to these aforementioned topics, and by virtue of publishing this post, they could get push-notified in real time (like I speak about in my previous blog post). I dont know who they are personally, and they wouldnt know who I am until they read the post, but somehow there must be a way to connect us.

If only the Internet had a way to ‘push’ posts to groups of information consumers… (if you arent sure what I am talking about.. please see my previous post)

As I re-read everything in my post, I think I may sound very incoherent to readers, jumping from thought to thought. The short point that I wanted to make is:

Evolutionary growth of knowledge is non-linear, and so should our knowledge consumption and dissemination systems be. Our knowledge management should be multi-channelled and multi sourced where we get to decide on the priorities of more and more incoming multi-dimensional knowledge factoids in real-time.

We should provide ways and means for people to be ‘jack of all trades’ educationally. It should be possible to specialize upto PHD and beyond, in multiple disciplines at the same time, rather than concentrating on a single closed-circuit bookish qualification. Study of Medicine might be an exception. You wouldnt to trust your surgery to a person who has dabbled in law, engineering and astrophysics while attending college.

Knowledge production and consumption would still follow an incremental process somehow. Like when you dress yourself. First goes your shirt, then your tie. You cant wear your tie first, then your shirt on top of it. There needs to be a common base upon which you can build more divergent and lateral systems. Like you can wear a different tie/shirt combination every day of the week, or even T-shirts, but you need to wear SOMETHING. So in knowledge management (dealing with everyday knowledge – the things you learn and come across) a process must be obeyed in so far as to achieve a common uniform base, and then be divergent, multi-lateral, fanning out into several tangential branches at the same time.

Everything (including Knowledge) is a work-in-progress, and essentially homeostatic (constantly changing in response to external stimuli).

I hope I have made sense. English is not my first language.

Update 06/29: What I was about to say above is that, the days of books and magazines as a way of disseminating and distributing knowledge is likely to be numbered. As more people use the internet for their daily fill of information, knowledge and entertainment, their brains will be trained to ignore anything longer than say, 500 words. If you are absorbed in book-reading, you are missing out on several hundred other best content chunks whose primary mode of delivery is the internet. Knowledge dissemination is essentially evolving this way:

Long oratorship > Printed Books > Short Articles delivered timely and digitally.

May be I am extrapolating my personal perception into a general phenomenon, what I am personally experiencing… If you gave me a good book today, I would put it aside without reading it. But if you gave me one page sustaining my interests I will probably read it immediately.

Further, there I have been putting up an obvious filter as to what I choose to read. I no longer read news, since it doesnt matter to me. Whats in it for me anyway? My interaction with the web is based on what I find relevant to me as at this moment in time, and I suspect others will feel the same way too, as they face the flood of content explosion. Journalism is still producing long-winded, heady articles that nobody will have the patience to read in full, for fear that they are going to miss something else in a flow of real time information if they spend time reading long and irrelevant pieces of content.

Publishers on the internet aim to get the most eyeballs/visibility/readership/influence/recognition for their blogs and websites. The more traffic your blog gets, you get the feeling that someone’s reading you, and you are happy. Isnt all the media (inclusive of the internet) about ‘ideas worth spreading’? So how would you make this model better, given the current state of things on the net? I wasnt particularly thinking on this topic, but the following idea is a long term idea from my repository – feel free to add, modify, and use this idea in your own app or webapp, if you are going to build one.

The evolutionary background: Push vs pull

Examining the current models of information dissemination, you find first there was ‘pull’ – people using web browsers pulled up web pages as and when they felt the need to do so. Then came along the availability of push – I am careful about how I word this one – because ‘push’ is not necessarily a good way to evolve from ‘pull’. But it is good to know, there is push available, if and when you need it. Push is when you use programs that send alerts on stuff like weather, traffic conditions, news, etc. to your desktop (or mobile). In web parlance, push is when you use online or offline ‘feed reader’ software to keep up with updates of your favorite sites which you have chosen to ’subscribe’ to. The ‘publisher’ publishes updates to his or her website or blog and you get updated in your feed reader about the new updates. They call this the publish/subscribe model. For web pages that didnt support RSS feeds you could always use webware like ChangeDetection, Fliptop, Femtoo, etc. to keep abreast of updates.

Now with this background, if we move back up into a ‘holistic’ ivory tower view, and examine our priorities once again, we see publishers want ‘the greatest possible reach, the maximum influence’ with every written piece they publish. It is but human nature to brag about your stuff, to yearn for some name and recognition (personal branding). People tend to do lot of stuff to get their names recognized. The rewards may not be forthcoming immediately, but most people think, believe and act in a way that seems to suggest that there ARE rewards in giving things away for free provided you could attach your name to it (think Creative Commons License – free to propagate, with proper credit or attribution – example programmers who work on FOSS).

So now, you could update yourself and keep abreast of your favorite blogs and websites using feed readers. There is one problem: there is a time lag between when the publishers hit PUBLISH and the time you receive and consume the same. Most of the time this doesnt matter, but sometimes you sit around all day twiddling your thumbs, checking your inbox, twitter and facebook to see if someone has been up to something. OR you could be on long-haul flights with nothing but a iPad (or equivalent slate-like device). With the evolution of the Knowledge Economy/Digital Age/Information Age people will have more and more free time to spend on ‘pursuit of information’. Books were one way people could satisfy their need to pursue information, but with shorter attention spans, who has time to read full books unless they are textbooks? The last time I read a full book cover to cover was ten years ago…

If you were a particularly intellectual type you would also want to keep yourself abreast of blogs that serve as inspiring sources of info which make you think ‘where does he get that material from’ or ‘how does he write new things everyday’? I know I had this in mind when I read Seth Godins blog. First I added him on twitter, then I began to see I was missing posts because I cant be logged on to twitter all the time. And my RSS reader was overflowing with feeds getting pushed to me, so I tried to search for a reasonable alternative – I found two services: notify.me and feedmyinbox.com. I set up Seth Godins blog on notify.me so notify.me would email me whenever Seth published a new post. Now I never miss a post because the link comes to my email and I get notified within say ten minutes of his posting if I happen to be online when he publishes. And I can get to it whenever I please, it is sitting right there in my inbox.

This near real-time model seems perfectly fine and fit for its purpose, except that, if you look at it with a ‘big picture’ mindset, we would still want the greatest possible new connections of people and concepts and this model doesnt satisfy ‘need to connect people’. That is what the internet is for. And that means, the more strangers you connect with and socialize on the net, the better you feel that you have put the internet to good use!

So heres how I dream of a solution. It could sound excitedly crazy, non-workable, baseless, far-fetched, incoherent, etc. All ideas probably sounded far fetched, atleast in theory, when they were first proposed. So here goes.

There would be a desktop client program, which you download and install on your system. OR for those people who are ‘minimalist’ and very choosy about what program they install (like me, again) you could choose to sign in to a website when you are ready to face the information firehose. OR there could be a browser plugin which you would install. What you would already have done on a specific web site is, you wouldve specified keywords and topics which matter the most to you, and then you will wait for the world to push you relevant information in real time. It would work both ways – if you are a publisher or producer of information, you would see ‘what the world is waiting for’ – a tag cloud of ‘keywords’ and topics that people *currently online want to hear about, (without necessarily starting a chat with you – thus different from MIRC) in your dashboard. (Thus this differs from Google alerts because in google alerts the publisher wont know ‘what the world is listening for’) The publisher could then choose to whip up a quick blog post on any of those topics or keywords. Then the publisher would add his creation into the system and the system will push the url of the story to notify the listeners or the subscribers of the topic.

THE BIG PICTURE: It is basically publish+subscribe, pushing info in real time, and furthermore, ‘open’ because you are not actually subscribing to a blog (differs from Google reader again), you are only subscribing to a ‘topic’ to be notified in real time, expressing your willingness to receive push notifications in real time from information producers (or other consumers). Multiple publishers can ‘push’ their updates towards the same topic. This will promote/induce more of production and consumption of information.

This has similarities with Skribit. In Skribit, people suggest what blog authors could write about, (see an example here) and publishers who think they have hit the writers block or simply looking for ideas to write about, would be able to get sources of ideas to base their blog posts upon, by reading these. This also has similarities with Vark and LivePerson. But Vark/LivePerson is for Q&A and once you choose a person and answer, pretty much thats it. End of story. But in the ware I am describing, it doesnt end there. The webware I am proposing would be styled on the lines of ‘anything goes’. You could even share your search queries in real time. (your search query would become a topic to which you are subscribed) People who are currently logged in to the site will be able to see that you are interested in receiving push info on a particular topic (opted in), and if they feel up to the task of guiding you, (without starting a chat – mind you – this could have ‘unsolicited human contact’ implications), they could ’suggest’ pages from their bookmarks satisfying your search query. You would have effectively passed the buck – letting others search and suggest the best results for your search query. Then this would be ‘human powered real time search’ or the REAL ’social search’, the way it should be (not how Google has modeled social search to be – search your friends blogs and their starred search results and Google calls this ’social search’? PHDs! may be they think they concentrate only on fruitful profitable stuff – like Product Search starting $25,000 a year – and Newspass)

Everything is better with samples. So here’s one. Assume I am a student preparing GMAT math. Instead of paying for a decent coaching website that gives you live real tutors to help you with your problems, being the freeloader that I am, I place trust on Good Samaritan math teachers who happen to be online at the same time as I am, to help me. I type in, ‘GMAT math work-time problems’ as my topic and switch it to ‘listen’ mode. Perhaps there is a math teacher up late in the night, bored and lonely, somewhere out in the world, willing to help me real-time. And you bet there would be someone like that. The teacher happens to be logged in to the same site at the same time, sees the keyword ‘GMAT math work-time problems’ in green, meaning someone is online right now ‘listening’ in to this topic. Then he or she recalls she read this blog post about how to solve GMAT math work-time problems and ’suggests’ this page to the ‘topic’ (not the ‘person’). The url gets pushed to the listeners (in this case, me) Anybody can join any topic (even topics that others have started – it would be interesting to see a tag cloud of interests/topics of currently logged in people – will it be sports? food and drink? TV? educational? travel?), as long as they remain logged in, the topic will be green (if they were offline the topic could be gray or something, meaning others could refer to the archive on this topic, but the topic has no active listeners right now). Inactive topics could expire after 24 hours. It need not even necessarily be a ‘topic’ it could be a question or an economic solicitation (as long as its not blatant spam like Viagra).

Example: Major topic “Travel” Double click on this circle-> drill down -> channel #orlando – your item – ‘Looking for a competitive luxurious place to stay’ and then you go about your own business and wait until someone recommends you something and you get push notified in your push notification client (see the part where I speak about 3-4 tracks of prioritized incoming notification handling). This differs from MIRC and Vark – different from MIRC because you dont have to stay in the same #channel after posting, and the #item you posted remains there even if you log out of the Travel room. Different from Vark because your #topic need not be a question – it could just be an expression of interest soliciting ‘any and all’ further info – even a status message – like ‘Learning about SQL joins – would appreciate useful pointers’. Different from Vark because your #topic or #question never gets closed – you could keep it open perpetually.

Imagine reading and your brain registering the meaning of messages like these

’so-and-so suggested you read so-and-so web page’ ‘This could be what you’re looking for – Thanks, Allen.’

And then I read the web page, get what I wanted, give props or positive karma points to the teacher, teacher feels good, I feel happy that I have been able to save the time that would otherwise be spent wading through tons of search engine results pages. I have also effectively passed the buck- delegated my task – I have got another person to do what should have been MY WORK! Hmmm.. sounds just like my forte.

Back to base. The human contact doesnt end there. Lets say there is another student studying for SAT math. There is a high probability that the syllabi for SAT Math and GMAT math overlap. This other person could add himself to the existing topic and get notified in real-time when someone pushes something to this topic, this something could be like ‘Read this and that’ and so on. // A great place to lurk, for the people who consider themselves elitist, or just a timepassetc. A great way to share your knowledge with people who are in need. A great way to group study and for self paced lifelong learning. And to avoid spammers pushing irrelevant posts to topics, spammers would earn negative points from the topic originator if they push irrelevant subject matter to irrelevant topics.

You no longer have to comb through Mahalo answers and Yahoo answers trying to see which questions need answers in your area of expertise. Those are there and good, but there are simply one too many Question and answer sites these days you simply cannot keep up with them all.

Note: As an afterthought, it occurred to me that I should have covered Google’s PUBSUBHUBBUB in this piece. This lets you get alerts of new web content in your reader, that matches your keywords, in near real-time, if you didnt know of it already.

The above model could also be extended in many tangential/divergent ways. Lets say you are reading a piece about the latest and greatest iPhone 4/ios4. Being the knowledge-sharer and the constant-pursuer of new contacts (read:social animal, atleast on the internet, but introvert in day life) you are, you immediately click a button in your Firefox plugin that lets the world know you are reading an awesome iPhone 4 story, with the url. (Just like a tweet) Now you have thrown a ball at the world wall. It is supposed to come back, as per Newtons third law, somehow. So, you wait with holded breath until someone chances upon your shared url, and he/she starts reading the same thing. But you still dont know tht another person began reading based on ‘what I am reading’. My model above would take care of it. There is an existing Firefox plugin called ‘Eyebrowse’ where you can share the page url you are currently on, with other users of Eyebrowse. But all the urls shared from all the people go into one huge vertically growing high scrolling thing that keeps growing from the bottom towards the top, so it is not possible to keep track of particular keywords or subject areas for example. My model above would address this aspect. This is because, in order to get human-pushed, human-filtered, human-approved and human-recommended iPhone4 stories, you should have first opted-in to receive this kind of pushed info by (a) signing on to the site and (b) registering your interest with the ‘iPhone4′ meme.This is different from google alerts/google reader update because the push is originated by a human (not by Googles computers) AND the push is in real-time AND the push is to a distribution list (not to a particular person, though P2P communications could be allowed through private messaging).

Now back to the scenario, I share an iPhone article url, somebody picks it up, and somehow I am notified of how many people actually are currently online AND reading the same piece as I am, after I started sharing it. The other person whips up another iPhone4 story url related to what I am currently reading, and blips it to me, perhaps thinking I might be interested in reading this story also (with a comment). Talk about new ways of enabling people to connect among themselves. We could then start a private chat, based on commonality of interests, both sides add each other as ‘friends’, or even use the concept of following/follower etc. and so on…

This could be like the next chatroulette or omegle, but here you arent doing aimless chat to while away time, but you are connected by common interests. Hmm.. does this still sound like MIRC and its #channels? But who uses MIRC in a webified world? I think MIRC is dead, just the way Gopher is.

All this could also sound like a ‘giant forum setup’ with lots of private messaging going on. But here you message topics, which act as a gateway distribution list, rather than messaging individual parties. Once the individual has accepted you as a friend, you would be able to push your way directly to your friend. But once you start having a few friends, your interest in reaching out to a larger audience will wane?

This would differ from Google Buzz because there, there is no central place or clearing house of all the topics people are listening in.

Now turning to focus on commercial, economic and mercenary interests. We have to think ‘how will the site make money, duh?’. This, would be by facilitating a connection between buyer and seller. Lets say John is looking for classy and stylish eyewear. He posts, ‘#looking for eyewear under $40′ and then sellers currently online scramble to get his business. (I think this is possible in twitter also – try posting a tweet like this) Talk about new models of enabling contact between parties of an economic exchange. But with commerce comes spam. You could control this by having site terms and conditions saying, ‘no pushing unsolicitated commercial messages if you are a seller’ which means, you cant advertise your wares but you can push your wares to a buyer actively looking for the same.

Afterthought: I need to have covered a couple stuff above. One is sites like BlogLovin which lets you ‘keep track of’ the blogs you want to follow. But it doesnt allow a real time push of a particular post from a new publisher to a potentially interested consumer.You only follow the blogs you have listed as ‘want 2 follow’, and thats it. Someone cant recommend new blogs for you to follow based on your real time constantly changing interests, and based on what you are *currently reading…

Afterthought #2: If you are trying to implement the above as a webapp you will want to have a look at this open source real time push engine which uses AJAX:

http://www.ape-project.org/#

Thus the client only needs a browser and doesnt have to install any client program.

You could also use some kind of downloadable software for the client end which allows the user to get social media updates as well, in the same software package. Take a look at Skimmer and take a page from how Snoop client from reinvigorate.net works (in this link look for the option that says, ‘Track from your desktop’).

Related: check out notify.io – web notification system and Snarl. Snarl is a desktop program for managing ‘push’ notifications…

Isnt it confusing as to how many client programs that one has to install in order to keep up with the macrocosm? (MSN messenger, yahoo messenger, ICQ, Meebo, Skimmer, Friendfeed desktop notifier, Tweetdeck or other twitter client, custom windows sidebar gadget that displays traffic, weather, etc., etc.)

I wish they would simplify all this into ONE ‘push protocol’ where the originator can be anyone from the ‘world’ and the recipient would be ‘me’. You will only need install one client program on your desktop which would then receive all types of IM (like meebo), facebook, twitter, friendfeed updates, AND custom notifications. I think the HTTP protocol itself would need some amendment for this, so when someone buys from your eBay listing, someone makes a purchase on your etsy shop, someone comments on your blog post, someone answers your query posted in a Q&A site or a forum, your stocks just appreciated in price, the ebay auction you are sniping will end in 5 mins. etc. you will get notified. Currently many of these notifications come in only via email (and may be your mobile can be set to receive push notifications also), but for some events there is no email notification but still you would like to be notified.. Imagine seeing options in eBay like ’send me push when I get out bid’. True you can get SMS notifications but what if you are online but doing something else, like fapping off to porn, and would rather not let your concentration divert from computer to mobile (for reading SMS)?

Further imagine if you want to get notified if somebody has started adding items to the shopping cart on your site, obviously you wont get email until the purchase is complete, but currently the only way to get notified when someone is just visiting your site (and adding to cart) is through something like chartbeat. Also if you have installed things like zopim or livezilla for live support, you will probably need install clients for them also… BUT with one single common real time protocol for push, the operating system itself will need only one client program to receive anything from ‘World’. May be we will get to see built in programs for receiving and handling pushed notifications packaged as part of the OS. (like Calculator and paintbrush)

Some other scenarios that I can think of, where push might be a good way to notify concerned or interested people:

* You run a multi-author blog, and one of the authors has submitted an article for your editorial review.

* You have put your profile on singles dating sites and somebody is trying to contact you (you probably received a PM)

* You have posted ad on craigslist and someone visits your ad but has some questions… If you are online at the same time they ask their question, you can answer in real time, the craigslist webpage could eventually allow you to place your ‘Personal identifier for Push’ and then visitors to the page would be able to contact you in real time… Just like zopim…

* Somebody just bought your book on Lulu

* You entered (in the webware I talk about above) that you were looking for a Groupon deal for visiting a fancy seafood restaurant (wishlist) and Groupon has that deal today, and you didnt even have to visit Groupon site or read its RSS feed – Groupon, with some keyword matching magic, simply notifies you in real time that they have what you are looking for. It may not be worth emailing, but certainly worth getting notified about.

* Another wild imagination – lets say you are interested in viewing pictures of teriyaki steaks, daffodils and red Lambhorginis. A Flickr uploadr, when uploading pics to Flickr, if he tags teriyaki, daffodil, or Lambhorgini for the pics he is uploading, your ‘alert reader’ would get notified. The alert reader would have <Prev and Next> buttons so you could cycle through all your previous and next notifications (sorta like Gmail’s web clips – the blue line you see above the main gmail inbox) – think ‘one common inbox’ or dashboard where you could cycle back & forth through your real time pushed notifications.

If we had a real-time push protocol in place, then you could even get notified by tapping and connecting with ‘the internet of things’ (see stuff like touchatag)… You can get notified realtime if your kids mobile wanders beyond a pre-defined location, your spouse spends on your card, the parking meter can notify your phone that there are actually 3 people waiting for the parking space you have been occupying for the past 3 hours, etc. In an office situation, the IT Support dept can be notified if they are listening via their push client (or alert reader if you prefer) via ‘internet of things’ – printer running out of toner/paper notification, so on and so forth…

Afterall, email may be/could become dead as less important things are only pushed but not emailed to you. Email would be reserved for ‘the most necessary tasks’ only. You will use email only for those things which you want to ‘place on record’ (like evidence for court etc, things which you will need for later reference, etc.)

Related thought: Collaborative brainstorming or crowdsourced brainstorming – lets say you are collecting ideas on which to base your academic essay, you simply post – #looking for material for my story ‘Was the moon landing faked?’ – social copywriting perhaps? Gathering input ideas from crowdsourcing…

This ware would probably kill existing Q&A sites and forums.

Update: I think I may have found a best practice for how the push handler should work. See the windows task bar at the bottom? There could be a couple of horizontal line spaces above this taskbar. The exact number of such lines would be configurable. You could have 3-4 horizontal tracks as a workable number. For each ‘track’ you would set a priority – High Medium or Low. There would an options… button on each track. This button would let you configure the ‘information sources’ for that particular track. Lets assume you have installed surveillance cameras at your home. The camera has detected an intruder. So the camera, using the ‘internet of things’ (touchatag) can push you a SMS notification and a ‘high-priority’ notification to your alert reader. This will appear in Track 1, the highest track. Lets say you have also bought some kind of security bracelet for your kid to wear while attending school. The bracelet continuously monitors your kid’s location coordinates and if it ever detects your kid in an unfamiliar location (limits as to what is ‘familiar and regular’ surroundings would be defined by you as a circle of radius), it will send you a notification on Track 1. Track 2 will be where notifications related to critical business events would come in. Somebody completed an order on your site, so it says something like ‘New Order #2484 made for 10 Blue widgets’. Track 3 will be for social media updates. It could also say stuff like ‘Dilbert just posted a new cartoon for the day’ … Track 4 would be for keeping track of your interest areas and hobbies. Lets say you enjoy watching pics of stamps on Flickr, tweetphoto and the like. Somebody (you may not even know them) tagged a photo that they uploaded to Flickr or TweetPhoto as ‘#stamp’ then that site would send you push – ‘3 photos on Flickr available with tag #stamp – New!’…Then Track 4 also tells you (some_user whom you have never met before) suggests you read a post abt something based on the interests you shared (or the topics you are currently subscribed to). You can then rate some_user if it was a real worthwhile read, based on the subject matter of your interest or what you were looking for at the moment (your #topic or #question).

You get the picture…

These notifications could be set to scroll like a horizontal marquee, like a stock ticker does, but in my experience, with such scrolling stuff, your eye tends to wander often into the ticker area, distracting you from whatever you were doing on the rest of the screen. Each track should display only one line item at a time, with Previous button towards the left and Next button towards the right so you could click them and navigate back and forth among notifications. There should also be a Delete link so you can delete notifications that are of non-interest. The design of the Gmail ‘web clips’ horizontal line would fit perfect…

If you ARE interested in scrolling type of notifications take a look at FeedRoller , Snackr, Firefox RSS Ticker addon, Open source RSS ticker.

lastly, the big picture again: do we need push after all? is this the right direction to evolve? I am not sure, but I think this could be so. The world accepted and embraced SMS and email, both are P2P push, and now we cant live without SMS or email. As internet and computing technology expand to embrace ‘internet of things‘ (see related reading – 5 companies building the internet of things) there is going to be a need for these devices to communicate with us while we work on computers for the better part of the day. Yes the world needs a refined defacto standard push protocol and operating systems need have an inbuilt push handling client…

As I re-read everything in this post, I sometimes feel like I am excitedly trying to re-invent MIRC and internet forums… My brain is fried at the moment after a long day staring at the computer so I am sleeping on it and will probably update this post again in the morning…

In this post I will write about a couple SAT ‘power techniques’ learnt from experience.

One of my favorite stops every day is the ‘Sat question of the day’. It probably gives a boost to my estimated self-worth as I try to see how quickly I can solve their problems (one a day).

Today’s problem was particularly interesting that I had to write about it. Here’s the problem verbatim:

If half the people in a room leave at the end of every five-minute interval and at the end of twenty minutes the next to last person leaves, how many people were in the room to start with? (Assume that no one enters the room once the process begins.)
Answer Choices

* (A) 32
* (B) 28
* (C) 16
* (D) 12
* (E) 8

One look at the problem and I knew what I had to do: it would be simpler and more time would be saved if I used one time-honored technique used for solving all types of multiple choice questions. It is: work backwards from one answer choice at a time.

After getting the answer right (the answer is (C)), I saw how they were recommending students approach the problem – as expected, they cannot tell you to ‘work backwards from the answers’ since they are expected to be formal, theoretical, erudite and didactic in content and tone. (as to how they recommend cracking problems like these). They wont tell you how to use ’shortcuts’.

BUT it is a lot easier if you work backwards – first choose the answer that seems ‘most likely’. I chose to start with 28, becoz it sounded like a reasonably high number that could stand getting halved four times.

I started with 28, put out one finger in my right hand, thought ‘14′, next finger, ‘7′, and then found 28 could not be answer for 7 could not be ‘halved’. So score out 28. Choose 16. Finger,16,Finger,8,Finger,4,Finger,2. So it must be the right answer. Click click submitted the answer (C) 16 and it came out right.

Morale of the story: Avoid a convoluted, theoretical path if your brain estimates ‘this will take longer’ (unless you have all the time in the world and are feeling instructional to someone else showing off your math skills).

Here’s a SAT sentence completion problem that came up a few days ago:

Demographers and anthropologists have corrected the notion that European explorers in North America entered a ——- territory by showing that the land in some areas was already as densely ——- as parts of Europe.
Answer Choices

* (A) fertile . . settled
* (B) colossal . . wooded
* (C) desolate . . populated
* (D) valuable . . exploited
* (E) hostile . . concentrated

As I read the question completely, I thought to myself that the person who set this question has essentially given it away by choosing to position the blank just after the word ‘densely’. I now knew I no longer needed to worry about the first blank as I quickly eyed over the five choices given. ‘densely populated’ sounded just right and familiar, from the medium-volume reading that I had already done. So I chose (C) and hit Submit. And it was the right choice.

Lesson: Sometimes you only have to fill one blank and the other ‘fills itself’.

IF you knew these already (from some test prep book or something) – think of it as ‘reinforcement’!

The View from my corner of the world!

Couldnt resist commenting after reading this piece about Google’s obsession with engineering. It talks about Google’s obsession with higher ed – google supposedly (and reportedly) hires the’ best’ people around – where ‘best’ is defined by Sergey Brin in terms of academics as in – ‘if you got high marks (or grades, depending on where in the world you are reading this frm) in your academics and you studied up till PhD in compsci then you are in’.

If these engineers Google hires are supposedly super-smart or atleast better in smartness, creativity and energy levels than the people they look down upon, where in the earth were these people before the time when Yahoo and Altavista were the only search engines around? Everybody knows google came in late in the search engine market, but is (currently) most well-known and most highly-publicized of all the search engines. Where were these geniuses and wht were they doing in the pre-Yahoo and pre-Altavista days? Why couldnt they start a search engine of their own accord back then? Why did they have to do something that Yahoo and Altavista already did? (even if it were with the intention of making search better) (And wht abt the poor guy who imagined a search engine in the first place and who didnt have an education in comp sci? Dont tell me Yahoo or Brin conceptualized search engines before the very first search engine was made!) Atleast Microsoft was better in this aspect, capitalizing on the personal computer operating system market (the first company in the world to address this market with its DOS).

In short: Google hasnt done anything first, or out-of-the-box so far, it has only taken fruits from other peoples’ trees and made them better tasting, presentable and palatable. (Gmail was an improvement over the then-existent free email providers, just as Google was an improvement over Altavista).

As I have always said: NOBODY INVENTED COMPUTERS AFTER STUDYING COMPUTER SCIENCE OR COMP ENGG. You gotta make room for people with low-tech education or with no relevant education at all (read: non-compsci backgrounds), simply only working on the basis of their aptitude, merit and skills. May be I am biased, becoz I did apply to Google India once and all I got was one further email asking me to fill up some form (which i did) and then a regret email.

It is not only Google, every major Indian software company (read: Wipro/Infosys/TCS/Cognizant/HCL – the tier-1 s/w companies) is obsessed with engineering and comp sci for software jobs. Little do they know many major concepts in software and algorithms were NOT created by people with comp sci backgrounds. In fact, there wasnt such a thing as comp sci when majority of these concepts were ‘invented’ or ‘dreamt of’. And these companies are no different than Google when it comes to software innovation – the things they work on are all from learnt skills from third parties (in the form of books and training courses) and on equipment first conceptualized and made by someone else (imagine the poor guy who first dreamed of such a thing called a computer) – NOTHING ORIGINAL!

Here’s a typical representation of what 99% of outsourced software companies do, and how they are so un-original, un-creative, nothing-particulary innovative: What your company does. (see the third picture). All innovations seem to happen in Silicon Valley only!

Sidetrack: Even Microsoft has chosen not to enter into social networking (M$ started with Vine but i dont know wht happen with it), microblogging, social gaming, etc. Sometimes I think Yahoo is much more adept in embracing and extending new technologies and new ideas – Yahoo Meme, Yahoo Pulse, etc (but even Yahoo did this after seeing twitter’s success; again, wht abt the guy who imagined microblogging in the first place in some remote place, without working for the big names in software biz). Yahoo has developer network stuff like hosted javascript include files (YUI), YQL. etc. seems path-breaking. Even Google only recently started hosted code frm code.google.com on the lines of YUI.

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Leave alone Google, Microsoft and the like, but isnt it western cultural imperialism that attaches a propaganda to anything and everything and associates ideas with companies and names of people before spreading the idea around (often the original inventor doesnt get credit in these propaganda). These (western) people already have their lives well cut-out for them, monetarily and socially they are secure (read: social security, unemployment benefits), so they can afford to spend time on pursuits like name and meme propagation just for the heck of it. Once you have your tummy filled, bills paid, you can concentrate on finer points in life like art, wine, fashion, literature and even blabber mouthfuls of verbiage on these topics while socializing and drinking. What would you do, if you had to struggle to pay for three square meals and a litre of clean drinking water and meet your rent obligations? What if you had to break your back and bones working in some low-paying third-world job for a meagre salary that only covers your food+rent with barely any savings? Sometimes I think western imperial culture is the perpetrator of all things anti-socialist and anti-communist. Think about foreign exchange. Why would the western nations price their currencies at a higher exchange rate? They say 1 dollar gets you forty-five Indian rupees (current exchange rates), but who in the world invented this kind of disparity in exchange? Then they toot their horn about how capitalism has ruined the world and they write over population is not a disadvantage as made out to be (IT IS), and how they want to be seen helping third world nations step up their own economies (in the form of aid monies and soft loans as well as working for the upliftment of ‘the poor and the untrodden’). Come on man, if you really cared about third world economies and people, simply make 1 DOLLAR = 1 RUPEE or 1 POUND=1 RUPEE or 1 RIYAL=1 RUPEE and see wht happens! At least for a trial… Would these people be willing to do it? Of course not! If they did, their ‘first-world’ economies would come crashing down like a stack of playing cards.

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Software industry has enlarged the divide between the haves and the have-nots. House prices have gone up through the roof, rentals have reached exhorbitant rates simply because most earners in software can afford to pay good, so wht abt the people without comp sci education or software employment earning lower than their software counterparts? And its not only about finance. The marriage market has a high ’stated and obvious’ preference for people working in software fields, earning handfuls and working in America, while those unfortunate enough not to have studied compsci (or couldnt afford to study anyways) are sidelined and have to make do with what little they got (read: last take on the best mates, the lowest pecking order in the marriage pyramid), even though they have contributed to the advancement of computing as a field of knowledge. (I KNOW THIS FOR A FACT) Dont tell me ‘its because they didnt study compsci-thats just the way it is’! It is but exploitation, disjunction and breeding grounds for frustration and depression. (societal disparity; income disparity)

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The (sad) demise of Monopoly City streets

Today I casually followed some links and found out Monopoly City streets is dead. For good. Personally I would have played it when it launched, but never found the time or inclination to spend time on it. May be its launch was mis-timed. This could have been THE ’social gaming’ story instead of Zynga and its Farmville. Players could have created their own digital mansions on the lines of Second Life, then invite other online players to visit their ‘virtual’ homes. I would like to think its launch wasnt timed for a better reception from the internaut audience.

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It could be coincidence. Just this morning I was thinking, ‘wht if you could submit items which are ‘related reading’ to a particular article/story/post appearing elsewhere on the net? so people could benefit by your tagging and be impressed by your ability to bring up stories worth a related rush read (or atleast a fast skim)’? And then link after link in my browsing I hit upon DotSpots.

The idea is certainly not new. First came Zemanta, then Pluck, then GrazeIT, then Sphere (now Surphace), then Outbrain (currently it seems to be very popular). But only GrazeIT allowed you to actually add content found elsewhere (including those on your own blog posts) to other stories that you find on the net. You had to install the GrazeIT extension in your browser. Now Dotspots allows it also, so if you installed the Firefox extension you could add a ‘dot’ to an existing page, and with this extension installed, you are also able to view dots on a web page (the ‘dots’ or ‘related reading’ other people have added).

See it in action

http://untoldstories.pulitzercenter.org/2010/04/brahmaputra-river-asha-workers.html

Even without the extension installed, near the end of the story you will find something like: ‘this post appears as a dot…’.

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Textecution - this phone app disables the phone when one is driving very fast as well as trying to text at the same time.

Reading Desk

b3ta’s humourous infographics and flowcharts challenge – Link.

Is the MBA overhyped and oversold? – Link.

Stuff from Nose Dept. – A brief guide to boogers – Link.

Ever wondered how product bar codes, new mobile applications and augmented reality will change the way we shop for goods and services over the next decade? In this 84-page SlideShare presentation, PSFK provide an analysis of the Future of Retail.

Research on 41.7 million Twitter profiles explains everything – Most retweets happen within an hour of the tweet and more interesting stats – Link.

Laggards can leapfrog from cassette players to MP3 players, and they arent ‘early adopters’. They form a sizeable chunk of the market for tech products. Prof. Goldenberg of Jerusalem University says laggards could be important market segment. Link.

Don Dodge – Hows it like working for Google? – A first hand experience account – Link.