05-Feb-2010

Commented on Mike Kujawski’s blog “My response to the Twitter debate on the NYT and New Yorker blogs” -

Twitter is good as a real-time conversation channel and you can follow people that you wouldnt have otherwise have had access to. For example, take celebrity personalities like Obama and BillGates. Without Twitter, would you have had access near them or would they even post their thoughts or what they are doing at the moment where anybody could read them? In one of the comments (or in the article I cant remember clearly) someone has said Twitter is like a river into which you can dip your cup have a sip and go about your work. If you have any more than 100 people you are following you can quickly see how overloaded/overflowing this river is and how good of an exercise it is in sorting out the chaff (people posting blatant spam, quotes, re-quotes, etc., nothing original). This sort of information overload when we are faced with, will help us evolve into better handlers and consumers/propagators of information, in the long run.

My Thought Blob 01:00 PM

Read the newspaper article about “biologically tampered” brinjals and opposition to it - thinking : so previously they were calling it “genetically engineered” “genetically modified (GM)” now they have started calling it BT – Biologically tampered. But arent genetic engineered foods taste better and isnt this all for a common good? If they are genetically engineering it, then there must be some advantage in it right? Thinking seedless grapes, seedless oranges, etc. arent they better to consume than traditional seeded ones? It is a choice to consume GM foodstuff, nobody is forcing anybody to buy only GM stuff? There are both organic foodstuffs available on the market, and GM ones, we could go with whichever we please?

My Thoughts 03:00 PM

Thinking about game mechanics, verbs used in games and how they can be applied in common information consumption situations (like RSS reading). You “shoot” an email to someone, “jump” from RSS feed to RSS feed, etc. etc. and so on.. What other verbs that can be seen as ‘common’ between game mechanics and information consumption?

My Thoughts 04:00 PM

Digesting of information is what is called as “takeaway”. People say “My takeaway from this discussion/meeting whatever is such and such”. That said, thinking why Readers’ Digest is not doing well in circulation (read it somewhere). Digests are supposed to be interesting topics, succinct, brief and with brevity, clarity, expressive in every word (meaningful) and covering every sense with no room for differing inferences. Thinking about my previous sentence, that sounds like a good thought for how a good email (or a piece of information) should sound like. Just recalling how some blogs write “Comments may be edited for brevity and clarity”.

My consumable links recommendations

10 tips to help you stay organized – Link.

Periodic Table of Smellements – funny infographic – Link.

9 unconventional steps to a thriving, “very small” business – Link.

Alternet article – the 6 weirdest things women do to their vaginas – Link.

14 key skills and attributes for Public Relations professionals – davefleet.com – Link.

‘Why People hate marketers’ from “The Art of Non-Conformity” – Link.

Guyism – the 7 worst ways to propose to a woman – Link.

14 ways to get breakthrough ideas – Link.

20 hilarious school exam answers – Link.

People judge someone’s facial attractiveness within 100 milliseconds – Link.

Commented on Friendfeed

about Internet censorship in Australia – in Friendfeed here.

Reproduced here below

“It is best to ignore this lest it will generate attention prompting companies to come up with more “bigbrother watching stuff”. Those people doing censorship should think that, their children and grand-children, down the line, will be watched and judged (even cornered and punished) for innocuous stuff on the internet by unrelated people if they build censorship stuff like this, i.e., the tools u build today can and will be used against you and your progeny by others!

Thinking how do people go about researching or finding out about a topic on search engine like Google? I am not a newbie to searching just wondering how others compare to me, how much time do they take before arriving at the results, how many search results pages they visit and the time they spend on each result, etc.

Learnt new word ‘asinine’ from the following usage “To claim that a product has failed before it’s even started the race is… asinine.” Then looked it up in MnemonicDictionary.com to help remember the meaning. Trying to remember “Ass in Nine (9)” Just like an ass or donkey. Vocabulary = Vocabulary + 1

Searched on Google “how to remember meaning of words with pictures” Amazing Google’s search quality is – clicked on two of the results (the justinelarbalestier.com one and the Amazon result). This caught my eye in the search results “Paramnesia — not being able to remember the meaning of words.” Nice to know! Now I have to try remembering the meaning of paramnesia..

Wondering why no search engine has an option to ’save this search so I can more deeply research it later when I get the time’. Sure, Google has “Web History” to store anything you search for, but it stores any and all search queries, with no option to save only the individual searches, and I have purposely turned it off (not because of privacy concerns but afraid of it being one more thing to manage in my radar, like periodically going through it).

Came across this in Google adwords and clicked on it “Need Better Search Skills?” seems the site is selling an ecourse for betterment of search skills. Interesting, now thinking about how can one better search does not matter, how can one digest/absorb/able to recall what just went flying by on the internet is what ultimately matters. We are going to need a course on information absorption, information management, information digestion, information consumption without succumbing to information overload.

Signed up for this free ecourse – How to Beat Information Overload by Jane Plass. The more you deal with information, consume, filter, try to remember and recall it at the appropriate moment, the more you crave for it. It is like an addiction. I would call this information addiction.

Thinking about the use of the symbol “/” to denote “balance” or “sameness” in meaning. Instead of choosing one word OR the other, using “/” to write multiple words that mean the same thing -could possibly evoke clearer mental pictures on the part of the reader/consumer of the written word/material.

Thinking whether this: outline of my next book (Guy Kawasaki)- could be a pre-cursor to what I would call “social book authoring” or “collaborative crowdsourced book authoring” (on the lines of several authors who cooperate on the topics, and comment, suggest, and guide the writer/author what to write about, exactly what topics to cover, etc. Authors/writers could use their blogs/public internet outlet to collect feedback/ ideas / suggestions from interested people on how best to cover the topics intended for the book.

Idea bulb What if there existed something like Google SideWiki, where people have succinctly summarized a very long article or blog post with just the main points if the author has failed to do so (like highlighting the main points with bolded text). Often times I feel like ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and SAS (Short Attention Span) I cant bring myself to read/consume/digest a particularly long article. Couldnt be there a collaborative literary effort of people who actually read long columnists fully, summarizing what they just read, and what the takeaway is… This could be entered in the comments field with a special indicator like /*TAKEAWAY*/ so readers/visitors would know this is a precise/succinct precis/summary of the ongoing post/article.

Searched Google for “adjective of brevity” . I expected with the new Google’s “answers within the search results” facility I would get an answer inline within the search results page but it took the first click on the first search result and reading through three paragraphs of text that “brief” could be considered adjective form of brevity.

Contemplating I need to spend some time adjusting the fonts of my Windows 7 installation with its default font set. I think the option should be somewhere in the Display applet in the Control Panel. More on this later.

Wondering just how many emails do people have to face/cope with everyday. Somewhere on the internet, there will be a published study.

Contemplating is there a word to describe people who think too much or too deeply about any given thing? If there exists no such word as yet, how about ‘thinkmaniac’. I was also thinking whether ‘thinkophobia’ would fit, but that would be a fear or aversion towards thinking. Also considered ‘ninja thinking’ and OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). Speaking of OCD, OCT would fit probably – obsessive compulsive thinking!

Commented on TechCrunch article “Facebook’s Project Titan: A Full Featured Webmail Product” as follows.

Not. Emails are still very much alive and kicking, and will continue to exist in some form though they may have evolved and become known like a ‘message queue’ or a ‘buffered message’ system. There is simply no substitute for a form of communication that does not demand real-time attention, that you can attend to sequentially as time permits. Read PBS article ‘email is far from dead’ here – http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/02/email-is-far-from-dead033.html. That said, facebook launching email to go along with your social presence is a cool idea. Facebook is seen pioneering the merging of email inbox and social media messaging dashboards conceptually.

Wondering if people would soon tattoo their personal digital ID like a QR code on their person, voluntarily, then you will not need any form of identification to use any government service.

Remembering I thought about this long time ago – “Google Store View” concept where you can virtually visit a physical store from far away, all via the Internet. Theoretically, from Google Maps Street View, you can double click on a particular business door to get inside and do shop-browsing. Eventually this may happen in real-time, using web cams. As regards Google coming to your shop and filming photos on-location, it just has to give local business owners a dashboard to upload their own pictures and panoramas of their shops. Google thumping a new world order and its omnipresence and brand awareness means business owners would only be too happy with the promise of more business and more customers, to voluntarily photo-shoot their own businesses and shop outlets and submit the photos/pictures of their shop/store innards to Google via a console kind of system. Update: I just found EveryScape.com has been doing likewise for a while now!

Commented on the page How should web browsers render alternative text? as follows

Commenter Chris, FF has the wrong implementation in my opinion. I posted about this in Bugzilla @ Mozilla last year (opened a bug report), that Firefox is not rendering the ALT text as a tooltip when you mouse over an image, and they said it is as per design, and that the web page author should use the TITLE attribute of the IMG tag for FF to display any intended tooltips for the image (if the image renders successfully). If the image is non-existent (404), then FF displays the ALT text only with no indication that the image was ‘missing’. They said this is as per the HTML working group recommendations. I didnt concur, since my stand is that, lets say the web page author hasnt specified TITLE attribute for the IMG, but has specified the ALT tag, then for the sake of describing the image, FF should still display the ALT contents as tooltip even when the browser is able to render the image correctly. This is because as a user/browser of the page in question, I would still like to see how the web page author has described the image,  and I dont know how to compile my own Firefox, so I ended up installing the FF plugin “Popup ALT attribute” which shows me the ALT text as tooltip in case of images successfully rendered.