Communication is the process that facilitate this forward-movement. And all communication is wished to be entertaining. The Web is the platform/technology for this. Because it’s the place where everyone in the world could be provided with the same quality
entertainment (basically, communication).

Now that the platform is ready for action, Wise Entertainment can step in. Wise Entertainment is that which spread Wisdom in an entertaining and enjoyable format, using the universal medium – the Web. So as to take Humanity forward in its course.

Humanity moves ahead to Wisdom. That’s how it has been and that’s how it should be.

—

A new start in this direction — teeviTV

We can take it on from here. History is everyday. It changed it’s nature. Everything being done or happening anywhere is archived in real-time, seamlessly and almost automatically. There will be no more sitting-down-to-write-the-past. There needs to be only searches into the upto-the-second archive. What is left for historians to do is, maybe compile this archive, which is vastly spread-across, into different categories/time-periods to facilitate the searches and to offer content for those who are not searching for something specific but wants to know about things in general.

It’s a colorful future ahead and as such, the history will be colorful too.

1. Facebook becomes the Internet’s Social Glue
2. I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet
3. Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy

They’re building and we’re gonna have a Web where ’social is the default’. Your whole Web experience is about to get very personalized and at the same time, you and anyone with a Facebook profile is gonna’ become more transparent than ever.

Why is it a Good thing?

Transparency kill bad things. The more you get transparent, the more ‘thought-out’ will be your actions. The more ‘thought-out’ everyone’s actions are, the better the World gets.

It’s good to be automagically shown or taken to things that you are passionate about, rather than searching for them.

Your friend circles get active and worthy. Scale this aspect worldwide and universal fraternity is on its way.

Not even a single Bad thing?

No, there isn’t even a single bad thing. It does nothing to infiltrate your world. It takes data/information about yours, only as much you’re willing them to.

So, the only thing you have to do is to be sensible and do only what suits you. Simple.
Everything else will be taken proper care of.

Okay, good joke. But seriously?!, just a joke. I certainly don’t and can’t think so. Because, it’s too true to be a joke. Quoting them

Millions of you play Farmville — so much so that you’re spending your life savings on virtual crops. Moreover, Zynga, the parent company of Farmville, is said to be worth as much as $3 billion.

We won’t skimp, because Farmville is serious business.

From the comments, it was learned that the ones who got this was a joke, got it from that last line where they called Farmville, a serious business. But it happens to be the very same sentence that made it sound real and convincing to me.

Why?

Because there is nothing weird in something like this getting launched. Farmville sizes more than Twitter as a whole and is the most popular game on Web. They say lifestyle and (pop) culture evolve and they took something like Farmville, something as phenomenal as Star Wars for Americans, as a joke.

Maybe Mashable won’t do it. But if someone does it, it’s going to be NOTHING foolish, but a GIGANTIC hit.

P.S. I haven’t played Farmville yet. But I’m not blind to discard it as ‘just-a-game’ and ‘focus-on-important-things’. Times change. Fun is getting serious.

You come across a great, new, well-built Web app.
You get psyched about the “usefulness” of it.
You feel like ‘this was what I wa waiting for’ and religiously sign up and do the first steps.
You won’t forget to share it with your buddies.

But then, the activity goes low and reaches an almost-zero level.

No, this is NOT the case always. But this has been the case with me regarding Penzu and 750Words.

Both of them are relatively new apps but built around the same concept – Private Journaling. That is, you keep it as a private notebook of yours, where you jot down anything and everything off your mind, not necessarily in complete sentence or grammar; as-it-comes style.

I admire good copy-writing and both of this sites does exceptionally well in that.

Penzu – “Not only can keeping a personal journal or online diary help your immune system and overall physical health, it can better your mental health and functioning as well.”

750Words – “The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.”

Highly inspired and motivated, I signed up for Penzu (I didn’t knew of 750Words that time). I wrote about 7 entries in one single day and one each for the next two days. It WAS a real life-saver for me, at that time. It helped me off-load a lot of things and successfully fulfilled it’s objective of improving Mental Health.
About a week later, I got introduced to 750Words. It had more “niceness” than Penzu, may be because of the fact that 750Words is built by an individual and Penzu is a group of people. Also, 750Words’ explanation sounded more inviting and convincing and the interface and the app itself was very light, neat and simple. So, I signed up there.

I wrote about 670 words on the first day and didn’t write any day after that.

Because, I didn’t have the need to. At 750Words, it’s seen and approached more as a ‘therapy’. While the creator advocates super-simplicity and clarity, he gets ironical introducing some points-system and monthly challenges with rude after effects like having your name on the ‘Wall of Shame’ if you fail to adhere to the challenge you signed up to. I was amazed to see how the creator could talk in two different planes at the same time. Maybe it’s how I perceived it, but it’s what matters when you make something – what the customer/user will feel.

The whole point is – use something when you need it or want it. Don’t try doing something for the sake of it. Ah, this is a golden line always recited at many places!
Here, two things that were made with the sole intention of lightening the mental load and make me feel better, ended up making me think over it and write up this post (by the way, after about 5 months of silence here).

But then, writing this indeed made me feel good. So I guess, the objective is attained.

Books will NOT die. They will live. But, the book publishing industry and it’s economy will be so radically changed that there won’t be any real resemblance between the current book publishing economy and the one in the future.

There will be new type of companies. Though not exactly the same, the new companies will be sort of similar to services like Blurb, Lulu, CreateSpace and a couple more. Those new companies will serve as the publishing platform to authors. Before talking about the new platform let me tell you something about the present book publishing industry.

You come up with unique content, meet publishing houses and if they’re interested, enters into an agreement where you’ll be paid either a lump sum amount or periodic royalty dividends. The agreement will be dealing with the rights of your work. You may sell all rights to the publisher, or for a certain period or reserve the right with yourself. It depends on other clauses in the agreement.

Back to the future. The new companies, which serves as the platform for authors will be working in a somewhat similar way. The author will enter into a contract with the company of his choice (similar to the type of agreements, we’ve got now) and provides the company, a digital master copy. From there, people could either download the electronic version (*points at* Amazon Kindle and similar things) or order prints. This is where something more interesting kicks in – there could be multiple versions of the same book. Like age-group based illustrations and quality of the language used. There will be multiple covers from which you can select the one of your liking when you order a print.

The essence is – right now, ‘books’ means ‘printed material’ whereas in the future ‘printed’ will be just another version of a literary creation called ‘book’.

Going a little technical. Undoubtedly, there will be a lot of companies doing basically the same thing. But this should not cause inconvenience to readers. This is where yet another type of companies will rise. The aggregators. Every publishing company will be having an API (somethat that enables development of external tools that can access and modify the main database) which will be used by the aggregators to provide a one-stop access to books published by all publishers.

This means, there will be both publishing companies and selling outlets. Also there could be giant companies doing both these actions. Thus, in whole, we see that the basics of publishing,marketing and economy doesn’t change (at the basic level) but the nature of it evolves to something more open and better. Something that will be loved by the new humanity – the Web.

What is Micropayment platform ?

Micropayments are very low (hopefully reasonable) prices that will be paid for things small in volume. Like paying for a newspaper. It doesn’t cost much. What Google is said to be developing is, a platform (similar to the payment gateways, in a way) based on Google Checkout – an online shopping option by them, almost similar to Paypal.

Why is this interesting ?

Because the subject of “future business models” is something that’s actively discussed and talked about. There are some who believe everything on web will be totally free forever. Not really. The web will be totally free and open forever. But that needn’t mean everything on web will be free. There will be lot of content for which you’ve got to pay for, and a lot more content that’s totally free. That’s it. That’s what Google means when it says “‘Open’ need not mean free”.

Back to micropayments.

Many things on the web, newspaper sites for example, are free because, as of now, it’s very inconvenient to charge (due to associated processes,fees and such) for single editions/copies (micropayments). What Google is said to be developing is something that’ll solve this problem. Their platform is expected to make it feasible for publishers/enterprises to charge very low prices for their content.

Yes, it’s kind of like the iTunes store and App store. Low prices. But this time, it’s open to people as a platform, rather than a proprietary technology, like Apple does it now.

Sum it up

It all comes down to this. Google is developing something new, that’ll extremely help not much people other than the already failing newspaper industry. In 6-8 years, Newspapers won’t be anywhere near what they are now. They will turn out to be, uhmm, just another type of paper ?!

P.S. There will be no type of paid content on the Internet, for which there aren’t free alternatives.

Thumbnail image by SqueakyMarmot

But what made me write about him is not only that, but the way he presents himself. He lives at DustinCurtis.com which is a simple HTML page with some personal info and links to his best articles. Yes, articles – that’s what I am talking about. No, not just about the content but the way he does it.

Every single article has got an unique design, which is so much in rythm with the content. You expect a designer of his kind to have a portfolio page. But Dustin Curtis haven’t got one. It’s better to say, he doesn’t need one. Every single article of him stands testimony for his awesome sense and skill. He creates his portfolio with the stuff he writes and designs for himself, rather than throwing up a list of stuff he made for ‘clients’.

Totally check out DustinCurtis.com, there are some really great pieces of art there.
Isn’t this a great way of doing things ? Yes, it is. Don’t you think.

The all new homepage
(full size screenshot opens on click)

The X Factors

• The only Indian news web site with a usable User Interface (UI) and a great User Experience (UX)
• Very smooth on eyes. Great readability
• Sensible AD placements
• They’ve got the AD thing right. No fiddling around hurting the content. ADs are placed in such a way that the UX isn’t damaged. It never gets in the way of reading.
  Also note that, there is NO AD at all on the single post page (except the sidebar ADs). That’s a bold move, Hats off.
• They haven’t broken any news item into multiple pages (as many corporate websites do, so as to increase the Page Views). Everything ends in a single page.
• Slideshows – What’s more notable than the beautiful slideshows are the way they’re done. The slideshow plays in a single page with smooth transitions. Again, this is a bold move as many of the corporate websites, as mentioned above, uses slide shows as a method to exponentially increase their page views by putting each slide in a separate page.
• Social sharing options. Recent posts widget. Most Popular/Most commented widgets. Related topics and news along side every post.
• …yes, there is so much to talk about.

Why does all these matter ?

Because this could be seen as the start of some sort of a trend among Indian web sites, where the users aren’t under-rated and factors like User Experience and User Engagement are given the importance they deserve.Designing quality designs require truck loads of inspiration and these awesome designs will go a long way in that direction.

We’ve got ClearTrip as a great example for sensible web design, and now we have The Hindu. The list is all set to roll down, and it’ll be just a matter of time – Indian web sites going the real web way (including those of the Govt. of India).

Note that the new design of The Hindu is in beta and the whole thing is in the redesign phase. They’re in the process of porting their archives to their new design, which understandably, takes much time. The wait will make it sweeter, if not sweetest.

(BTW, if you’ve got some great Indian web sites with awesome design as those mentioned here, tell everyone of them in the comments. Let the trend catch up.)

My requirements just didn’t fall entirely under one category and that’s a big reason why it took a bit long in the research phase! I needed a  pretty much powerful processor – Core2Duo to be specific – and enough memory to complement it. I wanted the screen to be at least 15″ in size. And in order to stand eligible for the free Windows7 upgrade program, I needed at least Vista Home Premium to be factory-installed on it. Above all, I was on a limited budget. And there was this one, Aspire 5738G offering all these plus many features more (including a dedicated nVidia 512MB GPU). There wasn’t any reason at all, to keep me away from buying it. I got it for Rs.42,500 (including tax of 4%) which on batteries with power saver mode enabled, lasts for around 5 hours on minimal use and 3.5-4 hours on normal use and 2.5-3 hours with WiFi on; which is pretty great considering it’s performance.

The thing about product reviews

One thing that I learned about the (user-contributed) product reviews and opinions is that, always take them with a pinch of salt. Some people tend to talk about a product or post a review, when it malfunctions or doesn’t work the way they expected it to. Remember that while there is this guy who is disappointed with the particular product, there are hundred others who is satisfied and are happily using the same product.

Read (user-contributed) comments and reviews only to shortlist 3-5 products. Do not base your final decision on them. And  it’s advised to read the reviews at CNET,  TrustedReviews (UK targeted), PCWorld and such corporate reviewers. In this context, Test Freaks deserves a special mention. It’s a review aggregator. You specify a product and you get to see reviews and comments on it, pulled from all over the web. But what makes it really stand out is that they’ve got expert ratings and reviews too, apart from user reviews.

And one question I’ve been asked much is, how is it possible for a company, to offer something at a much lower price than another company’s product with similar specs. I think it’s the brand value that plays the big part there. For instance, HP has got a higher brand value than Acer and costs more with similar specifications. Also factors like place of assembling influence the price.

And hey, a bonus tip: HP is giving away 25 packages, each package containing a Hp dv6 entertainment notebook, a HP Mini, an awesome backpack and Syncables software to keep the note and net books in sync. A friend of mine, @binoyxjwon a HP Mini the last time HP did a giveaway. Give them a try. You never know what’s the next awesome thing gonna happen to you.