Well, one of the things that Flickr does is that it ranks your photos by something it calls as “Interestingness”. I thought I would share the 5 most interesting photos that I posted as described by Flickr. Two of these photos even appeared within the top 500 most interesting photos on Flickr before being pushed out by better photographs.

Without further ado, here they are (and yes I know that some of these have featured on this blog before):

Waiting for my flight

This photo was taken at Frankfurt airport while I was waiting for my flight. The sky was crazy that day, and any number of photos would have been insufficient, but somehow this one came out to be my most favorite of all the photos I took that day.

Mehndi

This photo is that of a very good friend. This was taken at her marriage, and it came out very well. I love this photo.

Natural Fireworks

This photo was taken a long time ago during a storm in Gurgaon. I stayed up all night and took hundreds of photos, and this one was the best of that lot. Again one of my more favorite shots. This has been featured on this blog before here.

I didn’t break it

This photo was taken on one of many trips to the Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary near Gurgaon.

Emotional Dog

This is another favorite of mine. Its of my dog Peach when she was just a puppy. She is as naughty today as she was then.

I hope you all enjoyed this little post of self-praise. But, I just love to share my work. All comments are welcome. And please visit my Flickr page if you would like to look at other photos that I have posted.

In this post, I will be present the method that I am using to ensure what is referred to as Inbox Zero. Inbox Zero starts with the premise that at steady state, there should be zero emails in your inbox, and if that is not the case, work needs to be carried out to achieve that steady state.

I have been using a method for almost a month now, with an Inbox Zero almost everyday.

Let me begin by describing how I have setup my Outlook (which is what I use as my email program).

The Setup

First of all, I setup my Outlook as following:

• Create 3 PSTs (Outlook Data Files): one called Main to receive email, another called Processed to keep email that already have been worked upon, and a third called Secondary to store emails that don’t require active attention.
• Main PST – of the three PSTs, this is the one that is holding the Inbox which is supposed to be Inbox Zero.
• Processed PST – this is the PST where you will be manually moving a lot of your email as you process your inbox. Feel free to setup a folder structure in this PST to your liking. You can leave it to be one folder, or create folders for people, projects, etc.
• Secondary PST – this is where a lot of the mails will be moved through automatically processing using Outlook Rules. Again feel free to create whatever folder structure that you want.
• Take a look at your incoming email from the past month, and start identifying patterns. A lot of email is received as FYI information because you are part of a mailing list. This email can usually be looked at over a weekend, or skimmed once during the day. For each such category, create an Outlook rule which automatically moves these emails to a folder in the Secondary PST.

The Method

Having created that basic setup, let me explain the method that I apply to achieve Inbox Zero. Each mail, that remains in the Inbox on arrival (remember that some are being moved automatically through rules), has to be categorized in one of the three categories of actions:

• Process – that you will work on it right away, without looking at any further emails. Usually these are smaller tasks that can be done quickly (like responding to an email).
• Delete – these are emails which can be junk that finds its way to the inbox, or any mail that you want to typically look at the subject or a line or two in the body, and just delete. A lot of times these emails are left unread in the inbox and cause clutter, causing some important emails to be lost.
• Defer – these are emails that you have to process but cannot right away.

I go through each email every day, and based on the category they fall in, I carry out the following actions:

• Processing – this requires carrying out whatever action that is needed to mark the email as processed and completed. It could be a response, it could be creation of a document, or anything. The main thing to remember when processing an email is that till the email is processed, it doesn’t leave the inbox. This is important, so I repeat: Till the email is processed, it doesn’t leave the inbox. This is important because one of the biggest reasons for dropping tasks is if you are in the process of doing one, and are interrupted for something else. You may forget to get back to it later. But by keeping the email in the inbox, you still need to take one of the three actions on it whenever you visit your inbox to bring it to steady state, which will allow you to get back to it.
• Delete – simply select it and press Delete.
• Defer – this requires putting the task associated with this email on hold with the understanding that you will carry it out later. I have a folder in the Main PST called deferred tasks, I move the email to this folder (notice I don’t move it to the other PSTs). However, before moving the deferred email to this folder, I create a task for it in Outlook, with a reminder date and time (a guess about when I will get to it). Sometimes, I put the task on my calendar, if I want to block off a time slot on my calendar for that task. Only after I have set myself a reminder for this task, do I move the email to the Deferred folder. When it comes time to work on the task, a similar rule for applies as for the processing mails – Till the task is processed, you should never mark it as complete or dismiss its reminder in Outlook. Again, it is important for the same reason. Once the email is processed (task completed), you can move the email from the deferred email a designated folder in the Processed PST.

For all the emails that I move to the Secondary folder, I go through them from time to time to see if there is anything that I need to read about, or possibly take action on. Usually this is done once a day.

This entire process is repeated till there are no more emails left in the Inbox. To me every time I hit that, it gives me a feeling of Nirvana .

A little more needs to be said about the deferred tasks/email:

• Never defer a task without assigning a reminder to it.
• Never close your reminder window (which will pop-up to remind you of your tasks), without either snoozing the tasks which it is showing (thus extending your own deadline) or dismissing the tasks (which means that you have completed the task and moved it to processed – as discussed above).
• Keep a personal limit of how overdue are you going to let a deferred task be.
• It is important to clear up the deferred tasks folder when you have free time every time you achieve Inbox Zero.

The Optimization

Of course nothing works perfectly from the word go. And a process has to be tweaked all the way to ensure that it stays successful. So far, I have added a lot of tweaks to my method to make it easier for me. Here they are to get your imagination rolling for what you can do to make it easier for you, if you attempt to go for an Inbox Zero approach.

• The Rules – I created a lot of complex rules for the automated movement of the emails. For example, even within the emails that get moved to secondary, I mark some of them as read mails, and others as unread based on which ones I want to give priorities to when I skim over the secondary folder. I added exceptions to the rules when mails were marked personally to me, and other such tweaks.
• Toolbar Buttons – I added a custom toolbar with two buttons to save me a few clicks – one “Add Reminder” button clicking which automatically creates a follow up task with a reminder that you can specify. Another to mark all emails in a folder as read “Mark Read”. These buttons save me a lot of clicks every day.
• Favorite Folders – Outlook has a feature which allows you to specify some favorite folders that show up on top of the left navigation window. I keep the most commonly used folders there to which I usually move my email out of my inbox. That helps me speed up the movement of the email out of the Inbox.
• Flag Colors – when adding a reminder to an email, you can usually choose the color you want to give the task. You can use the colors to specify priority within deferred tasks. This gives you a visual aid when you start tackling deferred tasks.

The Conclusion

Well, the best way to conclude is that it is working for me. And if you decide to adopt a similar methodology, and have questions, feel free to post them. Remember, you will have to customize it to whatever makes you feel most comfortable.

I should probably talk about all these people I know who fall into this category, but today’s post is about Dr. Manas Fuloria. Manas is a very dear friend and mentor to me. I have learned quite a bit from him in the duration that I have known him. Recently, he started a venture which educates young minds from all over India – he co-founded a business school.

While I knew that he was also taking some classes at this business school from time to time, I didn’t know that he had started blogging. He had started blogging about a variety of topics for the benefit of his students so that he can reach out to them even when not in the classroom. This blog allows him to discuss a variety of facets of life, without the structure of a classroom.

When I finally got to know about this blog (last week) I went and had a read. And what I read told me that its not just his MBA students who can benefit from what he writes. His articles are applicable to everyone. Even though the articles are written to address a very specific target audience, the concepts are universal.

So, I now go and read this blog regularly. Because, when smart people speak, one should listen.

Manas presents often visited topics with a very fresh viewpoint – his view point. And that itself opens up your mind quite a bit since you probably didn’t thing of those things before.

I highly recommend that you should go and read this blog once, and if you like it, then you can keep going back: http://drmanasblog.proton.in/. And of course, if you like it, you can recommend it to your friends, and then they can recommend it to their friends ad infinitum.

Here’s a screenshot of the error:

Now, I went and checked everything within my power to see why this error was occurring:

• double-triple checked the password.
• enabled-disabled firewall to make sure that was not the culprit – on both computers.
• checked the remote settings on the computer I was trying to connect to.
• and a number of other things.

Then I read the message carefully once. It said “In some cases, this error might also be caused by a large time discrepancy between the client and the server computers”. So, I told myself, that can’t be it. But just in case, I checked, and yes the laptop I was trying to connect to had a date which was behind by 4 years (no idea how). I fixed the date, and tried again. And it connected without any problem.

The uninitiated might say that I was dumb to not have listened to the error message to begin with. But here’s what I have to say to them – with Windows, you can never be sure that the error message is saying the right thing. And to prove that here is another error message that I got today itself.

I was trying to backup a file onto my external hard drive. It was a 5.5 GB file, and I had plenty of space on my external hard drive. Here’s the error message: “Cannot copy Outlook: There is not enough free disk space. Delete one or more files to free disk space, and then try again. To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click Disk Cleanup”.

And here’s the screen shot:

Once again, I was perplexed for a moment. I had enough space on the drive. I thought maybe it needs some space on the source drive so for some temp files or something (stupid though, I know), and so I promptly cleaned that up. Then it struck me. My external hard drive had a FAT32 file system (don’t ask me why, it came that way out of the box, and I never bothered checking). And of course, 5.5 GB is over the limit of what you can put per file on a FAT32 file system.

Now, why couldn’t it give me that as an error? Of course, the fix was simple. I backed up everything from my external drive, and then formatted it as NTFS. And the file copied without any problem.

So, when Windows gives you an error message, it mostly doesn’t mean what it says, but then sometimes, it does.

So, well I looked around for a few minutes, and sure enough I saw it sitting right there on the building next to where I was. Time to click photos I said, and here is what came out:

In the one above, the bird was about to regurgitate something. I didn’t catch what it was – maybe some food it didn’t like so much.In these two photos, the kingfisher finally got bored of sitting around and decided to fly away further and further; but not before I managed to catch these two shots. In the second one (the one below), it stopped by that planter to get a drink from within it (it must have been watered recently), and then proceeded to rub its beak against the side.

All in all, it was a fascinating experience.

Since this post is about photography, I think it makes sense to also let the reader know that I maintain a Flickr stream of my best photos: Vaibhav’s Photo Stream (which may not be all that good being the amateur that I am).

One of the things I noticed right away is that the speech recognition program inserts an extra space after each period. A similar thing happens when you try to insert new lines or new paragraphs; it inserts extra lines and paragraphs. I will have to figure out how to get rid of this behavior. It’s probably a setting somewhere.

The program is supposed to learn how I speak as I use it more and more. I will have to be patient initially so that I can teach it my speech and it learns how I say my words. Hopefully this will improve its accuracy rate and I will become more productive while using the speech recognition option for dictating my blog posts and for creating other documents in my work.

The only other thing that I will have to learn is how to tell it when I want to give a command versus when I want it to include it as text in what I’m typing. As I said, it was easier than I imagined it to be however it will require a lot of patience in the beginning.  To type out this post I had to spend almost 20 minutes because of all the corrections I had to make.

I will keep giving it a shot and see if it actually becomes worthwhile to use speech recognition in place of typing out the text.

Here’s what I thought would be the real effect of the campaign:

However, as I said, the message is right. Its the same message as the one given out by WWF world over. Stop buying ivory, because if the buying stops, the killing will too.

Here’s how I backup my blog (it’s very simple, really). Here’s what you need:

1. Install the WordPress Database Backup plugin.
2. Figure out from your hosting provider, how to access your account through SSH, and have your username and password ready.
3. Download putty.

In addition, you should be a little comfortable with command line access to your server. And here we go.

Step 1: Backup Your Database

With the plugin installed, this is easy as it can be. Just follow these steps:

• Go to your WordPress admin panel, and find Backup under Tools in your admin panel. This lets you access the plugin options.
• Select the tables that you want to backup. The plugin automatically selects the core tables and lets you choose any plugin tables that you want to backup.
• Under backup options select “Download to your computer”, and click “Backup Now”. Depending on your DB size and the number of plugins you have, this process may take a while, but the plugin shows you a nice progress bar.
• Download the generated file and save in a safe location.

Step 2: Backup Your File System

The next thing to do is to backup your files. Normally, you may only want to backup your uploads and themes directory, but I prefer to simply backup the entire blog. Its only an extra few MBs, and this way you can simply restore your blog in one shot, if needed.

In order to make this part easy (compared to using FTP to get to your files), I recommend the use of SSH. Fire up putty (or any other tool or console to get SSH access on your server).

Note that different hosting providers have different rules for allowing SSH access. I had to have mine enabled by sending a photo ID proof to the support. I use BlueHost as my provider.

Once you have used SSH to login to your account, you should change your directory to one level above where your blog is situated. This is usually something like public_html, or something similar.

Once you are at that level, issue the following command:

tar -cvzpf backup.tgz public_html

Of course replace public_html by the name of your folder. What this command essentially does is that it takes the entire folder, and packages it in a tar file, and then compresses it using gzip into one compressed version of your entire file system for your blog.

Now simply download this file over, and save it where you saved the database backup. And that’s it, you are done.

Once you get the hang of it, its a very quick and painless process.

Firefox versus Chrome versus IE versus Safari versus Opera.

And so I present, the Great Browser Performance Showdown:

Setup and Preparation

A little note about the setup I had in place and the preparations I did before testing out the various aspects of these browsers.

• Windows Vista x64, 4 GB RAM, 10K rpm HDD, Core 2 Quad Q9550.
• Fresh Windows install.
• Fresh Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE, and Firefox installs.
• No plugins or addons on any browser.
• Set each browser to load a blank page upon startup.
• Warmed up each browser to visit several sites just to fill up cache and cookies randomly for each browser.
• Updated each browser to the latest.
• Each browser has a Quick Launch icon in my Quick Launch bar.

And for the record, here are the versions that each browser was running.

• Opera 10.0, build 1750
• Firefox 3.5.2
• Internet Explorer 8.0.6001
• Chrome 2.0.172
• Safari 4.0.3

Before I start, I have to say that this comparison is not very scientific, but is 100% unbiased. Also, I am not comparing features that each browser has, but comparing only performance while performing normal tasks. Features are a whole different ballgame.

Here we go.

Startup Time

One of the things that I want my browser to be able to do the most is to start off very quickly – it should launch before I am done moving the mouse after clicking the icon to launch it. So, how do all these browsers perform while starting up.

The method I used to test this simply classifies these browsers into two parts: Blazing Fast and Just Not There. This is more a feeling test – if I feel that the browser is taking a pause before launching, its Just Not There. And the results are:

Blazing Fast

• Chrome
• Internet Explorer

Just Not There

• Safari
• Opera
• Firefox

Even I was surprised by the results. Of all of them, Firefox is the slowest with Opera being the second slowest. I have to of course say, that the difference is really a split second. With Chrome and IE, you can say that they start instantaneously, while Opera and Safari, I felt a momentary lag before they start up, and with Firefox, it was quite noticeable.

Another way to confirm how fast each browser loads is to check for how long does the busy cursor in Windows Vista show? With Chrome and IE, I hardly see the cursor, while with the others I actually see it go round.

Another thing to notice is that the startup time increases over time. In case of Firefox, once you install some plugins, the startup time really takes a plunge (from past experience) and the same goes with IE. Even with Chrome, it won’t be so blazing fast after you have used it a bit.

Conclusions:

• Chrome and IE win.

Memory Usage

The other thing that is important is how much memory does the browser use. If you are anything like me, you will have 30-40 pages open at the same time, and before you know it your browser alone is taking up more than a gigabyte of your RAM.

The other thing to know is how quickly does the browser release memory as pages are closed and tabs are shut down. For this test, I am going to start the browser, and open 6 pages, and note the total memory consumption for all of the browser processes after each page is opened. Then I am going to close them one by one and see how the memory is released. In order to measure how the memory is released, I am going to take the measurement 30 seconds after closing the tab. I am going to use the same 6 pages for each browser.

Here are the results:

In the chart above, the x-axis is the number of pages open. The following observations can be drawn with this data:

• IE and Chrome take the most memory as you open more pages (IE is the highest).
• IE and Chrome release memory much better as the pages are closed.
• Firefox, Opera, and Safari don’t release memory as much as pages are being closed. This is obvious to see when you compare the memory that was being used when the browser was started initially to when the pages were closed to zero (Firefox 20 to 53, Opera 24 to 69, and Safari 22 to 79)
• Opera uses the least amount of memory of all the browsers per page.

So, as you go about your day, opening and closing pages, there is a big chance that you will have a sizable memory consumption when using Opera, Safari, or Firefox. While if you are using IE or Chrome, and you need to free up some memory, you can simply close some pages instead of the entire browser.

Some more observations that I made during this testing:

• Chrome and IE both use multiple processes for loading multiple pages. This is probably what causes the higher memory consumption, and also allows the faster memory release.
• While Chrome uses one process per page, IE doesn’t always spawn a new process per page. Chrome releases memory almost immediately, while IE takes up to a minute to release memory.

Conclusions:

• Chrome and IE win because of how quickly they release memory.
• If you are not a heavy user, then Opera wins.

Browsing Speed

This is the one that most browsers keep talking about. How fast does it actually load the page. And there are plenty of sites out there which have very scientific measures of browser performance. However, in my daily use, I want to see how fast these browsers load the sites that I visit. For this test, I have cleared my caches in all the browsers, and I am going to test them against 5 pages each (the same pages). Here are steps I am going to use to measure the time:

• Clear cache
• Start time on pressing Go
• Stop time when page stops loading
• Repeat 3 times and take average

Here are the results:

In the chart above, the x-axis represents the 5 different websites (LifeHacker, CrunchGear, YouTube, MidEastYouth, and StackOverflow) and the average time for all the sites.

The following are the obvious observations:

• Opera is painfully slow.
• And Firefox is blazingly fast.
• Chrome and IE do pretty well in most situations, with Chrome being faster more often.
• Safari is just about average.

One thing I would like to point out, is this. While all other browsers don’t change anything in the open window when you clear browsing data, Opera clears out the entire environment (closes the open page).

Conclusions:

• Firefox is the winner.
• IE on average is second best, but Chrome is probably a better contender. The average suggests that Chrome does very badly on certain types of sites.

Verdict?

Here’s the summary of my testing:

• Firefox wins – startup time and memory usage not withstanding, it is the one that gives you the fastest browsing.
• Internet Explorer 8 is a very compelling contender.
• Chrome is still holding its own. I am probably going to stick with Chrome for now.

For me it worked in two clicks – one to install the plugin, the second to activate it. And if you have an iPhone, try visiting my site using it (if you are not already). Here’s what it looks like:

This plugin is great. From the control panel, it lets me tweak whether I want the view like above, or if I want to display the excerpt as part of the default view. It lets me configure the pages, choose various icons for the pages, upload my own icons, etc.

It even lets me specify AdSense and Analytics information so that it will serve my ads and also let me track the visitor information. The reason I need to specify it of course is because the plugin is not using my theme, but its own theme to render the iPhone website.

Its not without bugs – for example, as of now, even after specifying my publisher ID, I still don’t see any ads on the iPhone site. But, I am guessing things will sort themselves out. Else, I might have to dive into the plugin code.

But at the end of the day, its a great plugin.

Here’s something new, you can maximize your window in a way so that it only maximizes the height of it. I am calling this Vertical Maximize, and based on my tests, you can’t do this horizontally. Here’s how to do this:

Step 1: Move your mouse to any of the horizontal edges of your window (top or bottom), so that you see the vertical resize arrow (shown below).

Step 2: Now, simply double-click and presto, your window expands to maximize the vertical dimension, while the horizontal dimension remains the same. I can see this coming in very handy when you have multiple windows open side by side and you want to increase the vertical viewable area for a given window without changing its width.

To restore the window, simply double-click the title bar.

A quick search reveals that it is pretty straight forward to install Windows 7 using a USB stick. However, various sites ask you to perform various different steps in order to get it going. And not everything works for everyone. Here are the most simple steps that you can follow and hope that it works for you.

Before you begin, please note that if you are using Vista, make sure that you do all steps as administrator (far too many people have been frustrated by not remembering this).

• Step 1: Collect your material – download the ISO image for the Windows 7 version that you want to install (at the time of writing, you need to be lucky enough to have a source such as an MSDN subscription). Get hold of a USB stick, which is at least 4GB in size.
• Step 2: Prepare the USB stick – make sure that you have no data on this disk. Simply go to your My Computer, locate the stick, right click and choose Format.
• Step 3: Copy the files – you need to make use of any number of ISO programs (WinRAR, MagicISO, etc.) to extract all the files of the ISO image onto the USB stick.
• Step 4: Make the USB Bootable – this is probably the most confusing step of all, so read carefully. First up, you need to have a machine which is the same target platform as the Windows 7 that you are trying to install (x86 or x64). If you are installing Win7 x64, then find a machine which is running Windows x64 and do the following (similar if you are running x86):
• 4.1 – on the USB stick find the folder called boot.
• 4.2 – copy the file called bootsect.exe to some place on your x64 machine (let’s say C:\).
• 4.3 – now, go to command prompt (remember to do this as administrator in Vista).
• 4.4 – change directory to wherever you copied the file, and execute the following command: bootsect /nt60 E: (here E: is the drive letter that Windows has assigned to your USB stick). Make sure when you are doing this, there is no explorer window open that is viewing files on the USB drive, as you will get an Access Denied error.
• Step 5: Boot with USB – now, simply plug-in your USB stick into the USB port of the target computer, and reboot. While booting up, access your BIOS and configure it to boot from the USB rather than your hard disk. It should start loading the installer from the USB upon reboot.

That is it. The one thing was good is that once I got the USB stick ready, the actual setup was very fast, since the USB stick is faster than the optical drive.

I will explain that in a moment, but let me introduce a very good friend – Paresh Rana (we are actually related – he being my brother’s wife’s brother). Paresh is one of those people who really increased my interest in photography. For him photography is a passion (if not a full time job, which it should be). He has done various portfolios and shoots as a photographer (if you clicked on that link on his name, it would have taken you to his website).

Anyway, Paresh is one of those people who just sees the world that he is capturing in his lens differently than the rest of us. And he uses his camera and some magic in post processing to come up with what he originally saw in the scene.

Here’s a photo he took of a performer some time ago.

Now this is a cool picture in its own respect. I love the colors and the pose, and also the mock expression on the performer’s face.

But this is not what Paresh visualized when he took the photo. He saw an end product which was totally different from this picture.

With some post-processing, he has transformed the image to something totally different. Here is the link to the final image on Flickr: Cosmic Color.

I tried to embed the final image from Flickr, but it didn’t allow me to. Since the image has been stored to not allow any embedding.

However, because Paresh had already shown me the final output, I had saved it (naughty me) and so I am able to reproduce the final output here. Please notice that the images are copyrighted by Paresh with all rights reserved. Do not copy or link to these images without his permission (I do have his permission of course).

So, here is the final outcome of that picture. It’s called The Cosmic Color.

This is awesome creativity.

I have started using Twitter a little more in the past couple of months, and I am liking it more and more (consequently, I have reduced blogging a little, but more about that in a different post). Below is a chart which shows my tweeting pattern since I joined – yup, signed up a long time ago, but only adopted recently:

Having started using Twitter a lot, I realize that there are a lot of features that Twitter can improve upon. I suppose that is the main reason for why there are so many applications out there which have been built using the Twitter API, but some of the features that I would like to see are related to the core Twitter offering. Here is what I would like to see in Twitter:

Opt-in Indexing of Tweets – what this means is that I should be able to choose whether I want search engines and other aggregators to index my tweets or not. In fact, I should even be able to choose whether my tweets should show up in Twitter search or not. Currently, everything I tweet is indexed by search engines, and of course also by Twitter. It is much like what WordPress.com gives you – the option to whether you want your blog posts to be searchable on search engines.

Some people might say that if I want that, then I should just protect my updates. But that is not what I want. I do want other users on Twitter to be able to follow me and I do want my updates to appear on the Public Timeline. I just want to prevent them from being indexed, that is all.

Original Trending Topic Tweets – this one is really close to my heart – every time I see a Trending Topic and click on it, all I see is trash tweets. Let me explain. The moment a topic becomes trending two things happen: spammers move in and start using the trending topic to spew spam; people start using the trending topic keywords as part of their tweets because those words are… trendy.

Not too many people are tweeting about the original cause of why the topic became trendy (though this varies from topic to topic). This usually is the number one reason on why I don’t use the Trending Topics feature at all.

What I would like to see are the tweets which caused the topic to become trending. The original hundred (or thousand) tweets which came out and defined a trending topic. At least this way, I would be able to see real discussion about a topic.

Filtered Trending Topics – based on the screenshot released by TechCrunch of the Twitter admin hack, it is clear that Twitter is tracking more than just 10 trending topics. I think it should let me block out certain topics from the top 10 list, and then fill out the the available slot with some other topic that is trending.

This feature would allow me to only see topics that I am interested in.

User Rating – there really needs to be some sort of rating system in place. And it should then be used in Public Timelines, Search Results (or trending topics), etc. to sort, hide/show tweets.

For example, if someone has been rated really low by fellow Twitter users (spam bots will fall in this category), then I shouldn’t see their Tweets when I click on a Trending topic. This would clean it up so much.

Well, there are many other things that Twitter can do to improve, but the ones above are my top choices (wish list items).

What would you like to see in Twitter that is not there?

I wanted to try out Macro photography. Admittedly, it’s nowhere near as good as it should be, but I still love this shot (click to see larger picture and go to my album on Picasa with more such shots):