Music Pattern:

People who know me say I’m sadistic, which I’ve always denied. And still do

Personality Pattern:

This, I actually took countless times to get the result I wanted So, take it with a grain of salt.

I liked their new revision of music patterns and their integration with imeem is awesome. It recommended me songs that surprised me. There were a couple of Hindi songs too. I wished they scrobbled songs I played to last.fm to which they link to in the profile.

If you have time and patience, do give it a try…. just to amuse yourself
Update: Their embed feature sucks. Need to click through to their site to actually view them.

Languages/VM/Libraries:

• Erlang/OTP
• J

Platforms:

• Facebook Application Platform
• OpenSocial

Protocols:

• XMPP
• ATOM Pub/Sub

Database:

• Hadoop
• Mnesia
• CouchDB
• memchached (its too simple and powerful.)

Deployment:

• Amazon EC2/S3/SimpleDB.
• Google AppEngine. (If they support languages other than python by the time I’m done with the above.)

I’m interested in seeing how long I take to reach these milestones while balancing my existing work load.

Also, I plan to write little posts about interesting stuff in these technologies.

What technologies are in your wishlist?

My favorites from the pick:

The Guild - Episode 1: Wake-Up Call

[Good premise for a serial. I know I'll enjoy it.]

How to solve a Rubik’s Cube (Part One)

[Ummm. Gotta lay my hands on one now.]

my name is lisa

[Away From Her inspiration.]

The Original Human TETRIS Performance by Guillaume Reymond

[The background music is crazy :P]

Potter Puppet Pals in “The Mysterious Ticking Noise”

[Dumbledore's gone nuts :D]

Battle at Kruger

[Awwesome once-in-a-time video. Have seen it lots of times with someone or the other.]

Stop the Clash of Civilizations

[Can this be realized? I think yes.]

Laughing Baby

[:)) :)) :)) :))]

balloon bowl

[Wish I could do that!!]

Lots of cool videos in the nominations too. Check them out here.

Tags: youtube, best of 2007, ugc

Cat and Mouse game of the lights and shadows. — Snayya.

| View | Upload your own

Blogged with Flock

Tags: comics, slideshare

It is a tool that helps organizing online learning, make notes, annotate and do a whole lot of other things. One feature I like a lot is it’s offline functionality. It lets me take snapshot of a page and not just bookmark it, which means I can view the page as it existed when I read it. I can make offline annotations on it, highlight certain sections, add my notes and add files of any type which I want to be linked with the page.

Though one may be overwhelmed by the amount of features it gives, they are all features which I had wished for at one time or the other. With a closer look, it turned out to be not-so-overwhelming, but quite intuitive and non-intrusive, so I see and do just as much as I would like to. It also tries to recognize the content I am browsing and shows corresponding options and automates information extraction. It can help while browsing library sites, google scholar, amazon, etc. I am yet to try these features out.

Also on their roadmap is adding an online account where all the organized content can be put and shared with others. They have APIs for other sites to build apps on top of this.

Anybody who spends lot of time online, learning, will find this plugin very useful. Try it out !!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: zotero, firefox addon, note taking, online learning, organize, bookmark

I love the serenity and calmness of this place.

Tags: banashankari, photo, temple, karnataka

It has interesting points which highlight the extra burden consumers suffer in this whole _Attention_ economy concept, something which I tried to explain in this previous blog.

technorati tags: attention-economy, internet, neutrality, the-holy-trail, tiered-internet

I now have a completely different view of this world. My definition of grandness, majesty and power have changed. I now find that the idea of _Empires_ contradicts all that I admired as a kid.

Not wishing to go into a lot of specifics about my changed perceptions and the reasoning behind it, I’ll go straight to the intended point.

This article is to give my views about _advertising_ as the most powerful marketing tool.
There are many reasons I’m uncomfortable with the idea of advertising.

1. It _forces_ itself on us.
2. It undermines the principle of _freedom-of-choice_.
3. It’s worse than the government taxes. [I'll explain why, a bit later.]

A month or two ago I was arguing these points with my friends and all were up against me saying,
“Advertising is the best proved tool.”
“There can’t be anything better.”
“How else would you make ur product known in this huge market place?”
“Customer is lazy. He needs to be shaken up and told, ‘look here!!’”
“Everyone is happy about it, why r u whining?”
“Look at Google’s business model. Can anything better this?”
“Tell us one alternative thing that has a potential to beat this.”

Am not an economist nor do I understand much of the dynamics involved. I don’t have any alternatives. Whatever. I know things can be better.

Now explaining why it’s worse than the government taxes:

Coke, Pepsi, et all, along with Beverage companies, invest a lot on sponsoring our favorite matches. They literally feed us our TV programs (never mind the nauseating commercials.) They put lots and lots of money making this _free_ for us.
With so much of free goodies one must obviously be happy. But I’m not. Where does all this money come from? From where do all the companies advertising with Google, get that money from? The _paying_ customer who buys products from these companies _pays_ for all this. We all know this. But whats wrong with this?

As a paying customer, I expect to get equal value for my money. I don’t care about how many matches they sponsor or how much they pay to Google. I don’t want to pay $10 for a 1 cent product. The more and more a person _spends_, more does he _sponsor_ things he wouldn’t even care about.

Government charges tax on the pretext of development and national security.
But companies charge much much much _extra_ money hideously for cheap entertainment of the masses and of course for some great _free_ services. More _free_ stuff u consume, lesser u pay. What a _buyer_ pays for, includes not just my _needs_ but also puts on my shoulders the _needs_ of those who consume for free.

The cost of advertising exceeds, in some cases, the total cost of manufacturing itself.
The cost does not cover the actual _worth_ of the _product_ and the _producer_.

Here goes a few more of my ires against advertising:

They treat consumers are guinea pigs with peanut brains. Customers are _told_ and forced to believe what their needs are, when it should be the other way round: Customers know what they want. But as of now, customer needs are decided by the companies.

I believe in commodity-isation of products + the cost of the value added to it. (creativity + producers resource worth + quality, etc.,)

Every body gets as much as they pay up. There is no such thing called _free-food_.

Roughly these were the thoughts I was brewing upon and was not sure if such an alternative could actually exist and _work_. I was looking for business models, which respect _freedom-of-choice_ and give user the value for his money.

I was thinking that bettering upon the _Cataloging_ models would be the solution. Here the companies, put up their product’s profile, which is _one-time_ and any customer would find his way out based on his _needs_ and the reviews and recommendations posted by other similar customers. Which would be much like Amazon’s current model. This way, the process of letting people know of my product gets much simpler and much much much more economical. But those who know for sure, their products will sink in such a ship, will of course continue their attention grabbing spree.

However, a few days later, I saw the silver lining. Obviously, I’m not the only one irritated by the endless commercials that keep popping up in every conceivable place. And I found that people _are_ thinking and working towards alternative models.

Advertising is about _Attention Economy_, while the alternative is about _Intention Economy_.
Although in nascent stage, the blueprints for such an economy are being laid out.
Do read this follow up article too.

Finally….. it’s becoming possible to “Break free of Empires.”

technorati tags: Intention, economy, advertising, attention, intention-economy, TheHolyTrail

With extensions we can customize and _extend_ almost all of our browsing needs. In fact, extensions are a must for any serious browsing. Everybody kind of has this _must-have_ list of extensions, without which browsing becomes an ordeal.

Just like people wish to expresses themselves in their way of dressing, walking and styles, extensions have become an integral part of our net presence and outlook. Extensions speak loads about a person’s online tastes, preferences, way of presenting and existing.

Now, coming straight to the point, I was annoyed and had even uninstalled Flock and sweared never to use this thing again till it fixes this. Well, I just couldn’t install my favorite extensions, without which it’s like I’m a handicap As we can use most of firefox extensions in Flock, I tried installing all my favorites and it just kept complaining about the unsupported version. So thought good old firefox is _the best_ thing. But then, the silver line did appear There is this link where u give the link to a firefox extension and it’ll do the magic for you. It will edit the version info inside the extension, to silence it’s false complaints. Flock did provide a link to a tool which has to be downloaded and will make all our downloaded extensions Flock compatible, but it’s much more easier to just give a link to my extension and get back the modified one for download. This way, I’ll only download the version I want.

Here’s my list of _must-have_ extensions :

• Tab Mix Plus.
• Restart Flock.
• Download Statusbar.
• NoScript.
• FasterFox.
• FoxyTunes.
• StumbleUpon.
• All-In-One Sidebar.
• Bloglines Toolkit
• Gmail Manager.
• QuickNote.
• SmoothWheel.
• Resizeable Textarea. [especially when I'm frequently updating by blogger template code.]

Other useful extensions :

• ImageZoom. [ Just ossom.]
• WordIQ Toolbar. [ For dictionary/thesaurus.But online querying everytime is too slow.]
• easyGestures.
• MeasureIt.
• Clean cookies for this site.

technorati tags: flock, extensions, browser, firefox, browse