Reverberations

Not that I was ever able to have bookmarking icons here, as this blog is hosted on wordpress.org with limited customization capabilities. I still want to present a case against having them. This one borrows generously from a comment that I recently encountered. With all due credit to ssp, here it goes after my editing/formatting-

[...]
wouldn’t you agree that having half a dozen ‘witty’ web 2 icons on your site

1. makes it uglier,
2. alienates people who don’t understand half of them,
3. suggests you’re a bit of a web sucker who can’t wait for his 15 seconds of web 2 fame,
4. insults the people viewing your pages by suggesting that
   • they are web 2 suckers as well who would put some ramble up on a bookmarking site and that
   • despite being web 2 suckers they’re too stupid to have a bookmarklet (or other technique) for the one service they actually use handy?

Just asking…

Or just show me the data which show a benefit of having those icons for a page being bookmarked. And, IMNSHO more relevantly, whether this benefit applies to good/helpful pages in the same extent as to meaningless/not-so-helpful pages.

I would never in my life could say it better. But exactly my thoughts. Perhaps there is a reason why Techcrunch doesn’t have them. I would be disappointed if it does.

Google has been offering its hosted email service beta for sometime now, and apparently plan to push it big. But does Google hold the right to lock out users from their account as it does with Gmail sometimes? No terms of use page exist for the service as of now. I would dread it if it does a ‘Lockdown in sector4!‘.

NYTimes : Yahoo!’s Consistency vs Google’s ‘Wow’.

Surprise of the day - even something as uninspiring as Yahoo! 360 is 17 times bigger than Google’s Orkut. Something as useful as GTalk deserves better figures.

(Graphics Source: NYTimes)

Amazing coincidence. Within one week after I blogged how we need direct permalink to the particular part of the video content, Google Video has come up with the exact same feature.

Google Video now allows you to link straight to a specific part of a video by appending e.g. #1m35s to the video URL.

This is what I wrote last week-

I have to download/stream the entire piece just to get to the interesting part somebody mentioned/linked. How about the ability to generate a permalink to particular portion of the podcast/vlog content- just like quoting text from a blog?

Damn! I should have asked for something else that day

The supposed reason is an order from India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT), and if it’s true, the only thing I’ve to say to the person who ordered this, is - “Sir, you are a moron. Thank you!”

[Update]: The great play ball.

I just wanted to list some general observations from the perspective of a consumer (and not a creator).

• Size: Sample this - a 5 min rocketboom show (a new found thing for me, after all that brouhaha) the file size amounts to ~28mb. That’s just insane. Too much of a hassle. My bandwidth is precious. Why doesn’t everyone use divX/xVid compression along with all other formats just for sake of choice? Or flash maybe. Audio formats are little better placed, but still!
• Linking: I have to download/stream the entire piece just to get to the interesting part somebody mentioned/linked. How about the ability to generate a permalink to particular portion of the podcast/vlog content- just like quoting text from a blog?
• Transcripts/Summaries: Availability in alternate formats is usually non-existent. Though I understand that each format is unique and all the subtleties and nuances are impossible to incorporate. *rolls eyes* (Watch Jumanji with subtitles :-))
• Tagging/Commenting: I have been somewhat irregular/occasional subscriber to Geek News Central, TalkCrunch, Morning Coffee Notes and FuzzyBlog over the last year or so, and I use iTunes to manage my podcasts. I can’t tag or comment an episode for later reference and have to depend upon the provided description, which is again - not searchable.

Atom is technically superior, more comprehensive and has more possibilities. From an engineer’s (and a purist’s) point of view - agreed. But RSS

• has been widely adopted already,
• has become synonymous to content syndication, and
• is more evolutionary than anything else out there.

I’m too naive to take a stand, but RSS just works.

Inventory Management:
Roadside make-shift shop selling sun-glasses (really cheap ones). It started raining. A car came. Sun-glasses were packed. Sun-glasses in, rain-coats out. Life goes on.

World Cup:
First it was Spain, I told myself “Brazil is still there”. Then it was England, “They would have lost to Brazil in semis anyway. Well played England!”. But then it was Brazil, and the defeat took long to sink in, “That Ronadinho MoFo”. And now even Germany lost. Hell, I’m burnt enough, I’m going to support the opposite team now. Go France Go! Don’t blame me if France looses

In one of my earlier posts, I had written about a common problem of online social networks (friendster, orkut et al)

We built all those ’social’ networks and then what!

Guy Kawasaki linked to an essay on the “What’s next” problem of social networks. It tries to find some answers.

ps: Another link towards Guy’s Mission Technorati top-ten
[Update] Apparently, the essay is written by Fred Stutzman, co-founder of claimID. FWIW.