Venkat sent me an email about a site, lendbee.com, that allows you to share books and DVDs, for free. This idea seems to have caught on at Chennai with employees of different companies forming groups at a company level and exchanging books/DVDs.

While it isn't a revolutionary idea, someone has to do the work of designing and hosting a site for this purpose. Whoever designed it did a good job of user interfaces. I'm sure its pretty useful for intra-company or intra-city interactions. These social services turn out to be fun and useful as more people jump in. Jump in.

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The search by time-frame filter has been used for Google Web Search. This filter has been there on their Blog Search and News Search but this is the first time I see this applied to their Web Search.Use this link to get to this new search page.

I'm sure people getting some good google juice(read page rank) are going to be upset with this. Blogs are here to be benefitted by this. Especially retaillers who might loose some customers as customers start to search by recently updated websites. Even Google might be stumbled by a different company's search algorithm in the future. Well, that's the game. Keep Playing !!

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There were speculations that the next hardware upgrade to Nintendo's Wii will be sometime in 2008. Though unbelievable, I wanted to believe that so I could wait longer to buy a Wii. But unfortunately its not happening atleast until 2010.

Here's a list of what's happening in the World of Wii during 2008.

So if you haven't bought your first Wii yet, its not too late. Rush to the nearest gamestop.

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Anil Dash from Movable Type wrote a blogpost that took over its competitor, Wordpress. He explained with pointers as to how Wordpress upgrade is getting tougher by the day and not as simple as advertised. Wordpress founder, Matt Mullenbeg responded on his twitter that Six Apart(Movable Type's company) is getting desperate and dirty.

While it may be true that Movable Type has some of its users to the Wordpress blogging tool, it doesn't mean they can't strike back, taking their competitors head-on. Anil's post didn't have a single loosely written line. While there may be factual errors or not, he did not behave like a cheapo. Matt did. And he is pissed.

Matt is pursuing Typepad Users(a part of Six Apart) like Seth Godin to move their own domains and install Wordpress to run their blogs. When Matt is adopting public/no-so-public ways to attract users, shouldn't he be ready for the same methods by his competitor.

BTW, I like Wordpress as much as, and sometimes even better than, Movable Type. This blog still runs on Movable Type for the last 4 years. The irony is that it runs smoothly because of Akismet spam catcher which is a product from the Wordpress company. Tells us that none of these guys are perfect yet.

The web market is still nascent. The perfect blogging platform creator is still playing soccer at Madison or Florida or Madras and hasn't the heard the word, blog, yet.

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And that's really news. Really a breaking news at the Seattle and Silicon Valley. Let's see how this one develops.

From NY Times -

Microsoft said the combination of the two companies would create efficiencies that would save approximately $1 billion annually. The software giant also said that it has an integration plan to include employees of both companies and intends to offer incentives to retain Yahoo employees.

"We have great respect for Yahoo, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market," said Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, in a statement.

Yahoo's shares are at a 4 year low at $19/share. And their market cap as of today is around $ 25.6 billion. But here is an important backdrop to this - Yahoo to Cut 1,000 Jobs, and Warns on Growth.

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I missed the news(on Nov 6, 2007...thats way too long to miss) but it isn't too late, even now. Live.com, part of Microsoft Windows Live network is offering email IDs for its live.com domain.

That means, 3 or 4 letter email ids are still available to be taken. If you are already settled on a hotmail, yahoo or gmail ID, you can stay put but if you are an email junkie and manage three/four handles at the same time, you've got to rush.

I was checking out the site and I got robots@live.com. Can you beat that ? Certainly nothing to do with Rajini's Robot. I promise that my love for robots have existed back from my comics days.

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I think Google Reader is probably on its way of becoming the killer app of Web 2.0 and its is becoming evident. Even the whole issue of GReader's sharing open-up just shows that people depend on the feed reader from google so much that it has become an indispensable part of their online life.

Each subscriber to Google Reader has a unique public page to share the stuff that they consider share-worthy. That URL was made up of a long long yucky integer[0270205865921283184]. To spice it up, I forwarded a domain, lazybyte.com, to my google reader shared page. I'm not sure if anyone would be interested to see what I'm sharing but its more of a trial exercise.

As it easy to share stuff that you read on Google Reader, its easy for junk to get accumulated on such shared pages but I'm trying to be as diligent as possible. It should be an eclectic collection of blogposts from various sites. And truly, the best thing about lazy byte is that , I don't own or create any of the posts on this page. Isn't that a relief ?

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playing level 2(yeah, still in level 2) of Halo 3. But enjoying the Bungie's latest offering.

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Not me but Amazon is. Their remodeled site went live today and it looks a lot cleaner from all the clutter before. This is probably their first biggest re-design in the last 5 years.

The US holiday season will kick-start in a just a couple of months and Amazon should be getting ready with their big-plans, just like the last year.

It looks like LCD HDTVs(not the boring plasmas or rear projection stuff) are going to enjoy huge pricecuts during this holiday season. My guess(just my stupid guess) is that 42" LCD HDTVs with 1366 x 768 resolution will be available during the Black Friday for as low as $550 - $600, pre tax. Wait for the holiday season and if my guess goes right, send me a box of rava ladoos.

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If I were to be an application in this weird weird world of Web 2.0(that's four Ws), I would be Gmail or Google Reader.

Gmail can also be called as old wine of email in today's Ajax world. But Google Reader, is set to become one of the most useful and dominant tools of the near future. The ever expanding world of the web has so much information in itself that its already too much for someone to handle and feeds are probably the only way(as of today) to get one's information world under control.

Dave Winer, the RSS champ, should be a happy man. We are going to see more and more people in the future joining the RSS club.

To read a thousand websites in one single app, it takes a neat reader with an unbeatable User Interface. Google steps in. Google Reader's version 1 and 2 are certainly masterminded applications with a good insight and understanding of the present web. I still remember what was written here when GReader's first version was introduced. Today Google Reader is undeniably the number one feed reader for the web, given that they just introduced a search bar also with it. Some users like Scoble track nearly 600 feeds through GReader already.

If you are newbie to the RSS/Atom/Feed world, just logon to Google Reader and subscribe to a bunch of sites. You might want to start with personal weblogs that will help you come back and login to GReader everyday. Also if you are a mobile internet user, Google Reader has a fantastic interface that you will be addicted to. I browse the reader, on my cellphone and that's how I read most of the tech blogs. It is such a darling of an app.

Check the Reader and I'm sure you will never come back here. Rather you would read this blog only through its feed. Truly, don't even bother to visit those personal blogs, especially the ones with 4 lines of blogpost and 40 advertisements blocks around it. There is no free lunch so don't provide free advertising dollars for those loser blogs. Make them earn it. If the content is really appreciable, check their site regularly else feed reader is should be more than enough.

There are also other extreme users who end with a lot of feeds but never read them. I'm a heavy GReader user and from the experience of using feed readers for quite some, here are some tips that I keep a check on the information overload.

1) Don't allow the count of unread posts on each feed to grow beyond 100. You will never read any of them. Instead mark them as read and move on. You are not losing anything, trust me. If you end up marking them unread for more than 5 times, just unsubscribe the blog. If you subscribe to feeds like Digg or Del.icio.us, they will grow beyond 100 in a single day. Be sure that you need them and you will read them in future, else unsubscribe right then.

2) Be truly diligent of what feeds you subscribe to. Just because a nerd around you bullies you by referring to Slashdot, you don't have to subscribe to it. Though how much ever you want to read the blog, you may not have time or the blog is awfully boring. Exercise your right of un-subscribing. Think of it as one way of taking revenge of blogs of boredom. No Mercy.

3) Make a habit to login once a day. If you aspire to be a go-getter of tech world, which is, as of today, nearly impossible, login to reader once a day and try to get rid of the posts by reading it. Procrastination is evil. By the time you ge to read about the 5th generation IPods, Jobs would have already introduced the 8th generation PODs and IPhones will cost $50 a connection. It's changing every nano-second. Read it once-a-day.

4) Read posts using the list-view. Not the expanded view. This will enable to read the title and then decide if you want to really read the post. Don't read all the posts of all the feeds. It's a crime of time. With that extra time, you can crack the solution of Petals Around Rose or watch Desperate Housewives Season 3 DVD, the dirty laundary edition with lots of extra footage !!

5) The last but the not the least(aargh...what a bad used-to-death cliche. Will someone ban those words - 'last but not the least'), don't have more 50 feeds to the max. If you are the owner of some gambling casino at Macau(not Vegas anymore), sipping martini in Honolulu, you can afford to read 250 - 500 feeds a day. For others, 50 hits the roof.

And yeah, don't bother to come to this blog, even though the blog has some nice random banners(are they ?) and no ads whatsoever. Read the feed.

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One of my complaints when Google bought You tube was that Google Video's player was supremely advanced than the crappy bulk download of You Tube. Though the red line moving on a You Tube player was a make believe, at the back-end it was only bulk downloading the file which took the fun of watching a video by clicking randomly in the timeline.

On Google Video, you actually load an one hour video and as you click on the 5th minute into the video, it starts running instantly. You can't do the same in a you tube video. You would have to wait for the video to load until the 5th minute is loaded, to start watching it.

This morning when I was watching Aish yakka's trailer of The Last Legion, I wanted to move to the fag end of the trailer where yakka battles with a sword, heroinically. And suprisingly, it worked. I am thinking it was a slient move by Google - You Tube to make their videos streaming. If this isn't official, they are randomly testing this feature out.Hope this goes live, soon.

Update - 4 out of 5 videos are now streaming on You Tube. This feature should go live pretty soon.

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The wait for GNetwork and/or GPhone starts now. Ain't that ultra cool.

Update Aug 03 - GPhone is linux based, releasing in 2008 and if you are a t-mobile customer, hang in there. It's coming.

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Share the pain. When people around you are losing their jobs, you can share the pain too. Take a smaller office. Turn in the company car. Reassign your personal assistant to a revenue generating position. Fly coach. Stay in motels. Sell the box tickets to the ball game. Give your thirty-inch, flat-panel display to a programmer who could use it to debug faster. Do something, however symbolic.

Guy Kawasaki writes this post, The Art of the Layoff, in a worry that the knowledge would be lost if undocumented. Its a good post. Its a bad post. Depends on your perspective.

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Flickr just announced that it will go into Gaama after being in Beta for a long long time. Since then the look and feel of Flickr has changed a bit, for better.

And if you are someone using Flickr to host pictures for you blog, you might want to read the Flickr Terms of Service. From today, when you try to grab the img tag of a picture to post on your blog, there is a reminder message below which reads, Remember! Flickr Terms of Service specify that if you post a Flickr photo on an external website, the photo must link back to its photo page. (So, use Option 1.) Hence if you see the previous post, I have given a permalink[#] to the appropriate Flickr photo page.

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You might want to check out Apple's latest consumer laptop, MacBook.

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Another day of breakthrough for the Business Intelligence community. Cognos, the top notch BI vendor, will release its latest version Cognos 8 BI powered with Google's One Box search. This combined effort would ease the process of delivering answers to on commonly asked business metrics.

What could have been reached only by creating a simple list report or by a complex multi-dimensional cube can now be googled. I mean 'Googled'. What a 'wow' factor is ? Imagine if you are the CFO of an enterprise and you would want the average sales of a particular region compared to the last few years. In the present world, a BI developer would essentially create a report/graph and deploy it over the web. The CFO would have to login into the intranet, run that report and wait for the results to come back. Now all that he would do is to type in the search box is Avg Sales - Seattle compare 2002-2005(or something like that). The result would pop up with a google speed. What would rest on the BI developer would be create the report and create appropriate meta tags to reach to this metric. It would create a world of googleable metrics.

I'm excited more than Cognos itself for such a thought hasn't flashed before. Even if it was flashed it wasn't implemented. It looking forward to work on Cognos geared with Google. This would certainly change the way how enterprises look at BI solutions. And that is a great step towards warehousing the world.

P.S - On a seperate note, Why Microsoft and Oracle want to be your one-stop shop for BI. Also, an interesting interview with Sohaib Abbasi, CEO Informatica.

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Just upgraded from Open Office 1.1 to ver 2.0. Worth the upgrade.

BTW, if you didn't know, you can actually create PDFs from any document, spreadsheet or presentation using Open Office, for free.

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Google's products are like Rahman's music. They grow on you, atleast for me. Read ahead.

Google Reader has now become a personal choice for me. I was enthusiastic when G Reader was introduced, the excitement was put down when I learnt the Reader wasn't compatible with Firefox. Though it was resolved in the next few weeks, it's only for the last month, I've started using only G Reader to read blogs and other news feeds.

Bloglines is such a robust app on the net for news feeds while Google's Reader is slick and has a very intuitive user interface. The G Reader has an option to read the posts both chronologically and blog-wise. Intially I wasn't comfortable with the chronologically ordered posts from various blogs. It needed a mind-shift, after being used to read posts blog-wise in Bloglines. Now after using it for well over a month, I've to say that I'm enjoying this interface which allows for lazy reading. If you wonder how to migrate from Bloglines to Google Reader, see this help text to export you Bloglines subscriptions as OPML file and this help to import that file into G Reader. Just two steps and you would agree with the analogy of Reader to Rahman's music.

BTW it seems like Rajini & Rahman's Sivaji music would be out by March 10. Kamal plans to showcase the h(a)unting music on March 5th. I'm hoping the news on Sivaji music is just a hoax. Whoever wants the music to be out by march and wait until Diwali for the movie. Shankar must be crazy if he is aiming for this. Thanks Radhakrish for the link.

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A tipping point has been reached, and going forward, you will need only one kind of database to run both the transactional and BI parts of enterprise systems. There will still be different instances due to performance requirements to support diverging transactional and BI workloads, but they will both operate with the same database. Proprietary systems that operate with special purpose technology stacks and databases are out. Open systems - including de facto standard such as IBM DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server - are in. Open source databases will remain outside the mainstream due to lack of features, functions and experience, but will exert a remorseless flattening influence on the major players in downward pressure on prices.

Just like his other articles on Business Intelligence, in this well conceptualized column, Trends for 2006, Lou Agosta makes a daring thought about the world of Data Warehousing. He throws his views on how companies could derive value from their BI systems by employing open source architecture and low-cost servers. I only wish those corporates who are thinking a zillion times to data warehouse their systems would read this. Build Data Warehouses for cheap and Warehouse the world. For this is what every Data Warehousing guy dreams about.

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Bill Gates talks to Channel 9, the Microsoft Video Blog. Unlike the usual interviews where formal keynotes and strategies are discussed, this one is a welcome break.

Gates is very informal in this seventeen minute clip. Though essentially played in Channel 9 as a curtain raiser to Mix 06, there are some interesting questions asked and answered.

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Yet again, Yahoo shows its love for Web 2.0 or is it because Google is already a Web 2.0 giant. Whatsoever, the lovely lovely folksonomy site, del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo.

At first it was the photo revloutionary Flickr and now with del.icio.us, yahoo tried to override it's own respective applications. Yahoo Photos could have developed to the speed of Flickr and its My Web 2.0 was developed on the same lines as of tagging which was a competing application to del.icio.us.

With Google missing to buy Flickr, it was rumored then that del.icio.us was certainly for Google. Another hit and miss for Google. What next ?

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I've been wondering who was linking this blog from CNET and it turns out to be their blog portal, BLOGMA. In CNet's words, To help navigate the infinite terrain of the blogosphere, News.com editors, reporters and readers will determine which technology issues are creating the most buzz among bloggers on any given day. These topics will then be summarized on Blogma, which will also include commentaries from various blogs and links to related sites.

I do follow CNET Blogs but didn't know about the BLOGMA, until they linked their blog post, Trepidation builds around Web 2.0, to the Google RSS Reader blogpost. Atleast I'm happy someone recommended this blog on the technology category. Cool !!

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Ev's Odeo is facing challenges right now. With Apple joining the Podcast fray, few months back, the podcast scene just got hotter. Just today, Yahoo announced it's share of podcasting service, Yahoo Podcasts which is in beta, as expected.

Ev Head's Blogger made a headstart in blogging and its long gone before these big godzillas of internet realised that blogging was a serious business. They don't want to do the same with Podcasts. So they are gearing up to enter podcasting sooner than ever before. And thats giving podcasting all the hype more than its worth. With whatever I've experienced in the last few months, ever since I started subscribing to Podcasts on my mp3 player, I believe, Podcasts will become the next radio. But I'm positive that podcasts may not erupt waves in the internet. They would consolidate soon and would become steady business rather than competitive, just like the blogging market. So podcasts will live but not as grand as blogs. The video revolution has already started and that would be a majot hitch for the podcasts to surge higher.

Now what happens to podcasting services like EV's ODEO ? With the online giants jumping into the podcasting badnwagon, fresh creative thinkers have very little to do in podcasting space now. The major difference betwen ODEO and other biggies is that they have software to creat and upload podcasts. Apple and Yahoo's podcast services are mearly a grouping of podcasts in one place whereas ODEO has a USP of creating podcasts. It wouldn't take much for them to buy this software from some unknown programmer and fix it into their sites. Ev's Odeo might succumb to the media majors if they don't take a lead right now. I just don't want EV to fail like Sabeer Bhatia, after all he was instrumental for a blogging revolution.

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[Image - Google Video and Photographic Channel]

No, I'm not blowing my anger here for the hack attempt. Its the name of a tamil movie trailer.

Google Video is already up and googling through it yesterday, when my blog was under siege, I discovered a bunch of Tamil videos uploaded there. From Ah Aha TV trailer to a full song from a recent tamil movie February 14 to UNICEF's report on Tsunami. I've now idea how Google is going to tackle the rights issues of these videos. Most film videos seem to be submitted by individuals and the producing corporations are going to be tad angry on these video releases.

This movie trailer, Poda Un Moonjila En Kaiya Veikka is supposed to be a parody on tamil films. Though it seems like a bunch of college dudes doing some funny-like-stuff on tamil movies, its been mixed and titled so well that it can be called as a parody itself. However amateur it seems, we are going to witness such home videos and amateurish small movies on video offerings the online world offers. As Mani Ratnam quoted in a recent interview, Filmmaking will become a lot more personal. It will become like writing. Anybody will be able to make a film. There are not only Kollywood parodies, Bollywood is no exception. Dont Stop Till You Get To Bollywood is a music video like parody on bollywood dance sequences.

I did bump on finally something gripping and more serious attempt in Google Video. Jonathan Torgovnik's Bollywood Dreams attempts to document Indian Film Industry as a bunch of picture postcards. The image above is from Bollywood Dreams short film and it somehow went so well with the title of the post.

This short documentary runs a little more than 5 mins and has been produced by the Photographic Channel. It is one man's observation on the Indian Film industry. Jonathan has travelled around India to capture photographs about India cinema both in the sets and in theatres. He is particularly amazed about the cinema posters. He says South India sports the cut-out culture and he is so fascinated by them. To add why I loved this documentary is that it captures on my interests, the cinema posters. I've clicked tons of pictures on posters, cutouts, banners, DVD covers and whatever assosiated with cinema advertisement. Some of them are also on the photoblog. Coming back, the documetary also briefly touches upon the touring talkies and the economics of a touring talkies. Good one. Don't miss it and keep Googlling for videos.

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I am going to enjoy the new yahoo mail. No doubt about it. The new Yahoo mail which has added Ajax technology to make the mail app look like desktop mail application. Many of us who are used to Outlook's look and feel are going to enjoy the virtual Outlook through Yahoo Mail.

But this review on WSJ by Walter Mossberg is certainly biased to a large extent. From the review -

Similarly, Gmail forces you to view ads alongside your emails. Unlike Yahoo, it offers no paid option to avoid the ads.

I'm sure Gmail will get better and better, and will eventually adopt the new programming techniques that allow desktop-like ease of use. But I'm not sure Google's arrogance will ever make room for user preferences on things like folders or ads, or how emails are grouped.

Yahoo's new email program would blow Gmail away if it were widely released today. That's partly due to its features, but also to its respect for user choice.

GMAIL, when it was introduced last year, it was appreciated for being radical in approach and not following the boring and conventional method of email maintenance. The replacement of folders to labels was similar to Web 2.0's tagging. And if someone doesn't understand what tagging is all about, cribbing about GMAIL changing folders to label doesn't stand up to the levels of WSJ's reputation.

I googled, googled and googled throughout the review to see if there was a mention of free POP access that GMAIL give. Yahoo was giving free access and then took it back few years back. I am not sure which user doesn't want POP access which GMAIL gives. Not everyone might need it but the idea of re-opening POP was done only by GMAIL. And the stingy 4 MB limit of yahoo mail was raised to 1 GB only to counter GMAIL 1 GB storage. This news of yahoo raising its limits after being forced by GMAIL indirectly is comfortably forgotten in the review.

And what an dramatically sweeping statement that is to say Yahoo's new email program would blow Gmail away. I have to say NO WAY. Yahoo may be the top notch on webmail as of today and may introduce the Oddpost way of email to the online community. But it's because of GMAIL that the email revolution 2 started and I assume its the first product to be used by millions of people even when its in BETA. So there goes the Yahoo pride !!

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Business Week carries a series of articles on Best of New Web aka Web 2.0.

Along with a bunch of Web Picks there are article on Blogs, Taggin' and ofcourse the very impressive AJAX. If you are a newbie to Web 2.0, they are a must read.

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Meebo is the newest addition to the online community using the hot hot Ajax[Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] technology. With Meebo you aren't contrained of a firewall blocking access to your Instant messaging. It's the kind of silent browser which were around sometime back where you have a browser inside another one and the sites that are blocked by the firewall can still be accessed. Seems like Meebo is just out of their Dev labs and is still in Alpha. When you login to yahoo client you have a toned-down version of messenger with which you can chat with your IM friends bypassing the firewall.

Meebo uses the Ajax technology to simulate Yahoo or MSN's IM client as a light-weight tool. I am using it and its truly awesome. I read about Meebo in Om Malik's blog and someone raised a question of giving away passwords to a start-up firm's website. I wasn't thinking about it when I was using it. And now that I'm making a recommendation, I thought I should also be adding the word of caution and leave it to your own judgement. As online world goes through Web 2.0 a.k.a programmable Web, we have to start trusting websites and online community. How else did the net prosper over the years ?

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[Image - Walmart]

That red thingy on the right corner of the picture is supposed to be a mp3 player/cube. Also its boasting to be the world's smallest MP3 player.

Some things loose their charm if they are SMALL. This is one of those.

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Larry Ellison is so bullish that his company just took over iFlex as their third biggest acquisition of the year. After PeopleSoft and Profit Logic, CitiBank's Tech group iFlex will be controlled by Oracle.

Earlier this year when Oracle took over PeopleSoft, I wasn't sure of their plans. Having been in the PeopleSoft Data Warehousing consulting arena, close to 4 years, I had vested interests in PeopleSoft being taken over by another ERP giant. Not anymore. Because it seems like the consolidation is truly becoming the order of the day. And I've matured over the time to think mergers, consolidations and hostile takeovers are all fine until they do good for customers and shareholders. At the end of the day if the customer gets a better software solution, any thing is fine because business these days does not bother too much of ethics.

Having worked in Citibank for a short period of time, I have worked alongwith iFlex people even before, when it was called as CitiCorp. And I have to say, buying out iFlex is only going to do good for Oracle. IFlex has one of the best banking software in India. My buddies keep saying that iFlex's Flexcube is much powerful than Infosys' Finacle and Temenos' Globus. But i'm not taking a guess at it. Whatever be it, banking is one area were software services never stop growing. We have been witnessing the growth of Polaris over the last few years given the fact that most of their client are in the banking industry. Larry Ellison's this move is certainly startegic and would reap fortunes for Oracle. So the next time iFlex sells a thousand installations of Flexcube, Oracle dB comes along with it. Neat, isn't it ?.

Despite the growing contention over him, Larry is certainly Oracle's Oracle. He just made Oracle Inc as India's largest enterprise vendor. Need say more.

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Oh !! It feels so nice to say that. Isn't it ? To be a part of the immense, ever expanding, never ending, pastures of web, is definitely a cool thing. Think about the web and it's infinte possiblities, you will have be jiving. If not, you will not be reading this weblog. Atleast, I wouldn't be writing it. I enjoy the web. And it roughly 10 years since it started to be used widely.

The next Wired magazine [Aug], has a special feature that reflects the grand past of the internet, the current and an interesting peek into the future of the net. I subscribe to the offline magazine so I got my copy today. These articles aren't online yet but would eventually be in the next couple of days. 10 Years that changed the world, the special feature, starts from the point of Netscape's IPO in 1995 and tracks the interesting fads and happenings of the web until now.

John Battelle, author of Search Blog writes a special column on The Birth of Google. Though this has been beaten to death several times, it is never boring to read interesting stories on Google.

We also have pages on Marc Anderssen, whom we forgot to salute for his Mosaic browser, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs and even Wonkette - the political blogger. Did they leave blogging ? No way. A special note on the blogs of war that talks about the US soldiers who blog from Iraq.

BTW, Blogger is 9th fad in the Top 10 Web Fads listed by CNet. It's no more a fad. A way of life for some.

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The newest version of iTunes has a section for Podcasts. iTunes 4.9 was released a week ago and within two days more than a million customers subscribed to the Podcasts content. While this may sound a welcoming break for iTunes users, start-ups like Odeo might have stiff competition. Odeo essentially does the same thing of accumulating a common place for Podcasts. It also allows Podcasts to be created and published. While iTunes allows you to publish, it doesn't feature Podcast creation software.

With Apple joining the Podcast fray, not only will Podcasts gain attention, new & fresh podcasts will come to light. The online/print media wouldn't want to miss the happenings of Podcast movement like what they did for blogging, in early days. Every second article on the technology forum of mainstream online media is on Podcasting. Just be aware of the media hype created here.

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Ev Head's new venture on podcasting, Odeo has been on the talk over the blogosohere for sometime now. Curious to see what EV is onto this time and also try my hand on podcasting, I had signed up for their beta version earlier when it was first announced.

Today I recieved the Google type invite for Odeo. When you sign in, you need to download a synchronizer with which you can subscribe to podcasts or create your own. While I subscriebd to some podcasts, I'm contemplating to create a podcast. Probably I will and will also be the only one listening to it. If you are the unlucky joe, you might get to listen my podcast where I drool over the Sonia Agarwal or go gaga over Spielberg's latest addiction to pre-visualization.

From Odeo's create podcast page -

Odeo Studio - A browser-based tool that makes it easy to record and publish audio. With the Studio, and a cheap microphone (or even the one built into your laptop), you have everything you need.

Phone Posting - If you can leave a voicemail, you'll be able to podcast, with Odeo's phone-posting service-a quick and easy way to put your voice on the web (and in people's ears).

Feed Creation and Hosting - If you already have audio, and you just want to get it into podcasting form, Odeo provides the turnkey way to do that. Just upload your MP3s, and you're done.

Neverthless, the first impression on Odeo is 'Exciting'. Way to go EV and team !!

For starters - Podcasting is for radio what Blogging was for print media. It's the name of technology by which you, as an individual, can create radio shows and air them through internet. Now, it won't be exactly sent through air, but will be dumped into your domain server as an mp3/wma file. Your audience, if you get some, will download these mp3 files or podcasts into their IPOD/mp3 player and listen to it on the go. Podcasts can be like radio shows or comentaries with/without music as the background. Imagine instead of reading through a review of Star Wars, you will actually hear your favorite podcaster talking through it. This adds just another human dimension to it and you don't need to actually read through the review, like audiobooks. It has it's own pros/cons and the good news is that, many are still figuring out this animal.

That's my definition, more on Podcasting in Wikipedia.

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God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

That was one of my faves from an entire gamut of such levelheaded quotes as spoken by Tyler Durden aka Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Even after this being playing-in-a-loop at the back of mind I went ahead to buy an IPOD. Not exactly an IPOD. But the other IPOD. God created Apple, ITunes and IPOD for the classy dudes. For the masses he gave Windows, Media Player and Creative Zen. Creative Zen isn't a poor man's IPOD but indeed it's an intelligent man's IPOD. Yep, I may admire the professional qualities of Steve Jobs. I may re-read The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, I may have booked ICon at the local library even before it is released or I may even aspire to build a small network of Apple Mac Mini at home but I may not buy IPOD.

Why ? I hate to pay Apple 100 bucks every year when my battery dries up. $105 just to open a lid of IPOD and tuck in a mobile phone battery may prove a costly for the masses like me, especially for ones who loves to listen every single genre of songs available. While I love the IPOD wheel and have read enough of gaga over it's UI, I felt that on the same price with an extra GB of storage, a FM radio and voice recording capabilities(which I am sure I would never use), Creative Zen Micro was a killer buy. A true replacement for those IPOD Minis . It has a battery that can be easily replaced. Infact only after I bought it I saw for myself that the batteries of Zen can be easily misplaced too. Yeah, the back lid is just not tight that even when Unni Krishnan is singing Enakke Enakka!!, in your ears, it might have fallen down on the stairs.

Creative Zen looks cool to me just because I haven't used any other mp3 player except CD players until now. It is certainly not durable. The casing looks as though it might even break with the first fifteen days that I might return it to Best Buy to take a refund. But the user interface is nice as an IPOD. As anti-hyped, the touchpad isn't all that bad. I got used to it before I was out of the store counter. Creative Inc known for their computer audio/video accessories have done a great job in designing Zen and it's generation of MP3 players. It's been born from the dis-advantages that IPOD currently has and will attract people who don't want an IPOD. I'm just a little curious about the performance of mini drives, which is used in Zen or IPOD mini. I would feel comfortable with a flash drive because these mini drives poses risk of read/write issues and might soon end up with clusters of bad sectors. The sound is crystal clear but don't believe if someone says Zen or IPOD only have such clear sounds. MP3 players are digital and will certainly have more or less the same frequency. It's actually your headset/earbuds that might make the difference.

I've been hearing the podcasts for the last few months. So for those who religiously worship Creative's Zen, let it be re-christened as Zencasting. And the thing about podcasting is that it simply doesn't impress me much. Podcasts may be a hit but may not take-off as blogs, is my humble belief. This may not be a prophetic statement but may become true as Podcasts are widely understoof. I may also probably change minds once Evhead's Odeo is released for public. But for as of now, other than BBC stuff I am still figuring out the good Zen[Pod]casts.

I might stick with this Creative Zen until Steve decides to gift me an IPOD or he releases IPODs with replaceable batteries. This Zen unit is a lucky one. It gets to play some of the best songs ever composed. Be it Illayaraja or Rahman. Currently our Maestroji is singing the cult classic, Adi Vaadi Enn Kappa Kezhangey.

Update 26 May 2004 IST - As an anti-climax, the ZEN which was fully charged this morning, lost all it's battery charge by evening even though I had only listened to it for two hours. I had switched it off for the rest of the time. Yep, I'm returning it for an IPOD test drive. I might probably settle with those 1GB flash drives with FM and voice recording(as said before, though I wouldn't be using it). Best Buy, here I come.

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The big change in the read-write sphere came about because of applications such as weblogs, the personal journals that put newer material at the top, and wikis, sites on which anyone can edit any page. Not only could people make their own sites, but they could update them easily and rapidly.

Blogs have been especially important in the world of the read-write web.

They are far more than the “what I ate for breakfast” diaries of cliche; they have become a key part of a growing, complex global conversation.

We are moving quickly beyond text and pictures in this version of the web, to audio and video.

The cost of the gear we need to make high-quality content is plummeting while the power and ease of use continue to grow.

And then comes the latest web. This is where it gets really interesting.

The emerging web is one in which the machines talk as much to each other as humans talk to machines or other humans. As the net is the rough equivalent of a computer operating system, we’re learning how to program the web itself.

Dan Gilmor's column on the paradigm shift of the web, Web 2.0? Try 3.0 was an interesting read. Link via Emergic. Offlate the talks about Web 2.0 is on the rise. As some try to call it as - It's a Whole New Internet, Bloggers like Kottke and Andre Torrez have their last laugh.

Whatever name it's been called and however it's been debated out, this is getting to be one of exciting times for the WEB.

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lazy geek | # | Comments (23)

Probably for the first time, I am very unhappy with Google. Even when they had plugged in My Search History, I was pondering why Google would go in for a service that makes this little privacy intrusion. It's accepted that My Search History was a boon for people to come back and look at their search phrases, even after a year but then isn't it like giving Google your email address and all what you search using Google.

Now with their latest offering of Google Web Accelerator, I am at an uncomfortable state even more. GWA is a plug-in that gets attached to your browser and whenever you hit a web URL, the page is either fetched from Google's web server through pre-fetching mechanisms or the Google's web servers nominated just for this purpose will get the page loaded from the respective website's servers through differential or parallel loads. There is more to it than just this.

Google says that it gets the same information as what my ISP gets. Agreed. Why am I getting hassled here? Two Reasons.

One - My ISP is Comcast and Comcast knows what I am browsing. But there are umpteen ISPs around and I can switch to anyone of them any time. Google is ubiquitous and unique. Imagine just 25% of browsing population in the US installing GWA and using it regularly. If only this 25% of them browse 100,000 sites a day, the traffic to those sites gets routed through Google web servers. So those 100,000 web servers would get to know that most of their traffic came through Google Web Server and not the actual IP address or geography of the browsing source. Last night, when I installed GWA and at clicked on this blog URL for numerous times, the traffic page was showing that the hits came from Google Inc, United States and not from my IP address. Not only GWA acts as a free anonymizer[proxy] to the web but also grabs away the nominal information a site owner should know about his audience.

Two - Google as of yesterday knew my email address, my personal search history and my home address [if subscribed to Google AdSense]. Until now, if only I searched something with Google, I sent some information to Google. Now with Google Web Accelerator, I don't need to search anything to give Google some pie. Whatever I browse/see/read/visit goes through Google and it knows all that. You might think what's wrong with that. Being a Google fan/admirer/patron I feel Google is run by honest dudes who are just trying to enhance the web. But then, just too much of everything isn't good. Having been involved with Data Warehousing technologies, I perfectly understand the power of analytics and business intelligence. With so much of browsing data and web page calls sent through Google, its as simple as building an OLAP cube to get the taste of web. Give a me that RDBMS/Flat File/XML that contains the URL calls and IP numbers, I can get you a scorecard for the web within minutes. With Google being a Data Mining company, this should be just a click away. They will eventually know what goes on in the web. Who sees what? And if only that data is used for enhancing user experience, I am the most happiest of all to salute Google. Will Google assure of that?

As I had supported the Autolink tool of Google, I said that Autolink is a service that's available for people who download the Google toolbar and also enable the option. The so-called privacy intrusion happens only then. But even if 10% of broadband users subscribe to GWA, I think it's just much info in the hands of Google. Autolink wasn't a slippery slope like GWA. I'm just thinking if people were booing at the Autolink feature, imagine what they would do to GWA. Google is risking its brand loyalty and probably that's the best way to run a successful company. However, appreciate the guts to take the risk.

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Gartner known for it's research insights, outlined 7 'Fatal Flaws' of Business Intelligence leading to a failure of a Business Intelligence implementation in enterprise. Also with suggestions to avoid them. This and much more were discussed in the Gartner's Business Intelligence Summit in London this week.

Though some flaws are discussed as lessons learnt at the Business Intelligence circles, the enterprises still skip them as a joke. High time, the BI installations start making sense to senior management of the enterprise. Have added the 7 seven flaws here as points with my bullets. Do read the article, Gartner: The 7 'Fatal Flaws' of Business Intelligence, How to Avoid Them, the flaws and suggestions to avoid are expanded.

Seven Flaws of Business Intelligence -

Flaw 1 - "If we build it, they will come"
Flaw 2 - "Managers need to negotiate the numbers" (it happens)
Flaw 3 - "Data quality problem...we don't have one" (*** Alert Alert, Critical Issue)
Flaw 4 - "Our enterprise applications vendor will deliver the best solution" (* Just a dream)
Flaw 5 - "Darwin was right - BI projects need to evolve" (** True Gartner, We love you for this)
Flaw 6 - "We can outsource the whole thing"
Flaw 7 - "Just give me a dashboard!"

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MSN has a new look, from yesterday. Just incase you haven't had a look at them. But here's the interesting news, Gates personally clicked open the upgraded version of MSN Search. Gates also writes a letter to the msn surfers about the re-designed msn site and msn search. The re-designed msn is powered with msn news, msn desktop search and ofcourse the normal search.

MSN has also planned a heavy showdown of Ads to promote the new MSN Search. There might be an MSN Ad on the Superbowl broadcast this sunday. Interestingly, all this and more on a day when Google posted it's sevenfold increased fourth quarter results. Looks like search arena is becoming a tougher sport.

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IBM strengthens it's Business Intelligence capabilities by acquiring SRD, a company specialising in identity resoultion. SRD's products can answer "Who is who?" questions in the area of analytics with accuracy. That's a big leap for IBM in the BI arena.

It's over. Oracle has purchased more than 97% of PeopleSoft's stock, and the application vendor is now a wholly owned Oracle subsidiary.

Must read for the Google guys. This is a long read but a neat technology review of Google and suggestion for Google on the road ahead. What’s Next for Google by By Charles H. Ferguson.

Windows Media Center PC is making way into the living rooms.

lazy geek | # | Comments (2)

The articles taken to purview are limited to the scope of my reading and hence I am not sure if this is a perfect title to be awarded. Yet for the heck, since I've been reading a hell of these tech stuff in the last years, I wanted to give it a shot.

There are times when new technology has been criticised by the part of the tech world. Sometime the degree of criticism varies. But when most of the critics are up against a technology indicating the public to shun that tech, to rise up to the occasion and to write an article in support of it is a herculean task. Not just that you got to be politically right. You should also be doubly conscious that you and technology don't get into something much bigger than the original issue.

While there were many tech articles on Outsouring of US Tech jobs, Open Source on the main-stream industry, IPOD Mania, nature of Google's IPO and the Search Engine wars that created an uproar and comments from the readers, only a few will stay with us.

Read More..."Tech Article of the Year 2004" »

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Finally. Oracle buys PeopleSoft for $10 billion. Isn't that a breaking news ?

This part of the press release is impressive -

"We intend to enhance PeopleSoft 8 and develop a PeopleSoft 9 and enhance a JD Edwards 5 and develop a JD Edwards 6. We intend to immediately extend and improve support for existing JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customers worldwide."

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This note on moneycontrol.com says that Life Insurance Corporation of India is planning to implement the largest insurance datawarehouse in the world by 2007. LIC is looking at a 60 terabyte DWH size in the first phase. US’s largest insurance data warehouse is understood to be deployed by Nationwide which is in the region of 20 terabytes.

The article however states the largest datawarehouse in the world as of now is Walmart's DWH with 300 terabytes. Thats not appropriate. I have no clue from where did they get a number thats just 75% of the original volume. Per New York Times, Walmart's datawarehousing capabilities are 460 terrabytes big. Thats a blooming number to match.

The application provided by Teradata – a division of NCR, will enable LIC to study trends not only among customers but also its 1 million strong agency force. The project will be implemented by Wipro and is estimated around Rs 40 crore (Rs 400 million), to Rs 50 crore (Rs 500 million).

More than 10% of the country's population are the customers of LIC. Just 10% percent and we have the biggest Insurance Datawarehouse in the world. The kind of mining that could be done with this datawarehouse would be countless. A real worthy datawarehouse to build.

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Anand Chandrasekharan, who guest blogs here , has won the Global Indus Technovators Award for 2004. Anand will recieve this award today at a special ceremony to be held from 6-9:30 pm. at Wong Auditorium, MIT .

I did know this news a couple of weeks back but was waiting to post it here only after they announced the technovators 2004 online. This award is given away by the Indian Business Club at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to recognize and felicitate 20 distinguished innovators of Indus origin working at the cutting-edge of technology that may be harnessed for far-reaching applications.

Anand co-founded Aeroprise from Stanford, which specialises in Mobile Workflow Management system. Having known Anand for sometime now, I'm personally happy for this acknowledgement and wanted to share it here.

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David Weinberger writes about Data and Meta data in the Third Age of Order. Something that I found very profound.

There used to be a difference between data and metadata. Data was the suitcase and metadata was the name tag on it. Data was the folder and metadata was its label. Data was the contents of the book and metadata was the Dewey Decimal number on its spine. But, in the Third Age of Order, everything is becoming metadata.

Why does this matter? It changes the primary job of information architects. It makes stores of information more useful to users. It enables research that otherwise would be difficult, thus making our culture smarter overall. But, most interestingly (at least to me), this does the ol' Einsteinian reverse flip to Aristotle. Aristotle assumed that of the 10 categories by which one could understand a thing, one must be primary: Where that thing fits into the tree of knowledge. So, you could say that Alcibiades is made of flesh or lived in Greece, but if you really want to understand him, you have to say that he is an animal of a particular kind. But, now that everything is metadata, no particular way of understanding something is any more inherently valuable than any other; it all depends on what you're trying to do. The old framework of knowledge — and authority — are getting a pretty good shake.

Interested. Read More. Link via Rajesh Jain.

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Informatica proves yet again !! - Informatica, the Data Integration Software giant along with CNA, Wins DM Review's 2004 World Class Solutions Award for its successful implementation of Informatica's market-leading data integration software. The World Class Solution Awards are symbols of excellence within the business intelligence and data warehousing industry. This piece of news reassures Informatica's presence among the top notch Data Integration software providers. Cool news guys.

Seven Reasons Why Businesses Should Blog Now. Makes Sense.

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On Kamalhassan's Thenaali tone, if I have to say, these Deiva Machaans, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, are awarded with the highest award in engineering. These googles guys are selected for the 2004 Marconi International Fellowship Award at Columbia University. Read More.

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I liked this just-one-page-redesign of Anil Dash called which made it seem like a Google search page. Here's one more Googlish page from his links archive, probably the one that should have inspired him. Google must probably be happy that he have entire sites designed like them.

The Mirchi Bazaar is here in Chennai Trade center. They promise to make the consumers get happy with their range of stalls. Chellam