[the big picture]

Not a big fan of the online facebookish tests but found this one interesting because of the way data mining is being used[click on read more...and then how it works]. I would love to read more on this algorithm. But just in case you like wasting time on social networking sites, you can also try this.

3 Stupid Questions is not a mock. Genuine questions to be/not to be answered. I don’t intend to answer them but just throw it out to the world and see what happens(even if nothing happens). 3SQ will be served as often as I hit hit eureka with the next set of stupid qs.

1) Why do blogs start resembling mainstream media as they become popular ? So is blogging a reason to beat the bureaucracy, get big and become a part of it ?

2) Blogs written by non-sub-intellectuals still discuss Indian politics, explain ?

3) Hollywood has bad acting but not so easily spotted like Kolly/Bolly/Tollywood. Kollywood has bad acting in every single movie. Recent example, Naan Kadavul. What makes the difference ?

Have been watching Olympics over cable but NBCOlympics.com created in combination with MSN has been a great source of live olympics content. NBCOlympics site which is powered by Silverlight has amazing video quality. I watched the Federer match over the web and it had some breathtaking camera shots combined with the great presentation by the NBC Studios.

The best part of the whole presentation is that, when you watch a live video feed on this site, you have the option of watching 4 different events side-by-side.

For the ones who missed the spectacle on the opening day, you can watch it on this site. Who else can create a grandeur like that except a moviemaker. If you did not know, the creator of this gala spectacle was Yimou Zhang, the director of Hero and House of Flying Daggers. It was a breathtaking effort and he pulled it off successfully.

P.S – And don’t tell me its at the top right corner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.