Daily Archives: February 28, 2003

Blog Directory

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Dave Winer has a suggestion for what Google should do with blogs for the community: “Give me an accurate list of all the librarian weblogs, and all the lawyer weblogs, and all the weblogs of people who have implemented an XML-RPC stack. You get the idea. They have been able to do this with news stories, it seems they should also be able to do it with weblogs. This is the biggest unsolved problem I see in this world, and I don’t know how to solve it, it’s not what I do.”

Tom Matrullo adds his wish: “Ease of directory assistance for bloggers. E.g., say you want to find bloggers who know all about Matisse’s childhood, or Indonesian cuisine, or Ponca City, OK – how, at present, do you find them?”

We need a blogger’s directory…its something we’d like to do with BlogStreet. Have been thinking about it for some time. It has to be based on people and their expertise areas, since unlike other web pages, blogs are inherently about people, who aren’t easy to segment and classify.

Classifieds via RSS

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John Robb has an interesting idea with an example on how RSS can make for more useful classified ads: “I would love it if the NYTimes classifieds (as well as the Boston Globe for me) were available as keyword sorted RSS feeds. Just put in your search terms: automobile, BMW, X5, 2001, 200 mi (the distance between me and seller) and get all new entries on that topic automatically. It’s clear that newspapers could reinvent their business models by making long term connections in this way.”

Google Rankings

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As Google becomes the Web’s hub, being high up in its search listings is important for traffic. (That’s an importand reason to blog and blog early in life.) WSJ writes about what people do to climb up in Google’s rankings.

Google’s site has become the prime battleground because of its unprecedented power over the Web. Barely four years old, Google has grown largely by word of mouth to become the place where most people start to look for something on the Internet. Three-quarters of all online searches use Google or sites that use Google’s search results, according to WebSideStory Inc.

Because of its importance, Google can make or break businesses that sell over the Web. It’s the new “location, location, location” for online retailers, for whom ranking at the top of a Google search is the Web equivalent of landing a choice corner on Miracle Mile or Fifth Avenue.

As of now, this site (Emergic.org) is the first link which shows up when someone searches for “rajesh” (great for the ego). I moved to #1 some time after I added “Rajesh” in the title of the page. The Google PageRank, a measure of a page’s importance, for Emergic.org is 6/10, which I think is decent for a blog.

Desktop as a Meeting Place

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If we were to rethink the desktop, what should it be? This is a question I have often pondered about. NYTimes writes about Robb Beal’s Spring “to unite a broad range of Internet information and services behind a single interface” and “replaces icons for software applications and Web sites with representations of people, places, and things that can be connected.”

Mr. Beal sees Spring not as an all-inclusive computing environment, but as an interface for basic and frequent Internet activities like communication and shopping. On the screen, a Spring canvas, as the display is called, looks much like Apple’s current desktop, filled with large, cheery icons. Yet there are no icons for Mail or Microsoft Word. Instead, the icons (“objects” in Spring parlance) are small databases of hypertext information that describe people, places (New York City, say, or a favorite local bar) or things (most obviously, products and services for sale).

Objects can be created by the user or downloaded. To accomplish most tasks, the Spring user places a cursor over an icon, clicks a mouse button, then draws a line from one object to another. For example, to invite Todd and Ellen to the Monkey Club after work, one would draw a line from icons of their faces to one representing the club. Once a line is drawn to connect them, Spring offers a pop-up menu of options: do you want to invite them, send them directions, or create a new custom function?

Mr. Beal said that the initial onscreen action – connecting the people to the place – was an important conceptual change in the interface between human and computer.

With a desktop, he said, “your mind is thinking about which application to launch, whereas it should be thinking about the person you want to communicate with.”

For now, Spring runs on OS X. Another reason to buy an Apple.

Valuing One’s Own Time

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An interesting article in WSJ discusses how we use and value time when it comes to doing household chores. The articles begins with a story of a Manhattan executive who bills at USD 200 an hour and spent 10 hours battling Sprint for USD 9 in late charges!

In an economy of convenience, where time can be purchased in everything from bags of prewashed lettuce to dog-walking services, these studies aim to help answer dozens of questions Americans wrestle with daily: Who can afford a babysitter? A lawn service? A personal shopper? “The household is a little firm,” says Daniel Hamermesh, an economics professor the University of Texas. “It employs labor, it buys technology, it makes decisions about what services to outsource.”

But it is a firm that could use some management consultants. Americans often make drastic miscalculations about the value of their time, taking a do-it-yourself approach to tasks that might be less costly in time and money to hire out. A simple oil change, for example, costs $24.99 at some Jiffy Lube locations. But the supplies to do it yourself can run about $21. Yet about 43 million U.S. residents say they change their own oil.

In the past, economists looked strictly at your income to put a price on your leisure hours. Now, the study of off-the-clock time — or “household production,” as it is formally known — is getting a fresh look, even beginning to take into account intangible factors such as satisfaction and pleasure.

Am wondering about how this applies to blogging. I think I am spending 30 minutes a day on blogging, and 30 minutes on average a day for the Tech Talk columns. So, that’s an hour a day reading, thinking and writing for myself and others. It is a significant time investment. And as I have written here in the past, it is definitely well worth the time spent, though I couldn’t possibly put a tangible financial value on the activity.

Blogger’s News Aggregator

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Seeing this News Aggregator for Weblogs At Harvard gives me an idea – perhaps we could look at a service in BlogStreet which takes the blogroll or neighbourhood of bloggers (which we have identified) and then make a public page which creates a news aggregator page for each of the bloggers. What this does is shows me (and others) the updates happening on the bloggers of interest to me – it takes information filtering one-level deeper.

So, if I like Kevin Werbach and his blog, then I can now see not just his neighbourhood which comprises his blogroll and related blogs, one can also find the updates being done in the aggregate set of these blogs. These way, one can find a wider perspective on topics we know the blogger is interested in.

I think we should do this as part of BlogStreet.

Online Gaming and Grid Computing

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Sony, IBm and Butterfly.net are planning to use grid computing to create massively large multi-player games, according to NYTimes:

Games with great numbers of players present daunting computing challenges. The market is just beginning to emerge, and the game environments are frequently bedeviled by technical glitches sluggish graphics and long delays for users who want to play. For online game enthusiasts, grid technology could deliver the ideal of letting thousands of simultaneous users enjoy fast, realistic graphics, and letting them play either alone or with friends in teams without having to wait.

Grid technology allows many clusters of computers to be linked together as if they were a single machine, making it easier for players to roam widely within a game’s virtual environment.

The other thing Sony and its technology partners hope to do with the grid model is reduce the costs for developers to make and support multiplayer games for PlayStation 2, the leading game console. Such games have been costly, bespoke projects. The game developer or publisher has had to set up and support expensive computer server and host systems for each game.

Bhopal and Bangalore

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4 days of hetcic travelling. 2 days in Bhopal, to look at how IT can play a role in rural India and eGovernance, and then 2 days in Bangalore, part of which was spent participating in an open-source conference organised by MAIT.

The Bhopal trip was very interesting and a good learning experience. I am convinced more than ever that we can and should technology as a utility to the people, so as to provide a platform for improving quality of life in the villages. Perhaps the highlight of the trip was seeing school students working in foursomes on computers in Amoda village, and seeing them interact with technology as if they were born to use it.

Imagine if every village can have 4-5 computers as part of a telecentre (or a tele-info-entertainment centre), which bridges the digital divide in terms of information, knowledge and services. Will post a presentation I had made on the blog shortly. The underlying vision remains the same: “A connected computer accessible for every employee and family”.

To make technology a mass-market utility will require a number of innovations. The two biggest challenges (besides ofcourse the cost) are power and connectivity. On power, one could look at pedal power or solar energy or even adapting the power supply of the computer to directly take in 12 volts. Connectivity is also a problem – phoe lies are not necessarily there, and even if present, sometimes don’t work too well. We need solutions like WiFi used as a wide area network, with amplifiers allowing it to be used over larger distances. Need some creative thinking here.

At the MAIT conference, I was on a panel, wherein I made the following points on what government and industry can do. The government should:
– reduce duties and taxes to make computers more affordable. Specifically, all sub-Rs 10,000 computers should be exempt from all levies.
– not mention by brand what hardware or software they need. The focus should be what they want done.
– consider setting up telecentres in every Indian village, to take computing to the villages across India.
– focus on intelligent, real-time governance.

The industry should:
– focus on the next users at the bottom of pyramid. See what disruptive innovations we can to solve problems like cost of computing, and the power and connectivity issues mentioned above.
– build out an ecosystem using engineering college students for open-source projects, creating a talent pool which can then become a resource for enterprises when they join the workforce.
– become practioners with open-source software, rather than just talking about it. See if some projects can be initiated in our companies, consider using Linux desktops, and use OpenOffice on Linux (rather than MS-Office) for presentations at open-source conferences!

TECH TALK: RSS, Blogs and Beyond: Blogs (Part 2)

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Blogs are not yet quite organized, and theres plenty of work happening to do so. There have been a number of initiatives to map blogspace. Blogdex and Daypop provide information to whats hot right now in the world of blogs. They do so by analysing what bloggers are linking to and discussing. The problem I see is that this is too generic what I care about is whats hot in my microcommunity. Id like to know whats hot among the bloggers that I track, and what they are reading. This is not yet available.

Technorati and our own BlogStreet track the top blogs, based on whos linking to whom. BlogStreet also has a blog neighbourhood analyzer, which lets you find related blogs. Nick Denton is coming up with his project, codenamed Lafayette, later this year, which aims to turn the weblog network into accessible media, and help readers browse weblogs when they don’t know what they’re looking for.

These are still early days. Clay Shirky had a more in-depth analysis of the world of blogs and concluded: Though there are more new bloggers and more new readers every day, most of the new readers are adding to the traffic of the top few blogs, while most new blogs are getting below average traffic, a gap that will grow as the weblog world does. It’s not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it’s harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year. At some point (probably one we’ve already passed), weblog technology will be seen as a platform for so many forms of publishing, filtering, aggregation, and syndication that blogging will stop referring to any particularly coherent activity. The term ‘blog’ will fall into the middle distance, as ‘home page’ and ‘portal’ have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning.

The world of RSS and Blogs is a world of microcontent. Well end this week with a comment by Anil Dash, in his essay on the Microcontent Client, elaborates:

Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use to view digital content today. We’ve discovered in the last few years that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet.

Microcontent is being used as a more general term indicating content that conveys one primary idea or concept, is accessible through a single definitive URL or permalink, and is appropriately written and formatted for presentation in email clients, web browsers, or on handheld devices as needed. A day’s weather forcast, the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent.

Anil Dash identifies three key activities that we do that are at the heart of microcontent: Searching, Aggregating and Authoring. Microcontent is at the heart of much of what well be discussing next week, as we look beyond RSS and Blogs.

Next Week: RSS, Blogs and Beyond (continued)

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