educe

What to post on Tumblr??

Open Source "cloud"

I have been watching Thomas Hawk on Friendfeed publish his pictures (same albums) in Flickr and Zooomr and it gives me an idea. Why not have an open source cloud storage for different media (like photos, videos) and provide the publicly shared media as a web service and let the different photo / media sharing site render them in their own way and let the people choose which service they like and use it. In cases like Thomas make it available in multiple places to reach out to a bigger audience.

I know what you might say next. What business sense does this make? Well, to begin with most of the photo sharing sites (let’s talk just photo sharing in this example) offers free storage and social networking (a basic version of course) in their tool. But each has a differentiating factor in the way the content is presented and in the way they offer social networking. People throng to different sites simply because the features suits their personality or convenience. But there are tons of people who would like to reach out to a broader audience and end up posting their pictures on multiple locations. Now this is a waste of resource and inconvenience. If we could make data available as an open source format and simply build tools around it and the USP itself will be around how efficiently you build those interfaces and how effectively you market them and use them as a revenue generating source - advertising for example.

I am not sure if such a thing already exists but I think it is not a bad idea.

Let me know what YOU think…

Snippets of information

I was thinking how my reading habit has changed over the years. When I was very young, I was enamoured by comics especially Tintin, Asterix etc and would read them again and again without ever getting bored. As time went on, I started to read teenage story books like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. This then evolved into a little more serious suspense stories like Perry Mason and Agatha Christie and graduated to bigger novels written by Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth and the likes.

By then I was well into my mid-twenties and the Internet came into existence. Initially the behaviour over the Internet was no different from an offline behaviour in terms of writing letters vs. emails, reading books vs. articles published online. But since then the behaviour of consuming information has taken a huge U turn and nowadays I just scan for details and pieces of interest.

There is this urge to read way more than what my brain can digest and retain. I never seem to get satiated by just focusing on one topic of interest. I read about technology, religion, current affairs, politics, economics, humour, philosophy, medicine, environment and the list goes on. Practically, I want to get my hands on every bit of information available which even remotely interests me. I know that I don’t have any use for this information, I know that I will forget it the moment I move from one topic to another but the obsession not to skip something is too great and end up spending hours together in a day reading a lot of totally useless information.

The best part is the way I read them nowadays. If I read someone’s blog which has a few paragraphs, my eyes automatically scans for keywords that I would be interested in and read the sentence only if I find it interesting enough at that point in time. The funny thing is that the topics that I am interested in also changes over time and so does my reading behaviour. There are times when I am simply scanning and there are these times when I am patiently reading every word in every blog that I subscribe to.

In the kind of environment we live in, there is definitely pressure to keep abreast of what is going on just so that you maintain the edge in your professional and personal life. But that seems to be taking a crazy pace which at least I find it difficult to keep pace with.

I guess, I need to slow down a bit and also expect everyone to do so or else, who is going to read this blog!

Some painting!

A poor man walks up to a rich guy’s house. He’s down on his luck and needs some money. He rings the doorbell.

“Hi there! I’m down on my luck and need some money. I was wondering if you have any work I could do for you?”

The rich guy decides to give him a break, and says: “Sure, my porch needs painting. I’ll pay you 50 dollars to do it for me.”

“Sure thing, Mister, I’ll get started right away!”

Time passes, until…

“Hey Mister, I’m all done painting!”

“Well, here’s your 50 dollars.”

“Thanks, and by the way, it’s a Ferrari, not a Porsche.”