Diigo: Survival of the Fittest

Darwin discovered natural selection, which went on to be made popular by Herbert Spencer as “the survival of the fittest.” Yesterday, I saw it being applied to Web 2.0. I have been a del.icio.us fan for some time now. del.icio.us is synonymous with social bookmarking, in fact, for all practical purposes, they invented it. In fact, I switched back from Firefox 3beta because there was no del.icio.us support.

Yet, del.icio.us never came out of Version 1 of this Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Along comes diigo. del.icio.us on steroids!

Changes the way you will use and share (and I really mean share) bookmarks. What they have done to social bookmarking is not rocket science, but they have done it. What they have done was never difficult, but being the one who does it first makes a lot of difference. I have happily switched from del.icio.us to diigo.com. And I am thrilled using it the last 18 hours.

Highly recommended!!!

I am an addict of all things Web 2.0. There is only one cure for it — subscribe to more and more things that seemingly make life simpler and interesting. Oh, how I love to be here!

Skype Emoticons & Flags Cheatsheet

For those of you who use Skype and were feeling emotionally constrained!

Skype Emoticons & Flags Cheatsheet

Victoria’s Secret?

For some reason it is the ‘hottest’ underground line of all. Beats me.

What’s with RSS Bandit?

My recentest mostest favourite RSS reader.

Here’s the deal:

• Can read secure (authenticated?) feeds. Very important for me from a work perspective.
• Does some nice thing called favicons – assigns WordPress or Flickr or Blogger (or custom) icons to feeds. Good way to organise content?
• Allows direct comment posting!!!
• Works. Like (you know what!)
• Gives alerts. Customisable alerts, i.e.
• Gives options for look and feel for items (not very important – but nice feature)
• Stable since their last version.

BESTEST PART?

• Allows direct post of items to del.icio.us
• Allows direct blogging to WordPress (and other blog services) through WLR (Windows Live Writer)
• Allows selective reading of comments to selective posts
• Allows me to assign font colours to various types of feeds. Yippee!
• Allows RSS feeds to Google Alerts equivalent. (No need to check mail now)
• Looks sexy!
• Doesn’t take an IQ of a million to set it all up!

Am feeling good! And How! Did I just achieve Web 2.0 Nirvana or what!

ToI’s Bad Design

Yes, it’s pretty much the respected paper as far as the seventh largest country in the world goes. Apparently the IT superpower. However, I can’t help noticing that the mobile version of the Times of India is a small “view demo” button on their main site at the parent browser site.Here is a scenario. You are on you mobile device. Let’s say Windows Mobile 5? Right. Now, you want to access the mobile version of the TOI. Chances are – you do a Google search. What will you search for? Mobile Times of India? Mpaper Times of India? (Hoping that they have replicated the epaper URL format)

Well you won’t find a whole lot with the Google searches. So you go to the parent site. (I won’t honour it by linking it here).

Yet on your mobile device, while you see the “View Demo” under the “mPaper: Mobile Edition” that bloody “pop-up” won’t open on your mobile device. It’s a flash demo – something happens – and you see the wonderful white of the browser.

What level of intellectual thinking does it take to put a simple URL of the mobile edition of the TOI on the site, upfront? Or is it that all the intellectual smarty-pants people have been allocated to make Google-ads look like news pieces so that NRI idiots click on it? Or were they thinking of the locals?

Till such time, they decide and realise that their mobile users need a mobile URL to access the mobile version of the Time of India, the largest circulating newspaper in India, I give you the URL here, without having to view the flash demo on your computer. http://mobile.timesofindia.com/.

Being a leader is much more than self proclamation and circulation popularity statistics.

If I am wrong and there is a better key-word set to find the mobile version of the TOI, please let me know. Will happily correct myself.

Of Faith and Science

I got this link off this post.

There is a funny aspect to it, and almost tragic. While the small icons in red in the second box give an idea of what the author is speaking of, it’s not just religion, but even preconceived notions that follow the same pattern as faith does, here.

Respecting Value

Jeff Atwood, says that December 1 is “Support Your Favorite Small Software Vendor Day” and in that post, mentions Media Monkey.

So I went and checked it out. And I am a complete convert, just 6 hours into the program.

As regards his very interesting argument of supporting the ‘small software vendor’, I couldn’t agree less. Most of the best of the software on my desktop is from small software vendors. Supporting them however, for me, isn’t a factor of “Share the love by sending money to the person/shop/organization that created it.”

It has to be a factor of perceived and received value. That is the ultimate salute, because, as Francisco d’Anconia, in Atlas Shrugged said, “Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce.”

Words 4 U

One of the better off-line dictionaries I have seen in a while. Good features, light, and works to search for word meanings from inside an application. Doesn’t use the registry, so mobile – you could carry the dictionary on a USB drive. Also, gives a whole lot of information about the word and works very nicely for anagrams and potentially, for crosswords. Support staff are fun and nice too.

TheSage from Sequence Publishing is a good tool to have on any desktop especially if you have a way with words. A good way or bad, i.e. And if you do a whole lot more with words and languages check out their other stuff.

For a long time I have been relying on The Free Dictionary, from Farlex – and excellent reference tool that goes beyond the dictionary.

Fill It Up

Kadfl d hfqewlh flqelwkhlqkewlkjrhqweh ruewh rqwe rkqwelkqweigiwqenirwqeyr qigrliwqe rliwe lirh wre lciqehwrewhr lqwehr liwqe sjdfkjash dfhkjsahdkjash dcewr lqwe rlwhe.

Isn’t that what we do when you are trying to fill in text in Microsoft® Word? You probably do this often when you are attempting to test some formatting or create a template. Or you do the Lorem ipsum thing. The apparent gibberish that is filler for text.

There are, apparently, better ways

If you wanted to generate three paragraphs of ten sentences each, you would get into your Microsoft® Word document and just type:

=rand(3,10)

See what happens.

Or if you prefer the more ostensible Lorem ipsum, that has a generator too. And it is not gibberish. It means:

“But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?”

Above translation, courtesy of Lorem Ipsum