Skeptic Geek: Now on Facebook!

Though I prefer Google Reader and Twitter as my news sources of choice, many others use Facebook. Skeptic Geek Logo 75x75

A few weeks back, I decided to experiment with Facebook Like buttons on all my blog posts. The results were very surprising. Earlier, many of my posts became popular because they were shared by some influencers on Google Reader and Twitter. However, Facebook has surprisingly remained a significant source of readers.

More importantly, since Skeptic Geek is platform and company agnostic, posts become popular on different networks depending on the content. For example, my post on Is Windows Live Delivering What Google Buzz Promised? took a critical stance on Google, was not shared by any influencers I know, but has almost 950 shares on Facebook (at the time of this writing).

This is why I decided to put an end to my neglect of the Facebook Platform, and have chosen to leverage it. I remain platform agnostic, and will continue to be impartial in my critique of the social web. This is just another way of letting my readers have more choice in their preferred way of reading Skeptic Geek.

If you wish, you can become a fan on Facebook here.

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NYT Profiles Techmeme

From The New York Times:

One of the first Web sites loaded on Silicon Valley’s laptops and iPhones each morning — and then again and again throughout the day — is Techmeme.

Couple of factoids:

  • 260,000 readers who check it 3 million times a month
  • Techmeme plans to include cogent 140-character Twitter posts written by influential people as headlines

Thanks to Marshall:

“You definitely get a lot more traffic when you’re the lead story in a cluster on Techmeme, and it’s super high-quality traffic because it’s where a lot of industry thought leaders go to get their news,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said.

In the photo on the article, check out what’s lying on that sofa chair in the background. :)

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The Real Tablet Revolution

This is the slate I used growing up as a school kid. There was sibling rivalry over whose was shinier or had a larger “screen size”.

Slate

They are still used by some school children in India. Millions of them go to school today like this (image credit):

School Bags

With heavy burdens on their back, no wonder they hate going to school.

When Steve Jobs unveils the Apple Tablet in a few hours from now, I will be part of the thousands who will witness this revolutionary device remotely. But the real revolution in my mind will happen when such devices become mainstays in educational institutions worldwide.

apple_tablet

No doubt the tablet will be great for entertainment, gaming, reading, and news consumption. But no other application has a greater, lasting impact, than that which revolutionizes learning.

As Joe Wilcox describes it, a “unified content platform, mixing different media types and live information” holds tremendous potential during the formative young years of our lives.

Imagine a classroom where students had access to live information about any topic under the sun. That is the world I want my kid to grow up in. When that happens, it will be the real tablet revolution.

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A Year of Change and New Beginnings

The year end is a good time to share a bit more about myself, about this blog, and learn more about you. Skeptic Geek started four months ago. Discounting FriendFeed, Feedburner says there are already about 100 “true” subscribers. This really is a surprise.

I come from a world of cubicle farms in the software outsourcing industry and am a complete newbie in the social web. I joined:

My last stay in the US during ‘06-‘08 was to manage the development of a website for the largest automaker in America. The project was to provide 5 million+ auto financing customers with an account self-service website in order to reduce call-center costs. More recently, I worked in embedded software, working with real-estate developers in India to build intelligent digital homes.

My career has been in project management (requirements gathering, people management, scheduling, risk management, etc.), competitive research, proposals, business development and so on. I lived amidst J2EE, EAI, and RFPs. Two years ago, I had not even heard of Twitter or FriendFeed.

In other ways, by some standards, I am a veteran. I sent my first email in ‘89 from India when there were no ISPs here, and browsed the web with Netscape Navigator for the first time in ‘95 from Berlin. The first “computer” I handled was a Sinclair ZX-81, and the first PC in my home was a PC-XT with a 20 MB hard disk. In college, I learnt assembly language programming with the 8085 and 8086 microprocessors.

As you can imagine, this year has been a change in many ways. Taking a break from the enterprise software world, I ventured as a freelancer on the web. My experience is indeed useful to my work, but I found that I had to make a fresh beginning. You might manage a million dollar software project within budget on time, but a high-school tech enthusiast may be better informed, better networked, and write faster blog posts than you.

I started my personal blog on Wordpress.com in Apr ‘07. For the past two years, my personal blog has been an enjoyable hobby for expressing my varied interests. I was a complete stranger in the tech blogging world when I started writing for MakeUseOf.com in Apr ‘09. After a few months, I joined Techmeme. It has been a good year and I feel grateful.

The social network I am most indebted to is FriendFeed. It offered me some of the best and brightest tech minds to network with on a platter. My networking journey, if it were to happen via any other network like LinkedIn, might have taken years. FriendFeed accelerated it to a few months. I have made many good friends there and elsewhere, many of whom have kindly added me to their Twitter Lists.

Road Ahead

These are my humble beginnings this year. I started this blog as a parking lot for my thoughts about online tech developments. My writing at MakeUseOf is for a non-geeky audience, and I wanted a place to pen more insightful posts. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that there would be anyone interested enough to subscribe. While I don’t want to write blog posts under any obligatory pressure, I do want to write regularly, at a slower pace of about a post per week or ten days. At this moment, it’s a long road ahead, and I don’t know what’s lying in store after the next bend.

Are you really out there, dear subscriber? If you would be so kind to let me know, I would be obliged. Do you have any feedback about my posts so far or about the blog in general? Would it be interesting if I bring an occasional India-specific tech angle in my writing that might be amusing or interesting to western audiences? Should I continue writing at all?

Finally, here’s wishing you a Very Happy Christmas and New Year! May we all enjoy a peaceful, connected, and exciting 2010!

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Writing for MakeUseOf.com

A lot of things have been happening at An Unquiet Mind. A journalist quoted me in the Hyderabad edition of The Hindu. AUM is now on Twitter here and you can see my tweets in the sidebar.

muologo

I have been chosen to contribute to MakeUseOf.com on a trial basis. I have loved MUO since a long time, and I am eagerly looking forward to writing about “Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips”.

MakeUseOf.com has 54K+ subscribers, and is part of PC Magazine’s “Top 50 Blogs”.

This is my first foray into professional writing since 1996. Wish me luck! :-)

PS: Do you like the new About Myself?

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Web Graveyard Update

I had recently mooted the concept of WebGraveyard.com, where your presence in the online world will forever be preserved, including your social networking profiles, blogs, etc.

If anyone is yet not convinced this is a great idea, check out Online-Funeral.

Online Funeral allows mourners to participate in the funeral ceremony via the Internet, and if their appointment book doesn’t have a free slot at that time, allows them to see the videos later, or even order CDs.

‘Virtual Tributes’ are nothing but a simple signing of a Guest Book. In contrast, our plan is to offer virtual memorials – full 3D replicas of what’s offered on Memorials.com.

Compared to our WebGraveyard.com, this is peanuts! There is no integration of the deceased person’s online life. In fact, Online Funeral just looks like a simple widget that we can add to WebGraveyard, no?

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Logo Design using Paint.net and Inkscape

I am not a graphic designer and do not have the dedication required to learn complex graphic applications like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. However, I do have an artistic itch. Hence when my wife endeavored to set up a business partnership for a corporate psychological training service firm, I endeavored to design their logo. It was a perfect opportunity for me to scour the graphic design application landscape on Windows for amateurs like me (or like myself?).

Paint.net

Paint.net is sometimes positioned as a free and better replacement to built-in Windows Paintbrush, but it is really something like Photoshop Lite. Packed in a tiny 1.6 MB package, this is truly great software considering that it is completely freeware. Check the screenshots here for a sample of what it can do.

Using its support for layers, unlimited undo, some special effects, and some great tutorials in their forum, this is what I came up with:

U Turn Gold

I know it’s not that good-looking, but hey, I’m an amateur!

Inkscape

Professional designers will tell you that logos should be designed as vector graphics, not as raster images like with Paint.net. This is so that they can be easily manipulated and scaled to suit different applications like web, print, etc. Adobe Illustrator and Coreldraw for example, are vector graphic imaging software. So how do you start without spending a penny on such expensive software?

Inkscape is a great open-source vector graphics application that was originally designed for Linux, but now runs on Windows too. Most of the digital graphics you see on Wikipedia are designed in Inkscape by volunteers. It takes some time getting used to working with vector graphics – for example, there is no ‘Eraser’ tool to quickly obliterate your mistakes and tweak your pixels, because there are no pixels here, only lines and curves – but it’s not difficult at all.

I also decided to get a bit creative on the logo concept. U Turn’s services all have their base in psychology. Now, the Greek letter Psi (Y) is the symbol of everything ‘psy’ – psychology, psychiatry, etc. So I wondered if I could make up Psi using U and T of U Turn:

U Turn with Ribbon U Turn Swirl 500x618

So above are examples of some of the designs I’m proposing to the entrepreneurs. Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions as well.

If you do not want to install or learn any software, but are simply looking for a quick and dirty way to come up with some text-based logos primarily for use on the web, the following sites may interest you:

Note that logo design is a profound and complex subject. I have only focused on easy to use logo creation tools here. The design concepts, art, philosophy, and marketing strategy behind logo design is a fascinating topic by itself, and is out of bounds for this post.

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Web Graveyard – A Startup Idea

Very few people I know blog about death. It is not a pleasant subject, and essentially, one reads blogs to be happy. But let’s face it, death is very real. Though cyberspace was once known as the virtual world, it is becoming increasingly real, and the overlap between online and offline is getting increasingly complex.

As bloggers, gamers, sellers, artists, online community participants – we are increasingly living very real online roles. We have our own avatars. Our own bookshelves. Our Facebook personae. Our LinkedIn profiles.

So what happens when we die? Death is sudden and unexpected for most people. What happens to their blogger friends? How do their Facebook or Orkut friends know? What about items they have put up on sale on eBay? What if they’re part of an open-source development community and are actively contributing to projects?

Don’t take this lightly. Sudden disappearance in the virtual world can cause a great deal of concern and have a wider impact than one may suspect. Our social world and legal systems take care of the eventualities in our offline life, but what about our online life when we really go offline? Who are the legal heirs of the copyrights to our creative digital content that we so meticulously safeguard?

CNET’s Technically Incorrect blog post inspired this post. It describes two website services that send out emails you’ve composed after you die. Deathswitch has a free account option with one recipient and no attachments. With a tagline of “Bridging Mortality”, it encourages you not to take your secrets to the grave. SlightlyMorbid does not have a free account, but has a “Free Trial”. :-)

Startup Concept – WebGraveyard

How about WebGraveyard.com? When fully functional and out of beta, Web Graveyard can offer:

  • My GraveSpace – automatically imported social networking profiles like Facebook and MySpace Cemetery
  • My Memoirs – a diary of your blogs on Blogger/Wordpress
  • My Graveiti – comments on your blog and by visitors to your eGrave
  • My YouTomb – the videos you’ve uploaded to YouTube
  • My Gallery – automatically imports your Picasa web albums, Flickr photos, etc.
  • My GraveRoll – links to eGraves of your friends
  • My Graveatar – automatically imported Gravatar
  • GrMail – automated email reminders of significant events in your lifetime like anniversaries

Premium Services

  • Users can import your birthdays and anniversaries into their Google Calendar or Outlook
  • High-resolution gallery of Tombstones
  • Templates for great Epitaphs
  • Users can drag and drop flowers on your eGrave from an abundant gallery of beautiful arrangements
  • GPod – automatically import and create a replica of your iPod
  • Your favorite last.fm playlist plays in the background when visiting your eGrave

Any takers for funding this startup? Any more ideas how it can be made more ‘user-friendly and productive’?

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Adding My Restaurant in Google Maps

For fun, I decided to add my restaurant in Google Maps. I found out there were two things I could do – add it as a Local Business via Google Maps, or use Google Mapmaker.

Adding Local Business to Google Maps

After logging in to my Google Account, Google Maps let me add a business listing from the left sidebar itself.

Add Google Local Business Listing

I could correct the location marker position easily by dragging it on the map. After entering all the relevant details like contact information, restaurant details, etc., I am done. Now comes the funny part – how does Google verify that I am indeed the owner of this business?

Google Local Business Center Validation

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that Google – the symbol of our high-tech age, the epitome of cloud computing – will send me a postcard via snail mail! I get a radio button (option button) but there’s no other way to choose. Can’t they verify simply by calling up on the telephone numbers I’ve provided?!

Google Local Business Listing

So now, I’ve to wait for “2-3 weeks”, and after receiving the PIN via snail mail, I get to verify and add my listing. I remember the last time I had to register for Internet Banking after opening a bank account in India!

Curiously, there’s a nice little feature that’s not prominent while using the Local Business Center site – Coupons! Coupons are not as popular in India as in the US, but because of the booming IT sector and entry of multinational (read American) pizza-majors, they’re gaining widespread even if limited use. Using Google’s Coupons, you can add a few lines of text, set an expiration date, and you’re good to go. Neat stuff.

Google Local Business Coupons

Adding to Google Mapmaker

Adding to Google Mapmaker is simpler. Google Mapmaker seems to have a Wikipedian content authoring and moderating system.

Hotel Yash in Google Mapmaker

After adding all the details, I now await for the moderator to approve my entry. Phew, no snail mail this time!

Now, I wonder if there is anything like Google Analytics to find out how many ‘hits’ my restaurant had on Google Maps – that would really be an interesting proposition…

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