Make Over

Like the interface overhaul of WordPress control panel, this blog is also undergoing a radical change. It will still be a Noisy Palette. But all these grainy stuff shall now move around one concept. Search.

What does a non-technologist, Internet enthusiast can speak about the myriad and elusive world of Internet search? That shall be the point of this blog from here and now. And how!

Search engine, robots.txt, forums, videosharing, del.icio.us, information organization, Google, semantic web, human-empowered search, web 2.0, deep net, bittorrent, videosharing,  underground…these are among the many strands of the serach arena as I see it.

What Changes: A change in the layout, new header image, an apter subtitle and lots of chaotic and unruly posts on the Internet search phenomenon.

And my only qualification to do this: I love the internet.

Hyderabad Blues

Another viscious attack on the heart of the hyderabad city. Another illusion shattering. The Local behaviour of terrorism is always a matter of heartburn. No one wishes his/her place is vulnerable. It is not sad, it is downright mean. It is quite easy to smuggle a bomb into a crowded place. The chilly feeling you get when walking through the hustle and bustle Charminar on the eve of Ramadan is no more a joke or something to be trivially talked about. The sadness of the whole thing lies in the fact that, the fragile nature of communalism gets itself boosted here in these instances.

One could easily start Muslim bashing as usual. But wait, Hyderabad! It is not just any run-of-the-mill areas where you can do all your bashing and get away with it. A place known for its Nawabs and Islamic culture, clearly something is wrong in here. Maybe it is time to blame it on Hindus. The Mecca Masjid clearly points to the same. Maybe it is the retaliation. Maybe it is local vengeance of the global hatred.

None of this however takes into consideration the gravity of the situation. Not of terrorism, anyway. This is a time where all the terrorism rhetoric comes up, become alive in the newspapers for, say, one week and becomes common place only to come back in the next wave of attacks. Let us not be so complacent. Maybe it is time to tell people that hatred isn’t helping. There are peaceful methods of protest. That all of forms of extremisms are criminal. Let not the leaders get lost in their own rhetoric.

Let us make sure that we start thinking for ourselves and not lend our heart and brain to our so-called leaders. let us enjoy the pleasures of thinking for ourselves.

Taking Note

Digital notebooks are always tempting. With a host of exciting features I don’t know why they are not so popular as they should be. And we clearly need a disctinction between the many word processing utilities like the skinny Notepad to the very resourceful Word 2007. Though one can use them to (and many of us do) maintain reasonably well-off notes, they clearly lack the spirit of the online workflow. Think of embedding a audio in the notebook and the Word file won’t even open properely.   Well did I say audio. Maybe I was talking about Powerpoint. The word doesnt even have an option like that. So what does that signify? Well Word was always meant to be text-processing tool not a notebook. But in the current web2.0 era it is obvious that notes are not only about text, but involves all kinds of media. here comes the utility of notebooks. Well OneNote is clearly in your mind with its 2007 version offering a dazzling array of features making it the most useful notebook manager ever. But we are talking about the web 2.0 era right? So the primary criterion is that it have to be online. Forget about the many sharing features of OneNote. The thingy I am talking about is completely online.

The Zoho Notebook. Easy accesibilty anywhere around the world. True web 2.0.

Start a notebook and add anything: text, pictures, audio, video, sheets, files and even feeds to a page! Then share it with anyone you want. Share a page or selected pages or an entire notebook as well as create and share any number of notebooks.

Cool  links:                                                                                                                                            1. Web Worker Daily  An excellent write-up on the various online note-talking tools is available here.   

2.Solutionwatch  presents a collection of  50 note-taking tools suited for various purposes from around the web.                                                                                                                                                            

Photosharing

I was a hardcore Flickr user, uploading regularly, tagging photos, commenting on others, adding friends… until yesterday I was stuck at the 200 Photo limit. So that is it? The free version stops here? I was disappointed, to say the least. Here was my fave photosharing site setting limits to me. Arrrgh I went. I quickly went to Photobucket and registered for an account. The sign up was done but the page refused to download. So I went to my mail box and logged into the account from the mail they sent me. And what did I found?

Upload 10000 photos. 1 GB space. That is each photo should be no more than 1MB. I remembered that most of my High-Res photos always bordered around 2MB! So sadness again and I found the pro-version here too. 50000 photos! Big Deal.

Can’t a derelict like me upload photos endlessly? I immediately went into my web2.0 directory, Go2Web20.net where I selected Photos tag and I was introduced to a plethora of sites on photosharing. Or so I thought. Actually half the sites were about blogging and social networking which made me realize that… that was what I wanted! Share photos with friends!

So I searched for the coolest ones and I found these two:

faces.com – which lets you upload an unlimited number of photos and music and you can download an upload widget to do that. So I registered and I am enjoying the thing. You can write a blog an connect with your friends through faces.

snappages.com is an amazingly cool web 2.0 photosharing site which lets you do all kinds of stuff with your photos and keep them neatly arranged in folders. It acts like your virtual desktop, exclusively for images. It is all designed in shiny black. so cool.

Meanwhile I also remembered how multiply.com sent me a mail on how Yahoo Photos were shutdown. And it said how this is the best time to upload all your photos to your multiply website (which also lets you host innumerable videos) quite unlike orkut where your album has a dismal 12 photos. So I am confused about my Facebook entry. Facebook or multiply?

P.S. My truemor ranked first in the Greatest area with 71 score and 15 comments!

Presentation

Currently settled on this theme though it looks very arty. My purpose of blogging may get confused. At least the font is bigger. Posted something on truemors.com and got some positive clicks. Should check back to see the new position. Didn’t know it was by Guy Kawasaki.
Well he knows his way around the world, real or otherwise. Paying $399 for that logo is enviable enough. I can imagine why outsourcing is still popular there.

P.S. My truemors thing got 18 points and is 3rd on the greatest list today. So feeling up and even if it goes down, I am up. up.

Posthosting

This could my blog for sometime. My tumblog is dead long ago. But I am happy I brought some one back to blogging. Our very own. James machu. I shall post here. Very irregularly But maybe I shall go back to my bloguru account.