I've had a lot to blog about recently, but wasn't able to due to sheer laziness and hesitance, but as time is finally running out, I've realized I have to push things now and get a few things out of my system to clear my head. Blogging is one such medium which clears your head well, as far as I have felt, other than being a great tool to communicate your ideas, make a lot of friends, advance your career, creating your online brand, helping you not forget things that you've done, and being your resume, etc.. Let's not get into too much of that right now and stick to the topic ;)
Recently, I've had a lot to blog about, but wouldn't do so for no good reason. Time, was definitely not a problem since college got over. I was just too hesitant, too lazy, obscure to put it right. I've had this huge pile of ideas in my head. It feels such a burden right now. I have to let it out somehow. Blogging is the best way to record it I guess. It'll help me thin the cloud in my head atleast.
Too much innovation, too much information
The web isn't linear. It opens up like a tree. Information is widespread. Information overloads. It kills you if you don't stop consuming it. Everyday, I get up and start with the process of consuming all that information and knowledge that other people in the world keep creating. Emails, newsletters, feeds, blog posts, news posts, articles, reviews, technical insights, tips/tricks, tutorials, videos, podcasts and the worst time killer - new web 2.0 websites! There is just no end to it. With me, it all starts with my email inbox, then I come across a score of interesting articles to read up in those favorite newsletters of mine (not to mention the time taken to read all my mails and newsletters is a little overkill, especially after joining the sun campus ambassador program..), I open them up in tabs (thanks to firefox for easing the pain in atleast some way!). As I start reading up on stuff, I discover more interesting stuff. I get this unwieldy urge to check it out. That results in more tabs, and more tabs, until there are atleast 50 tabs open, enough to make my entire day! But hey, who's going to read all that stuff now! I have so much work! I have to-do lists of to-do lists remember? Close some of them? Close them all? I can't close anything, it's all important and it's all very interesting, I must read it! And after this thought, thanks to the invention of another great firefoxy addon called the Session Manager, I'm able to put away all of that new information for awhile for later reading.
So much information, so much unprocessed information in your head just makes you crazy. It gives you anxiety, the fear of loosing out on something by not being able to process it all and make the best use of it. Hey, check that out, there's a new website which allows you to search for use contrbuted geotagged images around a place on a map. How neat is that. It's even got an API. Wow. I could use that somehow. Hey check this out too, a new drupal module which makes adsense integration into your drupal website a whole lot easier! Wow! How can I miss this, I have to implement it in all my drupal websites now! Wait what's this, a new second life client for a mobile phone?? Oh my god! I have to check this out NOW! Oh wait again, a new tip from labnol, he just wrote a great review on the iPhone, I love his reviews, they're always insightful and honest, I must read it. Argghh, there's a new cross-browser javascript library for persistent client-side storage. Amazing, it mashes together all the different ways of storing data on the client and creates a layer of abstraction for it to be super easy for developers to be able to just do what they have to do - store data, and not be bothered about all the intricacies involved! Yay! ASUS finally comes out with the XG Station. Now I can finally super power my laptop's graphics with an external PCMCIA graphic card! Wait, chuck all that! There's a new netbeans tutorial to help you learn to make a reverse AJAX app using DWR!
What the heck! There's just too much innovation happening at such a supersonic speed. How is a tech freak like me ever supposed to keep up with it all.
Writing all this down, I've realized maybe the solution would be to narrow down your interests a bit, I guess. Maybe.
I know. This is just one of those days. I'll get over it :)
My little Idea Factory
Our mind is a powerful tool. It assimilates information coming from random directions and makes so much sense out of it. It converges thoughts, methods, processes, ideas, it links them and creates new ideas and processes which do something totally new. My experience with technology has been very inspirational. In the past 2 years I've come up with many more ideas that I could use. I never blogged about them. I never blogged at all for that matter. And, I seldom told them to anyone. Now I realize how important it is to note down your ideas. Being articulate about a matter further strengthens the thought process. It enables you to think about things you would have otherwise overlooked. F
I'll give you an example. Recently, I discovered Twitter. A web 2.0 service which allows you to let you tell your friends what you're doing all the time and to let you know what all your friends are doing. Neat, eh? They call it microblogging. Interesting! You can tweet from the web, your phone, or IM. But, the amazing thing is that Twitter is not just the website, twitter.com. It's got an API. It's got a plethora of twittering clients, ranging from firefox addons, to ABOBE AIR based clients, to windows mobile / java clients for your mobile phone to perl/python scripts to tweet from the Solaris command line. There's just something for everyone. Twitter's very popular. There are many new websites which just use the twitter API to do wonderful things. There's a website which shows you people's emotions, one which shows you a measure of URL popularity on the basis of those tweets by people, one which shows you a live display of tweets around the world on a 3d rotating map. People have thought of cool ways to feed your blog to twitter, to even feed your google talk status to twitter! I could tell you a lot more about twitter when I was in the twitter frenzy mood, it's been awhile now.
Well, as a developer, I just saw it as a great free one-to-many and many-to-many messaging solution with programmable end points for sending or receiving the messages. The possibilities are really endless. We recently had our annual techno-cultural college festival called JIVE. We could have made such good use of twitter that time. A twitter feed for all the society members, for event coordination updates, notices, call for meetings. It would have been so much easier for us. Twitter let's you receive your tweets anywhere you are, even as an SMS. Our student community portal is powered by Drupal (i made it so that's obvious ;). The event registrations are handled at this website. We could have easily used the twitter module for drupal to make announcements to the participants, tell them about unplanned on-the-spot events happening during JIVE, promote important events and what not! A little disclaimer: I'm letting all this outta my mind after a long time and so the original signal has obviously got a little distorted. I would have surely told you all this in much more enticing and exciting way had I blogged about it back then.
There's more to it. Twitter can be used to replace RSS feeds. I know this sounds kind of unnecessary, but I kinda like following some blogs using twitter. Furthermore, if we aggregate a group of blog feeds (like feeds from all your college friends) using Yahoo Pipes, then tweet their updates automatically into a common twitter account, we'll be able to receive tweets for all our friend's blog by just following that common twitter account. How cool is that! Twitter can be used for collaboration as well. Members of team, working on a project, can maintain a common twitter account for their project, tweet their project work-related updates to that project twitter account using @messages and all the team members can follow that account. Much better than IM, forum posts, mailing lists, or even wiki's IMHO.
Sun used twitter in very creative ways at JavaONE recently. They maintained a twitter account for JavaONE updates, where people could post their updates about the conference, where they are, what they're doing and what's happening everywhere at the conference! I think that's the coolest way of connecting people attending a conference. They even used it at CommunityONE to get audience input during the panel discussions. Sun is cool in their ways of doing things. I had recently read somewhere that twitter was used in customer support services. Whenever a customer calls, he's issued a support ticket and given a twitter feed for getting updates of the resolution of his/her problem. I guess that's a great idea for support tickets which take considerable amount of time to resolve.
An idea which me and a friend had cooked up was related to twitter and weather. People often tweet about the weather at their place. "Its raining outside, I wish we could get of school early today and have fun" and stuff like that. Using the Twitter API, the locations of these people can be known (every profile is supposed to have a "Location" field"). Well that's all we need. A website where you get people driven weather updates, searchable and mappable by location.
The diabolical side of me once came up with a crazy master plan to use twitter to take over the college, but I won't share that idea here ;)
This is just a part and parcel of the cloud of idea's I've got for such a long time. One owes it all to the continuous innovation happening around the world (brought to you through the web). For as long as the web keeps ticking and inspiring us, thoughts will keep springing up in the form of brilliant ideas, forever :)
