Tagged: Technology

August 13th, 2005

Killer calendar

Webapps are the rage these days. I think personal information management is one of the key areas where web apps have a very good chance to make inroads into conventional desktop applications, and here’s why:

* these days we use computers at work, at home, on the plane, in a cafe — everywhere. We would like to have seamless access to our personal information //everywhere//. But personal information is personal, so security it important. You don’t want to carry around your laptop with you everytime though. Most places have Internet access — why not put everything online?
* We’ve already seen some very rich internet apps around personal information management. There’s [[http://mail.google.com|email]], [[http://tadalist.com|to-do lists]], [[http://backpackit.com|organizer]].

I think a critical piece in this puzzle thats missing right now is a rich web based calendar. Currently I just use something like unison/rsync to keep my calendar/contacts updated on each computer I work at. This is cumbersome, but it works. Email synchronization is a mostly solved problem (IMAP). But synching the calendar and contacts this way is problematic.

For a while I was using [[http://calendar.yahoo.com|Yahoo! calendar]] — its highly functional (reminders, recurrances, holidays). But I think the interface still needs a lot of work. There is no free/busy support, nor is there any iCal/vCal support as far as I could tell. I want to be able to subscribe to other calendar sources and aggregate free/busy information and so on.

There was [[http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004282.html|quite a rumor]] about Google releasing a web based calendar, but it hasn’t happened yet. I won’t mind if the folks at 37signals.com did it — but someone //should// do it, and do it fast!

I don’t care too much about web based email and addressbook because I access email from a variety of sources, and for a variety of reasons its not possible to access them all online. Further, I need to access my addressbook across all of my email accounts in a seamless manner — again, for a variety of constraints this is not always possible online. A local client like KMail is much more flexible in this regard.

Although I’m quite happy with my current setup in KDE ([[http://kontact.kde.org|kontact]], [[http://basket.kde.org|basket]]) I think I’ll give backpackit and tadalist a try. A few less things to synchronize.

August 13th, 2005

Google News for Geeks

No, I don’t know if such a thing exists yet — I’m just saying it would be cool if it did.

Here’s the idea — I’m sure everyone has had a look at Google news. Now that they [[http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html|have feeds]] too, its ultra cool — it helped me get rid of a whole block of feeds from my aggregator.

However, there’s still a large chunk that Google news doesn’t cover well — the geeky news sites. Sure it indexes Slashdot (and probably others too), but the appearance of stories in Google news is heavily influenced by where they appear in other news sites. So for instance, if a story appears in the NYTimes, the Financial Times, and Slashdot, then it usually (or seems to) have a better chance of appearning in Google news, than suppose it appeared only on Slashdot and LWN.net

Google news for geeks would be just like Google news, except that it would index and collate related stories from a restricted subset of sources. Here’s an initial (but not exhaustive list):

* Slashdot
* Arstechnica
* Wired
* LWN.net
* Newsforge
* O’Reilly Radar
* Planet Debian
* Planet KDE
* Planet GNOME
* OSDir.com
* OSNews
* Kerneltrap

Someone at Google please take this up for your 20% project ;-)

August 3rd, 2005

Paradigm shift

The world of information organization is shifting paradigms — from categories to tags.

In the traditional world (the files and cabinets, papers and folders world) everything was neatly classified into a single folder or category. But this did not scale well. If you were looking for a long lost article, and were not sure which category you would have put it back then, its probably going to be hard to find it.

Categories/folders are good in places where there’s a unique identifier to each item — for instance, a social security number, or a library catalog ID. But the classic example where folders break down are your bookmarks. The Internet and search engines have changed the way we deal with information. When I see a web page, there are many thigns I associate it with.

Filing it into a single folder is not reliable (because the thing that popped up first in my head when I filed it, may not be the first that pops up in my head when I’m searching for that page again). Its also not very expressive — how would you file a page that deals with both culture and politics.

For a while, directories such as [[http://dir.yahoo.com/|Yahoo's]] or [[http://directory.google.com/|Google's]] or [[http://dmoz.org/|DMOZ]] tried to deal with this problem by trying to place each website in a hierarchy of categories. This did not scale — there is too much manual labor involved, there is no unique procedure, different people might expect the same page to be in different categories and so on.

Then came along tagging. Tags allow you to associate multiple attributes with any single item. This is much more expressive than the category mapping. Tags also make searching and sharing information easier. The real popularity of tags is driven by the large number of web applications supporting tags these days. Here’s a brief list:

and many many more.

BTW, here’s a [[http://trutag.rubyforge.org/|cute little app]] that lets you work with your tags across a lot of different websites. I think we’ll be seeing more tools like this in the future — that aggregate and analyze tags across your blogs, photos, bookmarks, emails — to help you find and organize your information.

We live in a brave new world :-)

July 29th, 2005

We are the web

[[http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html|Fascinating article]] on [[http://wired.com|Wired]]
>> //The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That’s 100 pages per person alive.//

>>//How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective history and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone’s 10-year plan.//

If you do the math, that amounts to about **150 million** pages of //new// contrent //**every single day**//. Even if we were to take 20% of that as a conservative estimate, thats still more than 30 million pages. Now //that// is truly staggering.

>> //What a shock, then, to witness the near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds.//

A new blog **every 2 seconds**. Beat that!

But a little too far fetched at some points (IMHO):

>> //In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing.//

>>//Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine’s internal workings will be so complex they won’t be repeatable; you won’t always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine.//

An interesting read, none the less. And finally, the omnious sounding conclusion:

>> //Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.//

July 28th, 2005

Call for Jabber

I’m sick of Yahoo! instant messenger — frequent connection drops, spurious presence notification, lost messages, and the general unfriendlyness towards free clients — everything sucks. I’m not a big fan of those “IMvironments” nor the “buzz”, so they are just minor attractions. I’ve heard AIM/ICQ are better, but the protocols have become defunct, and hardly any of my friends use AOL.

Meanwhile, Jabber is amazing. Its open, its free, its distributed, its rich in features. I was surprised to see that Jabber is more popular in enterprises than among the public. Here’s a call to all my friends to please, //please// give Jabber a shot. If you use Gaim or Trillian or Kopete, you don’t even need an additional client — all of them can handle Jabber very well.

To know more about Jabber, here are some useful links:
* [[http://www.jabber.org/about/overview.shtml|Jabber overview]]
* [[http://www.jabber.org/network/|List of public Jabber servers]]
* [[http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.shtml|List of Jabber clients]]
* [[http://www.jabber.org/user/userguide/|Jabber user guide]]

And if you //really// can’t live without MSN or Yahoo or AIM, you’ll be happy to know that Jabber has these things called “gateways” that allow you to use Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ through your Jabber ID and client — no multiple IDs, no multiple clients needed. And there are plenty of public servers out there that support gateways. So give it a shot!

I should point out that Jabber is meant for (and **only for**) //instant messaging//. This means that there is protocol bloat for supporting webcams or voice chats. Use video conferencing or VoIP if you want those. Lets keep IM simple.

Oh yes, if you do try Jabber, don’t forget to add me on your buddylist. I’m at diwakergupta **at** jabber **dot** org