Brij Singh's Random Musings

RSS Ad Smasher

For some reason this particular thing is getting me all mad. I dont like RSS ads inthe  personal blog feeds. If a personal blog is  like  blogger's personality then why the heck you need to put ad on it.  I have yet to see people putting logos on their faces !

Do you interrupt your conversation in starbucks to do few Ad inserts before resuming your conversation? No ! Then why in the world you want to have RSS ad inserts.

Now if its a professional blog then definitely yes. You have earned all the right to include ads. That distinction is important because that will drive reader's motivation on whether to trust you as a person or a pro who is selling me something. Both models are acceptable but mixing the two puts extra load on my attention-starved mind.

Charlie Wood has some Ad stripper if you want to take out these pesky ads from the feeds.

Trust in a context free world

How about this:

As Reflected in classical mythology society is complicated. Upon Peter Pinkleton-PishPosh's return to Britain he remarked 'class will refelect the inner hero' [1], he failed to understand that if one seriously intends to 'not judge a book by its cover', then one must read a lot of books. More a melody to societies dysfunctions than a parody of the self, blogging cleary plays a significant role amongst the developing middle classes.

When one is faced with people of today a central theme emerges - blogging is either adored or despised, it leaves no one undecided. Just as a dog will return to its own sick, society will return to blogging, again and again.

You will be excused for thinking that some deranged, half-drunk rambler wrote that piece. The thing is machines are catching up and they are catching up fast thanks to MIT grads weekend hacking (Thanks Sumit for the link !).

I see a wicked opportunity to program  funny games on top of this. Something which highlights the trust issue in the media world to name one.  How about this to begin with: 

I am a blogger but I am powered by the context-free grammer !

This will go into the architecture of next generation spams. I know thats not a good thing but I dont see how one can avoid it either. With increasing emphasis on the real-time content to generate traffic (and revenue) this will become yet another building block for  the Nigerian-style scams.

Switch off cellphone in your home ?

Wow, looks like a big foot in the mouth:

"Why in the world would you think your (cell) phone would work in your house?" he said. "The customer has come to expect so much. They want it to work in the elevator; they want it to work in the basement."

I wonder how long big telcos will last with this kind of attitude. 5 Years max ?

Attention allocation is an ongoing struggle

Steve Gillmor gives more insight into this emerging concept:

This is the subscription economy we’re talking about. Not the Blogosphere so much as the Syndisphere. In this ecosystem, the contract is based on continued attention, not captured attention. It leverages a form of broadcast couch potato dynamics, where inertia keeps you tuned from ER to Leno to Today. When CSI broke that cycle, it was a big deal. In the Syndisphere once you’ve signed on, it takes more effort than it’s worth to sign off. Unsubscribing requires real motivation.

Economic model is still a work-in-progress here. When vendors mix information with advertisement they are effectively adding to the reader's cognitive load. Current users of Bloglines or Technorati may not be a good sample to evaluate how much is the optimum feed load.  More syndication choices to end-users and smart filtering should ease this burden on the attention.

Microsoft Print Ad

Why would Microsoft risk antagonizing their users by putting them in a dinosaurus heads. I cannot locate any link for those ads.  I think they are running these "office upgrade" ads only in the print media.

One I saw in latest Business Week is a really stupid one. You do not want to put your users in a dinosaurus head. That too when you are a Microsoft - a company which raises more emotions than any other company out there.

Rule number one: Always respect your customers !

FUD itself is a good business model

Sample this quote from Julie DeCecco of Sun Microsystems:

"Do a cost/benefit analysis early on to quantify what is the financial impact of using open source,It might not be worth the cost. A proprietary license might be the way to go"

9 out of 10 times fear works like a charm. Big question remains as to who defines the "financial impact" and what objective method they use to estimate that.

Medical tourism

One of my business contact pointed me to this NYTimes piece on growing medical tourism and how India plays in this growing sector.  The lure of economics ! Trumps every other concern.

Howard Staab, 53, an uninsured self-employed carpenter from Durham, N.C., to repair a leaking mitral heart valve. Mr. Staab paid $10,000 for his surgery, his round-trip fare to India and for a visit to the Taj Mahal. In the United States, his options included surgery costing $60,000 at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

To take advantage of patients like Mr. Staab, Indian hospitals are expanding. In the Gurgaon suburbs of New Delhi, Dr. Trehan is building a $250 million multispecialty hospital modeled after the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. In the same neighborhood will be Fortis Healthcare's Medicity, a 43-acre hospital complex for foreign patients, which will have special immigration and travel counters and interpreters, with the idea of branding itself the Johns Hopkins Hospital of the East.

They are really developing new processes. Who thought one day hospitals will have INS type window helping on immigration chores !

Drone + Keyhole = I know where you are going

Taking a conservative estimate, in 10 years  time (if you apply accelerating change theory, you might get it sooner) this military technology might be available at your local dealer store.  Robotic plane and their smaller  family member called  Drones will have some non-creepy civilian use as well.

Combine that with Google's Keyhole capability and you have a friendly (may be creepy) I-can-see-where-you-are-going toy.

And the question is what stops someone from doing it ? Security and air zone regulations maybe ? There can be many good civilian use of this combination as well. Specially in situations like Tsunami where its hard to cover a very wide area.

License explosion

Straight from the guru Eric Raymond:

"Quite honestly, my hope is that if we piss off everybody at once we won't piss everybody off so much that they leave, I think it will eventually work out because everybody involved with the problem realizes a common material explosion of different licenses isn't in anyone's interests"

Open source licensing explosion is a major issue. We created this license browser just for fun and get to some sanity around the legalese around it. Hopefully industry participants will see reason and cut this list down to the manageable number.

Expect to see more such announcements when all penguin lovers get together at OSBC.

Outsourced storage management

= 80 x 

Why would somebody need this. Now all you need is a smart interface which can front-end 80 gmail account (using Gmail APIs ?) and bingo you have a personal outsourced storage manager.

All ready for the long tail consumers.

Update: Whatever you can think of, somebody somewhere has done it.

It seems many people are trying to write this kind of application. From hack-a-day. This seems to be more advanced implementation of the concept. Mounting Linux from Gmail. As Frank will say in that famous sitcom - Holy Craps !