Wednesday, February 28, 2007

A tour!

I had been to Rishikesh last weekend and had a good time there. Here are some pics. A video is here. You can get the other videos by going to my profile!
It was a small tour with friends of my workplace. Main attraction was water riding!

Monday, February 26, 2007

Interesting ways of using Gmail!!

IMified is an interesting
application developed around Instant Messanger to keep in sync your
Google Calendar, To Do lists etc. in Sync. With IMified its easy to
create new time-lines in GCal, BackPackit, or Remember the milk. An
interesting post describing all this is here
. This post details some interesting ways in which gmail can be
used. If you are a fan of Gmail and want to increase its usefulness,
this post is for you!!

It's All Text!

Here is a cool
add-on for firefox for using your favorite text editor when you need to
post something on a web-page. A small link appears next to the text-box
on the web-page, clicking it opens your favorite text editor. It's going
to work great for me, since I can use the power of VI editor alongside
not being recognized blogging in office :P
What's better is that you won't lose any unsaved text if posts don't
happen the way you want it!!

Word source: A web 2.0 dictionary !

The social networking abilities have crawled into dictionaries too!
Word source is a new site providing definitions of words in web 2.0 format. What's better is that you need not search for the word, instead simply type http://word.sc/your-word. With a simple look and tagging, networking features in place, it's sure to gain some attention.

Word source: A web 2.0 dictionary!

The social networking abilities have crawled into dictionaries too!
Word source is a new site providing definitions of words in web 2.0 format. What's better is that you need not search for the word, instead simply type http://word.sc/your-word. With a simple look and tagging, networking features in place, it's sure to gain some attention.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

RSS mash-up !

Positive reviews for Yahoo pipes has helped gaining attention for RSS mashup. A number of sites are providing good mashups of RSS feeds. xFruits is another step in that direction. With xFruits, you can do a lot more, like convert RSS to pdf. I hope to see lot more work in this direction!

Easy preview of links present on web-pages !

Being able to preview sites is an interesting technology. A number of good applications have been developed around this technology - noteworthy is Snap which has a considerable presence on the web. Another new development in this domain has been from Syntactica.
Their plug-in - iReader allows users to see a quick snap of the site by moving the mouse over it. The good thing is they show semantic content of the site. A good review is here.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Updates in my blog!

I have brought in a lot of updates in my blog in the last few hours. You can find a completely new look with different web-page, feed site and some ads!
Along with this, I have added a few widgets from myBlogLog. Only now do I realize the reasons for so much of attention that myBlogLog has always got. A search box has been added only to make things complete. Feedburner has been used for subscribing to feeds from my site. I have also added a link to subscribe using e-mail (for those who are still unaware of RSS readers). A few ads have been placed at places where they would be least disturbing to the readers. I would keep updating it in the next few days to ensure a tidy look of the interface. Let see how it goes!

Thursday, February 22, 2007

My new domain: http://www.kumar-anurag.com

For the last one hour or so, I was busy creating and setting up my own domain space.
With Google apps for your domain, it is a really simple process. The reason I got interested in doing so was because of the enterprise launch of Google apps. Web media is abuzz with the news of this new service google is providing. I hope to see a number of new features getting added up to the present services provided by google in a few days. By the way, my new domain is www.kumar-anurag.com. I have also set up my new blog address to blog.kumar-anurag.com. With this, I hope my web-page and blog won't shift any longer.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

A timely price cut!

I am going home today. Just noticed that air-tel is slashing its roaming charges today. I am really lucky this time!!

On yahoo pipes: part 2

Here is a tutorial/insight into what can be done with Yahoo Pipes. People have been working on effectively using RSS feeds and some good applications are quickly developing. With the attention that Yahoo Pipes has generated, I hope this trend to continue. This is only the start of something really interesting. Google may also be taking interest in this aspect, since it is an example of information assimilation after collection over web.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

On yahoo pipes

Yahoo pipes had got incredible online media focus when it launched. In spite of some initial hiccups with their bandwidth, they are working fine now. People are playing with the pipes and a huge list is already created. I found this method great, but it can still be made better with better filtering tools. I would love to have something which can take as input some feed and search over those links to take out the really relevant one. Currently, I take feed from digg which directs me to the digg site. I would like to create a filter to take these as input and give me as feed the actual site so that I can bypass the slow and heavy digg page. I hope such improvements are in the pipeline - coming either from yahoo or its competitors. By the way, after a long time I have seen something really good coming out of Yahoo directly and not through an acquisition (I am not sure if it is created by a team acquired by Yahoo).

Friday, February 09, 2007

Predicting the news trend

I just came across a news prediction site trendio.
Research in this area has been hot with sites like digg and reddit getting popular. It would be interesting to see how news prediction can be integrated with user generated news as is done by digg. As of now, I could not find anything in trendio which could keep me stuck to the site for some time, but maybe with time the site will evolve to give better and well formatted information.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Filtering the web with pipes.yahoo.com !

pipes.yahoo.com is alive! It tries to capture the philosophy very commonly used in UNIX. pipe is used for using data of one process by some other process. The same concept is used by yahoo Pipes -- it captures data on web and provides an interface to use it for some other purpose.
Ever since I started using RSS feeds and recently Google Reader, I have been overwhelmed by the amount of articles I get to read everyday. I would like to read a much smaller number and wondered if there can be some filter. With applications like pipe, filtering out the right news for me would become easy! Although I am finding the interface of yahoo pipes not very intuitive and fast, I hope it would solve some of my problems.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

An excellent video on web 2.0 by a prof.

Watch this nice video on how the web has emerged as it is today.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Buzz around new google products

Blogs have been abuzz with indications of google launching their online presentation tool soon. Not something which would have taken their competitors by surprise. The way they have been launching products, buying companies and hiring people shows that they indent to have a strong presence here.
Apart from a presentation tool and wiki, I hope they would come up with an online cabinet system for maintaining such files similar to what is already provided by jot. Moreover, they need to plug in some key features into their spreadsheet and docs to make them handy. Not allowing graphs in their spreadsheets irk me a lot. Their were small issues as well with copy-pasting jobs also the last time I checked it.