Ask.com finally rolled out it’s search engine for Blogs and joined the race with Technorati, Feedster, Sphere, Google, PubSub, Yahoo and at least 10 other upcoming search services for blogs. While Feedster’s demise has been predicted by Jeremy Z., Ask.com’s offering is a nice refresh.
There are actually two separate announcements — Ask.com Blog search and enhancement of Bloglines’. Some obvious enhancements on Bloglines’ search interface, including the ability to view the full posts.
Ask.com’s Blog Search Engine: Never too late for the fight
June 3rd, 2006Yahoo Map Bug: Displays Lat-Long in starting location
June 3rd, 2006Was planning to go from somewhere to somewhere using Yahoo Maps and managed to capture an interesting bug where Yahoo Map replaces the starting location with latitude and longitude.
Yes, I still use Yahoo Maps and that too the classical version — I only use the satellite imagery when I need to look at the top of the buildings.:D)
In case, you happen to be from Yahoo Maps developer group and still wondering, drop me a comment and I’ll let you know the exact date and time of this occurence.
Tag: Yahoo Maps
Just wanted to know are you Orkut?
June 1st, 2006… No, I’m LinkedIn!
Web2.0: Symantec CTO validates spending and surge
May 14th, 2006In a keynote at Symantec’s annual user conference, Ajei Gopal presented some key data points to validate the impending surge in tech spending. According to him, the IT sector as a whole is on the brink of a major innovation and spending cycle. He also presented a chart showing the IT-investments-to-GDP ratio growth overlaid with the advancements in computing and echoed the unabated progress in hardware; commoditization of memory, disk, CPU devices have reduced the prices by factor of thousands with net increase in ROI.
If this is an indicator of change, we are also seeing spurt in funding activity which is a strong supplementing signal.
This is also changing the rules of entrepreneurship and the startup culture, with incubators like “Y Combinator” seeding companies for as little as $6,000 while trying to replicate the success of Flickr and del.icio.us (both got acquired by Yahoo); wherein Google is saying that the whole valley is the research lab and then acquiring companies for a little change.
Tags: Web 2.0, Symantec
If I’m flying, I’m in Second Life: Joining Second Life as a Hindi Instructor
May 8th, 2006Joined the Second Life crowd over the weekend as “TuFan Till”. Thinking of something unique to do there — I thought it would be a good idea to teach Hindi to the Second Life community. I already have a request :D) from a citizen! Let’s see if I could spend 30 minutes over the weekend teaching the “pleasantries” atleast; between tonnes of other stuff I have going on.
Second Life has a great potential as a platform or an OS (as Scobel calls it). Overall, I see lot of innovative stuff which could be done there (Lot of light bulbs glowing in my head, right now!).
Tags: Second life, Hindi
Browser Marketshare
May 4th, 2006Fred Wilson is reporting about the growing market share of FireFox.
Good to know that best of the breed browsers are controlling around 95% of the market. These are the browsers which support XMLHttpRequest, L1 DOM, CSS2 (in parts) and XHTML. The developer community should blindly remove any code which shows courtesy to the remaining 5% browsers and let the nasty javascript errors be visible so that the users actually upgrade.
Sigh of relief! Come IE 7, it wil probably take away the remaining 1.7% marketshare which Netscape still commands.
Myspace.com CEO Chris DeWolfe’s no fluff profile in LinkedIn
April 27th, 2006Here’s a little nugget I found on LinkedIn. Didn’t realize Chris is just 2 degrees away. No fluff, amazing!
Summary:
I have started and/or managed several Business to Consumer Internet businesses. I have an MBA from USC.
I’m looking to meet anyone who had ideas how they can work with MySpace.com.
Specialties:
Have been involved with Internet companies that have had an ad sales component for last 6 years.
Grassroots geekism in India
April 18th, 2006Just saw this story coming across from Digg & Slashdot (thanks for the link, Vicente). Kalyan Verma took this picture of a bus which has a Firefox logo painted all over it 😀
The naysayers on slashdot are calling foul — probably they don’t know the photoshop too well. Here is the link
Microsoft Launches Annual Awards for Indian Language Blogs
April 15th, 2006
Trophies, Gift vouchers, watches, and other goodies are being given away. Interesting way to make inroads. Now, I need to order my Hindi keyboard.