smritiweb.com

The dullest blog in the world

This blog is the dullest blog in the world. You should check it out:

Tidying some pencils (dull, March 16)
Some pencils were scattered around on my desk. I picked them up one by one. I placed the pencils in the drawer which I use to store pencils.

Opening a cupboard door (dull, October 17)
There was a cupboard in the corner of the room. I reached out my hand and gripped the door handle. I pulled the door towards me, thereby opening the cupboard.

Found: here. See full article.

Bloggers are happier - feel bloggers

ABCnews is reporting on a study which says that after a couple of months of regular blogging bloggers feel they have a better social life than non-bloggers. Excerpt:

The research, from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found after two months of regular blogging, people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog.

[...]

Bloggers reported a greater sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people and feeling more confident they could rely on others for help.

All respondents, whether or not they blogged, reported feeling less anxious, depressed and stressed after two months of online social networking.

Blogging is good for your (perceived?) social life. And online social networks are good for your mental health. Cool. (Looks like the bloggers in question hadn’t started receiving comments from users yet!)

See full article (via techcrunch)

Komli offers Rs. 2,00,000 for your algorithm

Pune based startup Komli (which recently introduced the very intriguing service PubMatic) has just announced an algorithm contest, with 2 Lakh Rupees as the prize. It’s certainly a very innovative way to get a solution to your business problems, and potential recruits too.

Details:

Komli lives in the world of online advertising, and online advertising is rife with opportunity with complex algorithms based on cutting edge topics such as machine learning, data mining, graph theory, etc. Online advertising is growing at a very fast pace, and the number of variables affecting the performance of an online ad has been growing at an even faster pace. Komli is devising methods for maximizing the yield of online advertising using advanced statistical machine learning methods over large-scale systems. This is a very interesting and complex algorithm problem.

Komli is currently using a set of algorithms for maximizing the yield of online ads, collectively called ‘Yin-Yang’. There are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to Yin-Yang that have yet to be tried. Komli is interested in determining if any of these alternative approaches can beat Yin-Yang by making better predictions.

Komli will provide participants with anonymous ad impression data and a prediction accuracy bar that is 50% better than what Yin-Yang can do on the same training data set. Participants’ solutions will be judged by ‘Time complexity’ and ‘Space complexity’ criteria. The participant whose solution works best will receive Rs. 2,00,000, bragging rights and an opportunity to work with Komli. Of course, participants have to share their method and code with Komli. Eager participants can signup for the contest by filling the form on the left.

See full article. Mukul who runs engineering for Komli is a friend of mine, and I had recently talked to him about their technology. I found it to be extremely interesting and it sounded quite challenging.

Book-Reading Meme

My blog is not really a blog. More than anything else, it is a glorified bookmarks list. My friend Deepa chided me once that this blog does not really give any insight into the real me - i.e. what my opinions are, what I stand for, etc. A few days back, Venkat tagged me with a book-reading blog-meme which gives me the opportunity (excuse?) to go all I-me-myself on you. So here goes:

Books that changed your life – As a kid, instead of studying, I would read Ya. Perelman’s books: Physics for Entertainment, Figures for Fun, and a book on algebra whose name I forget. Interestingly, as a result, I ended up doing really well in my exams without really studying for them. I must be one of the few people who ended up high up in the IIT-JEE rankings without ever having read Resnick and Halliday or any of the other bibles of cracking JEE.

Even today, whenever any kid I know shows some interest in Physics or Maths, I give them a set of these four books.

Books you’ve read more than once – Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For a few years, I would keep this by my bedside, and just before fallling asleep, I would open a random page and start reading. A great combination of humor and insight.

Book you would take to a deserted island – A notebook. I don’t really see myself reading some book over and over and over again on a deserted island. I could however spend lots of time writing things.

Book that made you laugh – Jerry Seinfeld’s SeinLanguage. Another great combination of humor and insight, this time in the most trivial things. All done in tiny bite-sized chunks that are easily digested.

And of course, P.G. Wodehouse, especially the Jeeves series, definitely needs to be here. And Mark Twain, especially his short stories.

Book that made you cry want to kill yourself – I don’t really get depressed from reading books. But there were some that did make me cry. The one I really remember is Kramer vs. Kramer. But that was a while back. More recently, I think I’ve just stayed away from books that might have had a deep emotional impact. Not sure why.

Book you wish you had written – This doesn’t really match my style of thinking. When I read a good book, I don’t go “I wish I could write like this”. So nothing in this category for me.

Book(s) you wish had never been written – I wish 99% of Atlas Shrugged had never been written. I do find the central argument of the book interesting, but having to wade through the 1000+ pages of one-dimensional characters, repetitititive repetitions of the same argument over and over and over again, and a fairly silly plot, is just torture. Nobody should have to read that. It would be much better as a short story.

Book(s) you’re currently reading – Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (thanks Ganesh). Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. This was a rather eye-opening experience for me - since I don’t have any background in arts or literature (being a science and math person all through) I was completely unaware of how writers use language to achieve the impact they want to. And this book helped me start looking in the right places.

Book you’ve been meaning to read – Outline Of History by H.G. Wells. Another topic that I hated while I was in school, but now find very interesting.

Book you have been meaning to finish - J.A.B. van Buitenen’s Mahabharata series. It is an (incomplete) unabridged translation of the Mahabharata. I read the first couple of volumes and found them fascinating. The unabridged version has some really cool things that are missing from the shorter versions like C. Rajagopalachari’s book (which I love by the way). You get a real feel for why Krishna is so godly until you read his decimation of an opponent’s argument in full unabridged glory. But it’s just too long, and parts (especially the ones that deal with ancestry and lineage) are very boring. Someday…

And now I tag Paul, Rujuta, and Krish Ashok.

Rationality and the English Language

Eliezer Yudkowsky over at Overcoming Bias has a great article on the difference between the meaning of some text and the impact it has. Excerpts:

Some rationalists will try to analyze a misleading phrase, try to see if there might possibly be anything meaningful to it, try to construct a logical interpretation. They will be charitable, give the author the benefit of the doubt. Authors, on the other hand, are trained not to give themselves the benefit of the doubt. Whatever the audience thinks you said is what you said, whether you meant to say it or not; you can’t argue with the audience no matter how clever your justifications.

A writer knows that readers will not stop for a minute to think. A fictional experience is a continuous stream of first impressions. A writer-rationalist pays attention to the experience words create. If you are evaluating the public rationality of a statement, and you analyze the words deliberatively, rephrasing propositions, trying out different meanings, searching for nuggets of truthiness, then you’re losing track of the first impression - what the audience sees, or rather feels.

A novelist would notice the screaming wrongness of “The subjects were administered Progenitorivox.” What life is here for a reader to live? This sentence creates a distant feeling of authoritativeness, and that’s all - the only experience is the feeling of being told something reliable. A novelist would see nouns too abstract to show what actually happened - the postdoc with the bottle in his hand, trying to look stern; the student listening with a nervous grin.

See full article.

How to improve your Google ranking

Although there is a lot of information on the internet on this topic, I found this article to be particularly interesting, since it did mention techniques that I hadn’t heard of earlier, and which seem quite reasonable and useful. For example:

When I started work on Aerobed they only had a handful of links, so I had some serious link building to do. After looking at their competitor’s backlinks using a link command on yahoo “linkdomain:www.domain.com –site:www.domain.com”, I set a target of 2,000 backlinks. Here is the 6 point plan I adopted:

1. Link mining following by 300 email requests – This was fairly straightforward, I simply looked at the backlinks of their top 15 competitors. Then email any suitable websites with personalised email, which either suggested Aerobed.co.uk as a suitable site for their resources page, or offered a small payment for a link. Below is a sample email:

See full article. Worth reading if you have a website and want to improve its ranking.

How to get (old) Media Publicity for your blog

Hobbit Hob from has an interesting article on the IndiaPRBlog where he gives ideas on how you can get some publicity for your blog or for yourself in the old media (newspapers, etc). I obviously have no experience with this myself, but it does appear to be useful advice. Also, what I do know is that many people would never even consider something like this, basically because it appears to be too difficult, or out of their league. But these are fairly easy to achieve if you take time to do your homework and take a disciplined approach.

For bloggers who are engaged in blogging as a profession or are aiming to build up a high profile through blogging, getting covered in the traditional media can be the next big achievement after making a presence in the blogosphere and among the blogging community.

[...]
It’s difficult but not impossible to achieve. With an understanding of how the media works, bloggers can do their own PR and chart out a plan for their own media-image building exercises.

Here are the top 5 steps that bloggers need to take.

Link. (found on DesiCritics.)

Kurt Vonnegut’s tips on writing

Wikipedia’s page on Kurt Vonnegut lists his eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I especially like 3, 6 and 7.

This blog post tries to apply the same principles to blogging. It takes each of the above points and then expounds on how that can help you with your blog post.

Vonnegut also has a longer write-up on How to write with style. That is also a great read.

The complete A-list of the Indian Blogosphere

Gyaan Sutra has painstakingly created a complete A-list of the Indian Blogosphere. It is rather useful, because I was unable to find any other place which gives a nice list of the top Indian blogs. Alexa does provide a list of top websites visited by people in India, but that is not the same (but did you know that Orkut is #2?).

Here’s the top 10:

01. 006,998 Digital Inspiration
02. 007,732 IndianPad
03. 013,154 Quick Online Tips
04. 030,529 Tech Buzz
05. 036,136 Content Sutra
06. 045,388 Tech Whack
07. 051,848 AlooTechie
08. 051,900 Sepia Mutiny
09. 057,602 Kamat
10. 075,448 Anil Dash

And he goes up to 80.  See the full list - it’s quite interesting.

Blogging using clipmakrs

Clipmarks is a neat firefox/internet explorer addon which allows you to essentially cut-n-paste into your blog one or more chunks of content from any webpage with a single click. Very easy to use. For example, in this post I have clipped descriptions of clipmarks’ features from their website.

clipped from clipmarks.com Clip-to-Blog You can now post clips directly to your blog, with or without saving it to clipmarks.com. Supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal and Vox. Clip-to-Email You can now email what you clip without saving it first.