Vinu’s Online Cloud

Where ever you are around the world here are my best wishes to you, your family and the cool friends that surround you and make this wonderful place a worthwhile place to live in! Appreciate every moment that you live 8-).
May the ‘FORCE‘ be with you.

Take care and Have a nice New Years’ Eve. Would love to hear how you spent it!
Sayonara, cya in the next year.

My online life is slightly ‘disorganized’ and given the rate at which the blogsphere is exploding in terms of content and people - I feel the desperate need, I repeat, ‘desperate‘ need to get organize. Of course, life itself goes through with periods of organization and disorganization but the online life very soon reels out of control. I ‘predict’ people in future will pay to see to that its slightly organized - on the lines of an ‘online’ maid! May be algorithms or programs will do the job but I bet we will use such features in the near future … two or three years may be? Solution: Tags? Well Yes and No …
Tags start out to be a way of isolating and organising in a very non-linear way. But soon you will learn that it has its own pros and cons. Tags are a very nice way to isolate the Signal from the Noise in a particular html page, blog or even flickr photostream. And Tag clouds (example and how to) give you the real picture on what this are more important of those tags!

If you are an early adopter and understand ‘tags’ very well here are two good posts ‘Tagging is expensive‘ and ‘The Year in Tags‘

Check out ‘ my del.icio.us ‘ tags (my only bookmark site!) and ‘my flickr ‘ tags. You can see where most of the snaps in Flickr is coming from the tag cloud for the entire ‘flickr site‘. If you have already followed the links I have given then you will feel even Blogs will need tags but right now I am using categories (and sub categories!) as tagging is very dicey.

The main problem I face with tagging with delicious tagging is that one has to be ’slightly’ disorganized and slowly you will see the number of tags increasing. Now, if you are really going to use the tags for bookmarks (the main point of the site) then you need to understand how to retrieve it too!

If there are too many tags then you either need to ‘tag’ the tags or search the ‘tags’ (ha ha wink and kaboodle are already doing it!)  The problem with flickr tags - its time consuming (I am lazy) and I want to conceal my online snaps in a way! if I tag everything then all google and technorati have to do is to get a picture of some aspect of my life is to archive the tags. Personally I know in what range the pics come and hence I tag here and there. A small amount of ‘privacy’ in a myraid of around close to 5000 pics I have online.

In short the things I need to clean up these soon are:
- my ‘flagged’ or ’starred’ most of the 389 mails on gmail
(google folks should have a 1, 2, 3 rating or a color gradient based starring soon!)
- The blogs I am subscribed too! I am definitely spending or sometimes wasting time online
- my del.icio.us tags (which is mostly not going to happen … ha ha)
- my flickr tags (will think twice)
- categories of my wordpress blog (I just did - check it out on to you left. I have started using sub categories)

Do you know any online maid as we Indians are used to getting work done cheaply! A nice place for ‘personalized’ outsourcing shall we say?? ahem!

Life has always been fast paced in Bombay (or Mumbai as it is known now).

I went to Mood Indigo yesterday, a cultural festival organized every year by IIT Bombay. And I did carry my camera with me (as always :-o). Noticed two key things, even the ’service’ industry is finally catching up its pace with the people in the city. Food and work have become on the go. Some of them just aping western american trends and some due to needs and adoption indegeniously! More pics from my brief stay a Mood I (as it is known commonly). But believe me, the spirit and the crowd at Saarang (its coming up on Jan 06) my alumni’s i.e IIT Madras’s cul fest is far too good

Food on the Go - Indigo!!

Shoe Polish and even child labour on the go