Kingsley 2.0

It looks like a bunch of my things on my blog are broken. I’m going to take this opportunity to upgrade to the new version of WordPress and then fix what’s broken.

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

My new Tamil blog: என் தமிழார்வ வலைப்பூ

Guy Kawasaki, who I had written about earlier, now has a blog. Guy was an evangelist for Apple and writes well about consumer evangelism. Via Scobleizer.  

Jensen Harris has a great real-world usability blog about the design of Microsoft Office 12.     

… Mencia wasn’t so "dee dee dee" himself! The problem with world is that there are too many people like Mencia and not enough people to eat them.

Pardon the mess.  

I’ve moved from categorizing my entries to tagging them using the Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin by Neato. It lets you do various cool things with tags, like the tag cloud you find on the sidebar. I’m still playing with it.

Update: There’s some documentation here.

I’m writing this post using Performancing for Firefox, a new extension that puts a full-fledged, split-pane multi-blog editor in your browser. It’s something I’ve wanted for a very long time, and something Flock failed to provide.

The entry for my home town, Chennai, has been featured on the main page of Wikipedia today. Thanks Ravages for the tip! Earlier, the Tamil language article was featured on the main page in April.

Google acquires stake in AOL: I think this is a good defensive play by Google to keep Microsoft and Yahoo out of the main value that AOL represents, which is it’s large user base bound together by network effects. But $1 billion for a 5% stake seems overvalued in my financially naive opinion.

..and convinced them to try graphical ads. Let’s all save some tylenol for when Google wakes up with a hangover.

AOL Coaxes Google to Try Busier Ads - New York Times

Beta is the new 1.0. The WSJ disses the trend of perennial betas:

Few people would fly on an airline that advertised its planes had untested engines, or swallow a pill from a drug company that admitted the side effects were unknown. Yet when it comes to software, it seems consumers are much more adventurous.

The article ignores a key factor - price as an indicator of quality. People wouldn’t be using Google News (which has remained in beta for 3 years), if it weren’t free. And obviously, the limited downside of (gasp!) trying a bad news source. Users satisfice. Most betas are a killer combination of free and adequate functionality. As more software moves towards the SaaS model, beta might actually become a desirable label, signalling continuous improvement.

I’m writing this test post from Flock.

Bill Burnham says Google may be using Google Base to harvest information fed through RSS feeds. Google Base is a new service that lets you list a variety of items including recipes, wanted ads and vehicles. Burnham thinks that Google designed this software not for human use, but as an automated way to build structured data from RSS feeds.

I don’t see how that approach will filter out the avalanche of spam it would have to cope with. Google already has enough trouble with spam without making it easier to put structured, high volume spam into it’s indexes.

The face recognizing photo service I talked about earlier, Riya, may be bought out by Google according to Niall Kennedy and Om Malik. If true, it could mean a Google photos offering, probably integrated with their image search.

From 10 Ways to Please Us, the Customers - New York Times

IX. Thou shalt not hog the power strip. If a power cord absolutely must incorporate one of those big black transformer bricks, how about putting it in the middle of the cord? When the transformer brick is at the prong end, it hogs three slots on our power strips or both outlets on the wall, and that’s just greedy.

Can I get an autographed, stone tablet edition please?

An interesting interview with Guy Kawasaki about user evangelism. Some home-grown wisdom about why some users evangelize products and how can you encourage them. Guy looks past the whole blogging & social networks buzzword orgy (which he does think will lead to Bubble 2.0), and into the real drivers of consumer exuberance - product design, casting a wide net (not speaking to a narrow target audience) and keeping a humble, open mind.