Aravind’s Blog

Got a chance to view Robert Scoble’s video on MSFT’s upcoming ‘Virtual Earth’ service. Its a nice & innovative way of marketing - putting the members of the development team on Scoble’s amateurish camera for an interview. The guys who are developing the Virtual Earth demoed some pretty cool features of the service. One thing I couldn’t understand is how helpful it will be for a competitor like Google to have such a preview put on a platter & given to them.

But this didn’t stop me from thinking how a video with our own development teams would look like! How about showing the screens of the upcoming MS Exchange monitoring in OpManager or the full integration of Active Directory into ServiceDesk Plus which would allow single sign-on? We do have some screenshots of the upcoming features posted in OpManager Lounge’s Preview section but a video interview far surpasses them all.

The month of May, in this part of the world can be too hot. With temperatures hovering around 105 degrees, the OpManager team had a welcome break in the form of a 3 day trip to Ooty, the ‘Queen of Hillstations’.

Strictly speaking we just passed through Ooty. Our place of stay was actually Kurodha, a tiny village which had just 4 buildings. What follows below is a photo blog sort of with bylines.

Last week should have definitely caused Google some blushes. First, the Adwords & Adsense accounts across the world showed no clicks for more than half a day. Then the famed Google’s Search page got sort of hijacked & typing google.com lead you to a page named SoGo Search. Google says it was some DNS problem & the site itself wasn’t hacked. The blogosphere was abuzz with this news and GigaOm had this to report.

The problem was set right within minutes but then it was Google. What if the same happened to your website? Will you come to know of this anomaly as it happens? OpManager, our network monitoring software has got this URL monitoring feature which not only checks whether a URL is up or down but even searches for a specific text on the page. Visit the OpManager site and know more of this sleek networking tool.

You familiar with OpManager? We still have news. Visit the newly launched OpManager Lounge, the cool place where you can interact with the OpManager development team and other OpManager users.

More than 50 years after his passing, Gandhi’s views still continue to influence India as well as the world. Turning the pages of ‘The Hindu’ last Saturday, found a picture of the Japanese PM holding on to a banner listing the ‘Seven Social Sins’ as told by the Mahatma in ‘Young India’. The list here :

Politics without Principle

Wealth without Work

Pleasure without Conscience

Knowledge without Character

Commerce without Morality

Science without Humanity

Worship without Sacrifice

Have some vague remembrances of reading the great man’s autobiography a few years ago. Coming across such news makes me want to read more of this great man & his teachings.

Yahoo Photoes was the only place I’d used to share pics of me to my family & friends. Flickr seems to be a phenomenon. No wondr (oops) that Yahoo! acquird (is flickr going to change the way words are spelt?) them last February.

In addition to digital photo sharing, what makes them stand apart is the other web services that they offer. When I signed up, was surprised to see that Flickr had also created an email account for me. You can post photoes to blogs and add notes/comments to your photoes.

More about Flickr. Some snaps in Flickr which I found interesting. And, a competitor for Flickr.

Blogs, podcasts and now flickr photoes. Business Week in its current issue’s cover story had mentioned all three togethr. No doubt they have created a splash. What next?

With text blogs (is it already on its way of becoming a retronym?) & audio podcasts becoming so popular, can video be far behind? There’s a growing community of video bloggers who either add video to their text blogs or have their blog entries themselves as recorded videos.

According to the wikipedia article here, video blogs, vblogs, v-blogs or vogs became famous on the aftermath of the tsunami that struck Asia. With the news that Google will be going into hosting and searching videos, there’s even more interest shown on this topic than ever before.

If you’ve started using a computer only from the late 90s like me, this question must have risen to you at some point of time. Well, seems there was (is) a B drive available. Its meant for the good old 5-1/4 inch floppy disk. Google got me this answer.

You keep bouncing against these two words pretty often these days, right? With so much hype around, I’m betting on podcast becoming the word of this year (like blog became in 2004)

A podcast is similar to a blog post. While a blog is a text message, a podcast is a mp3 recording of someone’s voice. Podcasters just record their random thoughts & make these recordings (podcasts) available on the web. These podcasts can then be downloaded and listened to in iPods, iPod like devices or on PCs. Rapid evolvement of RSS feed technology & fast sales of iPods/mp3 players have made podcasts THE happening thing.

Two names come up when talking about the origins of the word podcasting. Dannie Gregoire, who coined the term podcasting & Adam Curry, who made it popular. I just listened to a podcast for the first time - that of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. Actually, its nothing got to do with coding, as he asserts here.

For more about podcasting, refer to this wikipedia article. And a nice FAQ on the topic here.

Let me start right away. Ever wondered who first uttered the word ‘blog’? Here’s the story.

Jorn Barger is credited with the first use of the word Web log or Weblog. That was in December 1997. Here’s an archived link to Barger’s Robot Wisdom page then.

It took 15 more months for Peter Merholz to shorten weblog to blog. The oldest page that webarchive could come up with is on April 28, 1999 and is available here

Some interesting links on the subject :

http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

http://peterme.com/archives/00000205.html