42 Quirks

Anybody know what’s special about today?

Yeah, a Wednesday, but not just any wednesday, Today also happens to be the International Quirkyalone Day!

Erm, ohh, and yes, also St. Valentine’s day…

Sasha Cagen the author of “Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics” conceptualised a personality type termed a Quirkyalone. In Sasha’s words:

Quirkyalones are people who resist the tyranny of coupledom. Oddly enough, we quirkyalones also tend to be romantics.

Odd, eh? Well, read on, there’s more!!

Quirkyalones (QAs, henceforth) are not anti-love or anti dating, they are basically normal people who ‘resist the tyranny of coupledom.’ A QA generally enjoys solitude and sometimes even craves it. But that does NOT mean a QA is a loner. In fact, its just the opposite. Having spent so much time in social company, QAs need time to ingest, introspect and recharge for the next round of interactions.

If you think this thing is a one-off occurence, think again. This is a movement that has spawned an entire breed of Quirkyalones, and what do you know, it will be four years strong this year. The IQD (International Quirkyalone Day) has been celebrated with much fan-fare across different parts of the world.

Head over to Quirkyalone, for more details. Some of you might even want to try this quiz:

How Quirkyalone are you?

Here’s what I got:

Your score was 117. Very quirkyalone:
Relatives may give you quizzical looks, and so may friends, but you know in your heart of hearts that you are following your inner voice. Though you may not be romancing a single person, you are romancing the world. Celebrate your freedom on National Quirkyalone Day, February 14th!

w00t!! I am lovin’ it!! [:D]

Do let me know how yours turns out. Post your score in the comments section. Happy Quirkyalone Day!!

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RSS feeds have dramatically changed the way we consume content online. Over the course of time, I have come to subscribe to 90+ feeds of which I manage to read about 20 of them completely.

If there’s one debate that keeps raging across the blogosphere, off and on, it has to be about RSS feeds. Even now, I hear occasional raves and rants about how partial text feeds are irritating and nonsensical, and all that.

What if (this may be a very silly what-if) the choice were left to the user?

What if I as a reader could decide whether I wanted a Partial-Text, Full-Text or Headlines only feed for a given site?

For instance, I’d prefer to have a Headline-only feed for heavy output websites like Slashdot and ZDNet while I’d prefer a full-text feed for sporadically updating sites, like friend blogs.

Alternatively, this can be achieved from the client-side itself, i.e. within the RSS reader. To me, it makes sense to open the feed in three stages:

Headlines >> Partial Text (Excerpt*) >> Full Text

In either of the cases, the publisher must provide a full-text feed.

Of the few readers that I have tried and tested, Google Reader comes close, offering Expanded and Reading views. Combined with keyboard shortcuts, these make for an amazing experience.

At the end of the day, reading RSS feeds is nothing but consuming content, and right now, there are only so many ways to do it.

I have a sneaky suspicion, things will be different soon.

(*caveat: I would define an excerpt as a paragraph or two, having a total of about 5-7 lines at least)

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If you are getting some dirty thoughts in your head, well…

Don’t reel them in. You are pretty close. The knobs in the title refers exactly to the knobs you are thinking of. Or at least the ones I presume you are thinking of.

On the occasion of World Aids day (December 1st, for the blank stares) WebChutney, (an Indian full service consultancy that delivers innovative, interactive marketing solutions) came up with a really innovative idea to spread HIV/AIDS awareness.

Difficult in conception, simple in execution. Go ahead, click the image and “Cap the knobs“.
My best in a few times that I attempted was 21 seconds. Do let me know how you fared.

Ah, did I mention it was probably NSFW - Not Safe For Work? Unless you like to argue about it being educational and all that…

Spread the word, is what I’d say. Every little bit helps and heck, this is info-tainment, right? Or something like that…

Among other news:

1. I have added a small sidebar widget called “Read These Yet?” to each post. What this snappy li’l widget does is display related entries calculated according to a certain algorithm. Thanks a ton to the developers Alex@w-a-s-a-b-i and Jonas Israelsson
   
2. This website will see a lot more of template changes. But don’t worry, most of it will happen, while you guys aren’t looking. So rest easy on that one.
3. I will also add a shoutbox soon. Am currently evaluating the possibilities available out there on the web.
4. If there’s anything else you guys think is missing on the site. do let me know, via the comments or by mailing me. I’ll see if I can scrounge it up.

Keep visiting, fellas. And, spread the word, if you can…

How many times have you had people sending you invitational eMails saying, “Try this cool site I found!” or “This is an amazing site!” or “You’ll absolutely love this one!” or lines to that effect?

Too many, I suspect.

Web 2.0 and the concept of User Generated Content has had the world in a tizzy for quite a while now. Innovative ideas and domain name registrations seem to go hand in hand. The people riding the waves of the Internet never had it so good. New services are introduced every day and competition is building up before you can say, “Watch out!”

As the Internet grows, as the flood of ideas increases, so will the number of identities. The number of services we use though, will continue to remain the same, maybe a few additions here and there.

Why? Because we are all loyalists to the core. We all have a list of our favorite sites that we visit regularly and we rarely visit the competition. There are innumerable excuses for this loyalty ranging from the old ‘comfort zone’, to the very latest ’swanky look’, and the geeky ‘amazing feature-set.’

Truth is, we cannot handle multiple identities.

Having multiple identities is similar to owning two or more cell-phones. The greater the number of phones, the greater the interruption. Each cell-phone contributes an identity (in the vaguest sense of the word). Each eMail address is an identity that we have created for ourself on the WWW. Each profile on a social network is an identity that we maintain.

The number of eMails in your inbox is a fair indicator of the number of identities you have on the Web. And those of us, who are actively tracking the development of the collaborative Web, must have emails running into hundreds.

One idea would be to have a single secure identity that will cater to logins all across the internet. If such an idea were ever to gather support, it would have some interesting implications:

Naturally, this would imply a unique database to cater to all our identities across the web. But who should get the right to create and maintain such a database? The huge set of meta-data that would result would be a statistician’s dream come true! The flip-side of this is obviously the large ‘corporations’ that would give a few arms and legs (or even take a few) to get a crack at this data. (Ok, so I am a li’l partial to scientific research…)

What could be better than acquiring this data?

Having the data on your own servers! MyOpenID, Windows LiveID, Google Account Authentication, are a few names in this context. This probably explains why there is an intense competition between the Big Three and a few other key players.

If this sounds fairly Orwellian and reminds you of “1984” and Big Brother, you are probably right. :o)

The virtual world we live in, closely resembles the Orwellian 1984. Recent cases (Digg v/s Netscape, for instance) indicate as much. Search Engines indexing our content have the power to convey them to the faceless ‘Thought police.’ We have rich-sounding names like User Generated Content and Long Tail. And we have a faceless Big Brother who ‘purportedly’ keeps everything in check.

Makes you wonder: was Orwell right all along?

Technorati Tags: identity, web, orwell, 1984

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