I stay seated behind closed doors and barricaded windows that don't even allow light and wind to seep in without permission... Is it raining outside... How do I know... Who will tell me...


Thanks Gmail!

Truth to say, I thoroughly enjoyed Prabhakar Raghavan's talk at the Leela. The talk started off with some facts about what and how users search on the web; delved into the complexities of understanding and deducing the users' needs; and few details on how the monetisation engine has proceeded over the years. The insights offered were quite delightful. The videos of the talk are available on the BigThinkers events page.

And, oh yeah! The video of the QA session is also available. :-)

This year's Yahoo's Bigthinkers India Series kicks off today. The talk is on hard science problems at the core of web search, by Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Labs. The event is going to be held at the Leela Palace.

An abstract -

Web search is undergoing an evolution from high-precision document retrieval for keyword queries, to fulfilling the task implicit in a user's search. We review examples of this in major search engines, then survey the underlying hard science problems both in computer science and in the social sciences.

More info on the event can be found here. I attended Andrei Broder's talk on Computational Advertising last year; and I sincerely hope this time round it turns out to be better than that. I mean, the talk was good and enriching. But it was the hour-long Q&A session that actually killed me. Some of the questions were so unwarranted that Andrei must have wanted to catch a flight back to Silicon Valley right that moment. Am keeping my fingers crossed this time.

If any of you are attending too, then give me a hoot. We will catch up at the coffee bar while the juveniles fire their questions!

Abhishek pointed me to an interesting link. It was for driving directions on google maps from Seattle to Honalulu; right across the Pacific ocean. The amount of data they have; and the ways they find to crunch it. These guys never cease to amaze me.

Other than that, what I really liked is this (click on the image for a bigger picture) -


Apart turning left on this road and turning right on that; google recommends you to kayak 4000 odd kms across the Pacific. Given that it estimates about 14 days and 6 hours for you to reach your destination; I would like to believe the 14 days are for kayaking itself, even for a guy in supreme fitness like me.

If the image appears blurred, then you can catch the action here. Maybe you could brave yourself to walk. You can't escape the kayaking though even then. :o)

[quote]
A lot of people I followed seemed to be obsessed with having as many followers as possible. In fact, there seems to be a strategy (I credit Leigh Duncan-Durst - @livepath for this word) called "Twitchers" – people who follow you, so you would follow them, and they would unfollow you – all in an effort to beef up their follower numbers. This reminds me of creepy people from high school who were devoting their lives to a popularity contest.
[/quote]

Alan Weiss is right in a way. Most of the people on social networks are there for the fame quotient. In the case of orkut, how many fans and testimonials do you have? How do you rank in the cool and trust meter? How many scraps do you get? Do you feature frequently in your friends' feed?

Having said that, it is indeed phenomenal about the amount of time that people spend on social networks, and live by them. I had setup my birthday on orkut two years back; and received tons of wishes. I had it removed last year; and only received a handful. :-D

My good friend Vinod had some choice things to say about his first experience with orkut. I will do a favor on your heart by not narrating it here. My good friend Nithin has this thing about bloggers. I will do your heart a favor there too. Or maybe not.

In the meantime, if you would like to follow my blogs be informed when there's a new post, you can do so by registering here and there.