Open Book

Sharing your knowledge and expertise online using Squidoo

2008-03-16T20:15:00.003+08:00

These days, there are so many ways for people to take their thoughts online and share their views to anyone in the world. Blogs, websites, micro-blogs (e.g. Twitter), wikis, and more give anyone who care to take the time to learn, the means to put their thoughts online. But what if setting up a blog or a website is just too much for you? How do you contribute knowledge to the world out there? Enter Squidoo.

The founder of Squidoo, Seth Godin, once said that "Everyone is an expert on something". Squidoo was conceived to make it easy for anyone to share their knowledge and expertise online. In Squidoo, individual pieces of knowledge or topics are called lenses. People who contribute these knowledge or lenses are called lens masters. There could be more than one lens on a particular topic or subject, however, conceptually Squidoo encourages diversity of perspectives; duplication is therefore not necessarily a bad thing.

In an earlier blog post I talked about creating your very own personal knowledge management system. By organising your personal knowledge centrally using GMail, you will be able to quickly create and recall things that you know. The question is, how do you share your knowledge and expertise with the world? Well, the easiest and fastest way for the ordinary internet user is to use Squidoo. By organising what you know into single coherent chunks, you can use Squidoo to implement and create these chunks of knowledge in the form of Squidoo lens. If you need to know how to create Squidoo lenses, follow this link to Squidoo 101, a step-by-step guide to organising and sharing expertise using Squidoo. Try it!

Trying out BlogRush

2007-09-27T18:15:00.000+08:00

This is yet another blog referral scheme called BlogRush. I have just activated BlogRush for my blog and will be monitoring its effectiveness over the next few weeks. Go ahead and try it and do let me know how it goes for you.

Harvesting information from the web for your personal GMail knowledge base

2007-09-10T23:54:00.000+08:00

Objective

The purpose of this post is to examine how to gather information into your personal Gmail knowledge base using today's popular web2.0 social networking sites; namely Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and reddit.

Background

With the advent of web2.0 and the explosion of information in the internet today, many of us operate in constant information-overload mode, turning us into news junkies. As they say, too much of a good thing is bad for you. So how then do we sieve through the entire mass of information that the internet offers to find what we need? It was in this environment that search engines were born. Today search engines such as Google allow us to do keyword searches which still often yield large result sets for us to wade through, of course sorted by relevance or pagerank, which does help somewhat; Google does this using mathematical algorithms.

However, with the coming of the social network or community based web2.0 sites, we now have community or human based ratings which serve to deliver webpages to us based on our preferences. So which of these sites should we use? Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, or reddit?

Analysis and Comparison

First, we really need to sit down and understand our own needs. Are we merely wanting to keep updated with the latest happenings via news? Or are we more interested in studying specific topics and concepts. In the former, timing is important because news become less relevant overtime. In the latter, content is more important than the time in which the information was first made available. Or perhaps we need a combination of both concepts in our lives; we want some news in order to be relevant, and we also need to target specific information for our own personal or work needs. Digg and Reddit are more socially driven news and content sites, whereas StumbleUpon and del.icio.us succeeds more in delivering targetted and specific content.

The need for news

Many of us are news junkies eventhough we might not admit it. We crave for news. With Digg and Reddit, we can specify the broad categories of news that we would like to receive. The community then finds and submits those news in the form of links and comments to websites, blogs, or other materials. The rest of the social compact then votes which news are more "worthy" or "newsy" within the various categories. Reddit even allows users to vote down the news articles. Digg on the other hand allows the community to "bury" some of the more irrelevant news. At the end of the day, what users get are news that float to the top of the heap; these are news that the social network deem relevant and worthy through the mechanism of "digging" or voting. As users, we then cast our own votes for these news, at the same time Digg and Reddit remember the news items that we just voted for; at some later stage we can then come back to review or study those items that we voted for, or we may use RSS feeds to push these news items into our personal knowledge base.

Now if we participate fully in the Digg and Reddit communities, we should also be good citizens of these sites by giving accurate and relevant reviews or comments about the news items that we voted for. In so doing, we are also leaving for ourselves comments that are going to be useful for us as well at some later stage. If you have read my previous post on using Yahoo Alerts to feed information into your personalised Gmail knowledge base (KB) system, then all we need to do is to use the news RSS feeds from Digg and Reddit to pump our selected news into our KB. We can then use the Gmail search features to mine our news for nuggets of information as and when we need the information. Super isn't it!

The relevance of targeted information

StumbleUpon and del.icio.us are more successful at delivering directly relevant content to us and serving up news. With StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, we have the options of specifying in slightly more detailed form what our preferences are for information that we wish to consume. In StumbleUpon, users are directed to websites which are more relevant to their interests and those of their network of friends. The more you Stumble and review websites, the higher your rating will be. Again, it is the social network that determines whether your reviews are useful and relevant. Wikipedia states that "StumbleUpon uses collaborative filtering (an automated process combining human opinions with machine learning of personal preference) to create virtual communities of like-minded websurfers. Rating websites updates a personal profile (a blog-style record of rated sites) and generates peer networks of websurfers linked by common interest."

All those sites that you reviewed using the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" function will be tracked by the system. As before, you can then push RSS feeds of these reviews back to your personalised Gmail knowledge base (KB). What you then get are highly personalised and relevant websites that are served to you and pushed into your KB for future mining.

del.icio.us operate in a slightly different manner in that it does not have any voting mechanism which will determine the relevancy of the website to your specific requirements. Instead, you can use it to create streams of bookmarks to websites that you have encountered (both yours and your friends) and use RSS to push these into your KB.

Impact to our lives

So what is the impact of these technologies to our lives today? With the careful use of Digg and Reddit for delivering relevant news, and StumbleUpon and del.icio.us for serving up personalised and relevant websites, and pushing these information via RSS into our personalised Gmail knowledge base, we now have very very refined information that we can mine at our fingertips. This information come to us through a process of social collaborative filtering which makes them more relevant to us, certainly more relevant than a list of results dished out to us by Google everytime we do a keyword search. As a result, information harvesting becomes less painful and more relevant.

Mining data in your bookmarks using your Gmail personal knowledge base in 5 simple steps

2007-09-08T18:05:00.000+08:00

Objective

In my previous blog post, I talked about how to create a personal knowledge base system using GMail. In this post, I will talk about how to harvest information from the web using bookmarks and sending these information into your GMail personal knowledge base for future search access.

Background

Most of us make use of bookmarking systems or websites such as del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and so on (by the way, these are my favourites and I use them extensively) to save links to web pages which we have visited. We might also want to share these links or bookmarks with our social network (made possible by the social networking phenomenon). I call this process information harvesting. The problem with information harvesting is where do we put all those information that we harvested and how do we find those bits that we need during our day-to-day activities. Well, if you have read my last post, you can now use GMail as your own personal knowledge system. What I will show you today is how to stream your bookmarks into your GMail personal knowledge system so that you can search and mine for them in GMail.

Step-by-step

We will make use of Yahoo Alerts to stream your saved bookmarks to your GMail personal knowledge system.

Step #1: First, go to Yahoo Alerts.

Step #2: You will see the following screen. Select the "Feed / Blog" link.

Step #3: After you have clicked the "Feed / Blog" link, Yahoo Alerts will take you to this next screen below:

In this screen, you now proceed to key in the URL of your RSS feed in Part A. After that make sure you type in your designated personal GMail knowledge base email address where you would want your bookmark stream to go to. Select whether you want to receive the alert everyday or as it happens.

Step #4: Save the Alert .... and you're done !!

Step #5: Give the alert system some time to work this out. Check your email inbox later and see your latest bookmarks streamed right into your GMail personal knowledge system. Now you can mine all your saved bookmarks anytime you want !

That's it for now. Thanks.

Creating your own personal knowledge base system in 5 simple steps using Gmail

2007-03-29T04:09:00.000+08:00

Objective

The purpose of this blog post is to help you implement a personalised knowledge management system using Gmail

Background

Have you ever wanted to find some information that you have read on the web recently but locating it was just impossible? In the early days of the internet, people would just use the bookmark feature that was in their browser to bookmark all those links that they would like to retain. Guess what, soon their browser bookmark tree became a tangled mess of links; ever felt that way? Then came the online bookmark sites, my favourites being del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks and Yahoo MyWeb. That really made our lives so much easier, with the tagging and tag cloud features of these sites, you are now able to tag and categorize all the information that you had read on the web. But then, searching for stuff required you to tag your resources correctly using a taxonomy that only you understood …. and sometimes forgot ! Not to mention when some of those bookmarks pointed to pages that expired or got moved, what a pain. At least for MyWeb you had the option of actually saving the page that you just read. But then, wouldn’t it be great if you could have a “personalized mini-google” for all your personal online information that you can just search in the manner that you now do with Google?

Also how many times have you come online and found that you have too much information staring at you; each email, webpage, news alert, and more screaming for your attention? Well you are not alone, we information junkies all suffer from the same “I need more information but I can’t read them all” syndrome. So what do you do with all those information that come from your searches, yahoo alerts, google alerts, RSS newsfeeds, emails, and your constant traversing of all the links in webpage that you are currently reading? Surely you can’t read all of them? Or do you just conveniently ignore most of them, only to regret it later when you get into a “now where did I read this piece of information from?” mode.

Well for most of us, knowledge management was not something we learnt in school and thus with the onslaught of information from today’s internet, we just do not have the method or means to capture, retain and distill all the information that hit us everyday, where we want it, and when we want it.

Not to fear, I would like to share with you some simple steps that can help you create such a knowledge base using something most of us use regularly (or not so regularly J) … yep, GMail. You heard me right …. your very own personal knowledge base using GMail. I was really inspired to do this by Steve Rubel in his article Turn Gmail into your Personal Nerve Centre.

Step-by-step Guide

Here’s how to create your very own knowledge base in 5 simple steps.

Step 1

Create a set of gmail tags that are broad categories within your personal knowledge base system, e.g. @DB, @KM, etc. The @ sign is very useful as it kinda sets apart your knowledge base from your other gmail tags that you would use normally.

Step 2

Download the latest version of Google Toolbar which has a Send To feature.

Step 3

Go to GMail and create an email filter with the “To:” search criteria being [Your gmail account name]+[Your Knowledge Base Tag]@gmail.com, e.g. christopher.yeo+@KM@gmail.com.

Still in the edit filter mode, remember to check the “Skip the Inbox (Archive It)” checkbox; also remember to check the “Apply the label:” checkbox and set the drop down list box to your knowledge base tag, e.g. @KM.

By doing this step, what you would have done is to set up an email filter that checks whenever it receives an email to your special email account with the special tag, e.g. christopher.yeo+@KM@gmail.com, gmail will filter the email, apply the label @KM, and then archive the email! Immediately, your email gets whisked away from your Inbox, reducing your clutter, as well as pushing the received email into your “tagged” email archives.

If you want to read more about this technique of using a special tag in sending emails to your personal gmail account, LifeHacker explains the value of this here.

Step 4

Now, go ahead and surf the web! When you come across an article or some information that you would like to save into your personal knowledge base, use the Send To feature in your Google Toolbar (see Step 2 above) and send it to your special gmail knowledge base address (e.g. christopher.yeo+@KM@gmail.com see Step 3 above).

Note that the entire text of the article, plus some of its useful links, get saved into your gmail account, appropriately tagged with your knowledge base tag, and whisked away into your archives bypassing your inbox ! Now you don’t have to worry about saving links back to that article knowing that links may expire because of some reason (website is down, article got removed, etc.).

Step 5

Now what happens when you want to access that bit of information that you read or saved sometime ago? Easy! Just go to gmail and in the search criteria, enter “label:@KM” and a keyword and ….. bingo! You now have your very own personal knowledge base that you can query …. Google style! You can then make use of all those fancy advanced gmail searches to do some serious mining of information in your very own personal knowledge base. Take a look at Gmail Tips for some cool query techniques.

With the size of gmail accounts these days (around 2.8GB for the free account and 10GB for the Google Apps accounts), your personal knowledge base will hardly chew up any significant portion of your gmail account capacity. I’ve got hundreds of gmail emails a day and I’ve hardly utilized even 10% of my gmail capacity!

Impact to our lives

So there you go, you now have a really mean personal knowledge base system in just five simple steps using Gmail! This will go a long way towards helping you manage your information in this age of information explosion. Have fun!

I think Google Code is better than SourceForge.net

2006-07-28T15:36:00.000+08:00

Yesterday Google launched their very own open-source projects hosting site called Google Code. Once again its the clean interface that is going to make this site my favourite open-source project hosting site. Searching for projects is also made to look very much like the usual Google search function, I wonder whether the projects are indexed by the Google bots as well or there is a separate bot for this.

Google engineering manager Greg Stein announced Google Code during a talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore. see this article on Cnet. There's also a short review of this site on the Google Operation System blog.

Getting the most out of Flickr

2006-07-27T18:00:00.000+08:00

I must say, I am addicted to Flickr, the more I use it, the more I like it. Certainly Flickr makes online photo sharing and discussions one of the most addictive pastimes (or even wastetimes) ever ! However, the help or FAQ provided by Flickr themselves are either so unstructured, or very sparse. Once in a while we come across some good guide or write-up about how to use Flickr. This one comes from Flickr themselves.

The post-client/server world

2006-07-26T14:06:00.000+08:00

Benioff prophecies the post-client/server world.

The CEO of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, is one guy who really preaches about the on-demand model. Sometimes his rantings pushes the envelope of credulity. Yet somehow, his message is becoming more acceptable these days. With the likes of Google, Yahoo, Salesforce.com and others like them, maybe the days in which the client/server application is beginning to look numbered. Web 2.0 is the latest buzzword.

Comparing 9rules and Squidoo

2006-07-18T22:07:00.000+08:00

Another blog search engine? 9rules was started in 2003 and have only just begun to be noticed in bloggsphere. Can it even be compared to Squidoo. Well, I did a Google Trends comparison and 9rules didn't even figure in the results as its search volume was too low. Conceptually, 9rules and Squidoo are similar, click on the title to this post to find out more details.

My own opinion on this is that 9rules is an exclusive club of bloggers who become exclusive members of a community who helps one another to promote their blogs. Squidoo on the other hand consists of content in chunks called lenses, which are not really blogs. I have personally found that using lenses in conjunction with blogs is a great idea.

Back from my June holidays and business trip to Osaka Japan

2006-07-04T17:13:00.000+08:00

Hi everyone,

You might be wondering why I have not posted any thing since 17 June, well its because I was on holiday in Sarawak with my family, and then it was off to a business trip to Osaka Japan. Well, I am back once again. The photo you see above was taken at the Marriot in Miri, Sarawak, Borneo Island. The sunsets there were really beautiful.

Well, it was a good break. On again with my posts for technologies that impact ordinary lives !

People who don't matter to technology anymore

2006-06-29T22:43:00.000+08:00

My recent post on who are today's movers in the technology world contrasts with this list of who don't matter to technology anymore. The people on this list are not neccessarily has-beens. However, their influence on the changing landscape of technology has been waning for sometime. Click this link and see who these people are:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/technology/10dontmatter.biz2/index.htm

Who are the most influential people in technology today?

2006-06-29T22:32:00.000+08:00

Technology is today influencing many parts of our lives today. The main topic of this blog is about how technology impacts our ordinary lives. But who are the people who are influencing technology? Is it still Bill Gates, the richest man on earth? Can it be the founders of Google Sergey Brin and Larry Page?

Follow this link and tell me if you agree with this list:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/peoplewhomatter/index.html

I prefer Flickr over Picasa Web Albums because of its community

2006-06-15T07:35:00.000+08:00

Today, 13 June 2006, Google launched Picasa Web Albums. In case you’re not familiar with Picasa, it’s Google’s free desktop photo management software. Picasa is a quick download that makes it easy for people to organize and edit their pictures using something that’s simple and clutter-free. Google is now trying to bring that same experience to online photo sharing with Picasa Web Albums. The official Google Blog was the first to break this news on 13 June.

A blog post entitled Google Picasa Web Albums Review with Screenshots in computers.net does give quite a detailed description and screenshots of Picasa Web Albums functionalities. But what was more interesting were blog posts which compared Flickr with Picasa Web Album (I wonder why no one bothered to talk about WebShots, another photo online storage service). Picasa Web Album -vs- Flickr gives an unbiased comparison of the two services. Flickr vs Picasa Web Albums does give an excellent comparison between the two services in areas such as price, storage limit, and so on.

My Experience: Why am I so attached to Flickr? Well, that's because the application is built around the community aspects of online photo sharing. Allow me to elaborate. Everytime I logon to Flickr, out of habit I would go to the "comments you've made" link on my Flickr home page to check whether there are other people who have commented on the photos that I commented on. The nice feature here is that every photo that you have commented on will be shown here, together with the comments on the photo, as well as a link to the profile of the people who commented on the photo. This serves as a pseudo bookmark of the photos that you were interested in.

I especially like the links to the people who commented on the photo because I would spend hours just surfing the links of many people whom I do not know. If I like their photos as well, I would be able to make them my contacts (i.e. bookmarks to people I like to interact with in Flickr). I can also leave messages for these contacts. I am encouraged that the community in Flickr tend to be quite friendly and approachable. If somone commented on my own photos, their comments can be found at the end of the link called "recent activity". It has become quite a reflex action for me to click that link immediately after I logged on. You can also create discussion groups centred around interesting topics such as "Beautiful Sunsets". People on Flickr can then contribute their photos into the group's pool for everyone's enjoyment.

As can been seen, the strong bond within the community is truly rewarding as people get to share their photos, interact and become friends. So Flickr is not just an online photo storage website.

My verdict: Use Picasa Web Albums as an online photo storage service that is tightly integrated to Picasa itself. WebShots is another such online photo storage service. If you want to be part of a vibrant social community of people who loves photography and who loves to interact with one another, then Flickr is your best bet. For me, I choose Flickr.

Seth Godin's 56 ways to drive traffic to your blog

2006-06-13T23:12:00.000+08:00

One of the things that I've noticed was that bloggers who have very popular blogs do not post on weekends. I have no conclusive proof of this but I have noticed that there are more hits on my sites during weekdays. So if you have breaking news, its best to do so on weekdays. Reading Senth Godin's blog post on 56 ways to drive traffic to your blog seems to indicate that what I felt all along was correct (see point no. 41 of Seth's blog post).

The other thing I noticed was that if you submit stories to digg on weekends, they tend not to make it into the front page. Somehow there are less readers to digg your story, and because of that the secret digging algorithm sort of relegates your story to the end of the digg queue after a couple of days.

The other thing I noticed was that if you announced breaking news (e.g. the advent of Google Spreadsheets) you will get a substantial increase in traffic to your blog. This again was confirmed in point no. 8 of Seth's blog post.

Seth's 56 ways is certainly a list seemingly full of contradictions, humour and good advice. A must-read for all bloggers.

The Person-centered Information Services

2006-06-13T07:44:00.000+08:00

Many people today use several devices over the course of their daily lives; mobile phones, laptops, PCs, amd PDAs. With advances in technology, we will see the internet becoming more pervasive and appearing in everyday applicances such as TVs, refrigerators, cars, toys and much more. The day will come when we have to interact with so many different kinds of devices connected with the internet that the neccessity of person-centred information services becomes paramount. Otherwise each device that you personally interact with gives you its own context and that can become downright useless and confusing especially when there are so many other devices around.

The latest announcement by Google regarding the Google Firefox Synch Extension I belive is a step in the right direction. It gives each of us a personal context regardless of which computing device we use, provided of course it runs Firefox. Nonetheless this becomes a step in the right direction where our personal context gets stored somewhere in the internet. And it doesn't matter where we are or what computing device we are using, we get to see what we were doing when we last interacted with the internet. Sun Microsystems tried to do this with their SunRay initiative, however, this was too much of a hardware dependent solution.

I believe more research will be poured into the person-centered information services and Google will be seen to be pushing deeper into this very soon.

Squidoo 101

2006-06-11T14:54:00.000+08:00

After all the excitement over the last few days over Google's Spreadsheets, its time for me to come back to another Web2.0 favourite of mine, Squidoo.

Since the inception of Squidoo, it has been getting rave reviews around the internet. Just what is Squidoo? With there being tons of information going around in the internet, what impact does Squidoo have on our cyberspace lives? Today, data and information abound in the internet. In fact, there's so much information out there that it creates an information overload problem. Anyone who has done a Google search can testify to that ! Squidoo simply faciliates the focusing of information into knowledge by the use of squid lenses.

Well, I have just updated my Squidoo lens called Squidoo-101 which takes you through the basics of Squidoo and how to build squid lenses.

Other blog posts that I have done in the past regarding Squidoo are:

1. The Role of Squidoo in Blogosphere
2. Creating Dynamic Content in a Squidoo Lens
3. Combining the use of del.icio.us and Squidoo
4. Squidoo Tips and Tricks
5. Why Squidoo Won't Work
6. Making Money from lenses in Squidoo

Google's Web Office

2006-06-10T16:39:00.000+08:00

Whether or not Google's intention is to unseat MS Office, one thing is for sure. With Writely and Google Spreadsheets, the foundation for Google Web Office has already been laid. Would people want to use a Web Office from Google, definitely. I believe that for the most part, people will use a Google Web Office for less intensive kinds of work like writing personal letters, making notes for their latest book, keep track of shopping lists and so on. As far as corporate users are concerned, I think the heavy lifting will still be done by MS Office. Even OpenOffice is not there yet. Google's Web Office by Dan Farber from ZDNet records an interview with Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise on what is the company's plans for building corporate type applications.

Google Spreadsheets - the day after !

2006-06-08T14:43:00.000+08:00

Well, its been a day since Google Spreadsheets was launched on 6 June 2006. Phew, there are tons of blog postings and articles in the internet about this latest offering from Google. I have read through many of them and decided that I should give a really short digest of those postings and articles which I think are more interesting and "authoritative" for those of you who have just tuned in on this latest buzz and who want a quick update on what its all about. Here goes !

1. Inside Google Spreadsheets, Google Blogoscoped, Philipp Larsen.

This post is interesting in that it contains two movies showing Philipp putting Google Spreadsheet through its paces. No sound though ! Good overview, not much details on the actual features.

2. Microsoft: Google Spreadsheets is so 10 years ago, InternetNews, Nicholas Carlson.

This article discusses the product from the perspectives of the Google product manager, Jonathan Rochelle, as well as the views of Microsoft spokesperson Heather Gillissen. No details on the features of the product here.

3. Google Spreadsheets: A Good Start, GeekMix.com.

This blog post gives a bit more details on the workings of the spreadsheet as well as what is not so good about it.

4. Google Spreadsheets has fewer functions than MS Excel, San Francisco Chronicle, Verne Kopytoff.

This article takes a fresh but contrarian view of Google's latest offering, the author preferring Excel over Google Spreadsheets.

5. Google Spreadsheets: Very Basic, Pretty Interesting, Harry McCraken.

What I like about this article is that it gives a pretty detailed account of the functionality and features of Google Spreadsheets.

6. Google Makes Strides in Online Office; Microsoft Lags, Forbes.com, Kate Dubose Tomassi.

This article discusses about what how Microsoft lags behind many startups today in the area of online applications.

7. Google Spreadsheets Beta: A Review, Brian's Blog.

This blog gives by far one of the most detailed account and description on the functionality of Google Spreadsheets. Lots of pictures available.

8. Other links include:

a. Spread a Little Google by Michael Calore
b. Google Spreadsheet - its not about Microsoft by MarketWatchh

9. Thanks everyone !

Google Spreadsheets is out !

2006-06-06T22:20:00.000+08:00

Yeah, I just got my hands on an account for Google Spreadsheets and have managed to put it through its paces. I do not intend to do an indepth comparison of Google Spreadsheets with MS Excel, I just want to try to use the spreadsheet to see if after so many years of using Excel I would be able to switch to something else.

Verdict: I think most of us can survive without Excel !

Google Spreadsheets is quite intuitive to use. It does take some adjustment for those of us who grew up using Excel. From my first looks, most of the usual formulae are there. Almost what you can do with Excel, you can likewise do with Google Spreadsheet. Click the title to this post to go to a very very short tour on how to use the tool, not much here but nonetheless enough is mentioned about the basic functionalities.

What I miss is the Format Painter tool which we can use to copy a format from a cell and then paint it on other cells which require the same format. I tend to use this quite a lot and I can't seem to find an equivalent in Google Spreadsheets.

Conclusion: Might not be suitable for the heavy financial or scientific kinds of applications. But will be able to meet most of the needs of everyday personal or business applications.

More on Digg - A Complete Digg Tools Collection

2006-06-06T04:31:00.000+08:00

Back to Digging. Over the last few days I found Digg to be quite useful as a site which serves up technology news. Due to the community based editorial concept, you get to see news that you would otherwise not see on other traditional news sites, e.g. Yahoo Technology.

Now if you really like Digg, then you would like this website, the Complete Digg Tools Collection. It has got the most comprehensive widgets on Digg that you can find on the internet !

The Future of Personalised Start/Home Pages

2006-06-05T12:43:00.000+08:00

Personalized Start Pages is a growing, but fiercely competitive, market. So what are they? Predominantly they're homepages for Web information, gadgets and widgets. The impact they will have on our ordinary lives is that they are going to be very personalised homepages to which we will go to everyday of our lives. They will contain our favourite news sites, RSS feeds, photos and much more.

The kingpins of this domain are still Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. And then there will be a few more start-ups on the periphery. Personally, I find that the most comprehensive is still My Yahoo. Google's is more customisable, but not as comprehensive as that of My Yahoo; and I must confess that I tried getting myself to use MSN but gave up after a while.

I believe that personalised start pages, together with news feeds (e.g. Findory, Digg, CNN, and so on) and RSS feeds, will have a combined effect that is more far reaching that each on its own. Imagine that we can now have information and news that we want presented to us from different perspectives on a single page. Imagine that we can also assess this page from our PCs, and our mobile phones. With the internet becoming more ubiquitous, it will not be long before we have personalised pages on our TV sets, our PCs, our mobile phones, our refrigerators, our cars, in our airplane seats, and ...... the list goes on.

What an impact that will have !

Digg and the news junkie

2006-06-03T15:02:00.000+08:00

The internet has definitely turned many ordinary people today in addicts, news junkies that is. And believe me, there are many ways to get your daily news fix; Yahoo News, Google News, MSN, CNN, blogs, and many more. News news news .... we get buried in information and news. Over the last year or so, I've sort of narrowed down to using only a few sources of information for my daily news fix. These are Yahoo News, del.icio.us, findory and now Digg. I use these sites as mechanisms to discover breaking news and trends. They perform this task faily well, and as a result, many people check such sites nearly every day. (Reference: Delicious, Digg and the new balance of power).

Admittedly, most of the users of Digg are more of the "technie" kind. More than half its news are technology or science in nature. Digg has a real-time view of all the activities that happen in the site, including new story submission, Digging status, etc. Now who would want that except geeks and techies? (Reference: spying on Digg).

Now, let's take a look at the social framework or community that makes Digg work. Afterall, news in Digg are submitted by its community, voted and commented by its community, and even buried by its community, i.e. news by the people and for the people. Alex Bosworth's blog gives a very good description of the dynamics of this community. According to Alex, there are several groups of people that make up this community. What's really interesting about these groups is that each of them is required for the system to function, they all came together relatively quickly, and each of them have different and complementary rewards for what they do. In general, this is both good and bad. The bad part is that the news are shaped by the behaviour of the community. (Reference: the Wisdom of browse).

Lately I've observed that people who submit links as news to be "Dugg" by the community are becoming very competitive. They scour the internet for hot and news worthy links and rush to be the first to submit those. I have read many angry comments by people who fight with one another over who submitted links first, very much like children who say "I saw it first !!!". In Digg, there is a feature to bury stories by reporting them as problems, duplicates or inaccurate. I have also seen people who use this as a weapon against others by deliberately burying their rival's stories. There are also people who are so prolific as story submitters that they submit a story every few minutes, 7 days a week ! These become celebrities with huge following.

So if you are new to Digg and have suddenly been caught up with the excitement of submitting and Digging stories, do be prepared to get flamed once in a while. Some comments can be real nasty as well.

In conclusion, Digg is good for those of us who are news junkies and need our daily technology or science news fix. You do not get many business and finance type of news here. Forget about health, sports, entertainment or other kinds of news here. All-in-all, Digg is good. I also kinda like the fact that it saves under your profile all those stories that you Dugg, sort of like bookmarks. The only problem is that they do not have good search or tagging mechanisms for you to manage your bookmarks, especially if you have many of them. That is why I balance my diet for news by using del.icio.us, findory and Yahoo News (more about these later).

Have a nice new-sy day !

Limiting The Digg Effect

2006-06-02T01:07:00.000+08:00

In my previous blog post, I talked a little bit about Digg, a community driven, tech-news site. Its users post links to articles called stories. If enough people find the article helpful or amusing, they "digg" or vote for it. Once the article has enough diggs, it is moved from the mildly hidden back-end of the site, and put on the front page for anyone going to Digg.com to see. This article, gives a few simple steps on how to Limit The Digg Effect.

Dig this - Digg Digg Digg !

2006-05-31T05:40:00.000+08:00

Now this is interesting. Although I've heard about Digg for quite some time now, I've just begun to use it in the last week or so. For those of you who have missed this (where were we?), Digg is a news website where users submit stories for review. These so called stories normally revolve around a link to a website, and your actual "story" about what was at the end of that link.

After you have done your story, you then submit the story for "review", but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories make it to the front page, called the homepage, the users do. Readers of Digg perform their voting (a la American Idol style) of your story using a "Digg" button next to your story. The more votes or Diggs you get, the higher in ranking your story becomes. Ultimately with more votes, your story keeps climbing up in the ranking ladder until it makes it to the front page. On the other hand, if you do not get sufficient votes after a certain time, your story drops out of the review queue (i.e. it gets booted out). At the end of it all, you get a community of users who both submit, read, and vote for stories.

"So what?", you might say.

So ..... the community gets to consume news or information that they themselves have selected as noteworthy. I kinda like that because I am beginning to use this Digg concept to source for materials that I need in the course of my research and writings. Digg also combines social bookmarking, blogging, and RSS. You are just one click away from bookmarking their materials. This you do after you register your profile. Those articles or stories that you have "dugg" will then appear within your profile area as bookmarks. With one click you can also blog about the stories. RSS is also available for lots of stuff like the frontpage stories, stories that you "dugg" and so on.

Digg is also a social networking website (what ?! Another one ?!). Stories that you have "dugg" may be shared with others in the community. You can also see which stories they have "dugg". Readers may also leave their comments on any story, this is also one click away.

In essence, as an information junkie I now use Digg, del.icio.us, Findory and Bloglines to trawl the internet for information to satisfy my insatiable desire to learn.

p.s. More about del.icio.us, Findory and Bloglines later !

The Role of Squidoo in Blogosphere

2006-05-31T00:19:00.000+08:00

Is Squidoo irrelevant in the age of weblogs or blogs? In the internet, content can be static or dynamic, structured or unstructured. In the early days, many websites offer static information. Then, websites were merely static pages with links to one another. Today, there are many websites which still offer static and evergreen content. However, things are now a bit more sophisticated. Wikipedia is an excellent example of a site which is updated and refined by ordinary folks. But Wikipedia content is something that is fairly stable and can be linked to reliably. In other words, its content is quite static, with some degree of refinements.

Blogs, on the other hand, are the very essence of refreshed content. People go back to blogs every day to see what’s new. Good blogs generate stickiness and repeat customers. Essentially, a blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order.

The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”.

Squidoo however is something that lie somewhere between Wikipedia and blogs. The basic premise of Squidoo is that anyone can create a Squidoo-hosted weblog (called a “lens”) about any topic that matters to him or her. You can create as many lenses as you want, on as many topics as you want, and other people can build lenses on the same topic you’ve chosen. The goal of Squidoo is to create a collective grouping of information with the aim of providing users multiple points of view on both broad and niche topics. Its a platform that makes it easy for anyone, even a newbie, to teach people about topics they care about. The assumption is that everyone is an expert about something, and the Squidoo.com platform is designed to make it easy to do that. See Squidoo lens on Squidoo-101.

The Squidoo idea was thus simple and easy to explain: allow anyone to build a single page, called a lens, on a topic that he or she is passionate about. The person building the lens, the “lensmaster”, gets recognition as an expert in his or her area of expertise, and cash. Squidoo shares a percentage of profits with its authors.

I see Squidoo lenses as complimentary to blogs in this information age. A Squidoo lens is supposed to present information on a subject in a more structured manner whereas a blog is more chronological in nature. Information or knowledge is best presented in logical blocks. Likewise, a Squidoo lens captures the subject matter in chunks called modules. A module can be several paragraphs of information, or it can also reference other material in the form of links. The link list, RSS and Technorati modules are such examples of modules which are meant to refer to other materials in the internet.

The lensmaster can thus craft his lens as a master craftsman does by presenting his subject matter as a series of knowledge chunks called modules, some of which contain essays and others which reference other materials. A master craftsman would be able to beautifully weave all his modules as a tapestry. If used in this manner, a Squidoo lens becomes a very valuable piece of knowledge, left behind indefinitely for all to behold.

On the other hand, if a lens is merely a set of links, then it becomes just a directory. Are directories bad? Not really, they are useful in our everyday lives. But they are not really pieces of art are they? Nor are they thesis in nature. But they are useful. Thus, Squidoo lenses have their place in blogosphere as individual nuggets of information containing concise and yet precise knowledge on certain subjects; organized and structured for easy learning.

Blogs on the other hand are like living diaries. They chronicle the lives of the blogger as seen from the perspective of a certain subject. They are not really structured or organized, though some blogs can be. But in general, blogs are just that, web logs. So are blogs less superior than Squidoo lenses, or vice versa? I think neither. They each have their own place in our lives. We track blogs via RSS readers because we are addicted to information or news as and when they develop. But if we need to learn or know more about some particular subject, a Squidoo lens becomes the lamp unto our path.

An avid blogger would thus be able to make use of a set of Squidoo lenses as his or her knowledge building blocks. These can then reference the set of blogs that he or she maintains. Those blogs can also reference the set of Squidoo lenses where appropriate. An ecosystem of lenses, blogs, emails, and links (ala del.icio.us) is thus created in which a “Web2.0 person” shares his or her knowledge to the whole blogosphere Can this be how knowledge is created, shared and presented in this new millennium? Perhaps. Who knows what else will be innovated; findory? MySpace? 9rules?

Creating Dynamic Content in Squidoo Lens

2006-05-29T19:44:00.000+08:00

Over the last few days, I was fiddling around with using the RSS Module in Squidoo in conjunction with del.icio.us. I think I have finally got the hang of it all. In my previous post on this topic, I described how this was done. In essence, you may use the bookmarks you saved and tagged in del.icio.us as content in your module. This content is dynamic because as you save more links and tagged them appropriately in del.icio.us, these will appear in your module via RSS. How is this done? Easy, just work through the following steps:

Step #1: Decide what kind of content you want for the module. This obviously has to tie in with the subject of your Squidoo lens.

Step #2: Select an appropriate combination of tags that reflect the content of your module.

Step #3: Begin to bookmark and tag the links that you want in del.icio.us.

Step #4: Using your tags in del.icio.us, click and select the sequence of tags that you decided on in Step #2. This would look something like tag1+tag2+tag3 ..... near the top of the page.

Step #5: Look for the RSS chicklet at the bottom right of the page. Copy that link.

Step #6: Go back to your RSS module in your Squidoo lens and set up that module using the link you copied in Step #5.

Step #7: Publish your lens.

Step #8: You are now ready for some dynamic content !

Step #9: Going forward, as you encounter materials that you want as part of your content, bookmark them using del.icio.us, tag them appropriately and ....... wella ! They appear in your RSS module as your dynamic content !

Isn't that cool? Using this technique, your Squidoo lens will be as fresh as today's eggs ! Give it a try and tell me how it goes. Cheers.

Compare online prices for the Nokia 770

2006-05-28T16:58:00.000+08:00

Yep, the Nokia 770 is now on sale on a number of websites. This is what C|Net has to say about the internet tablet.

The good: The Nokia 770 boasts a gorgeous, high-resolution screen that makes stunning Web pages. It has a full-featured Web browser and an e-mail client, plus it supports Internet radio and RSS newsfeeds. The 770 is attractive, easy to use, and great at detecting Wi-Fi hot spots.

The bad: The Nokia 770 suffers from extremely sluggish operation, with most movies and Flash animations too slow to be useful, and it relies only on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for connectivity. Unfortunately, VoIP and instant-messaging features have not yet been implemented, and the device accepts only RS-MMC memory cards.

The bottom line: The reasonably priced Nokia 770 is a neat idea and a slick device, but slow performance and a few missing features keep it from realizing its potential.

Combining the use of del.icio.us and Squidoo

2006-05-28T01:54:00.000+08:00

Want to know how to create dynamically updated fresh content for your Squidoo lenses? It was only today that I discovered a cool and interesting way to combine the use of del.icio.us and the Squidoo RSS module. This is how you do it:

Set-up and Configuration

1. Go to "your bookmarks" in del.icio.us and click on the tag that you are interested in (I assume you have already created your tag in del.icio.us)

2. Go to the bottom of that page and find the RSS chicklet

3. Right click the chicklet and copy the link

4. Go to the Squidoo lens that you are interested in creating dynamic content for

5. Add a RSS module

6. Paste the RSS link that you copied in at 6.

7. Save the Squidoo module

This is what you do when you come across interesting articles on the internet

1. As you come across interesting articles on the internet, tag it using del.icio.us using the tag you selected earlier on

2. Also, ensure that you write a concise and brief note for the bookmark of the article that you have just tagged

3. Wella ! Everytime you tag an article with the tag you selected above, your Squidoo lens is automatically updated !

If you go to my Squidoo lens called "Hello I'm Chris", this technique was used to create the module called "The impact of the internet on our lives today".

Cool yah ?

Making use of Feedblitz in your Blogs

2006-05-27T23:52:00.000+08:00

Wow, this is one really cool tool to use to drive traffic to your blogs. Feedblitz uses email to promote your blogs. It's own promotion line is:

RSS, Blogs, XML, readers and aggregators can be confusing. Adding email services to your blog isn't. Email RSS feed and blog subscriptions powered by FeedBlitz can:

Boost your readership to reach the largest possible market
Give you valuable insights into your readership
All using the familiar, most pervasive Internet application - Email.

Follow the link in the title to this post to the website. I will trying this out and telling you guys how it went. Cheers !

Something new in Blogosphere ---- Its SPHERE !

2006-05-27T15:01:00.000+08:00

Here's a blog search engine that has overtaken IceRocket and PubSub.

Sphere is an impressive blog search engine and one that is sure to rise in traffic. In a very short time it has already reached feedster's traffic levels and surpassed Pubsub (they have a while to go before reaching Technorati).

Read O'Reilly's blog posting on this new entrant to blogosphere.

The 25 Worst Technology Products

2006-05-27T00:15:00.000+08:00

So what would that be? The Iomega Zip Disk, or the IBM PCjr? Or how about the Windows O/S itself? I'm sure all of us have our own ideas about which tech product is the worst of them all. I think my most hated tech product would be Microsoft Internet Explorer. It is the one product which suffers most from spyware, malware, and all those terrible stuff that creates pop-ups, re-arranges your wallpaper, etc.

What is your vote? Click the link to the title of this post to see what the folks at PC World think.

Making money from lenses in Squidoo

2006-05-26T07:27:00.000+08:00

Oh well, if you have read my previous post you might be feeling that Squidoo won't work at all. Nonetheless, I believe I am still a Squidoo addict. It may not earn people much, so if you are thinking of making mega-bucks online on Squidoo, you might be better off doing something else.

But did you know you can make at least some money by developing lenses in Squidoo ? Share what you know, talk about a topic you care about -- and maybe make a little money along the way. Interesting isn't it?

Similar to most affiliate programs, the Squidoo co-op gives you the chance to earn royalties from your lenses. With a twist: You can choose whether to pocket the proceeds, contribute to a group charity fund or donate to a specific cause.

The official lensmaster training guide, SquidU actually lists 8 tips for making more money from lenses. Just make sure you have an account in Squidoo, and that you have created a lens, then follow the link in the title to this blog posting to SquidU where the team from Squidoo shares about how to generate revenue using your lenses.

Do let me know how it works out for you !

Why Squidoo won't work

2006-05-25T11:42:00.000+08:00

From my previous posts on Squidoo, you can see that I am quite excited by the concept. I like the idea of people who are experts in their own fields creating lens which presents their area of expertise in a concise and comprehensive manner. However, there have been people who compare Squidoo to other Web 2.0 favs such as MySpace and Wikipedia and say that Squidoo will not work or survive. Take a look at this link on Why Squidoo Won't Work, it gives a very good treatise on Squidoo and others like it. Enjoy.

Google Trendspotting The World Is Funny

2006-05-23T22:20:00.000+08:00

In my earlier posts, I covered a little bit about the exciting new service fromGoogle called Google Trends. I also posted some interesting hypothesis that one can conjure up when using Google Trends as a research too. Today, I stumbled upon another interesting article called Google Trendspotting The World Is Funny in which someone has used Google Trends to develop more interesting inferences. Here's an excerpt :

In recent news, the Emerald Isle has led the world in searches for [lonely], according to Google Trends. Before you start sniffling, you should know Dubliners are far from alone. They are joined from the Far East and America, depending on which form of the word you use.

My Squidoo Lens on the Nokia 770

2006-05-22T00:41:00.000+08:00

Hi all, with there being some excitement about the Nokia 770, I've decided to construct a Squidoo lens dedicated to the device called the "Really Cool Nokia 770". This lens gather into one place all the information you've ever wanted on the Nokia 770. It also lists resources that you can tap on if you want to do some research on the device. Hope you like it !

The Power Of Kindness

2006-05-21T14:19:00.000+08:00

You know what? In this cold and impersonal world, sometimes all it takes is just a spark by someone to start a "kindness" movement. In this 21st century, the pace of life is just increasing at a break neck pace. First World cities like New York, Tokyo, Singapore, London and many more tend to have its share of Third World residents who don't give a hoot about the people around them.

I think just a little kindness shown by all of us daily to those around us will make the world a much better place. Read about the Power of Kindness by Nancy Graham in Squidoo. It can be a life changing experience. Have a nice day.

Squidoo Tips and Tricks Lecture

2006-05-21T07:00:00.000+08:00

Now taking a short break from the excitement of the release of the Nokia 770, I was re-organising my Squidoo lenses today when I stumbled upon this interesting website. It's a Squidoo Tips and Tricks website with a lecture by Dan Beatty. I listened to the lecture and found it very effective. I sure hope Dan makes it into a series. Worth listening, highly recommended.

Nokia 770 versus Treo 700p

2006-05-20T00:40:00.000+08:00

Well now, making use of Google Trends, I decided to see if more people were searching for the Nokia 770 or the Treo 700p. It seems that more people were looking for information on the Nokia 770 rather than the Treo 700p. And it was also obvious that more Europeans were looking at the Nokia rather than the Americans.

Soooooo ..... seems like the Nokia 770 was more popular. What do you think ?

I am not too sure about Google Notebook

2006-05-19T14:21:00.000+08:00

It's now been about a month since Google Notebook was released (see Note This from the official Google Blog). I wonder how many people are still using it? Has it been useful for you guys out there? Many have blogged about the functionalities and features of this service from Google (see A Closer Look at Google Notebook). Its defintely a nice tool to use, but has it been really that fantastic? I've been using it while:

1. Researching for new articles for my blogs.

It's neat to have something that resides in my firefox browser that I can simply right click on my selected text of interest and then click on "Note this (Google Notebook)" and wella it saves the text and the link. Using it in this manner keeps the flow and momentum of my research going at a steady pace, the train of thought is preserved.

Many times I use this feature in conjunction with the del-icio.us "TAG" button that I have in my tool bar. In this manner, I save the link to the web page together with comments, and at the same time I can then tag my link as well.

2. Jotting down my thoughts.

Yes, the other thing that I've been doing is to quickly jot down ideas and thoughts that I've been thinking about everyday. The ability to just get the notes written quickly, and then coming back to them later to organise them using the "Section Heading" feature is quite neat. However, I don't do this often because I am not constantly tethered to my computer and the internet. And ideas come and go at a flash and its seems easier to note things down on my Treo600.

So I am still not too sure about the usefulness of Google Notebook for this purpose. Certainly I have not made use of the collaborative features of Google Notebook yet. Perhaps this is where it can shine.

In Conclusion

The one thing I really cannot stand about Google Notebook is that after capturing all our thoughts on this great tool, how do we get it out ! I mean, the only thing we can do it Print. What I would have liked is for a feature in which I can just copy all the contents of one notebook, section headings and all, and then paste it into something else, e.g. MS Word, notepad, etc. But there isn't a feature in which I can do that! Maybe I am missing something here, can somebody tell me if there's a better way to do this?

The Nokia 770 and the Treo 700p

2006-05-19T13:22:00.000+08:00

In the last few posts of this blog, I blogged about the Nokia 770. I really like the device, but don't get me wrong, I am stilling rooting for smartphones. In fact I have been using a Treo 600 for more than a year now and i don't think I can live these days without it. A smartphone is excellent as a phone PDA. But an internet surfing device its not. For VOIP, internet surfing, webmail, RSS, I still think that the Nokia 770 is perfect for the job.

Check out the above link, its a nice video presentation on the latest Palm Treo 700p with software demo. Really cool.

Nokia 770 raw but indispensable

2006-05-18T13:58:00.000+08:00

Still on the topic of the Nokia Internet Tablet, the above image was taken from the geek.dom review of the 770. Look how small it is. I have been checking out comments from various people in Blogosphere who have actually used the gadget and it seemed that most have good comments about the device. Nokia 770 raw but indispensable was written by Steve George from UK.

I think that in countries where WiFi access if free in joints such as McDonalds and Starbucks, having Google Talk would be a boon, I would prefer having Skype though. I often call my colleagues around the globle using VOIP while sipping tea at StarBucks. Would be great to use a Nokia 770 to do so. I wonder ..... anyone tried downloading and installing Skype on these devices ?

The Nokia 770 Press Conference

2006-05-17T13:02:00.000+08:00

Yep, this is the latest news on the Nokia 770 from the official Nokia press conference on this new internet tablet gadget.

Now, its not a smartphone. Neither is it a ultra-portable laptop. So what good is it? Well, in my own opinion, I love it because whenever I just want to get onto the web to check my webmail, my RSS feeds, the performance of my websites, etc. etc., I just:

a. Do not like to use a smartphone because ITS TOO SMALL. The screen real estate does not do justice to internet surfing.

b. Do not like to use a laptop because IT TAKES TOO LONG TO BOOT UP. Have you ever got into the situation where you just need to get onto the internet, but then you open you laptop, press the power button, wait for windows to boot up, launch your explorer ...... .well you get the idea.

So there ! I just want to get my hands on this Nokia 770, and it has GoogleTalk even. Just take a look at these photos of the device !

Google Notebook - the good, the bad, and the ugly

2006-05-16T22:25:00.000+08:00

Ok, Google Notebook is launched and reports are just coming out on this. Here's the first one on ZDNet.

Google Notebook - the good, the bad, and the ugly | Office Evolution | ZDNet.com

Nokia to offer Google Talk on Web tablet-sources

2006-05-16T10:24:00.000+08:00

Now this is what I have been waiting for ! An internet tablet that is smaller than a laptop, but larger than the screen on a smartphone. Take a look at this cool gadget from Nokia, the Nokia 770. WiFi hotspots are now sprouting up all over the place. You can find them in many cities round the world, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, etc. You find them in McDonalds, StarBucks, airports, shopping centres, etc.

What I really don't like is to drag and lug around my laptop, wait 5 minutes for it to boot up, and then launch my Firefox, just to have a quick catch up on my emails or websites. Wouldn't it be really cool if I just whip out my Nokia 770, turn it on in 5 secs, and then get on with my surfing? Wouldn't it be even more cool to call someone over Skype or Google Talk using the tablet ? This is revolutionary because it sure is cheaper than doing an IDD call overseas.

I believe that internet tablets the size of BlackBerries, or slightly larger, will have a major impact on our lives. I can just use it anywhere I like, anytime, without the painful experience of booting up a laptop.

My dream machine !

Is Google Evil ?

2006-05-14T23:35:00.000+08:00

You either hate it or love it. Google. The company whose intention is to "do no evil" is certainly growing up, both in revenues as well as in culture. I stumbled upon this article by The Economist and I think it is a very good article on Google the company. Do have a read and let us know what you think. Have a nice day.

The Google search Juggernaut rolls on !

2006-05-14T06:16:00.000+08:00

Yep, the recently launch of the 4 new Google services have seen Google going back to its roots of making information more available to the masses. Google Trends tells you what the masses are searching for, Google Notebook is how you should remember what information you have seen on the net, Google Coop is how people share their expertise, and Google Desktop brings you further out into cyberspace.

Although as usual these products seem to be haphazard from the marketing point of view, they do seem to lend credence to the Web 2.0 vision where "all you need is the browser" because the "network is the computer". Hhhhhmmmmm ....... haven't we heard that before ?

10 Things I learnt from Google Trends

2006-05-13T07:16:00.000+08:00

I know I know .... some people have already done this kind of stuff in Blogosphere, but let me contribute my set of "10 things I learnt from Google Trends". Please please please, hope you don't take these seriously.

1. Oracle is more popular that SAP as an ERP.
2. Windows is still far more popular than Linux, or Unix.
3. HP is still an interesting company.
4. Larry Ellison is not so popular.
5. Yahoo is still a very popular company.
6. Most software development in the world today uses Java.
7. Many people using Google are Christians.
8. People using the internet are more into Sex than Love.
9. People are as interesting in blogging as podcasting.
10. Tom Cruise is a better actor than Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis.

25 Things I Learned on Google Trends

2006-05-13T00:41:00.000+08:00

Steve Rubel's article on the 25 things he kinda "deduced" from using Google Trends is sometimes hilarious, and sometimes utterly serious. Just what can we infer from comparing search terms? And just how "strong" are these deductions? Can serious research be based on trends of search terms on Google? Google Trends may become the tool which statisticians use to form their hypothesis, or it may lead us all into making extremely flawed deductions. I think the jury is still out on this.

Flickr and Google Trends

2006-05-12T19:54:00.000+08:00

Now this is interesting. Using Google Trends, I compared the popularity of the search terms Flickr, WebShots and BuzzNet. These are the three most popular online photo storage and sharing systems. The red line represents WebShots, the blue is Flickr, and Orange is BuzzNet.

Looks like not many people know about BuzzNet. But take a look at WebShots. I have been using WebShots for around three years now and I found that there was just not much buzz associated with the site for some time now. It's a good site, especially for those of you who would like to use the photos posted on the site as wallpaper for your PC desktop. However, its photo sharing and community services is just not really there.

Flickr on the other hand seems to be steadily gaining in popularity. Take a look at the blue graph. Its climbing and this year it has gained the same popularity (as a search term) as WebShots. I guess from the statistics of the search terms, it would seem that more and more people have begun to know about Flickr. I wonder how the rest of 2006 and 2007 would look like. I would certainly like to do another trend 6 months from today.

This little experiment showcases Google Trends and how it can be used for research in many different domains.

Any thoughts anyone ?

First Look at Google Trends

2006-05-12T05:36:00.000+08:00

Google Trends looks set to be a real addictive time waster, just like computer games ! With it, you can see how each search term has been used over time. But the best part is that you can compare one or more search terms.

The picture shows my comparison of the search terms Yahoo (in red) and Google (in blue). Funny why Yahoo is searched more often than Google ... in google itself !

Ok, we can also compare the frequency of the search terms across geography, as can be seen in the lower part of the picture. I think all in all, its such a fun research tool. If you are into Google AdWords, this tool can help you choose your search terms carefully to drive more traffic to your ads. If you are a marketing person, it can also tell you how people react to certain brands (in my example, Yahoo s. Google).

I think you should give Google Trends a try. It is easy enough to use.

Rating: 8 out of 10 (really good)
Ease of use: 9 out of 10 (really easy)

New services at Google !

2006-05-11T21:59:00.000+08:00

Google launch Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, Google Notebook and Google Trends

Hey everyone ! Google just launched new application services. A quick cursory look at these services tell me that they are cooooool. As usual, Google services are always well received. It seems to me that this time round, Google isn't venturing into some new space or domain but focusing on deepening their strengths in existing areas.

Google Co-op is a cooperative environment where various people can tag websites and pages so that others using Google Searches can op to use these tags to zoom down to more detailed and focussed searches.

Google Desktop 4 becomes quite like the Yahoo Konfabulator engine and its widgets. Google's version of these widgets are called Gadgets ..... how original.

Google Notes sounds like something I would like to use, it allows use to cat and paste portions of web pages, make comments and share these.

And finally Google trends which allows people to research on the popularity of search terms over time and geography.

Links to more articles:

Google unveils new applications

Google Desktop 4: now with Gadgets

Software Engineering Proverbs

2006-05-11T08:11:00.000+08:00

Just today I stumbled upon this really funny website. You must see this !

How Squidoo was launched

2006-05-10T22:40:00.000+08:00

As I was surfing the net about Squidoo, I stumbled upon some material on how the founder of Squidoo, Seth Godin, launched Squidoo. In October, on his personal blog (http://sethgodin.typepad .com), Godin offered a free 31-page ebook called Everyone's an Expert (about something): The Search for Meaning Online (www.squidoo.com/pages/EveryoneIsAnExpert.pdf).

Quite a good read. In the eBook, Godin launched Squidoo, describing it as being about online lenses: a way to filter a person's expertise on a subject onto a single page. Godin claims that by checking out a lens on a topic of interest, we can quickly find what we are looking for. A person who makes a lens is a lensmaster, and he or she uses a lens to provide context. Everyone is an expert, and Squidoo helps them to share with the world.

Good reading.

The Squidoo FAQ on lenses and how to get paid

2006-05-10T13:52:00.000+08:00

Yes, its been around two weeks now that I have been fiddling with Squidoo. I must say, its quite addictive, and useful as well. Today I received a payment for 13 cents from Squidoo as part of the share of the royalty from the company for my lenses. Not much, but hey its cool. I think the guys at Squidoo are really serious about their vision. Its not the amount that matters, but the principle that Squidoo stands for, and the effort that they put into the system just to make the royalty payment happen. That's good.

Do follow the title's link into the FAQ. I think its well written and concise in the way it explains the essence of Squidoo, its lenses, and how lens masters can get paid.

The Squidoo It Yourself Blog

2006-05-10T01:00:00.000+08:00

This blog is recommended reading and tracking. I find that the articles are well written and comprehensive, whereas mine are shorter and to the point ! :( . I kinda like this blog. It makes interesting reading. There are several good postings here. Let me reproduce a section which I like, this concerns building fresh and relevant lenses, posted on March 17th, 2006 by Richard.

Unless your lens is deliberately archiving content, you will want to write original material whenever possible. This content might take several forms. One method is to feed your own blog postings into the lens via an RSS feed. This provides fresh content on a regular basis, without any additional effort from you on the Squidoo side.

Other shortcuts to building significant original Squidoo content include posting previous articles you have written into your lenses. Our only caution here is that you will probably want to make these postings an introduction to the article, rather than reposting the entire article itself. Although there is no limit to the amount of content you can add to your lens, it will become difficult to read and cluttered with longer, intact articles. Our suggestion is to write a short abstract of the article and then link to it elsewhere - using the text link module - to an instance of the full piece hosted on another site or blog.

The Squidoo It Yourself Lens

2006-05-09T08:02:00.000+08:00

This is another interesting resource on how to build lenses in Squidoo. This particular lens is quite comprehensive in its coverage of Squidoo. It's however not a step-by-step guide on building a Squidoo lens however.

Singapore has a new government !

2006-05-07T16:07:00.000+08:00

Well there you go, general elections 2006 has just concluded. We have a new government ...... very much the same as the PREVIOUS government. 82 seats go to the People's Action Party (PAP), 1 to the Singapore Democratic Alliance (SDA), and 1 to the Worker's Party (WP).

I think the WP did much better this time round. They put up a credible team with a new party branding. They will definitely pose a stronger challenge to the ruling party next time round.

That's it ..... on with the usual stuff now.

Squidoo 101

2006-05-07T16:01:00.000+08:00

Hi all, I think I am addicted to Squidoo. It is definitely a very innovative website, up there with the rest of the "Web 2.0" pantheon of new websites. Since the inception of Squidoo, it has been getting rave reviews around the internet. Just what is Squidoo? With there being tons of information going around in the internet, what impact does Squidoo have on our cyberspace lives?

Well, I have created a Squidoo lens that takes you through the basics of Squidoo and how to build squid lenses (more about this later!) . Here it is, Squidoo 101.

The Official Squidoo Blog

2006-05-06T16:54:00.000+08:00

Squid Blog. This is the official blog on Squidoo. Generally informative. In particular I like the article posted on April 18th, 2006 by Megan Casey entitiled "The Power of Personal Recommendation". Let me extract something which I like here:

And so the important thing here is what causes the action. What is the secret sauce behind every interaction? What’s the nudge, the lighted fire, the springboard, the jumpstart?

9 times out of 10, it’s recommendation. Recommendation is the fundamental, LCD of all the stuff you’re hearing a lot about these days: user-generated content, personalized search, filters…. Recommendation is what web 2.0 is all about.

Of course, the best recommendations are authentic and personal and trusted, which makes it easy for you to take action on them. That’s why we invite passionate people to make lenses on topics they know or care a lot about.

Some of our best lenses are about spreading ideas, awareness for issues, sharing advice, giving hobbyist how-to’s. Basically, great content from passionate communities. Recommendation from real people.

Yep, build your lenses, recommend to others resources about your area of expertise. I think this is what Web 2.0 all about, collective knowledge.

Today is Singapore's Polling Day

2006-05-06T10:43:00.000+08:00

Elections 2006 is well under way for Singapore. Today, we will choose which political party we want to lead the country for the next 5 years ..... not to mention that we have been choosing one party since 1965 ! The four main parties vying for votes are:

1. The incumbent ... PAP = People's Action Party
2. The challenger .. WP = Worker's Party
3. The underdog .... SDA = Singapore Democratic Alliance
4. The funny ones .. SDP = Singapore Democratic Party

Follow the title's link to our local favourite blog, mrbrown.com. Quite a funny look at the political scene in Singapore.

More about Squidoo lenses

2006-05-04T22:07:00.000+08:00

The more I think about the concept of lenses in Squidoo, the more I begin to think that Squidoo as a co-op of lens masters is going to be BIG !

With search engines today producing copious amounts of results everytime you do a search, you will appreciate that lenses are hand-crafted webpages that leverage a human's expertise by pointing to recommended content and resources online. These lenses help you find a unique, human perspective on things that interest you... fast, as opposed to less meaningful machine generated search results.

So whereas searches with Google and Yahoo would be good if you are willing to wade through tons of material as you are doing your research, Squidoo lenses are more effective if you want to effectively LEARN about a subject FAST. Having understood a subject better, you may then resort to a little more in-depth research using Google or Yahoo.

By aggregating these lenses, Squidoo attracts and then redirects traffic all day long. Seth Godin and his team have built an online platform that makes it easy for anyone to build lenses on topics they are passionate about. Not only can Lensmasters spread their ideas, get recognized for their expertise, and send more traffic to their Web sites and blogs-they could also earn royalties.

What are lenses in Squidoo?

2006-05-04T07:00:00.000+08:00

Interesting concept. Lenses are focused topics or subjects. Lensmasters use lenses to share what they know, highlight little- known lore, show off their skills and recommend resources to readers. Lensmasters can also make money via their lens building.

The following definition of lens can be found in the Squidoo Glossary of terms in SquidU:

Lens A single page built by a lensmaster; a set of handpicked, organized content about a single topic; a collection of modules pointing to content on a single topic; a page, a single page, that highlights one person’s personal view of the web -- not the whole web, just one tiny part of it.

Do take a look at the anatomy of a lens as well, it gives a very good overview of what a lens is supposed to be and what makes up a lens.

Blogging 101

2006-05-03T19:16:00.000+08:00

Well, I have been blogging for about two years already ... on and off ....

I must say, it has been quite exciting. Many people are blogging today. Yes, it seems that the whole world is blogging. But just how easy ... or hard is it to start a blog? After searching through the web for some easy step-by-step guide for blogging, I found that there were not many clear and concise guides that can help a real beginner to start blogging. With that, I have decided to start one myself and hope that my efforts will help many others to start their own blogs.

I call my guide the Blogging 101 manual. This can be found as a lens in my Squidoo website. I really hope that this contributes to blogosphere in some small little way. May more people get to blog out of this !

The genesis of an online prescence

2006-05-03T11:11:00.000+08:00

I've been trying to set up an online prescence for sometime now. As of today, I believe I have an embryonic structure to build on. I have thus far linked together a fabric of websites from my Yahoo 360, my Squidoo lenses, Flickr and my blogs in Blogger. Each of these now have cross links to one another.

For the moment, the "Hello ! I'm Chris" Squidoo lens would be the top-level website which will serve as a jump-off point for the other websites.

My next step would be to find out ways and means to increase traffic throughout all of the above websites. I am also trying to weave in Google AdSense into my blogs.

Interesting times indeed.

The wonders of Squidoo

2006-05-03T08:33:00.000+08:00

Wow, time flies. It has been a year since I've posted anything on this blog. Well, better late than never. What have I been up to? Over the last few days, I have been playing around with Squidoo. Quite an interesting concept.

Squidoo is basically a website where people, called lens masters, may create topics for which they are experts in. These topics are called lenses in Squidoo. A lens master can create as many lenses as he or she wants. Each lens is a very focused subject which the lens master would like to share with the world.

As of now, I have created two lenses. One is called "Hello ! I'm Chris". This serves as my personal lens which tells people a little about my self. It also lists all the lenses that I have created. The first topical lens which I created is called "Really Cool and Interesting Websites". This lens lists and describes all those websites which I think are really cool and which I use almost everyday.

Do check out Squidoo, registration is free !

January 2005 zoomed by!

2005-01-22T15:17:00.000+08:00

Events

Wow ! Time really flies ! The month of January has just zoomed by and I didn't even get a chance to update my blogs since the beginning of the month.

Most of my time this month was spent at Panasonic (see my blog entry entitled "Back From Sarawak" for a brief description of the Panasonic project), especially dealing with the second user acceptance test (UAT2) that started on 10 Jan and lasted till 20 Jan. Most of that time I was at the Panasonic Tuas office managing the engineering team, mainly clearing bugs (we had a long long list here), integration (the project required us to integrate our product with a huge number of external parties e.g. factories, customers, carriers, etc.) and EVA Connect (this was our product that provided the interface adaptors to connect to external parties through EDI, IBM MQ, FTP and so on).

Around 5 days of my time was also spent on supporting the sales of one of our partners, Elipva. Elipva is basically an internet software services company. It did projects like internet self-help software, HR systems and so on. Currently they are engaging one of their latest customers, Chubb Insurance. Now this was really out of Elipva's league because Chubb wanted a data warehouse for their regional office, hence I was dragged in to support them. Quite an interesting project, it had to do with AS/400 systems and building and Operational Data Store (ODS).

A couple of days was spent on another potential customer, Midas. Midas is owned by a branch of a very famous Malaysian business family, the Robert Kuok family. Midas is basically a large supermarket chain catering mainly to the lower-income family from the region of Johor in Southern Malaysia. Most of today's sales session was related more to the Mall Management and rental aspects of the project. We presented a software from Wincor Nixdoft that could help them manage their mall tenants. The people who attended the demo were Christine (the GM for Midas), Baylor (her husband and son of the owner) and Victoria (another relative of theirs!) from Prestico (their property management arm).

About People

Kutra is back and about already. It was good to have him back. At the same time, it is good to keep him busy so that he will keep his mind off his grief.

Today was the day we prepared to give salary increments to everyone. Some were deserving and therefore got more than 15% salary increments, whilst a number of others would not be getting increments for this year because they were either undeserving or were contract staff. Things were really made hard for small companies like us when the Singapore government announced that civil servants will get about 3 months bonus this year! How can the small enterprises match that!?

Concluding Remarks

Mainly a month of hard work and difficult project datelines.

Photo Blogging

2005-01-22T02:15:00.000+08:00

Photo blogging is really fun!

I just discovered how to do this painlessly. Basically, just go to http://www.hello.com and download the very small application that will enable you to upload your photos into your blogs. If you use Blogger in conjunction with Hello, photo blogging is just so easy.

Just follow the instructions in Hello.com. By the way, Google bought Blogger in 2003. and just recently they also bought Picassa, the guys who created Hello.com and Picassa, the personal photo album management software.

First day of 2005!

2005-01-01T22:19:00.000+08:00

Events for the day

What a nice day it was ! The first day of the year 2005 was spent mostly at home. The entire family had an easy day at home in Sunrise. We have a lot of games CDs and movie CDs at home, sometimes these get misplaced by the kids. I managed to tidy up all the kids' CDs and the movie CDs. Also had time to tidy up the garden. Lots of casualties from the two weeks away from home.

As this was a Saturday, we did our usual ritual which was to head out to McDonalds for breakfast. Took the opportunity to talk to Daniel about his time restrictions on computer games. During weekdays, he is restricted to 30 minutes on the computer at Sunrise. Also stated his objectives for this year; first, to do well in his studies; two, to improve on his self-control. (Daniel, if you are reading this blog years from now, remember this .... daddy and mummy really love you very much).

Irene had to go to church for carecell leaders meeting from 7pm to 8pm. After that, the kids and I picked her up and we went down to Thomson Plaza for dinner at Swensens. After that it was home again !

Closing Remarks

What a restful day it was ! May the Lord bless us in this new year.

Last day of 2004

2005-01-01T19:52:00.000+08:00

Events for the day

Well, the last day of the year, 31 Dec 2004, was quite uneventful. I had to go to Panasonic Tuas to catch up on our defects management status. The weekly project meeting was also quite ok, not too tense. Ban Leong did not attend because he was helping Bernard on the JPB proposal.

We also received the PO from GLS for the WebSphere Application Server. It was quite a tough negotiation, nevertheless, we also PO'ed to Azure for fulfillment. Apparently Azure decided to give us only60 days credit with post-dated cheque. This was because their margins were too thin to give us 90 days credit.

Irene spent the day with the kids because Jacobs had a holiday. Unfortunately, Comex and Panasonic worked whole day today. Irene and kids went to attend the family communion at church at around 4pm.

As for me, the team had our long check point meeting from 5.30pm till 7pm. After that I took a cab and rushed to our carecell dinner at Cindy's and Richard's. Along the way, it was also work, work, work. Had to call Hasri and Amin about the scaling down of the hardware configuration for the JPB project. Basically I had to reduce the database servers from V880 to V440 but with faster CPU.

The evening with the carecell was also quite normal. Almost everyone turned up ... except Alice Yeap. We shared our testimonies for 2004, after which Patrick went through the carecell prayer book and gave thanks to God for all the answered prayers. While some people attended watch night service, the Yeos went home tired. We really needed a rest.

About People

Veera had a call from Kutra. Kutra has finally decided to send his son to US to live with his sister-in-law. I guess this was best for all because he wasn't sure his parents or in-laws were able to look after his son. The funeral rites will be performed on 9 Jan, so I guess he will return to office sometime after that.

Closing Remarks

Well, that was an uneventful close of 2004. God bless everyone.

Back from Sarawak

2004-12-30T18:28:00.000+08:00

Events for the day

Well, the whole family woke up quite tired because we got back from our Sarawak trip around 8pm yesterday. We were on the road for 12 hours from Bintulu to Miri to Senai to Singapore. Phew, it was such a long journey.

Anyway, for the first day of work after my holidays, it was back to my company's largest project in 2004/2005 .... the Panasonic global logistics system. We started this project in Dec 2003. Basically, in Apr 2005 Panasonic will begin to ship all their international orders outside Japan using our product, EVA 6.0. Hosted out of Singapore, EVA will begin to accept EDI orders from Japan and push these out to all Panasonic factories outside Japan. It then manages the entire export cycle to move goods from these factories to their customers worldwide. In terms of accomplishment, I think this project tops it all for us here in Singapore. Imagine, last year the revenue of Panasonic world-wide was US$62b, by this time next year half of this will be transacted through our system. Man, its mind boggling for us.

I had to go to the Panasonic office in Tuas, Singapore, because they wanted someone to stand-in for Kutra, our lead technical manager for this project. Kutra had to go back to India because his wife and daughter perished in the tsunami crisis that happened on Christmas day. That was real tragic.

Spent most of the day catching up with Anil, our Comex project manager, and Hilary, the Panasonic project manager, on the latest project activities. Also glad that we now had a daily checkpoint for all the engineers in the Tuas office, chaired by Anil. With this we now know exactly what is happening for the day and what would be upcoming in the next few days as far as engineering activities are concerned.

As usual, our meetings at Pansonic ended at around 9pm everyday. But for today intead of going straight home, we rushed down to Matsuo, a Japanese Restaurant frequented by Ban Leong our boss, for a company dinner; Grace, Beh, Anil, Bernard, myself and Ban Leong had a real yummy dinner. It was supposed to be a night-out for the team because it has been quite a while since we have all caught up together. Also met up with Marcus Pang after dinner. Marcus is our sales partner based in China. He was back from Shanghai for a few days to spend time with his family here in Singapore before flying back again.

About People

Veera, our technical manager for the finance module of the Panasonic project, was on MC today, apparently he was not feeling ok with what had happened to Kutra's family. Veera and Kutra had been very close. The sad thing was, Kutra spent the most part of his life in the last 10 years working so hard that he seldom had much time for his family. Now, the Tsunami took away his wife and daughter leaving behind his son. He feels that life has washed away the good times and that there was a great sense of loss.

Apart from this, a number of other people in the company were also out of action because of medical reasons, funny that it all happened at the same time. Mike, our CEO, had his retina problem and was also on MC. Susan Sng, our HR executive, was also on MC because of a foot corn operation. Steve, our sales manager, was also on MC because he had to go for his medical check-up. He was urinating blood again, a problem that arose because of his kidney. Naveen, our Java engineer, was also on MC, not sure what was the problem here.

Besides them, Ligaya (our technical manager for the Shipment/WebTop modules), Boopathi (another senior Java engineer) and Ben (our harware infrastructure project manager) were all on leave. Hence, not many people were around actually.

Bee Kim, head of software group IBM keeps bugging me about closing the deal for the WebSphere and Rational for a large customer of ours. This customer was called Grocery Logistics of Singapore, the logistics arm for NTUS FairPrice, the largest convenience store and supermarket chain in Singapore. Told her that we needed to include training in her S$72K offer price.

IBM's distributor for hardware and software, Azure Technologies, needed to give Comex 90 days payment terms, and so Wendy, their sales maanger, went to Bee Khim to get more margins. This is quite typical in an IBM distributor relationship. When customers press the distributor for better discounts and/or payment terms, the distributor will press IBM for more discounts. But guess what, IBM says that its either the free training for 2 for GLS, or the 90 days terms! Comex can only pick one. What a tough decision here for us.

Closing Remarks

The time is now 2.30am. Started this blog as my dairy from today onwards. I figured that my entire life can be recorded on the net for a long time to come. Maybe my children and their descendants can read this and delve into what I did each day.

Well, that's it for today.

Our photo journal

2004-12-28T22:48:00.000+08:00

Photo Journalling

Yep. The Sarawak trip was really fun. Tiring but fun.

Here's a link to some of the photos we took during our entire trip. Just click this link http://photos.yahoo.com/chrisyeo1962 and you will be able to see all of my albums. The one entitled "Holidays in Sarawak 2004" is our photo journal.

Yahoo Photos

Oh by the way, Yahoo Photos is a real cool place for you to keep all your photos online. First, its free. Second it gives you an unlimited storage place to keep all of your photos. Now you can create albums and share it with the public, or share it only with your friends. Imagine years from now your grandchildren can have access to all your photos .... better than those old fashioned photo albums that are both bulky and yellow with age.

Highly recommended.

Go ahead and browse all the other public albums which I created in my Yahoo Photos albums.

See ya.

Its a beautiful morning in Miri

2004-12-19T09:00:00.000+08:00

Having a nice breakfast in the veranda was just what we needed.

Righa Hotel in Miri

2004-12-18T15:00:00.000+08:00

Here's where we stayed, Righa Hotel in Miri Sarawak. In fact, this is where the Yeos stayed practically every year since we got married in 1990!

Daniel Daniel

2004-12-18T14:50:00.000+08:00

Our sons, that's Daniel Lim on the left, and Daniel Yeo on the right ! Daniel Daniel. They were so good friends that they practically yakked all the way from Singapore to Sarawak and back !

Red Carpet Arrival

2004-12-18T14:45:00.000+08:00

Well, as head of our families we get to be the first to touch down ! Here's Vincent Lim and Chris Yeo getting off the plane at Miri.

Our travelling companions

2004-12-18T14:35:00.000+08:00

Here's our travelling companions, the Lims.

The Yeos in AirAsia

2004-12-18T14:20:00.000+08:00

Here's the excited Yeo family in the aircraft. Look at the leather seats!

Yippee! We are on holiday!

2004-12-18T12:30:00.000+08:00

YES ! We are on holiday. We started off this year's holiday to Sarawak by driving from Singapore to Johor Senai airport. From there we took the budget airlines AirAsia and flew to Miri Sarawak. Here's a picture of a beach near Miri international airport.

That's me in my office

2004-08-17T06:20:00.000+08:00

That's me in my office in Shaw Centre, Orchard Road, Singapore, 2004

I finally learnt how to blog!

2004-05-08T21:36:00.000+08:00

What's a blog?!

Its amazing. After reading about weblogs, I finally found out how to do it myself !

First of all, what is a "blog" ? I took this definition of a blog from Wikipedia (more about what in the world is wikipedia later -- http://www.wikipedia.com) :

A weblog, Web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a Web site would typically be accessible to any Internet user. The term "blog" came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server log.

Blogs run from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs and corporations, and from one occasional author to having large communities of writers. Some are maintained by single authors, while others have multiple authors.

Well, to me a blog is an internet based diary. Just think, the moment you blog your thoughts can be shared with everyone on the internet (especially if you get indexed by google). Not only that, your blog might be preserved for generations to come. Imagine years from now, your great grand children would be reading your blog to figure out who their ancestor was !

Here's how to do it!

How do you start your own blog ? Simple as 1, 2 3, just go to http://www.blogger.com

Follow the easy steps outlined in blogger. I did, and my first blog posting was done in 10 minutes. At the third step prescribed in blogger, you get to publish your blog ..... in that process blogger generates your very own url (e.g. http://chris-open-book.blogspot.com/) for your blog. Try it !

My first blog started in May 2004. It is entitled "My Purpose Driven Life" at http://purpose_driven_life.blogspot.com/.

My second blog was started in Dec 2004, it is called "Open Book" and it can be found at http://chris-open-book.blogspot.com/.

Hope you enjoy my blogs. See ya !