Friday, September 30, 2005

Another one who's got it all wrong

Heather Burns writes that "Blogging is stupid; go be a human being". And much of her ire is over what Seth calls 'cat blogs' in his Who's there ebook. Another good reason you would be better writing 'Viral Blogs'. Right Seth?

And, believe Heather doesn't own a blog (yet)!

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Rollyo, the customizable search engine

Thanks to Steve Rubel, Rollyo 'the roll your own search engine' seems fun.

The idea is real good. It lets you search from your own custom created list of sites - basically the plural of the "site:url.com " in Google. For example, the 'News Networks' rollyo will search the msnbc, abc, cbs & cnn sites alone for your query. A novel way to do vertical search, provided you know the authorities in your domain & to get rid of spam sites from turning in your search results.

Check it out - http://rollyo.com/explore.html

Scoble's boast

Robert Scoble says

Heck, you can already see that I've noticed that MSN's and Yahoo's quality has really gotten better in the past few months


Look at this post. Google is still being manipulated. And I find Yahoo's results for network monitoring software is worser than Google's. Comparitively, MSN's is better than the two. And that's not because of OpManager being No. 5 ;-)

update: and Robert in another of his posts

... even Open Source developers can make money on Windows. Jboss has about half of their customers on Windows.


Nice way of pulling down open source! open source aint 'free' most of the times, rite?

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Ringo or Pete

Seth Godin states,

And, yes, the Beatles were never the same after Pete Best left.


Don't know whether he means it in the positive or negative sense. From what lil' I know about The Beatles, seems Ringo Starr was a better drummer than Pete Best. Whats your say?

Ads in RSS


As a marketing guy, am always on the lookout for new avenues of advertising. And one of the latest emerging avenues is ads in RSS feeds. The technology is still at an early stage & the ads won't get displayed right sometimes.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Oh, the West

From Seth Godin's blog,

A recent study (sorry, I'm linkless here) by the government found that distinctly ethnic first names got fewer callbacks on otherwise identical resumes. Fair? Of course not. Not surprising, though, either.


Hmm, a name like Jim Baker or Ashley Michael here in India would work the other way round. Anyway, that doesn't stop Indian names from popping up in every nook & corner of the IT world.

Customer Satisfaction

Woo hoo - this is the fifth post am making today! If you just 'see' around there's so much to write about. And this unofficial guide to creating passionate users has a good point on satisfying customers :

When widget A does not fit properly in widget B, that's a defect. When user Barry Porter cannot figure out how to do the basic thing he bought the software for, and he's frustrated and his job is at risk, that should provoke a more visceral reaction.


Six sigma, CMM, ISO or not, customer is king. The recent Dell Hell experience would show all that. And that too in the age of blogs, never underestimate your customer. Ignore her & you are soup, annoy him & you are dead!

To Code - The Best Time is Now

"There has never been a better time to be in the code creation business" - so says this blog by Rick.

Can't agree with that more. Hmm, if only I'd been in coding still ... Ok being in Marketing is no excuse to not code altogether. Infact, as this site points out, its not bad to do a little coding now & then. Its only the other day had the WAMP set-up & got the apache running & 'designed' a rudimentary marketing homepage. Hafta learn CSS & HTML, followed with php/perl/python scripting (which P would you recommend) sometime soon. And the call from ubiquitous AJAX technologies is not far behind...

MyTicklerFile

Steve Rubel has this link to YAW2P (Yet Another Web 2.0 App) tool named MyTicklerFile. Sure a cute tool to have to email you reminders of tasks. It would be great if they have a free version of say 15 Ticklers a month. (now there's just a 15 day trial :-( )

And the form for registration isn't of the Web 2.0 variety, as they ask too much info. Can't email ID & password do? the time zone (which is very important in this case) choosing is pretty awful, took me 2 minutes to find Asia - Calcutta.

Hunger & Art

From Hugh MacLeod's blog -

Willie Nelson, on why his new songs weren't quite as [cough] good as his old ones.

"Because I wrote my old songs when I was cold and hungry".

How true! Almost every creative artist's life follows the same curve - the passionate, provoking thoughts during the early stage, the mature, sublime creations at the middle & the trite, not-so-good works at the end.

Small Ideas

Eric Sink, the guy whose blogs on source control are so famous has a nice note on small ideas

I think there is a lot to be said for smaller ideas. Try it. If it fails, get another small idea and try that one. I'd bet the odds of success with ten small ideas are a LOT better than the odds of success with one idea that is ten times bigger.


come to think of it, it makes lots of sense. Thanks Eric, am gonna try lots of small ideas from now on.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

the slingbox


slingbox from slingmedia sounds interesting. you can access your cable TV stream from your laptop.

Transforming Windows XP based PCs and laptops into personal on-the-go digital TVs, the Slingbox™ allows individuals anywhere-anytime access to their own living room television experience with no additional monthly service fees. Enabling consumers to watch their cable, satellite, or digital video recorder (DVR) programming from wherever they are, the Slingbox turns any Internet-connected laptop or desktop PC into a personal TV. The Slingbox redirects, or "placeshifts", a single live TV stream from a cable box, satellite receiver, or DVR to the viewer's PC located anywhere in the home. If the Slingbox is coupled with a broadband Internet connection, the viewer's live TV stream can be "placeshifted" via the Internet to a PC located anywhere in the world.



http://www.slingmedia.com/slingbox/how.php
http://www.slingmedia.com/
http://www.slingmedia.com/slingbox/

when will TiVo/slingbox be here in india?

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

The products that are close to my heart

Just thought its high time to mention about the products I work on. As you see to the left, OpManager & ServiceDesk Plus are the (software) products that I help market. While OpManager helps in monitoring networks, ServiceDesk Plus is for tracking trouble tickets & to manage IT assets. Both products offer good value for money & if you are an IT guy in need of a network monitoring/help desk/asset management software, you'll sure find 'em useful. We do offer a 30 day fully functional trial for both the products and a Free Demo Edition too. Go check 'em out - OpManager for Network Monitoring & ServiceDesk Plus for Help Desk & Asset Management.

Sorry for the marketing talk ;-)

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