Month: December 2005

Merry Christmas

One of the good things I carried out of living in Cyprus is Christmas celebration. I came to realize that it’s not a religios holiday of any sort. It’s just a date for a major celebrations. Some people prefer to have family dinners, others go to pubs, yet others ignore it all together. But the scale of the holiday is so huge that the spirit is in the air, and neither you, neither me, nor anyone else can do anything about it.

To all of you who appreciate the holiday – Merry Christmas!

To all those of you who don’t – you lose!

Happy holidays either way.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-12-24

MySpace anyone?

It appears that I’ve been living under a rock or something for the last few month. Or maybe I’m just getting old and losing the touch. I’ve been hearing about this thing called MySpace and I wasn’t paying any attention.

Today I’ve heard about it in at least four different podcasts. People were saying that MySpace is the hottest, newest, and coolest thing and that all the kids love it. Obviously, I am not the kid – because I had no idea what that was.

So, I went to check it out and registered my MySpace. I looked around. Nothing particularly interesting – it’s just a large portal with a bunch of features like user profiles, friend finder (by location, interests, etc), blogging tool, forums, a bunch of onlines games, image galleries, and so, and so forth. Basically, it’s your average portal of the last centures advanced, polished, and brought into this century.

For some reason, though, it is extremely popular. There are a lot of users and many of them login very regularly. And do a lot of stuff – blog, upload photos, chat, etc. For example, the search for people Cyprus returned an unseen ever before result of 35 users! And the search was limited to women who are between 25 and 30 years of age and have at least one picture in their profile. Not bad. Not bad at all. And there are some really nice women too.

Anyway, with this huge number of people, the value of the portal increases – no question about it. There are always people online, there are people with all sorts of interests, from all over the world – good for expanding your contact list and for killing few hours daily.

Two things that I wrote on a bad list. First one is very obvious – ads. There are so many of them and they are so heavy that browsing around isn’t much fun even with such protecting browser as Firefox. I can only feel pity for people who use MySpace with Internet Explorer. The second thing is, well, probably related to the Firefox itself. During those 15 minutes that I spent on the site, my browser had to be killed twice. It slowed down to a crawl and was abusing the system. Probably, their JavaScripts aren’t optimized for it yet.

Whatever.

After spending about 15 minutes on the site I realized most of its features and the value it has for many people. Am I one of those people? No, I don’t think so. But just in case you want to test MySpace with a real user – you can use me.

Why blogs are better than mainstream news

Every day I read more and more blogs and less and less mainstream news. Why? Because mainstream news suck! Most of the mainstream news agencies carry the heavy burden of the printed press and a century of mass media from before the Internet.

Picture is a thousand words they say. Here is a graphical example for you. Cool Tech Zone – “A Division of iTech Media.” Blah blah blah. One of the recent news items is titled “Microsoft Buys Out Opera“. Catching, isn’t it? It is.

In 5 paragraphs of text to follow, they tell that Microsoft is closing a deal purchasing Opera Software. Google is mentioned and so on and so forth. Makes one read a lot, wonder, think, wonder, think, and read some more…

6th paragraph reads:

Update: Opera recently confirmed that Microsoft has not approached the browser maker and there is no active acquistion deal between the two companies currently.

In plain English? OK. “All you’ve just read above is bullcrap. Lies. We just made it up.” Yeah. They just wasted a whole bunch of your time. And they are not sorry. “Opera recently confirmed…” Confirmed? Confirmed what? They didn’t confirm anything. In fact, they contradicted. It should have read something like “Opera recently contradicted this whole article.”

I’m telling you – blogs rule…

P.S.: Slashdot post

My del.icio.us milestone

I have posted the 1,000th bookmark to my del.icio.us account today.

Here is my bookmarking evolution.

At first, I wasn’t using bookmarks at all. I didn’t have my own computer,so there was no point. And there were only a handful of sites that I was visiting, so, again, there was no point.

Later I go myself a computer and bookmarks started to multiply. They were all in one folder, and then they grew out of it, so I had to create some sort of hierarchy.

Then I got myself another computer and an office workstation. My bookmarking rate decreased since I didn’t have any means of synchronizing bookmarks between computers. I was adding bookmarks slower and not using them at all. My favourite sites were still in my memory and not computer’s.

The need for a good bookmark manager was growing though. I wrote a few scripts that synchronized my data between computers, but it was still a pain. Too often the needed machine was offline…

Then came Google. Somehow it stopped the whole bookmarking process. And I wasn’t the only one. Many many many people forgot about bookmarks altogether. Finding it again was so much faster and simplier with Google that everyone were doing just that.

With Google and the progress of the technology the Web grew fast. Lots of amazing stuff got published on the web. Finding something specific is still simple. But there are whole bunch of these things that you see once and then forget about them, until you need them long way down the road. By the time you need them, you don’t even remember what exactly they were – just some vague association. Googling for something vague doesn’t work very well. At least for me. So the need for something else was growing again. Google was good, but it wasn’t enough.

And so it came – Delicious. I was so glad to find! From the start my usage of it was pretty extensive. I was posting lots of stuff, tagging, re-tagging, importing and exporting, building statistics, and doing all sorts of crazy things. It was exactly what I needed.

And it still is.