iConverged

You know, one would think a person interested in technology always would do his research before adoption. Well, in my case, my heart always conflicts with my mind. Consider my sudden move from blogger to wordpress.com. It went sort of like this “oh cool, there are some neat wordpress.com templates, I’m bored of blogger, so let me migrate”. I know, it was a ridiculous reason. I did not research wordpress.com’s limitations. After migration, I realized:

1. No google-ads allowed. Darn. I had just about started to see a reasonable return on my old blog
2. The import tool imported the articles alright but did not import images - they kept the blogger URLs. Once I removed my blogger blog, several of the images disappeared. My guess is others will disappear over time
3. No detailed stats. Wordpress.com’s own stats is very limited. Statcounter was far superior, but since I can’t plug in JS code, statcounter works with wordpress, but cannot show referrer stats
4. No linkage to analytics.
5. No customizations to CSS unless I buy it.
6. Article URLs were not rewritten - so if you go to my yearly roundups (which I forgot to do for 2007), they will all point to my blogspot.com URLs which don’t exist.

Like I said, a badly researched option for me. Guess I deserve it. Can’t blame wordpress.com at all. Gee, maybe I’ll migrate back and pain my readers to re-do their entire subscriptions etc. Or maybe I’ll just stick to this limited functionality. Gee.

On the plus side, I think Akismet rocks. It’s a godsend for spam.

Presenting the most powerful framework for conceptualizing your company.

Credit: here
Source I read it from: here

See this: http://www.tdbspecialprojects.com/

Click on the central ’shuffle’ button for ‘innovation’.

Hi Readers,

Just a short post to let you know that this blog just may be quiet for the next few weeks (hopefully shorter). I am in the process of discovering how lovely yet strenous it is to manage our newborn son

A Note to my friends from Russia: Thanks for your email - I apologize for not having responded yet - I will certainly put some thought on your questions and write back by next week.

(c) Corporaterat (please retain copyright if you copy)

Oh just a cartoon. Sometimes, I get the itch to draw.

Are VoIP/Convergence/Telecom/SIP bloggers really original or do they just keep picking up posts from each other?

Let’s have some fun. I wrote up a Yahoo Pipe (What?? you don’t know what they are??) that compares the feeds from:

• Alec Saunders
• Telecom’s Tsunami
• Pulver Blog
• this blog

Then filter them for voip/convergence related posts, then selects only those that after analysis seem unique, sorts ‘em and then creates a new feed just for you.

Check it out here and see what happens when the above four blogs are put to the ‘copycat’ test

I applaud the Yahoo team for coming out with such a great tool to let users apply diverse data into a personalized flow. Raw Data becomes useful information, only when you provide the right means to personalize them.

(Disclaimer: This post is just an excuse for me to test Yahoo Pipes - a very very nice new concept in personalized aggregation. It is not really meant to discover if we are all original or not - so don’t complain if you think the algorithm for originality is rubbish!)

For a more serious example of how it helps, remember my earlier post where I was complaining that the new blogger beta was sorting feed by update date not published date, and this resulted in old posts showing up for all my readers even if I fixed a typo? Yahoo Pipes solves it so simply - all I had to do was create a new pipe with a ‘fetch’ for my blogger feed and then sort it by published date and then export that feed to my feedburner input. Simple huh ?

Or, take another little more complicate example, where in addition to providing site feed, I show how to also add another feed attribute which shows who all links to each post.

Note: Yahoo Pipes is very slow after launch. Yahoo says too many people are overloading it - they hope to get better in a few days, so if you see no output of my pipe, run it again !

Feb 09 Update: I found a way to fix blogger’s feed sort order. Instead of providing my atom feed to feedburner, I created a Yahoo pipe to sort my feed and provided the Yahoo pipe’s RSS to feedburner. So hopefully, after I make this change, you should not see it at the top of the feed. If you do, I have work to do !

Update: Looks like the new Blogger will continue to re-order posts based on update date. Yeesh and !@$!XX!@* again. read more here.

Folks, sorry, but it looks like the feed to my website is completely messed up, ever since I upgraded to Blogger Beta. I use feedburner, which in turn takes it feed from the blogger feed at http://corporaterat.blogspot.com/atom.xml . If you look at that Atom feed, you would notice all my posts are topsy turvy, missing posts, and old posts showing up front. Of course, I should have researched before I upgraded, but it is too late now - I am at the mercy of Google to fix rss.

The positive side: As part of the blogger upgrade is I now have labels (see sidebar) so you can view based on category.

Not sure what I can do about it except yell and scream. So please don’t forget to visit this site every once in a while to see what’s new.

Okay, not a technology post, really. Just some light-hearted cynicism. We haven’t had one of those posts for a while now. Life is not all about technology, ya know ?

Yes, yes, I know, with the advent of the all pervasive IP pipe, you are going to able able to wave a hand and discover your friend’s contact from google with its advanced mindreader engine. You will be able to click on a webpage and call your friend (let’s not worry about minor details like how your friend’s contact would be on the web in the first place and whether he really wants that or not). You will be able to discover his presence and call him when he is free and all that good stuff. Ofcourse, there is IM as well, and you could just IM me your contact. Great stuff!

But in the meantime, let us assume that a vast majority of the users, who still use a phone as we know it, start getting used to this new world… After all ,why blame them ? Most of the devices I see today have a dialpad on them, even if it happens to be a soft-phone. So till UI innovations come in, I’d expect people’s usability pattern will remain the same for a while.

Since the dawn of VoIP, people have been constantly saying that with VoIP telephony, you can now dial by user names, and it makes life so much simpler than remembering a number.

1. Have you ever tried typing ‘billybob@myverizon.net’ on your phone vs. 3101457865?

2. Do you really believe that when this form of identity becomes popular, you will actually get an easy to remember email like ‘billybob’ ? I’d bet it would be more like ‘billybob_0012′. If you work for Tier 1 companies with 10,000+ employees, you probably know that already, looking at your email. In this case, we are talking about subscribers 10x - 100x that size.

3. Do you really think people will remember who is who, when you have addresses like samlikesfood@sip.yahoo.com, sam@myisp.com, samusr124@sip.vzw.net ?

4. If you believe that no one will dial user names, and that it would all be in an address book, then whether its numbers or user names, it doesn’t really matter now, does it ? And incidentally, I can bet you make several sporadic phone calls to people you don’t want in your address book.

Finally,

old-me: What’s your contact no.?
old-you: 3011563865
old-me: I’m sorry, thats 301-15-what ?
old-you: 301-15-..6…3…8..6…5
old-me: thanks

Next generation conversation:

me: what’s your contact ?
you: suzie281264@m-world.att.net
me: Is that suzie with a ‘z’ or an ’s’ ?
you: ‘z’
me: Is that suzie 81264?
you: No, 281264. Its my birthday -that was the best id I got that was available.
me: I am sorry, I couldn’t understand your accent following the @, it is ‘aim’ ?
you: No, the letter ‘aym’
me: underscore or dash ?
you: What’s that ?
me: I mean, the symbol after the @ and before ‘world’. What is it ?
you: Oh ok, it is a hyphen. What’s a dash ?
me: Never mind
me: great suzie281264@m-world.attnet
you: no, ‘att DOT net’
me: cr*p. Do you have a phone number ?