I was issued a new computer in the office recently, and had to decide which of the applications on my old computer were of sufficent utility to be installed on the new one. Not surprisingly, top of the list was Google Desktop Search and another similar program that I have incredibly useful, Actual Doc. I’ve ended up using these two in tandem because Google Doc simply has not been able to cope with the flow of documents I download and work on.

Actual Doc is a “recent documents”manager; in fact it describes itself as as extension of the Documents item in the Windows Start menu which has severe limitations. The most obvious ones being that it contains only the last fifteen documents acessed, and that too, only upto the week before. Actualdoc, in comparison, is positively on steroids. Recent documents can be accessed using type and date filters, and it’s even got bookmarking features that I haven’t got around to exploring yet.

I was tasked recently by the powers that be to locate an enterprise solution similar to Google Docs. Given the virtual deluge of information multiplied by the number of employees, this is the only way to keep track. The obvious thing to do would have been to  go for the Google Mini or the Google Search Appliance but their cost is a huge limiting factor.  Now, it turns out that there is a similar product brought out by IBM and Yahoo called the IBM Omnifind Yahoo! Edition which has a fantastic price of Zero. They also have paid support on top of that. Now, the only question is whether it is good as Google products but the only way to find that out is to implement it.

As I write this, I am simultaneously doing a task on Mechanical Turk. An Amazon innovation, I discovered it while searching around for some gainful work for my sister who was on a sabbatical of sorts.  The site was a repository of tasks that had partly been done by computers but required some human intelligence to be completed. My sister spent a month doing these tasks in her spare time and had the princely sum of $ 100 at the end of it.

I had forgotten all about Mechanical Turk till somebody else asked if there was any gainful employ to be had on the Net and I directed him towards Mechanical Turk. When I logged into my account to do a demo for him, to my great surprise I found that I actually had done some work, God knows when, enought to earn the measly sum of three dollars. By the end of the demo, I had turned it into 4 dollars.  The average task fetches between 1 cent to a dollar with bonuses thrown in for good work.  Some of the tasks are light enough to pass for a “timepass”.  Incidentally, the site  is popular in India to the extent that there are special arrangements for withdrawing your money in Indian rupees.

I find a greater incentive to earn a few USD these days since there are many services on the Net that I can purchase ranging from jax to ebooks. And if I keep going at my current rate and make a dollar a day, I’ll have enough at the end of the year to buy myself a Kindle:-)

While I might not have sufficent domain knowledge or patience to contribute to Wikipedia, I’ve been a regular contributor to Google Map Maker. So, once I got home, I took an afternoon off to go around my hometown with my sister and videograph the main street of Thiruvalla. Unfortunately, most of Thiruvalla is covered by a giant cloud but I still managed to add quite a bit of detail to the map including banks, ATM machines, and hotels. It was heaps of fun

The other neighbourhoods I’ve been mapping are the Kamal Cinema Complex in Safdarjung Enclave and my old haunt of JNU. Much more content has come into Google Map Maker since it first came online a few months back. However, Wikimapia still rules the roost, once you get past the geo-spam, and figure out how to use its rather limited search capabilities.

Another collaborative project that I want to work on once I get hold of a GPS enabled device is OpenStreetMap. These are just some of the ways that one can give back to the Internet what one takes in other ways such as using Wikipedia. And I hope more of my fellow countrymen (and women) would turn into givers as much as takers:-)

Train entering Ernakulam Station

First, I was on a train for 3 days. Then I was in the hospital city of Vellore for a week, again without the Internet. Did I miss it? Only sporadically, when I wanted to know if train tickets were available. Also, every time I walked out of an ATM, I would have a brief anxiety attack that I wouldn’t be able to check if the person who entered after me wasn’t an ATM scam artist and that my account had been wiped clean:-)

When I checked out my Dad’s computer at home, I discovered that it had been infected with a whole lot of Trojans and rootkits. I tried out Avast and found over 3000 infected files on the computer. It finally turned out that the only way to get rid of them was to reformat the hard drive:-( And unlike the last time I was in Vellore, I was much more circumspect about using internet cafes to check my mail this time around.

The one thing I noticed and twitted about was the profusion of mp3 devices of every size and shape on youngsters on trains, buses and other modes of transportation. The reason for that, I think,  is that FM stations are yet to service the hinterland and people have to carry their music along. In Delhi, most people are plugged into their mobile phones since they all come with FM receivers these days. One of the peculiar problems I faced with my MP 3 player was that the only way I could recharge it was through a USB port, and I finally had to give it to someone to recharge after it went low on juice.It certainly would help if the phone companies provided a USB recharging facility along with the recharge contraptions that they have put up in various public places…

I find that the Internet still remains very much on the periphery of people’s lives here in Kerala…my dad still uses it for the same purposes he was using it 5 years ago, which is to check mail, and occasionally check share prices.  The reason for that is that much of the stuff I do over the Net, from banking to booking tickets, can be done much more easily in person here in Thiruvalla, since it’s such a small town, but with all these services easily available.  That also probably explains why there are only 250,000 odd broad band subscribers in all of Kerala.  Come to think of it, even in Delhi, I’m one of the few to use the Internet for a variety of purposes other than work-related surfing. People are still too wary of the medium which I guess, is a good thing since it’s getting more and more dangerous over time. For instance, there was very little to indicate that those rootkist on my dad’s computer were still in memory other than some very vague messages that popped up when I ran Avast. So much for taking up Internet evangelism as a side business:-)

Posting to this blog will be slow this week courtesy Diwali. Watch out next week for interesting posts including my experiences with getting wifi working on a Nokia E71, and buying  Dell laptop over the phone. Mebbe even a review of said laptops, a Dell Inspiron 1525 and an XPS 1330

Till then, Wishing you a Happy Diwali and a great year ahead:-)

I made my first Squidoo lens in December 2006 on Online Travel Agencies(OTAs) in India, covering the then new phenomenon of booking tickets over the internet. Shortly afterwards, I made another lens on Indian air carriers and had a few more in the pipeline. But, first I though I’d see how the ones that I made panned out. The one on OTAs proved to be quite popular, with much of the traffic, averaging around 90 visits a week coming through Google. Then, one fine day. Google tweaked its algorithms and my traffic fell to half. With that, my earnings which were measly enough to begin with, also hit rock bottom. You see, Squidoo has a revenue-sharing model, with “lensmasters” getting a share of the advertising revenue in proportion to the traffic to their lens. So, at the end of 2 years, I had 20 dollars to my credit:-(

So, the others I had in mind never got past the draft stage. It was only after the creative bug hit me again once I started this blog that I was moved to complete my unfinished business on Squidoo. So, ladies and gentlemen, for your edification, I present two brand new lenses on Squidoo, Online Shopping in India and Online Train booking in India. Granted, they are not as comprehensive as my initial efforts, but what the heck, squidoo lenses are monkey business, given that you get only peanuts out of it, if you catch my drift:-)

I like the Squidoo concept, with all the various modules. After all, Seth Godin’s brain child had to be good.  It was actually a lot better in the beginning when they had a visual editor and an html editor, like on WordPress. But, the visual editor was giving too many problems, I guess, and it disappeared one fine day. The other problem with Squidoo is that you have to keep updating your lenses regularly, which is a pain, or they go down in the Squidoo rankings. Some people  have more than a hundred lenses(!!!) and make quite a bit of money from Squidoo. My ambition is much more modest…only I wanna do is spread the love:-)