Kicks and Kisses

LinkedIn has become a marketing tool for working professionals. At the same time it has also become a great tool for potential recruiters to find out/cross check the candidature. More and more consultants are trying to add you in their network. You approve it and you get a call next minute for a Job opportunity in xyz company.

I just thought about the “Trust” keyword regarding LinkedIn profiles. How accurate are people in writing about their title, work experience, skills, breaks etc. These types of discrepancies are always there. People write wrong information in their CV’s too. But one can discover the same while interviewing a potential candidate.

I came across one such profile. I knew the person and his profile in his current company. He is a senior software engineer but he wrote his role as Manager in LinkedIn profile. Later some people in his organization complained against him to management and he changed his profile on LinkedIn.

Recommendation is one of the great tools. But some how I feel it’s not that efficient. I have lots of endorsement requests pending in my inbox. I will endorse all of them one day, may be when I need such endorsements. I endorsed you so please endorse me. But if somebody writes about you it works like magic

Simpler tools can be design to give credential to one candidate. Credential can bring trust factor in particular profile. This credential can be given by people in your network, people outside of your network, old manager, new manager, technical person who interviewed you once, a consultant who talked to you once. There could be number of ways to do it. Statistical equations can serve as back bone for such tool and make great results.

At the same time there could be social implications of such tools. Even there is a possibility of frauds in any such tool. But an Intelligent credential tool can really help potential recruiter to quickly identify a right candidate.

Do you see the difference between the two images?

In the first mail i got to the mail by clicking on the “spam” link on the left menu. This is in fact same as using “in:spam” in the search. Since the mail is a spam, the button on top is “Not spam”. Which is the correct and expected behavior, as you are inside spam, you would want to unspam certain mails which have been wrongly labeled.

In the second image i got to the mail by first clicking the “spam” link and then refining the search with keywords. This gives me a search result page. And though the search also has “in:spam” the button on top still shows “Report spam”. So if I get to a wrongly labeled message through a keyword search I can’t unspam it.

Am i missing something over here? or is this a bug?

I guess they have different templates for the spam page and the search result page. And they haven’t put the condition that if the search has “in:spam” it should show the relevant option or the relevant template.

Flickr greeted me in LOLcat :).

Pop cuture goes mainstream?

So its not just parsing the text and showing relevant ads. There is either a human involved or they have some awesome AI. Very obvious but very clever, showing “fat loss” on a recipe page.

It can be plugged into a laptop, and can render a digital illustration on a wall. It is definitely lo-fi as the paint drips and the can wobbles. But that is the charm :). Here is one of its creations. More about it here.

Can you make a paper airplane?

I can, and I have seen only a very few who cannot. I at different stages of my life have made lots of different origami/papercraft. But the only two or three things which I still remember are the paper airplance and the paper boat.

But unlike the paper frogs and other such things, I did not learn how to make a paper airplane from teachers. I don’t even remember who taught me that. From what I can recall from my own experience and from what I have seen, the source of this knowledge is either a peer(friend, classmate,etc) or an elder (big brother,uncle). Now if you think you agree read on, or the rest will not make much sense. Now why do these two groups of people teach you something as trivial(?) as a paper plane.

Friends: Often the friend is just showing to show of his newly acquired skills. Getting the “ooh he can make such a nice plane” from others. Then one of his close friends would ask him (or request him) to teach him too. Or someone just grabs a plane and reverse engineers it (very unlikely though).

Elders: I definitely believe that every elder has a child sleeping inside. When a elder wants to impress a kid he loves (the typical uncle), he would make one.

What is the difference between the two? I think “making an impression” is there in both cases. In the second case it might be a little less, it could also be the self gratification of making a toy for a kid.

Who could be the first person who invented/discovered it? How did a few designs travel time(generations) and space (countries and cultures). We can learn a lesson or two in virality from paper planes. Would be very useful in making useful social applications.

Where the application designer does not impose the “invite your friends”.

Where people would search for such a functionality and if it is not there demand it.

I was shopping for groceries in my nearby vegetable market, when I saw this.

A little background info first. Vegetables in our country (India) are generally sold by smalltime hawkers. These hawkers may not even have a fixed shop. They get the vegetables from the whole sale sellers who are generally at the outskirts of the town/city. These wholesale sellers get them directly from the adjoining villages.

Compare this to the veggies that are sold in supermarkets. These supermarkets(the big chains at least) also get them directly from the producer, but they process the veggies (peel the peas, cut the cauliflowers) etc so that people find them easy to use. Given the lack of time and inclination who wouldn’t pay some extra cash for the convinience.

But this innovative seller was processing the greens (spinach and others), cutting them with his revolving cutter and selling it at the same rate as the other sellers. Obviously he had more customers.

Value addition tip #1 : Give your customers a little something more (something which will make there lives easier/happier) at around the same price as the competition.

There are different types of web applications out there. Some are based on content. Youtube and Flickr will fall into a content sharing site with a social network built in. People upload videos and pics and then share it with there online and real world friends using its different features. If we neglect small differences in features it’s about the same. One big difference though, Youtube is google searchable while Flickr is not.

What does this imply?

That considerable hits from youtube would come from google search. Now there is a high possibility that those who searched for a term and then came through google to a youtube video page, either:

1. did not know about youtube
2. did know about youtube, but did not think it would have what they needed.

In any case once they reach a youtube video page, there are two further possibilities:

1. they find what they were looking for
2. though close they need more precise result
3. they don’t like the result and go out of youtube

In both 1 & 2 if the video is surrounded by more related things, the chances of the user staying there longer increases. Now a video in youtube is surrounded by different things. Below it is what the registered users can do with it, favorite it, send it to friends, etc. On the right is the metadata, details of the video. Below that is the related videos. In 1024 resolution I can only see two of the related videos above the fold.

The question is if the percentage of users from google users is really great, should the related videos get more limelight?

The overall bigger question here is while some sites say Twitter or Pownce would have (my opinion, i have no data) less people coming from google. So the design should be optimised more for the registered users or for the people who know what the service is about. While other sites where data is more generic say Scribd, SlideShare or Youtube (in parts, ads, music videos and such) can expect a lot of traffic from google and should optimise for such users.

In short is your web app by the people or for the people?

I will tell you people a story today. Well not a whole story, just an incident.
So the evil man got in the way of The Bride. And his head fell in one neat stroke of her katana. If I make this into a movie there are two ways I can go from here. One is the gory japanese style ala Ichi the Killer, of which Quentin Tarantino is quite a follower. Another is the regular action film, where the director has chosen the genre of the film as non-gory, decides to just let the blood flow slowly. What do you think will happen to the evil man?

We will discuss scientifically what should happen lest the above incident actually happens outside a studio.

Why? Why oh why? What is the need of such a discussion do you ask. Becaue there is a difference between the science questions we grew up solving in school and that we encounter in our day to day life. In the school questions, all the variables are defined. You already know what is known and what you have to find out. In the real world the exact problem is not very evident. It is not even evident that there’s a scientific question around. There are prejudices, supersition, common sense and a lot of other such words floating around. So if you know what the exact problem is, the solution is just elementary school standard.

The above diagram is pretty self evident. And apart from the normal pressure head, there is a lot of lose in pressure due to kinks and bends in the pipe.

So when someone is beheaded, the pressure at which the blood will spurt out is =

P = (density of blood) X (gravity) X (height of head) + (a considerable lose factor)

Since our arteries are pretty branched the lose factor will be quite high.

Conclusion is that the blood will spurt for a moment of time to a height close to the top of the head (at least). The at least is because extraneous factors like the air resistance, the lose factor, etc. After the initial moment of spurt since the system is now not closed (less amount of blood in the system), the speed of the splurting blood will ebb and then change to a flow.

Adobe has released Buzzword. Looks very nice, have to explore it more. What struck me was the use of an image in place of an icon. Gandhiji’s picture has been used for the image icon.

No wonder though, because he is the ICON and now we have proof that the world thinks so.