“Have you stopped blogging?”, people ask me. I don't have a definite answer. True, it has been a long time since I blogged. Although I have been quite active in my online activity as is apparent here I somehow couldn't blog about anything for the last 3 months!
During the course of the 3 months since my last blog entry, I came across quite a lot of things, which I found interesting and would have normally blogged about. However, I got into this vicious circle where I thought that it is not worth blogging about it, after such a long gap and that added to the time, and now it became more and more difficult to blog about something.
Ok, so what's keeping me interested?
- Lotus connections, specially the idea of Activities. This has been an eye-opener regarding the way I organize information in my system/s.
- The emergence of a new web pattern of “server pushing information” to the browser, commonly referred to as Comet.
- ProjectZero, which is IBM's answer to rapid and 'Zero' obstacle development of Web oriented applications.
- TiddlyWiki – I wonder why I did not come across this before! It is absolutely fabulous and the idea of a single page self-contained wiki is just too good to believe and sometimes scary. 🙂
Also, of late, I started getting interested in analysis of web activities.
A day of effort, and some hacking of the Firefox history and a tool called RapidMiner helped me get some insights into my browsing habits, which I had never thought about before. I noticed a pattern in the way I come across new topics. Also I learnt about the way I get to certain frequently accessed sites and what I can do to get to certain information quicker than ever before. Finally, I realized that the new del.icio.us Firefox extension has helped me improve my browsing habits and made my bookmarks more valuable.
It is really interesting to see what other 'inferences' are possible with the data that is already available! Considering the fact that data today is available in a wide-variety of open-formats and the data also being openly available, it is possible to fetch all this data, feed it to some analyzer and get some interesting insights and use that to make your web journey more fruitful. The Flickr Cluster experiments are just tip of the iceberg!
Some projects/tools related to this are APML, ManyEyes.
Ok, I have written about a wide variety of topics that I am currently finding interesting.
So, finally, back to the question I started off with. Have I stopped blogging? The answer definitely has got to be a 'No'!