Interesting podcast

As I settle into the second month of the year and my new job, I have been making new friends and acquaintances, and, gasp, trying to prune my Linkedin network from its current status to include just my trusted friends from my earlier lives. I think “trust” is the operative word here. As an early adopter of Linkedin, I’ve been adding contacts rather injudiciously and I think the time has come to start being more selective about who joins my club. It is hard to balance the need for publicity against the need for privacy. It is easier to add contacts rather than delete them, as I’m discovering to my chagrin. David Berlind has a nice post on his blog,Testbed.

Originally I had evaluated Orkut and Spoke to serve as repositories for my contacts, but found it difficult to use all of these sites simultaneously. During my recent visit to India, I found Orkut to be immensely popular, I wonder why. Here are some interesting Alexa stats on Orkut versus other offerings.Guy Kawasaki has an interesting post on Linkedin as well – he talks about 10 ways to use Linkedin.
It also looks like Linkedin may be acquired by Yahoo??? And did I hear Linkedin is about to achieve verb status? Well,well,well.

Well, as they say, better late than ever.  I am going to keep it simple: lose weight, blog more and keep in touch with friends a little better than I did last year. Not necessarily in that order, though. Upon deep reflection, I think it is important to make resolutions rather than give up on them. And what better day to do it than the penultimate day in January?

 Just came back from Bangalore. No, the past ain’t what it used to be.

 It’s not only the name that’s changing – Bangalore to Bengalooru. Gone are the days when I would take leisurely walks in Jayanagar, the traffic is so terrible that many folks take an autorickshaw to cross over to the other side of the road. As for me, I stayed at home and watched TV or chatted with friends, many of whom have returned from the Bay Area to Bangalore(B2B, as the joke goes). Bangalore is still quite the media darling, judging by the articles that get written about it. Of course, many rivals claim that the boomtown blues have hit and that action is shifting elsewhere. The latest is Odicheruvu, the Andhra Science city.

 Anyway, back to my resolutions. Uma has a lovely blog post on her thoughts about New Year Resolutions. It’s called Make You Own Uncool, it’s a quote derived from a letter written by artist Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse in April of 1965. It basically encourages one not to worry about cool, but to make your own uncool. Nice one, Uma.

“The moments when you attain a goal and realize true perfection probably account for less than 2 percent of your lifetime, while the process of living and working toward your goals occupies the rest. If you look to perfection to supply your sense of success, you are discounting the other 98 percent of your life.”

Check out this new freeware to speed up typing

1 Friedman unit = 6 months

A new unit of time has been proposed by Tom Friedman(author of The World is Flat). Called the Friedman unit, it equals 6 months.

Google Answers, the expert-driven social site launched by the company in April 2002, will stop accepting new questions this week, Google said Wednesday. Speaking of Google, here are more widgets from them. I like the moon widget,  perhaps it will help warn folks about impending lunacy!

Bloggers are busy speculating about Google’s future this morning – the stock price has dropped below $500, over 4%. All because Barron’s suggested that the search advertising market is slowing down. I’ve heard worldwide advertising spend (including radio and TV advertising) is close to $500 billion – so there is more opportunity for Google.

Scoble has an interesting post on it this morning asking readers their opinion.My take on it is that in addition to Adwords and Adsense for the consumer market, Google is also trying to enter the enterprise space, aka Google 2.0. Also, the realm of deep search needs to be explored further.Not to mention video and audio search.

I think Google has a future ahead of it – growth is not likely to be as dramatic as the last few years but I think they have a bright future ahead.

Are you a web “guru” uploading your “avatar”? Or are you a mere mortal bemoaning your “karma”? What makes you tick, what’s your secret “mantra”? Honestly, I am enchanted when Sanskrit words like avatar, guru, mantra and karma make it to the colloquial Internet world. An oh, I forgot to mention nirvana, which I’m yet to attain. Sanskrit was never for the masses and was used only by the educated elite, so it’s really heartening to see words from this ancient language make it to the mainstream vocabulary.

The Sanskrit language (संस्कृतं saṃskṛtam, संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk) is a classical language of India, a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 22 official languages of India.

It has a position in the cultures of South and Southeast Asia similar to that of Latin and Greek in Europe, and is a central part of Hindu tradition and Philosophy. However, it was never really spoken by the masses, although many other languages are derived from Sanskrit.

Avatar: Avatar is derived from the Sanskrit word Avatara and means “descent”, common legends include the ten avatars of Vishnu, the ” Preserver”,”a Hindu god. I am surprised that abbreviations for the already short word exist and include ava, avvie and avy but I’m yet to upload my avatar on this blog. Neal Stephenson is credited with using this word to connote online virtual bodies

Karma: Karma is an ancient word and concept referring to the cycle of cause and effect. See my earlier post on karma capitalism
Guru: Guru refers to a subject matter expert and is quite a popular world in regular parlance, especially in high-tech circles

I wonder what Sanskrit word will hit the hoi polloi next – moksha perhaps?