From Chukku Kaapi to Cappuccino

Filed in General Interest, March 22, 2006, 12:06 pm by

Craze Maze – a new entrant to the blogosphere scores big with this highly entertaining post “From Chukku Kaapi to Cappuccino“. [Caution: includes english-ified tamil words. Sorry non-tamil speakers]. It is the type of post that takes you on your own nostalgia ride much like Cheran’s Autograph. I grew up in Chennai and now being back in Chennai, I can say that Chennai by itself has made a transition from the chukku kaapi era to the cappuccino era – perhaps  dabara-tumbler-filter-coffee era in place of chukku kaapi would make it more appropriate (Via Anuradha Prakash in The Hindu).

Dimitar tracks 7700 RSS feeds! – how many do you track?

Filed in Uncategorized, March 20, 2006, 12:26 pm by ,

For selfish reasons, I was trying to locate other Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) bloggers out there and I chanced upon Dimitar Vesselinov’s blog. And when i clicked on his profile, my jaw literally hit the floor. Excerpt from his profile:

My passion is knowledge. I track 7700 RSS feeds, 811 Orkut communities, 490 Tribe.net groups, 2095 del.icio.us bookmarks and many other sources.

He has generously made his feed list in bloglines and  his del.icio.us bookmarks public. (Caution: bloglines takes a quite a while to load his gargantuan feed list.)

I have a tough time tracking the 200 feeds that i have in bloglines. Therefore, i decided to conduct a brief email interview with Dimitar:

S:Do you mind sharing your secrets on how you deal with this many feeds?
If you don’t mind I plan to blog your response to this question on my blog.

Dimitar: I read my feeds ad hoc. I know the sources I should follow. Also, I
have lists on different topics.

Example:
Finance Blogs http://divedi.blogspot.com/2005/06/finance-blogs.html

S: I don’t completely understand. Are you saying that you only read certain topics on certain days and not necessarily read all the 7700 feeds? Just from a bloglines usage standpoint, do you then mark all read after you finish reading the topics you have chosen for the day? Because the problem I see is that the  unread folders/feeds will keep growing and the next time you chose to read a particular topic that had been unread for a few days, you may have too many feeds to read in that topic. How do you handle this probem? As a follow up question, do you read all the feeds on a chosen topic or do you have some way of reading only a few?

Dimitar:thank you for your interesting questions

1. I don’t read all of my feeds on a daily basis.
2. I don’t mark anything.
3. I have knowledge management goals I try to accomplish.
4. My feeds could be described as digital memory silos.

I stopped with that and requested Dimitar to write a post on his blog explaining his techniques in more detail, so that we can all apply his knowledge to track more feeds. Hope he will oblige some day.

References:

1. RSS Weblog conducted a survey recently on this subject. The survey results show that approx 12% or (19 out of 159 responders) process 390+ feeds. Comments in a older survey conducted by the same blog indicate someone tracking 677 feeds and also mentions that Scobleizer tracks 700 feeds.

2. An older Sep 2002 survey on Erik Thauvin’s blog shows approx 20% of 5272 survey responders read >100 feeds. BTW, Erik’s link blog is very popular.

Why collaboration is essential?

Filed in Uncategorized, , 2:41 am by

If ever you question the need for collaboration, read this excellent story by Leonard Read –  how a pencil is created, putting in perspective the complex collaboration needed. If such is the case of a mundane pencil, you can only imagine what level of collaboration is required for complex tasks (Via Bumblebee)

Can desalination be a solution for TN’s water problem

Filed in General Interest, , 2:16 am by

While  reading through the March issue of  Technology Review magazine, I came upon this article on desalination and how Spain has been leading the effort on research and development in this area. (Note that I could not find the article on their website. You may have to get the magazine 🙂 When I was wondering if this could be the long term solution for TN and Chennai’s (and possibly even other water scarce areas close to the coast in India) water problem, I was pleasantly surprised to read that one of the Spain companies was already involved in this effort. Upon further digging, I found that an Hyderabad based company –  IVRCL Infrastructure & Projects Ltd along with its Technical partner from Spain, BEFESA Construction Y Tecnologia Ambiental S.A.U,  has bagged a 500 crore project to setup a desalination plant in Chennai. As usual, this has to clear all the legal/bureaucracy hurdles to actually go through. For more on this and central-state government haggling, and reasons as to why desalination may not be the solution, read the following article . One of the issues with a desalination project for a big city is the prohibitive capital and maintenance cost. To digress a bit, the two mostly preferred technologies for desalination are –

* Reverse Osmosis – This has lower capital cost, but higher operation cost
* Thermal Desalination – This has higher capital cost and lower operation cost

Wikipedia has more on this. The Chennai project is to based on reverse osmosis. It has to be noted that besides the actual desalination, there should be a suitable process to preserve the fresh water by redirecting to reservoirs. Very importantly, environmental concerns such as high energy consumption and disposal of brine back to the sea must always be addressed before undertaking such as project. While I was thinking if the project could be done on a smaller scale – to understand how it can effectively work in a country like India, I was pleasantly surprised to see the efforts undertaken by aimforseva. I was glad to read that this was a grassroots effort led and partially funded by the villages themselves. I believe that a combination of harvesting rain and ground water, better utilization of water resources and well thought out desalination projects could be the long-term solution for TN’s and perhaps even India’s water problem. Ganesh

Holi – a south indian festival?

Filed in General Interest, March 17, 2006, 1:21 pm by

Fellow BITSian blogger Aarthi says Holi was once celebrated in South India as well, of course with a different name and a different mythology behind it! Good work Aarthi.