SAST Wingees

How did the Bengali sweet Rasgulla come about

Here is an interesting story of how it was  invented and marketed by Nobin Chandra Das in 1868.  I love Rasgullas and I feel proud to have eaten it at the original K.C.Das’s shop in Kolkata. (Via Priya Raju).

Effect of My Yahoo Vs. Bloglines on my blog reading productivity

I have been using My Yahoo for a long time and started using it for keeping track of blogs,  since they introduced RSS aggregation a while ago. As my interest in the blogosphere increased, the number of blogs i track has increased dramatically and I started noticing some problems.

All the while i kept using My Yahoo and  reached a point where the middle column of my My Yahoo page was looking like a long python ! I tried the “pages” concept that My Yahoo has and that did not help as well.

Another problem I started noticing is that, blogs like Boing Boing and Engadget that i follow keep putting out cool stuff through out the day and I ended up clicking to read them if I happened to access the My Yahoo page during breaks.

At the same time, I could not digest the information properly as i was just skimming the post due to lack of time. I tried shutting off the My Yahoo page but since I use the My Yahoo page to keep track of breaking industry news, competitor news, competitor stock quotes etc. I could not do that as effectively.

Also, due to My Yahoo’s design, you only see the top 5 (this number is customizable) posts of the blogs and there is no easy way to know which ones you have already read and which ones you have not.

Enter Bloglines. Like My Yahoo it is completely browser-based with no downloads required.  I first removed all the blog feeds from My Yahoo and added them to my Bloglines subscription. There are a few features that Bloglines has, that have had a significant impact on my productivity –

1. The left hand frame lists all the feeds and shows the number of new posts against each feed since your last session. So you immediately know which feeds have been updated since the last time you looked. Once you click on the feed you want to read, it  shows on the right hand frame, the posts that you have not “seen” since the last session.

2. “Seen” is important in the Bloglines world, because as soon as you click on the feed and the new posts come up on the right hand side,  Bloglines marks all of them as read. This is nifty because you don’t have to click on each post to mark it as read and since the entire post or a major part of the post is in the right hand frame, you can skim it and click on it to read further only if it is of interest to you.  This is important because not every post from every blogger that you are following is worth reading every word of.

The above two features help you process a significant number of  feeds which is impossible to do as efficiently using the My Yahoo design. I have also added search subscriptions and del.icio.us feeds to Bloglines. The search subcriptions feature allows you to monitor the blogosphere for certain keywords of interest to you.

One big change i made in my routine is to open Bloglines only when i know i have the time to read and digest the various interesting posts. Untill someone comes up with a better method of tracking the blogosphere, i am sticking with Bloglines. Perhaps Yahoo will release a widget through its Konfabulator acquisition that will one-up Bloglines.

References:
1. Excellent post on the To-Done Blog titled “productivity tips for avid blog readers”  which served as the inspiration for my post. (Via Ted Leung.)

2.  Interesting interview with Jim Lanzone, Senior VP, Ask Jeeves (which recently acquired Bloglines).

Wedding Crashers cracks you up

Wedding Crashers starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, had the entire theater filled with laughter in many scenes. The story line – 2 people crashing weddings to meet girls, provides plenty of opportunities for funny situations and the director capitalizes on that very well. Vince Vaughn carries the film with Owen Wilson providing the perfect foil. The Owen Wilson-Rachel McAdams romance provides  added color.  Thanks to Jason Kottke for a positive review that made me see this movie.

Another gem from Scott Berkun

I have already raved about Scott’s essays. Here is his latest on “how to learn from your mistakes”.   (Via del.icio.us/franzenjb)

Story telling and Cognitive Linguistics

I have been preaching the gospel of story telling as a tool for persuasion in the management context for a while now, heavily influenced by several articles that have appeared in the Harvard Business Review over a period of time.  The group of managers i am mentoring within my organization is currently engaged in a story telling exercise at my behest. As i was trying to explain to them how to improve their story telling capabilities, i came across a brilliant article titled “Framing Wars” by Matt Bai in the NYTimes Sunday magazine 2 weeks ago. If you have wondered, as I have, about how the GOP consistently hammers the same message over and over and wins elections, Matt’s article has a very interesting reasoning behind it. Matt draws heavily from the work of George Lakoff in the field of Cognitive Linguistics.  Based on Matt’s article, one could easily see how story telling could be improved by crafting an overall message or the “Frame”, and creating sub-messages that fit the overall “Frame”. However, this whole concept of multiple exposures to influence someone’s opinion is not new. It has been one of the fundamental guiding principles in the advertising world and the reason why you repeatedly see the same advertising spot many times during the same program (“reach and frequency“). As I started to look further for other psychological factors at play here, I came across a fascinating body of work called “Mere Exposure Effect” first studied by Robert Zajonc. It explains how     our inclination to rate something positive or negative gets influenced by mere exposure to some unrelated item previously.  Even more interesting is the “Sleeper Effect” that makes you remember a particular fact as true after a while, even though it came from a source that was not credible when you first came across it.  Strange are the ways of the human mind ! References:
1. Q&A with Matt Bai. In a strange quirk of NYTimes’s DRM, you have to go to the bottom of this Q&A and click on the related articles link titled “Framing Wars” to read the entire article. If you directly go to this article through a google search, you will be asked to pay for it ! 2. A superb article in The Economist on Persuasion – briefly touches upon another psychological factor – omega theories of persuasion that work to reduce your resistance to an idea. 3. Some links (link1 link2) from Harvard Business Review ($$). 4. Some other bloggers covering this topic –
a. Mark Liberman in the Language Log.
b. Provident Partners on the impact on PR.