Cool New Search Engines

Found this VERY interesting link on emergic.

Tried out these sites with a few search results - and they yield very interesting results.

There is Pluck - which is helps you organize Web pages and make them available from any computer. It also has a good RSS reader

Blinx USP is that it brings you relevant information before you even ask.

Then there is mooter - This presents a search based on a few key terms which mooter things are relevant.

Then there is Ingenio - which introduces a Pay per call concept from a pay per click concept.

StepUp - looks to supporting small businesses .

Lets see which one of these firms rocks !

Reality is merely an illusion ..

Check this piece on a crystal dragon out from Anil Dash's Blog.

Quite an interesting experiment in physics - and a very interesting download to play.

Bangalore on CL !!

Mr Newmark has made bangalore one of the three asian cities (toyko and singapore are the other two) on Craigslist!

Nice intro message from somone in DC

Zap that Spam !

Yahoo has some interesting open source mechanisms for email authentication - domain key based authentication - Its quite elegant - just an extension of the RSA public / private key standard. Hope this picks up in popularity !

The Rise of Blogs ..

Interesting article which compares RSS and Blogs to smtp and email and Http and the web.

RSS is guzzling space !

Check out these stats from Boing Boing

Valley speak

Blogging is right up there ! Quite an interesting article from businessweek

The Llama is dying ...

Sad news on Winamp - Big brother treatment from AOL have caused the founders to depart from winamp. Still remember this as the #1 piece of s/w (along with IrfanView - Irfan you still rock !) which I used to use in School - Been following its evolution for a long time - and its sad that things had to decline this way.

biased online travel advice

With the paid ads being allowed after a federal regulation prohibiting bias in central travel systems expires. Don;t be surprised if you have to scroll down and down and down orbitz, expedia and travelocity to notice good deals

Space Geeks

Chimpanzee's flying ? Check this out

When you are going thanksgiving shopping ..

Watch out if best buy classifies you as an angel or devil !
Some things Stores hate
1. Those who apply for rebates
2. Those who return purchases and buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts
3. Those who buy loss leader and then resell them on eBay
4. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge.

The part II of the article

IPod and other online music Challenges - Larry , EFF and Downhill's views..

I don't own an Ipod - But here is an interesting riposte for IPod fans on its benefits.

A lot of this argument again ties into the Intellectual property arguments and new formats for revenue sharing that Larry Lessig makes on Alternate Compensation Systems - and why big studios are losing revenue to Apple - and not to an 'overall' benefit for the consumer as such.

The Electronic frontier foundation has a lot of interesting thoughts on this topic of how to have licensing beneficial for all parties

The Thick and Thin........

.......and then there is none. Adam Bosworth writes in (after a long gap I must add) on how simplified web service based apps are the way to go for the future replacing (thick or thin) desktop based clients. Adam's blog is an excellent read owing to his ability to elucidate concepts in such a easy fashion and relate them to business and real world scenarios which an average joe would understand.

Sustainable open source ....?

Article by Mr Epstein on OpenSource non viability and a riposte from Boyle - Diametrically opposite views - Almost like Bush and Kerry on lemme see - ALL possible issues !

Isko Badal

...... is the hindi translation for Changethis has some interesting (easy to read and cool sounding) articles on a host of topics. Here's one on outsourcing. It presents quite a balanced view on the whole issue. Change this has a lot of other interesting stuff.

Advertise this.

Anyone who has used Orkut or other social networking tools will relate to this !
Check Danah's Article on this

IPR views

Excellent article on IPR and in grain.org
Totally relevant to india's battle for protection of traditional mechanisms for harvesting food and for medicines and cures that have lasted for centuries. When you think abt it - the idea that Food, Energy, Software, Music and (sometimes lifesaving) medicines - All have strong backlash towards 'Openness' - Conceptually seems excellent on how we can integrate all these concepts onto a common platform.
Credit - read it on Siva's site