On Writing

Posted by & filed under blogging, inspiration, observations.

Recently, while on a plane, I was talking to the person next to me and in his inebriated drool, he gave me an idea that can be a major plot point for a story I’m working on. That spurred me into thinking that of all the things that we as writers do to get ideas flowing. Most certainly, on the top of the list is taking inspiration from around us. There’s plenty of inspiration hidden all around and we just need to reach out and allow it into our lives. It may be by talking to strangers or reading new things or just carefully observing something commonplace.

 

Also, I recently did something different from my usual stance – I wrote for myself as an audience. Usually, when I write, I think of how I’ll publish it soon as I’m done with basic editing so that I can let my readers judge if the idea or post is good or bad. Well recently, I used a diary entry app to write something I’d usually publish on my blog. It felt very different in that the knowledge that I was the only audience changed how I reacted to the idea. I didn’t care much for syntax or spelling mistakes, letting Autocorrect fix what it could. I let the idea flow naturally instead of editing a sentence five times before it’s finished, the way I usually do it. I am really bad at editing text after the fact. It feels like tarnishing something sacred, even if it’s bad writing and that’s why all the editing I do during the writing part is all the editing most of my work ever gets. Thus, letting my writing style come out in full flow was a pleasant experience.

 

Finally, I’ve come to realize two things -

1. No matter how many writer-help books I read, they all seem to boil down to just one suggestion – Keep Writing.

2. No matter how much satisfying it is to talk about writing and how to do it and what are the best practices around it, nothing is as satisfying as actually writing and talking about it is no substitute at all because you end up thinking you’ve done so much about writing but it’s all just gas.

 

I’ll close with that and try to write something; if not for anyone else, then at least for myself.

Ghost: My comments

Posted by & filed under blogging, tech, wordpress.

Ghost showed up on Kickstarter yesterday and like any good blogging platform, it’ll be judged, commented on, loved and hated. So let me start early. I don’t like it. I love the idea, I loved the beginning, I just don’t like the execution. Here are the two reasons why -

1. NodeJS? Really?

NodeJS is all the rage right now. Every developer is discovering the strange and amazing things you can do with, of all the things, JavaScript and is running from pillar to post to launch a real-time, fast and easily scalable app as soon as possible. Of course, this means that there are some really nice apps out there. But is NodeJS ready?

Well, define ready.

Of course. Ready means that the next time some layman decides to set up a blog on the Internet, can (s)he purchase a simple hosting plan, upload a couple of NodeJS files and be up in 5 minutes? No. You have to rent a VPS or invest in Amazon AWS, upload files via git and then know how to develop locally and push out changes to the repo in the cloud(Notice all those keywords I threw there, developer?) In other words, you better be a developer and please don’t expect every Tom, Dick and Thorsten to be able to use this technology.

The ghost blog tries hard to defend its decision to go with JS based on the argument that it’s the future and is robust and allows innovation. It leaves out the fact that until the GoDaddies of the web hosting world don’t come out with NodeJS support in their basic plans, you’re not going anywhere with this blogging platform other than the few platforms that specifically support this technology. Oh, and your own computer.

2. What about WordPress?

When Ghost was first introduced, O’Nolan talked about how WP changed his life and how it was awesome and awful at the same time and how his plan is to take the WP Core and rewrite parts of it to make it awesome-awesome. He meant it. He was going to fix WordPress with just a plugin. But then he didn’t. He’s going to keep the WP format, so that themes and plugins can be easily converted. He’s going to make tools to import from WP so that people can shift to Ghost ASAP. He’s going to take from WP and literally give nothing back. Ever.

I did not expect this. Well, the folks at WordPress probably did. They understand that WP is open source and people can easily add or take as they want. But I did not expect that instead of solidifying and giving better direction to WP, John would just steal from WP so blatantly and try to replace one good platform with another. He could have worked on the Core, he could have made it so much better as to force Automattic to consider his direction as the right path forward. He could have influenced the lives of so many WP lovers in such a positive way, but instead he chose to give up all that just because it would be a little more difficult to make the same stuff in PHP than it is in NodeJS. He gave up on the entire idea and instead focussed himself on getting people to drop WP and come to Ghost, leaving behind the entire essence of the platform that he’s clearly got a lot to thank for.

I’m a big proponent of WordPress. When friends come to me with even a semi-serious resolve to start a blog, I tell them of the cheap and easy hosting plans out there, how they can just upload a bunch of files and run an install script by opening a link in a browser and can search for and edit plugins and themes right from inside the web app and be running a blog in 5 flat minutes.

Now, when people will ask me about Ghost, the “better WordPress”, I’m just going to tell them that it’s not worth the effort and that it’s not ready for prime time. That’s because, NodeJS being such a nascent technology, we can’t expect to see large-scale adoption of the platform any time soon. We won’t see people being enabled to quickly setup a blog without too much hassle and we won’t see ghost being the de facto standard for someone just stepping into the world of blogging. You thought App.net was a country club? Wait till Ghost comes out.

 

This whole thing seems too much like a rant? As O’Nolan says, “Haters gonna hate.”

Vast

Posted by & filed under inspiration, life, observations, philosophy.

I start my car and pull on to the road. The sky is hung quietly above me. There’s a single cloud towards the west, meandering, with a pinkish hue that bursts in my mind like cotton candy. It looks soft but tomorrow it’ll have jagged edges where the wind will have tugged at it. The day after, it’ll dissipate. The Sun is low in the sky and so it’s late in the evening. Not the time to be going home, but the time to be at home. I notice a bird dive in front of the car. It maneuvers to the right quickly and flies past me. There are two planes leaving marks high up in the sky, slowly gathering distance between them, like galaxies floating away from each other.

My route is a scenic one till I hit the highway. There are large windmills slowly churning away with the wind’s efforts. They look small from the distance but are massive. I know because I’ve driven past them once and stood in awe of how large they towered over the ground. But for now, from this distance, they are small. Behind them, the Rockies stand like behemoths. The mountains scale over the windmills almost in a greek tragedy of the Gods. Yet from all this distance, they all seem like toys given to a child. I head east. The city comes into view, a large tract of land stretching as far and wide as the eye can see, efficiently manicured, landscaped and built to perfection. There must be thousands living in these homes. But soon, I get closer to them and I see only small houses built for a family of four.

I cross all that urbanization and get on the highway. The road is straight and relaxing. I watch as townships fly by. I’m driving at sixty miles an hour. That might not seem much until you look just below the reading and it says 100 km/h. That’s fast. I climb a hill and slow down in the process. Suddenly, fifty-five miles seems like a crawl. As I get to the summit, I can see the great vastness beyond me. The city of Boulder lies ahead, spread out like a paintball on a victim caught unaware. The mountains still hang beyond, majestic; It is not just one rock jutting out of the earth but layers and layers of rock, each overshadowing the one in front, yet seeming so small from where I stand. My home is 15 miles from my workplace, another number that deceives. I’ve never driven more than half that distance to get to work in India, but here in the US, these distances seem small.

As I fly across the country, I realize the vastness of it all. The mountains are many miles away, yet are so large and uncompromising. The cloud and the planes in the sky are farther still, nothing to say of the now setting Sun and the stars beyond. How are we going to get there? How are we, so small in thought and action, going to affect the cosmos as it affects us? One can imagine the Universe in the eye of a marble, but the Universe is not, indeed, a marble. It is vast and we are small. We call ourselves conquerors only because of the slow march of humanity across land and sea. We call ourselves explorers only because others have dared before us to build the path. Sitting in that car listening to my favorite music, suddenly, I am aware of the vastness of the world around me. It is humbling to know that the world is kind enough to let us conquer it instead of usurping us whole. But is the rest of the Universe similarly kind?

The windmill is larger than anything I could have imagined. Yet it stands solitary in its quest against the mountain. It turns slowly, powerfully, inevitably and in the end, the windmill will win.

25

Posted by & filed under inspiration, life, philosophy.

Today, I turned 25. To some, this may not seem like an amazing feat, but for me, this is a great accomplishment. Why, you ask? Because this is the oldest I’ve ever been! It’s an amazing feeling!

But more than amazing, it’s humbling. It’s humbling because while on the outset, I’m this young kid who’s got his whole life ahead of himself, inside, I am well aware that I have about 25 years of experience which, though most of it has been forgotten, dictates who I am as a person.

I’ve been thinking of what life means to me. Not in the traditional philosophical sense, but in the sense of how life is supposed to be. I’ve created the thought that life consists of four distinct segments, each separated by a multiple of 25.

The first twenty-five years are formative, you are created, you explore the world around you, you learn, you win, you fail, you get hurt and you hurt others. You see the world through the rosy glasses of education and believe that everything is going to be perfect. Towards the end of this stage, you lose some, you get tired, you come to terms with the fact that the world isn’t a perfect place. The first phase of your education is complete.

The next twenty-five years are those of settlement. You settle down in a place, you start a family, you learn some more but soon you begin to teach others. You claim you’ve got enough knowledge to educate others but know for a fact that no human is complete. You’ve seen ups and downs and you face loss and gain with equal tension. I do not know exactly what this and the coming stages hold for me, but this is the way I think it’ll be.

The twenty-five years after that, you’ve created a world around yourself. Your children are or have already learnt. You have given them wings and taught them how to fly, only to hope they have enough sense to know how to use those tools. You calm down in life and you look at the ups and downs as part of what life is – a roller coaster on which you can only remain straddled if you’re serene all the time. I expect this phase to be tough, but not tougher than the previous one.

Finally, the last twenty-five years come by. These are a gift. You either live long enough or you die quickly, but you know for a fact that just like life was your friend and foe in all the previous stages, death is in this one. You await it like you await an old friend, who is coming from afar to give you some news. My grandparents lived to their 90s and hopefully, my parents and then I will follow this pattern too.

I am not ready for the stages that are coming. God knows if I ever will be. But I will give it my best shot. I will see all those ups and downs and I will react like a saint or a fool, based on the situation. But that’s life isn’t it? I’m willing to give myself a chance.

I will leave you with a story – A long time ago, in an English textbook, I read the story of the rhinoceros. It said that the rhinoceros is a creature of habit, it follows a fixed path all its life to go from its resting to its eating place. This makes it very easy for poachers to observe its path, set a trap by digging a hole in the ground and covering it with grass. When the rhino comes by the next time, it falls into the hole and the poachers tie it up, cut out it’s horn and leave it to bleed to death. Recently, the route I take to get to my office every day got obstructed by a construction crew for the next three months. The first day I observed it, I followed the detour they had created for people like me. The next day, instead of finding a new and more efficient route, I followed the exact same path I always take, came to a halt near the blockade and again took the same detour, which I’ve been taking since. I am the rhinoceros. I don’t want to be.

How the Common Man will pay for the Internet soon

Posted by & filed under observations, philosophy, tech.

If there’s one buzz word that’s promised to solve all the monetary problems of every Internet-based startup in the past two years, its “Big Data”. Everyone’s collecting it, everyone’s recording it and everyone’s saving it for tomorrow. From Twitter’s Billions(of tweets) to your Netflix queue and even your Google Search history, everyone’s looking to figure out how to sell you more stuff based on your habits.

But no one’s actually selling the data. The data in itself is useless, no matter how much of it you have. It’s the connections that are formed from it that are important and that’s what everyone is hankering to sell – information. However, all that these companies are trying to do is sell information to advertising sources and point of sales organizations like Amazon because that’s where they can easily get a large paycheck in exchange for a much larger database of customer information.

The Newspaper Model
Let us take a detour and look at one of the oldest forms of information sale that the modern world knows. We’ve been buying and reading newspapers since generations. In a lot many countries, newspapers have always been free or extremely cheap. This is because they were always supported by advertisements. But that’s not the reason why the public bought them. Any one really interested in newspapers was reading not because of the gory murder details on page two or the embedded advertisement on page three but for the editorial at the middle of the newspaper. People have always looked towards newspapers for analysis instead of the raw news or the advertisements.

With the coming of the Internet, the news shifted up to blogs and twitter. This meant a completely free platform where anyone could go and read the news without paying a penny. But this also meant that the noise increased. Companies now want to charge you money for access to the news but the same headlines are available for free everywhere else and so they’re fighting a loosing battle. What they’re not realizing is that the news doesn’t matter. The list of bomb blasts and murders and nuclear tests conducted by rogue countries affects only the general ethos of humanity but not the individual directly.

So what does affect the individual? Analysis. What was the consolidated effect of every activity that humanity has done in the past few hours? That is the question that the Internet is failing to answer, instead concentrating on finding newer and better ways of showing us advertisements. This is the right question and this needs to be answered soon or else this entire exercise of collecting and trading Big Data will fail.

 

There will come, hopefully soon, a businessperson who will look at the Internet and think, “I can’t sell goods, Amazon does that for cheap. I can’t sell listings, Craigslist does that for free. I can’t sell news, Reuters, AP and NYT do it for nearly free on Twitter. I can’t sell social networks, Facebook and Twitter have mastered that space. I cannot even sell data, everyone already collects that in their own walled gardens. I can, however, sell research. But not to the big companies in exchange for Ad dollars, someone already does that. I can sell it to the people.”

There are some who already do that. WolframAlpha doles out a nice Facebook information analysis for you for free, stats and all. If you want more in-depth information about your Facebook-ing habits, pay a small fee and you’re get that and so much more. The Magazine sells you well written articles by well-known tech authors, in essence giving you their two cents about the things that are happening around you. Netflix and Hulu analyze your most recently viewed videos and recommend more to you, indirectly selling you movies that suit your taste. I fail to find examples beyond these because there aren’t many.

We’ve got to look towards models where a large number of subscribers pay to a select group of authoritarians for their knowledge and analysis. Encyclopedias may be dead or dying but the authors that wrote for those publications aren’t. They have moved on and they need a way to connect with the common people. Newspapers may be dying because every tween with a camera phone on a street corner is a newsmaker today and in this deluge of information, newspapers have forgotten how to ‘sell’ news. But the thirst for information and analysis is not dead yet. I can follow a hundred news reporters on Twitter and find out every intimate thought of theirs, but I cannot look at the bigger picture that way.

With the coming of the Internet, we were supposed to find a medium of information and research that had unlimited possibilities instead of the limited scope of the local newspaper. But there is too much noise in the signal and those who’re able to help us, the masses, filter it will be the business victors of tomorrow. After all, a hundred thousand subscribers paying a dollar a year for real research and analysis will pay off better dividends than a million paying nothing for drivel.

On Google Reader

Posted by & filed under Google, iOS, webhosting.

Ever since the Google Reader news of day before, I’ve noticed a marked increase in traffic to my blog posts regarding Fever as an alternative RSS reader. In fact, I’ve seen my previous record for views in a day of 495 was broken yesterday with 539 views. I’d like to comment on a few things while I have your attention.

First of all, yes, Google Reader was a free service and yes Fever is not. You pay $30 upfront and if you’re not able to get free Appfog hosting, you end up paying about $4-6 per month for hosting it on a fairly cheap host like NearlyFreeSpeech. Why is it variable? Because Fever’s hosting costs you based on how many feeds you want to add to it (my Fever MySQL database is 200 MB at the moment). But even though Fever is a paid solution, I’d still make the case for it.

Then there are the other services. Feedly has been anticipating the death of Google Reader since quite some time and are readying a solution that’ll help people shift to the service without any hassles. Pulse is another feed reader that you can opt for. Of course, in this increasingly mobile world, it’s simply better to have a feed reader that has presence on your iPhone, iPad and Android tablets. So if you’re looking for a mobile fix, those are your options.

Finally, there are apps like Google Currents. The problem with such services is that they’re about auto-discovery. You don’t select exactly what feeds you’d like to read, you tell them your interests and the app then pulls out the right feeds and displays the correct content based on that. If you couldn’t be bothered to read smaller authors and build your own reading list, this is the way to go. In the mobile arena, this is the move Google is making. Currents gives them information about the one topic that Google Reader can’t – What are mobile users reading?

Then there are the link up voting style websites – reddit, HackerNews and theList. They will give you the top news that your community feels is important, but will leave you high and dry when looking for news, articles or opinions that few agree with or are simply, off the mainstream.

There are thousands of options out there and I’ve just highlighted the few. I’ve not even mentioned the amazing array of desktop and web feed readers out there because the focus is increasingly on mobile consumption. This is thus, not at all a comprehensive list but just a comment that with the death of Google Reader and the imminent rise of all other services. In fact, if you want a pretty comprehensive list, head to ReplaceReader because they’re evaluating services based on popularity. You can play with them all but I suggest you pick only the ones that lets you control what you see because if you’re letting them control what’s in front of you, you’re certainly not seeing the bigger picture and the better authors.

Ending Note: Unlike last time, this time I agree with Marco Arment that Google Reader’s demise is not a bad but a good thing because a lot of apps will grow and innovate to move into this space. RSS is not a failed technology and is not replaceable by Twitter. It is robust and though it’s been around since forever, there’s still enough happening to make it better. I personally know of a new RSS service that’s looking to replace Google Reader and Fever using compatible APIs. The future holds good things.

Title tells all

Posted by & filed under blogging, networking, social networks, tech.

Take a look at the following tweet -

Interesting isn’t it? The tweet tells you the title of the article and there a link present with it! How wonderful is that?!

Frankly, that’s the crappiest type of tweet I’ve ever seen. Social networks like Twitter and Alpha can mostly only support enough space that if someone is putting up a link, they’ll either put up a title and a link or an explanation and a link. And guess what type of post super busy (read: lazy) business people, SEO Gurus and Social evangelists who use automated services like Buffer or IFTTT go for? You guessed it, the former.

Why does it matter? It matters because in this world of micro blogging and tweeting, everything is just a headline and nothing is context. If I start giving importance to everything anyone ever posts, it’ll be hell for me. So, it only goes to say that it’d be etiquette to ensure that whatever you’re posting is easier to read by your followers. How can you do that? Pretty simple. Do NOT post links with titles. Post links with reasoning. By posting in context, you’re ensuring the other person has an understanding of *why* you recommend this article or service instead of them just hopping to the link only to discover they’re not interested.

Oh, and SEO gurus, by posting the context, you’re adding more keywords to your posts, thus making sure you get better hits. It’s really a win-win situation even though it might seem to take longer for you to make that post.

By the way, when you look at it, does my post’s title do a good job of explaining what the article is about? Not really. That’s just an example of how bad/wrongly worded blog post titles really are. So by adding context, you’re adding a lot more value to your followers.

Good day and have a good weekend! :)

A response to Marco Arment about ADN Freemium

Posted by & filed under social networks, tech.

Today, App.net (ADN), the social network that made me drop all others made an important announcement – that it is going to allow free accounts that are invited by currently paying members. I did not intend on writing a blog post about it because this is news that has already spread through wildfire in the tech community. Some have lauded and some criticized it. But the post that made me write is this commentary by Marco Arment.

Marco argues that while such news is welcome, ADN needs to do more to promote user growth instead of focusing on developing the API. He goes on to state that the main reason people are signing up is the twitter like functionality sans the spam and advertisements and instead of building file storage APIs, the team should develop spam protection and open the gates completely to free members.

Marco is looking at this from the point of view of a developer afraid to spend time and resources developing apps for a lesser known social platform. In his defense, he states clearly that from the outset, it seems ADN promised a wonderful social network that everyone will jump at.  From the earliest days, while I was talking to the early developers and with Dalton and team themselves, one thing was clear – ADN is not making a social network. ADN is making a social platform with an open API that encourages developers to build anything they want without fear of persecution. The objective is to allow developers to take risks and build anything they want. This is proven by the fact that there is no official app.net app, anyone can build their own.

Marco asserts that developers should not build social apps for ADN but should build for Facebook and Twitter instead, because “their role is to spread our apps”. This is too far from the truth. Today, Facebook and twitter are doing everything to pull users back to their default apps, from putting restrictions on the API to tightening the noose on the format in which content can be displayed. This is all just an advertising backed play. ADN, by that standard, has nothing to gain or lose by promoting one app over the other. The money flowing in will flow regardless. Marco also argues that instead of the ADN files API, developers should build on Dropbox because it is a million users ahead and can easily drive adoption of said app.

Marco would do good to remember that people were building apps and services for twitter and Dropbox long before they were famous, well-respected services. Developers come in two varieties – those who seek to earn money from a popular or well-paying service or those who seek to solve a problem they or someone else is facing while using their favorite service. Every social network needs the second kind during its growing phase because those who build the ecosystem just because they are loyal to the service often build the best solutions. Right now, ADN has a good mix of both simply because there is promise of never letting the company’s policies come in the way of what a developer wishes to build. It is not incidental that developers have started hating twitter after their recent change in policy. Therefore, it would be wrong to discourage developers to build just because a service is small or less famous. If no one would have built for Twitter, we’d still all be using our own blogs and if Dropbox would not have had a strong API and a great developer ecosystem, we’d still be using email to send each other files. The ecosystem, too often, makes the service.

It is also important to remember that out of all the customer-paying model based services, there are two that emerge – those that give away some free access and woo users with payment plans and those that are upfront about payment plans but flounder because of the lack of free options. One simple example that comes to mind is Dropbox and Box.net. Dropbox is enormously famous and has a great freemium model. However, most users of the service are free-loaders with the number that pay being much less. Box.net, on the other hand, has always been more of a paid service, whose free members were severely restricted in what they could do. But is Box.net a failure? Have they closed shop when faced with competition from Dropbox? No. Instead, backed by their corporate paying members, they’ve launched an attack on Dropbox by providing more and better free services to its members. Did Box.net just open its arms and start welcoming free-loaders? No, it went step by step, offering bonuses every once in a while to increase market share. Dropbox wins hands down because of its ecosystem that allows people to do so much but Box.net shows that there is always space for another competitor. Without its API and third-party developers, it’s possible we would have seen the end of Dropbox as we’ve seen the end of so many other file storage companies but just because of its paid customers, I doubt we’ll see an end to Box.net any time soon.

Marco states that in building an app for ADN, a developer is requiring people to sign up for a paid ADN service while they could be building for a free service like Twitter or Facebook which will provide better returns. Lets look at Marco’s own service – Instapaper. You can either buy a paid official mobile app for the free service but if you want to buy a third-party app, you have to start paying $1 per month for using the API, making it, in essence, a paid service. The only reason the service is still active in the face of competition from so many free services like Pocket is because it’s a good service, because people are willing to pay for it and because developers are willing to support it with a variety of apps. Once again, we see that more often than the service itself, the ecosystem drives growth and adoption.

One more thing – ADN isn’t asking developers to build ADN specific apps. Developers are taking that decision themselves or based on input from users. ADN is not stopping developers from building cross-posting or cross-functionality apps. Instead, it is encouraging them to do so. Twitter on the other hand, prevents users from building cross-functionality apps. This is as open an API as it gets. Nor is ADN telling developers to specifically use the Files API instead of Dropbox or other storage services, but it is presented as a good option, that’s all. It is only in the interest of the users and developers that ADN is building these features into the API. There has been, since the beginning, talk of building a variety of social networks that do very different things on top of the API. By calling these often discussed use-cases of the API ‘theoretical’, Marco is plainly claiming that such services will never materialize and ADN should just revert to being a twitter clone.

The freemium concept will help ADN grow slowly but surely. As the user base increases, developers will be attracted to the place because of the freedom they are afforded and this will only lead to more paid sign ups and thus, more free users. This is a much better way to grow than to face the “spam and abuse” that other social networks face because that was one thing that was clearly promised to the users. Arment would say that he’s talking for himself in the post and is forcing no one to follow his ideas but he is a beacon of light for independent developers who believe that he was the one man who did it alone, so maybe they can too. He of all should understand the value of an ecosystem around a product and instead of telling people to not trust ADN and not develop for it, he should foster growth. And yes, he is standing on the outside.

It is 1984.

Posted by & filed under blogging, politics, social networks, tech.

Big Brother is watching. This is the ominous note that strikes me whenever I think about George Orwell’s amazing book. It makes sense in a senseless world. We are aware of our governments watching us. But I’m not going to talk about intrusive governments. I’m going to talk about something else. Ever since I joined ADN, I’ve been part of a growing debate over privacy concerns regarding Facebook and developer concerns over a now well-locked down Twitter API. I’ve read about Facebook’s new Graph Search, I’ve read about Twitter’s fight with Instagram and I’ve read about Dunbar’s number. But today, when I saw a link about Twitter being the fastest growing global social platform, is when I realized where all of this is going.

Many months ago, I read an interesting article on Quartz about how Facebook is looking to Africa for its next Billion users. The method is simple – provide Facebook access for free via SMS. In this classic move, people get addicted to the free social network and Facebook gets marketable user data on a Billion more. This despite the fact that we’ve well established that Facebook isn’t what it’s all pegged to be – a way to connect with people. Then I saw this new post about Twitter today and I realized where this is all going. Those of you who’ve read 1984 will know that in the book there are three main countries, each too large to be defeated by the other two, even if they try to combine forces, which never really happens because of ever-changing alliances. All this while, the common people of each State are fed misinformation and trained to accept it as fact. This is an Oligarchical system that cannot be broken. There is a perpetual war and all available resources are concentrated towards it, sacrificed from availability to common man with the hope that it’ll help in the war effort. But the most important facet? Everyone is watched. Read more »

DotIt!

Posted by & filed under reading tools, tech.

A bookmarklet for importing to DotDotDot -

A few days ago I posted about an up and coming service called DotDotDot that is a great replacement for Instapaper. That day someone posted a link to my blog on HackerNews and my site got 280 hits in a day, a record for my blog… :) Read more »