Atanu Dey, the same guy who wrote “Stuff Matters” has another excellent post on the importance of accountability or ownership for a prospering economy. Excerpt from the post -

The market is slowly coming into being in India. The law is flawed. We need to get the “f” and the “ed” out of “flawed” to get some good law. What that means is we need to get the courts to move. Many trades don’t occur because contracts cannot be enforced by a court system which has a reported backlog of about 300-odd years. Finally, we need to make people owners so that they can properly care for their charge and this they will do only if they have an incentive to perform their duty, which they will do if credible commitments can be made about public flogging.

I was amused when he recommended public flogging as the way to mend public officials. I am sure it was not his intent but a by-product of the sense of humor I am sure he picked from the sunny-sunny California. 

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So finally we know what Matt has been up to. Just installed Akismet on Beta Thoughts. I have deactivated Spam Karma for now. Let us see how effective Akismet is. One thing I fail to understand is the distribution mechanism of API keys. Does that mean that every one should have a weblog on wordpress.com as well as one’s personal weblog?? Hopefully the doubt will be clear in few days.

The name Akismet is interesting as kismet is urdu/persian word for fate.  

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One of the blogs I often read is Brad deLong’s Semi Daily journal. You can always find good discussions on various economic trends and news from Brad’s prespective on this site. In one of the stories he linked, it had the following line from original author

The Holy Grail in economics is that price should equal marginal cost

I ended up spending more time in thinking about this line than I should have. Obviously my first attempt was to think about software pricing where this would fail miserably. The cost of producing next unit of software is practically nil. Infact this is true for any thing which can be made digital. This is the reason MPAA and RIAA are fretting over this so much for the music and movie copying.

Pricing is a very interesting topic. First instance of this would have been during the bartering system in the early stages of civilization. Initial pricing techniques must have been very simple. Some thing on the lines it costed me this much in producing 100 kilogram of onions. With this much as markup I should price this item this amount. Ofcourse the compitition should be kept in mind over here.

This simple concept must have taken drastic turn with the introduction of branding. I am not sure when the pricing technique of how much the customer would be willing to pay for this product/service would have come into practice. I guess it has been there since early ages :) Here are few pricing scenarios

1. Stock valuation - the most crazy and weird thing in the world to price. Is Google really worth what it is now upwards of $300?
2. Software Licenses - This is again a art.
3. Price difference between the similar quality branded and non-branded stuff. For example a simple white shirt stiched by a taylor in Bangladesh with GAP logo and without the logo
4. Health Care costs in US

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For the past few weeks/month Silicon Valley has been abuzz with the talks about Flock - a browser based on Firefox with lot of stuff added to make life easier. Before going further I would like to remind the readers a phrase coined by Om of GigaOm

“Silicon Valley is a hot house where everyone smokes the same crappy weed and participates in a constant feedback loop.”

So with that grain of salt let me say that I was happy when read it on Matt’s wordpress.com site that Flock it out. First thing I did after downloading was to post to my Hindi weblog as this is something I have been looking for. None of the free blogging clients offer a good support for unicoded Devnagari. I was a happy puppy when flock recognized the name of my weblog correctly.   You can see my shiny little hindi post from weblog at Haanbhai Incidently this might be the first unicoded post from flock. Needless to say this post is also from flock. I like the ability to put technorati tags from interface itself. Will keep using Flock and let us see how it helps making my online life easier. Kudos to Flock team.

Update: This is from WP interface. I had some formatting challenges from the Flock interface so making the changes from WP interface. Plus how do one posts to a particular category from Flock. 

Technorati Tags: flock, hindi

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Om Malik reflecting on Nicholas Carr’s Amorality of Web 2.0 writes about the culture of participation which is the center of so called web 2.0 -  

 

if this culture of participation was seemingly help build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset - time. We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off. While we may (or may not) gain something from the collective efforts, the odds are whatever “the collective efforts” are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will they share in their upside? Not likely!

Coming to Om’s point of being the outsourced workforce - there has to be something for this to work. So far del.icio.us, technorati have been hugely successful. Any successful transaction involves give and take. If I create a link pointing to AJAX, there are thousands other links created by the community in the same area for me to see. Naturally I got the benefit of that collective work. So yes 1 Person vs. del.icio.us is definitely in favor of the site but n Persons vs. del.icio.us definitely tilts the scale towards an individual.

 

I have often wondered about this in regards to Akshargram - the online hindi bloggers community website I have the honor to host. It is sort of a virtual meeting place where hindi blogger’s ruminate on various things like geeks talk about technology on Slashdot, Culture of participation thouhts of Om are true about akshargram too. Without the community akshargram would have died a silent death. So if participants spend time in  writing posts to Akshargram, do they lose or gain any thing. In my opinion I think it works both ways.

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One of the reason for moving from Louisville KY to bayarea was the startup activity that happens in the valley. It is too much fun being surrounded by geeks :D Andreeson whose Netscape started the IPO fever is telling on the same lines

There’s a critical mass of investors — way more than anywhere else, which does matter. [There are] sales people, executives, accountants, lawyers, bankers, and you’re in the flow of what’s actually going on. [Being in tech and not being in Silicon Valley] is like trying to be in the movie business not in LA or trying to be in national politics and not be in D.C. You just don’t know what’s going on half the time. You get outside the valley and you’re not aware of next six startups that just got funded. That actually matters.

Ofcourse now that I am here there are other reasons like great food choices for Indian Cuisine, lots of buddies from PEC - the school I went to in Chandigarh, Naz8 and so on.

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Impedance mismatch over HTTP

Coming from EE background and working with web-apps this title holds a special place for me. 

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