Came across The 9 Men who run China via Tim Iacono. Amazing, never knew Chinese policies are decided by engineers at the top in Politburo Standing Committee.

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Tim talks about the growing inventory of Hummers at the local dealer in sunny and beautiful San Diego(the epicenter of Housing Bubble). He even clicked few photographs from the so called undisclosed location

What I liked about the post was that it shows the power of blogging or an excellent piece of citizen journalism as Dan Gilmore of BayOSphere calls it. Tim ends the post with a thoughtful metaphor

The reason that the story of rapidly rising Hummer inventory is so interesting and so amusing, is that America’s most ostentatious Sport Utility Vehicle, the Hummer SUV, is a metaphor for America in the world today - overweight, overpriced, inefficient, and unloved.

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One of the prime reasons I moved from yahoo mail to gmail was the conversations feature provided by Gmail. You can see this feature in all glory in the following image. What it shows is the response to my Happy Diwali email I sent to few of my friends

In the non-conversation world I might have ended with that many emails and it would have been so not-cool to manage them. Here on Gmail I have them tied in a nice bundle.

Technorati Tags: gmail, diwali

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May the festival of lights bring light of joy and prosperity to every day of your life…

 

 to every one.

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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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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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