Stiki! or Story 2.0

I was going through IIM Indore’s placement report which was released officially a couple of days back. Eager to know what my alma matter has chalked up, I went through the report. What interested me is not the fat packages and the multi-colored graphs done on the data, but the last part of the report.

The Batch of 2008 also saw two students taking the road less traveled of initiating a business venture of their own, as part time to start with. They have founded www.ourownbook.com – an innovative website that provides visitors a chance to participate in a collaborative book writing project, and get recognized as co-authors of the final book published.

A collaborative book! That interests me … back when we were students, we often used to pass around small scraps of paper where one used to read the current contents of the paper, add some of his own and pass it further. The final outcome used to be hilarious. Many such stories and poems even had been made and fondly saved by us. This idea of Our Own Book seems to stem from such an idea. Immediately, it struck me as a Wiki way for writing your story … a Story 2.0 or a Story + wiki = Stiki!

Some concerns about this mode of writing is that all the authors should be in-sync with each other’s writing style and mentality. If this is unknown, then the story can meander into unknown … it can take a life of it’s own. And thats the exciting part … I remember reading this funny mail about how a psychologist gave couples to write similar stories, and one couple ended up fighting about the content and outcome of the story.

I just added my first entry to the already existing entries … there are simple and effective control systems to take out malicious users from the system. Thats good.

Looks like some people do remember that I is for Implementation after all. Kudos Anubhav and Dhruv … sahi concept!

IIM Jobs

No, I am not job hunting. Atleast not yet :)

But I came across this great site. Its iimjobs.com

Its a portal for all job hunters or for those of us who want to know our market value, and feel good with that information. The site has a simple layout with all the recent job openings on top. Plus, if you are particular about one stream only, then you can browse through the job postings by specialty.

And the best part about the site is that you do not have to register to get to the content.

Kudos Tarun!!

Coming back to this post after a decade, and can say so much has changed about IIM Jobs. It has become one of our default sites to post jobs, and also refer to friends and family when they are hunting for opportunities.

In the start-up eco-system, I can see that founders are posting jobs for co-founders.

Firefox reaches 500 m :-)

Its my favorite browser. My only browser for that matter (yes, I sometimes do use Konqueror) and only use the more ubiquitous IE but only to go to Mozilla site and download the latest release of Firefox.

Its great to know that all of us have contributed to the magic number. 500,000,000. There’s hope to this world after all :-)

Read more about the milestone here.

One more example of how the user and customer opinion and feedback was taken into account while developing the product. It sometimes becomes very difficult to choose between the two dictums Customer is always right and To thine own be true. Many a times people have to make those hard choices in order to keep a business running. So what if the product is slightly flawed … the customers wont complain, because they do not have any other obvious choice. Yes I am talking about you-know-who-who-bundles-their-browsers-with-their-operating-systems. Try uninstalling IE from WinXPSP2 and you will know what I am talking about.

Well, now they do. And they know about it!! Power to the people!!

N3tH@c|<

The mountain giant picked up a boulder and heaved it towards me. My female orc wizard ducked and narrowly missed the hulk of rock. I decided to take my Wand of striking and kill both the giant and the killer bee buzzing behind him in a single strike. The giant absorbed the magic and moved on to pick up the boulder for another shot. I smote off the killer bee with a couple of blows with my trusted +4 magic staff and turned to face the giant. The goliath had managed to pick up the boulder, now was the time … I took out another wand of magic missile and let go its fury at him. No effect. I would have to kill this one by hand-to-hand. No matter. The staff was up for the challenge and my mithril coat was unharmed. A fast flurry of blows was exchanged the giant lay bested at my feet.

No, this is not a dream. Its one of my favorite games, NetHack!! This is a single player game released in around late 1980’s … the development of this game has been completely on the net … and its a hack and slash game … hence net + hack = nethack :-)

Everytime I play the game, theres something new that happens. The maps are different, the characters are many to play with … and the game decides to behave differently on a full moon day!!

Just one more example of how a product has developed in a decentralized fashion over an open interactive medium (IRC and Usenets) to result in a customer oriented product.

Creating a personal blog

Blogger logo

So, a lot of us like to blog, and of course would it not be super cool if we had our own blog url and all the jazz effects at of course a minimal of a cost.

Well, now we can. And even the most basic of a computer user can go ahead and have his personal url blog … here’s how you do it.

  1. Go to a domains seller. I bought mine from Aalphanet. Needless to say, you will have to register first.
  2. Search for an available domain eg- kidakaka.com
  3. If available, go for the kill, purchase it. A .com comes for somewhere around Rs. 450.00 per annum, a .in comes at half the price.
  4. Once that is done, buy the Manage Domain rights for your domain. This costs an additional Rs. 45.00 per year.
  5. Now start a blog on the blogger platform
  6. In the Settings->Publishing->Advanced settings, go to the your own domain name, and provide the same.
  7. The complete instructions are given here, but this is what you do simply –
    1. Enter you domain name in the Advanced tab
    2. In your Manage DNS section of domain dashboard, make a CNAME entry for your domain to point to ghs.google.com
  8. It should take an hour and two and Voila!!

The blog now is hosted on the blogger platform, but the url is yours. A customized personal blog for less than Rs. 500.00 a year.