Always remember Carpe Diem

One of the hard lessons that I have learned this year is “Always

remember Carpe Diem“. The

corollary is that “If you don’t execute on your idea quick, someone

else definitely will.”

For example, long back Vikram had this

idea that there should be a company which takes care of odd chores

such as electrical maintenance or plumbing, basically handyman work.

Yesterday, I saw www.handiman.in on the back

of an auto rickshaw. I came home and checked it out and it does

exactly that. It’s a very useful

service and seems

reasonably

affordable, at

least for IT people. I’m sure lot of people in Bangalore will go for

it.

Today, Mrinal

pointed

to www.indimeme.com

a TechMeme for the Indian blogosphere.

I started kicking myself.

I’ve had this idea for months but I couldn’t really move on it because

I don’t have the knowledge yet, for example, about clustering

algorithms. However, I did brainstorm it with a couple of friends and

thought we’ll work it out. But a single person beat us to it.

There is a range of reasons why such a website is a good idea,

probably the same reasons why TechMeme is indispensable too:

And so on.

Anyway, the only downside I’ve noticed about IndiMeme.com is that the

clustering results aren’t good yet, but the thing is it is already out

there. It has been

executed.

It needs refinement. And I’m sure it’ll get there.

I don’t know whether I should add this idea to my already-long

personal ‘deadpool’. Sigh.

When I started thinking about this idea, I came across one paper

called Mining blog stories using community-based and temporal

clustering which

explained how this is a special type of clustering that takes time

into account. They call it:

I was thinking whether the same idea can be applied to an RSS

aggregator and then I found that was done

too as well.

I guess there are simply no low-hanging fruit left in this accelerated

world.