I’ll soon be getting an autographed copy of ‘Armies of Hanuman’ from Ashok Banker! Woohoo!

That book isn’t in available in India yet

P.S. I’ll write about the other 81 reasons later…

Some of my friends, who are uninitiated to the blogosphere, know that I write a ‘blog’ but they still don’t get what it really means.

I’ve achieved some success by helping them understand how to use Firefox Live Bookmarks but I am sure there must be a lot of intro articles on blogs. I just can’t find any that are simple enough.

Yahoo! 360° is now open for a public beta.

This photo is by Ernie, one of the Yahoos who has worked on 360° ; that 360° logo was created out of pixel blocks (whatever that means).

Leave a comment (with a valid email address) if you need an invite.

P.S. Remember, 360° is not blogs, blogs is one aspect of 360°. Read this review to understand what it is really about.

P.P.S. The only thing I really don’t like is the name 360°, I wish they had stuck with Mingle.

I’m trying to play catch up with the blogosphere.. but it is difficult when I have 221 feeds in Bloglines. Actually, there were more but I’m trying to trim down my folders to a more manageable size.

I got bored of simply reading, so I decided to host my own blog mela , so here we go…

Tech-related

• Feedster Alerts allows you to get email of new posts of a blog or any new posts related to a search term. If you don’t want RSS feeds, this is the way to go. I remember somebody asking me about this (unfortunately, don’t remember whom), so I hope they see this…

• The .NET BCL (Base Class Library) team had a blog day – they just blog the whole day and don’t work … turned out to have some interesting results. I liked Play the CLR acronym game! and The .Net Vision posts.

• Linux/Java guys visit Microsoft. Too bad the Indian version turned out to be such a fiasco.

• Drew has written a good article on XmlHttpRequest.

• A hilarious entry about designations in IT offices … for example “Project Manager is a Person who thinks Nine women can deliver a baby in One month” … you know where this is going

• code.google.com – ’nuff said.

• The latest show of LUGRadio featured Aaron Seigo who talked a good deal about KDE, and that was a great interview, especially considering the LUGRadio guys are gnome-rs ; but the suggestion to rewrite KDE/Gnome in Python was ridiculous…

• The extremely popular Nero CD-Writing software is now available on Linux! But the question is are the ISVs going to see any RoI?

• Python and OpenGL run on a Nokia Series 60 phone.

• Kubuntu preview with the hot-off-the-repository KDE 3.4!

People-related

• Gotta love this quote : “There are no shortcuts in life, unless you right click and find one” … JD, that’s a brilliant quote.

• Vignesh tries to explain that there’s nothing like a platonic friendship that brings back that good feeling in you. I wholeheartedly agree because I have such a friend too.

• Rashmi talks about how getting an IIM MBA doesn’t mean you automatically make insane amounts of money.

• Anna, the ‘suitablegirl’, goes mobloggin’ and later starts counting.

• Amit talks about all the cricket cliches and he’s at cliche number 28.

• Dilip asks what’s the big deal about Mittal and says Narayan Murthy’s driver is the real story.

• Chugs has had to deal with a lady who says he shouldn’t have linked to her blog, when all he did was mention a list of sites using templates that were designed by him!

• Shrutz puts up an old poem about her ‘Genesis’ class in college.

• Umang wants to get back to college life.

• Neels is lost in the world of music.

• The obligatory link to Sepia Mutiny about how Gujarat Chief Minister Modi was denied visa to USA because of “severe violations of religious freedom” a.k.a. Gujarat riots.

• Kruthi puts up some nice pics of her cats.

• Ravi blogs about… well, me! and also Kalyan and Pradeep.

• Pallavi is chilling in Wild Valley.

• Kalyan starts naming the leopards in B R Hills.

I think I better stop for tonight. Hopefully, I haven’t violated any blog mela norms.

It’s official. Yahoo! has entered the blogosphere. Soon, you’ll be blogging at 360.Yahoo.com . The integration is simply awesome. Having played with it, I think Blogger.com will face some real competition now.

Want to know how to write a great blog? Here’s how.

WordPress 1.5 is out!! Can’t wait to switch to it. The list of features is unbelievably amazing.

Personally, I’m tired of all the comment spam. WP1.5 solves that by a simple blacklisting mechanism where you can shift users to a whitelist (so that the next comment they enter appears immediately), the rest are under moderation. If it is real spam, mark it as such and the next similar spam comment would be obliterated on arrival. Same goes for trackbacks (which I have currently disabled due to trackback spam). Simple, yet effective mechanism.

The blogosphere is full of news about Mark Jen getting fired from Google for blogging. Zawodny has the full scoop.

The part that interested me the most is what Jeremy Cole had to say about it. I have been unknowingly following his three rules on what (and what not) to blog about work.

Also, Zawodny says:

Aside for the normal agreements that one signs as a Yahoo employee, we have no additional policies or rules about blogging. But we’re working on something: a set of guidelines that are very much in line with those used by Sun Microstems. The idea is to let all employees know that it’s okay to blog about life at Yahoo, as long as you’re smart about it.

My take: There have been so many moments for me where I discover something cool that’s happening at Yahoo and I go ‘Damn! I wish I could blog about this’… in fact, I could easily write two or three sentences about the upcoming stuff right here… but I would get fired as well. So, I’ll control myself.

P.S. Its been so many days since I last played foozball with my colleagues that I have lost touch of it ; and the guys in the next cubicle are getting better and better at the guitar everyday… also I’m getting spoilt by the sweets/chocolates that are at somebody’s desk or the other….

Update : Russell has a tip for new Yahoo employees

The news is that Ask Jeeves has bought Bloglines. I just hope it doesn’t become yet another good service that is bought by a big company and then goes downhill…

Update : Russell Beattie echoes my sentiments as well.

Update : It’s official! : Excerpt: "We want to assure you that the Bloglines service will continue to grow and thrive. Like other companies in the Ask Jeeves portfolio, we will operate as a standalone, separate service — the Bloglines name will remain, as will our URL, www.bloglines.com. We will support our current features and services, so please continue to log in to Bloglines to search, subscribe, publish and share RSS news feeds and blogs. All users will continue to be governed by the Terms of Service you agreed to when you registered for Bloglines."

Yahoo! Japan now has blogs. More at SearchEngineJournal.