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:

• Allows people to see what are the latest topics that Indian bloggers
  are talking about.
• Allows people to see the discussions across blogs, not just one blog
  and its comments.
  • Encourages the above type of discussion.
• The portal can become the gateway of the Indian blogosphere.
• For the website creator’s point of view, it can bring in a lot of
  visitors. And subsequently, advertisers.
• An indispensable website means the creator of the website is
  indispensable too. Just like Gabe
  Rivera
  is everything behind the scenes of TechMeme. (Let’s face it, we’re
  all replaceable in our workplaces.)

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:

“[the] Content-Community-Time model that can leverage the content of
entries, their timestamps, and the community structure of the blogs,
to automatically discover stories. Doing so also allows us to
discover hot stories.”

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.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not
enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

— Leonardo da Vinci