Blog Archives

WTF. #Fail.

Words we weren’t born knowing.

Words we didn’t know as young kids.

Words our parents didn’t teach us.

Words our teachers would’ve taken us to task for.

Words that would not endear our kids to us.

And many times we mean them even when we don’t use them.

And yet these are words we spout. As an expression of angst. As an expression of inability.  As an expression of despondency. We target current affairs, vendors, politicians, devices, legal agreements, human frailties, … etc. We target everyone but ourselves. In that we actually target no one but ourselves.

WTF and #Fail will not change the world. They are unlikely to inspire others. But they spread pessimism. They spread negativism. They encourage role models of negative expression. They are chemicals which gives us a temporary high.

Real life has great feedback mechanisms. It allows us to learn by taking some knocks. Positively or negatively, this feedback influences our wallets, our job titles, our status, our esteem in extreme cases even our relationships. The blogosphere feedback is exceptionally weak and sometimes quite flawed. In many a cases expressions that might have earned one severe negative consequences when made face to face, earns us page views and retweets.  And instead of having to deal with the aftershocks, it makes us feel like jocks.

Blogging and Microblogging is an information stream.  It is also an energy stream. It amplifies the energies pushed into it and simply throws it back at us.

Next time you tweet and/or blog, don’t shy away from criticism, emotions or even necessary debates. These can be healthy. Just ask yourself if you are feeding positive energy into the system. And so long as you are pumping in postive energy, feel free to use WTF and #Fail.  As a tweet that impressed me quite a bit said “don’t feed the negative energy monster”.

Image via Wikipedia

Seems to me there is a hierarchy of blog posts (inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy) in terms of blogging satisfaction. Read on, and let me know if it makes sense. Typically blog posts with the dominant category further along the hierarchy are likely to have elements which satisfy the earlier categories in the hierarchy as well. The classification is perhaps even applicable for tweets (though tweets simultaneously satisfying multiple categories are a little rare to come by.)

• Narrative : Diary, Journal, Things that happened, Event log etc.
  These are posts of something that happened or is about to happen. While in most cases the author simply wants to share the sequence of events, in some cases the sequence itself might be meant to trigger some thoughts, analysis in the mind of the reader. In such situations, the post is actually at a very different level than a narrative.
• Informative : How to, Top Ten Lists, Presentations
  These are perhaps the lowest on the individual expressiveness and attempt to provide a lot of value to the reader. This is probably also the most dominant category in terms of number of posts.
• Opinionated : Rants, Demands, Support, Cheer, Rage
  These are posts where the author wants to be active in either supporting or declining support for some particular incident, cause, organisation, philosophy etc. These are the posts where the author is perhaps the most expressive and emotional simultaneously. These are the posts where the author would like something different from the way things exist at the moment. My slight reservation with these posts is that while they are strong in expressiveness and can collectively be made to act as change agents, given the emotion which clouds both the author’s thought process and the readers ability to interpret the content, these posts unless they are able to elevate themelves into either of the next two categories, rank very low on reader value creation.
• Analytical : Analysis, Review, Commentaries
  These are posts which use an event, a movie, a situation and attempt to draw a few inferences from them and share them with the user. These are posts where the author manages to allow his emotions to be restrained and lets his thinking cap be quite visible. These posts take on the nature of the author attempting to present his understanding of the world by taking the dots he sees and attempting to draw the lines between them to create a picture for his reader. While there is a fair amount of individual expression, these are also the posts which focus on good value creation for the reader.
• Thought Provoking : Sorry .. can’t think of any other word to describe them
  These posts could really be about anything. They don’t aim at providing answers. Heck, they don’t even provide questions. They focus on content which require the users to come up with their own set of questions, to be answered in their own sweet time. They cause the user to think about these posts long after having moved on to other content. These posts are not directly catalysts to change, they are catalysts to a more enlightened reader. To me these are also the most fulfilling to read.

Is this classification really important ? : Thats entirely upto the blogger. But it seems to be helpful to have a good idea about it up front when you write a post, so that you can have a reasonable focus accordingly. Just like its better to know upfront, how much a blogger wants to focus on expressiveness and readership value creation before starting to compose a post.

PuneTech is 1 year old today. Birthdays and New Year days are a great time to reflect upon the year gone past, and it was a little difficult to let go of an opportunity to comment.

A community is as strong as its participants. A community is also as strong as the people who bind it together. A tech community is fed by content. A tech community is also fed by character. What I have learnt about PuneTech is that even if it is modest in attracting newer people into the fold, it does a great job of binding it together. In Navin Kabra and Amit Paranjape, and supported by many others one realises one has met a set of people who really want to bind and then grow rather than grow and then bind. Important elements for a solid foundation for a community.

In the past one year PuneTech has provided a community / platform / vehicle / opportunity / facilitation for (in no particular order):

• Increased creation and sharing of Technology related content, especially related to Pune based companies and individuals
• A watering hole for people with related interests to come together, interact and grow their interactions.
• Collaboration with other bodies of overlapping interests, most notably the Pune Open Coffee Club
• Network engagement and sustainance supporting essential infrastructural needs of a network such as event organising / sharing / reminders
• Visibility driving for participants by both writing about the community participants or allowing them to write about themselves.

One of the things that does strike about PuneTech is its freshness and its willingness to experiment, learn and retry. Its not only growing but continuously reinventing itself to stay more relevant and useful. In retrospect, a part of the the Pune Technology Community is far better served today thanks to PuneTech. Kudos to PuneTech for a great year. And while in my limited knowledge, it has been more successful than any other similarly focused effort in Pune, it could grow even faster. But what I like about it is that its growth so far is much more sustainable than it is rapid. Allowing the growth to gather more momentum while continuing to retain sustainability will require many more of us to ask ourselves how we can support PuneTech and then help providing and implementing the answers. Thats the kind of nutrition a 1 year old needs.

I remember my Market Research classes, where we were made to work extremely hard to come up with the right questions (could take weeks) before administering a questionnaire. Thats because if the questions do not have a clear traceback from the objectives of the exercise, they can give totally irrelevant and useless result at the end. If a research or a survey had to be useful, an enormous effort was required to upfront address what answers would be useful, and work back into the questions from there. Here’s a good reason (as a counterexample) why we were taught that rigour. A report titled “Users’ Choice: Scripting Language Ratings – A comprehensive user satisfaction survey of over 500 Software developers and IT Pros” from Evans Data Corporation measures “User Satisfaction” with scripting languages”. (Registration / Personal data sharing required) which got covered by the register in Developers more ‘satisfied’ with PHP than other codes.

Without spending too much time I will just point out one example : Turn to Page 23 – Performance. So PHP programmers are more satisfied with its performance than Python and Ruby developers are with theirs ? I suspect if they had Java ratings in, its satisfaction perhaps could’ve been even worse. Yet the actual runtime performance of these languages is exactly the reverse. So what exactly does “user satisfaction of PHP developers with its performance is higher than that of Python and Ruby programmers with the respective performance” tell me and how is it useful even in the remotest possible way ? Beats me – but the most sensible explanation I could think of is that satisfaction is a function of the challenges and the context – and these are not equal. So any such comparison is pretty meaningless. Even more damning is the fact that there is an abundance of evidence indicating actual language runtime performance being completely inconsistent with the suggested user satisfaction levels which questions the relevance of the comparison of user satisfaction levels.

I wouldn’t have felt so strongly about if only the first 14 pages of the report had been published. That would simply reflect user satisfaction – end of story. But the remaining 12 pages which present the data in a comparative manner make it an exceptionally meaningless exercise best ignored (or blogged about and then ignored ).

PuneTech just published its Comment Policy. Given its role in promoting technology usage and knowledge transfer in and outside Pune and (in my perception) to maintain a strong brand perception, this is just what the doctor ordered. Its a pretty detailed policy, but the short version is cute enough to tempt me to reproduce below :

if (the comment is not relevant to the article)
     We will delete it;
       /* take your irrelevant rambling elsewhere */

  else if (the comment is a personal attack)
     we will delete it;
       /* rude people not welcome here */

  else if (the comment has abusive language)
     we will delete it;
       /* we are trying to have a civil discussion here */

  else if (the comment exposes PuneTech to legal liability)
     we will delete it;
       /* we don't want to get sued
          that distracts from the purpose of this website
          more details below */

  else
     your comment is welcome;

What amounts to a defamation

In the context of topical issues regarding online media and potential defamation implications, this page seems to summarise the matter quite well. Retrieved via What is not libel or slander and When its not defamation.