Shreyas Srinivasan

Yahoo Glue: Clued in?

Yahoo recently launched a new feature in search called Yahoo Glue. Yahoo Glue shows search results segregated in different sinks like Yahoo Music, Last.Fm, Wikipedia and Youtube. When i first read about it, i thought this was a kick ass idea. Especially since i was once a avid user of the Firefox plugin Googlepedia which combines google and wikipedia results on a single page. While the over all idea and the implementation seemed quite slick, i discovered a few things which needed to be fixed.

1) Category is more important than source:

For a search engine, category of information is more important than the source of the information (discounting spam). For instance having a box called Last.fm Top tracks makes absolutely no sense in the context of the search request, what makes sense is “Top Tracks” which is the semantic identifier. Same thing holds good for Events, Biography and Videos.

2) Combining results is the prerogative of a search engine:

The first thing i tried when i used this was to check search validness, which is by definition what makes a search engine useful. I searched for “Kenny G”, knowing very well he is playing 2 floors below the Yahoo India office on the 12th of May.

And alas, no listing of the Bangalore event. What makes it even more worse, the event is listed on Upcoming (a yahoo property). This completely destroys the product being
i) Local search
ii) Glue across various sites.

It is imperative for a search engine to parse all kinds of sites and provide the user with a unified view of all that content. If i wanted a distributed search result from each site i would use them individually, the strength of search is the ability to combine them coherently, so i dont have to worry about combining them myself.

I think Events, Videos, Music, Biography, Articles, Talks (numerous others) are tangentials worth pursuing but not at the cost of search quality. The core features of ranking and categorizing need to be spot on for Yahoo Local search to be useful.

Great Indian Developer nomination

I have been nominated for the Great Indian Developer awards in the “Top Committer” category, this is old news but a lot of people have pinged me over the last few days to congratulate me and expressed surprise that i never pimped it on my blog. So well here goes

Vote for me or Naba or GOSUB

There are some very credible Indian contributers on that list, Including Naba who has always been a role model for me and all Gnome developers and users in India.

In the “Collaboration Solution” category, i heartily recommend Zoho Writer, from Advent Net. Zoho has to be one of the best examples of Indian web companies doing innovative and world class products!

In other news, Life goes on as usual, I hacked up a listing of all artists on RadioVeRVe. The page lists in detail bios of all 310 artists we feature on RadioVeRVe. You can check it out here.

26

Here is to one more year of fighting to make a difference!

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep.”
–
Robert Frost

Life is fun

When you have creative, fun and crazy friends

Sub Prime crisis

Vivek pointed me to a great set of slides which explain sub prime crisis. Check them out, it rocks!

Subprime Primer

Got to love accountants and economists. I wonder how some of these people(responsible for the mess) go to bed at night.

Freed.in/2008

I will be speaking at Freed.in on “Independent Music Ecosystem”. All of us at RadioVeRVe have been doing our bit in promoting Independent Music in India. This talk enlists some of the ideas behind RadioVeRVe and the steps forward to build a successful community and eco system around Independent music. If you are in Delhi and want to discuss about Independent music, Please drop in.

I would also love to meet a few Delhi’tes who are involved in making music, especially since i have heard it has an awesome music scene. So drop me comment and we can catch up!

LCD foo

I am thinking of buying a new LCD TV. I am trying to decide between Sony Bravia KLV-32V300 and LG 32LC7R , both seem to have very good ratings on cnet. Any suggestions or input on where one beats the other?

Why India won the Sydney test by 5 wickets

Total non available runs to the scorer due to incompetence of the umpire:

Symonds: -130 (Out on 30, given not out and went on to score 160)
Ponting: -38 (Out on 17, went on to score 55)
Jaffer: -30 (Given out on 0 off a no -ball, averages 30 odd)
Dravid: -17 (Given out on 38, Averages 55)

Total: -215 runs

Subtract this from the Aussie total of 330 and you get a target of 115 runs.

And India was 115-5. So there you have it!

Oh well, if everything worked around pure logic like that. Anyway i am quite happy with how India played, much improved performance from Melbourne.

Merry Christmas

Today has been a mix of joy and sadness, I woke up to shrieking sounds coming out of our neighbors house. On inquiry we got to know that 2 of my neighbors (Husband and Wife) had committed suicide. Although i did not know them personally, i have seen them at various times and they seemed like nice people. What made the whole thing worse was they tried to hang their 5 year old daughter too. As it turned out the rope was too long for her and she survived, although she had to stay with the corpses overnight since they had tied up her hand and mouth.

I don’t really want to go into the morality of the whole thing but i hope their souls rest in peace and i hope her daughter grows up without being affected by her convoluted past. My heart goes out to her and if she continues to stay opposite our house, i will make sure to get to know her and help in anyway possible.

After such a dampening start, my day got much better thanks to a great Christmas lunch at our very own Rockstar’s house. Lots of interesting chatter and absolutely sublime food (*slurp). Thanks for the invite Gaurav, certainly made my day.

All in all, A day of mixed emotions. Reminds me of the Alanis Morisette song Ironic

Well life has a funny way of sneaking up on you
When you think everything’s okay and everything’s going right
And life has a funny way of helping you out when
You think everything’s gone wrong and everything blows up
In your face

Merry Christmas folks! May the force be with you all.

Money as Debt: Must watch

Paul Grignon’s 47-minute animated presentation of “Money as Debt” tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it … all » is being created. It is an entertaining way to get the message out. The Cowichan Citizens Coalition and its “Duncan Initiative” received high praise from those who previewed it. I recommend it as a painless but hard-hitting educational tool and encourage the widest distribution and use by all groups concerned with the present unsustainable monetary system in Canada and the United States.

Must Watch

If this interests and intrigues you then i also reccommend reading “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”, The two put together makes you understand why big Foreign Corporations invest tons and tons of money into developing nations knowing well enough that they probably wont be in a position to repay that money. The system is driven by credit!

Spooky is all i can say.