Monday, November 21, 2005

Taking Orkut seriously

Google seems to be taking their Orkut social network quite seriously - they have come up with a version of the Google Toolbar with Orkut features - lets you search for a person's Orkut profile from the comfort of your trusted toolbar. Check it out - go to the "Search" section in Orkut, and you will find a big promo for the toolbar at the bottom of the page (only in Internet Explorer so far, I think). Spending (whiling away?) time on the net just got a bit easier :)

Saturday, November 19, 2005

The extempore blog

Too much work over the past couple of weeks has meant that I have found precious little time to blog and even precious little stuff has been found interesting enough to write about. That got me thinking... how many times, if at all possible, do people write extempore blogs? This one's an experiment at just that. What that means in other words is that I have no clue as to what is to follow in this post and how I expect this blog post to turn out. Now to be completely honest, I have spent close to a minute thinking about writing this post during a rather particularly relaxing shower, but then like many of the thoughts that have flooded my mind just before I doze off to sleep and hence have never seen the light of day, or those that met mortal peril after making a trip to the drafts folder owing to a lack of relevance and/or blogworthy content, are completely lost on me now. So for all technical reasons, this text is still flowing freely.

You made it through all that blabber? Good. Now, when I started blogging about a year ago, I had no idea why I was doing it and what I wanted to blog about. Not that I do even now, but I have started so I'll continue. At that point of time, blogging was taking off and I hopped on to the new fad. Of course some particular blogs were quite inspirational in terms of writing style, the humour, the amount of traffic from lands afar that they invited and so on. I considered myself to be in possession of some amount of ability when it came to writing stuff that would be humourous, but unfortunately that has happened very rarely and I am guessing that is also because of the amount of deliberation involved on my part in writing a blog post. This post is on the other extreme - I haven't so far gone back up to change a single word (unless of course its a typo, which I hate to do in any text that I type, but which my friends will agree happens with extreme regularity).

You know all the blah about how a blog should be a medium of expression and the true reflection of your self and the related theories right? Can it really happen unless you do it instinctively, without tailoring it to fit the image of yourself you want to put out there? Or is this habit of wanting of create an different identity itself a part of your nature? If it is, how will anybody other than yourself know that you are doing it? I don't know If I have made any sense at all so far but I guess my experiment has worked a bit. I have produced a post out of no particular incident if you exclude that watershed of a shower! So I guess the ultimately extempore blog, the one which you have hardly given any prior thought, rarely exists unless you have some sort of a Memory Charm which lets you lock your thoughts for later perusal. Speaking of which, I have decided that I shall stop this blabber and maybe start thinking about writing something about the latest Harry Potter movie I saw yesterday.

P.S: All Harry Potter fans - I realized I was talking about a Pensieve up there but true to the rules of this post, I will desist from going back up and changing it :)