Today's Random Walk - From Salil Tripathi to You've Got Mail

One of the columnists I like reading in the Mint newspaper is Salil Tripathi. His article in today's (03-Feb-2011) paper was about the protests in Egypt and last week he had a column on the assassination of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab (Pakistan). His articles are available at http://www.livemint.com/saliltripathi

This post is the first one that I am writing after installing Zemanta, a tool to assist in blogging. I learnt about it through one of these seemingly aimless browsing sessions that serendipitously lead to a happy ending - at least a feeling that I haven't wasted my time.

I had registered for one of these mobile developer events scheduled for this weekend and received an email requesting that I reconfirm my participation. So I clicked on the link to do that and then started browsing the event site (http://bangalore.mobilecamp.in/) - the agenda, the organizers and so on. Many of the organizers had LinkedIn profiles and included links to their blogs. As expected, most were in zombie state, with a couple of entries soon after the blog was created and none thereafter. I suppose many of them had moved onto the convenience of Twitter.

However one blog really caught my eye - it is at http://kwdinc.in/ and is authored by a young person called Kevin William David. I think it is a wonderful example of using the web to share your thoughts and also build a brand for yourself. When scanning through his entries I saw a link to Zemanta and that is how I landed up installing and using this tool.

I installed the plug-in for the Chrome browser and have this tool working for me as I write this entry. It has pointed me to a number of articles by Salil Tripathi - I saw that he has written occasionally for the Wall Street Journal and is the author of a book called "Offense: The Hindu Case". His article on someone arrested for venting his frustrations on Twitter about the closure of an airport is interesting. That piece is titled "Tweeting Fire on the Internet".

A piece of advice on reading articles on the WSJ - in case you are unable to access an article

directly on their site because it requires subscription, you can work around that by searching for the article on Google and then clicking on the link... and that is why I provided the title of the article and not the URL.

The plug-in also suggested a few images - I got a bit carried away and added three of them before settling for just one..

Incidentally I also opened a Twitter account this morning. I think I did create one a long while

Cover of You've Got Mail

back but never did anything with it and had forgotten my username and password. I followed a few people, scanned through their tweets and then got bored. I am not sure whether I should start using Twitter - I might just end up switching over completely and give up on attempting to writing blog posts. Even if I can convince myself that I will do both, is Twitter the best solution for the short update? Or should I use Facebook or explore similar solutions for LinkedIn? Ah.. the choices we all need to make in our daily lives.. I suspect I will feel important and agonize over this for a few days and then end up using none of the three.. Reminds me of the line from "You've Got Mail" -

The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self

Just in case you are wondering - I had to Google for the movie quote and cut and paste it in here - Zemanta didn't find it for me automatically :-)