BarCamp / BarCampBangalore rocked.
It was my first public geek meeting. I talked less and heard/saw more :). I was amazed to see real life geeks and their attires. Cool!

Some of the interesting stuff I heard

Anuj Khurana: MMS market in US is very less and MMS is a failure there.

Puneet : Oops! Then I should look for another job (Puneet works for Verizon ).

I: How much traffic are you expecting in the first phase of Taazza.com?

Arjun Ram: Well, You decide! (Ha Ha, nice answer)

Footnote: I really wanted to know how rails scale. I am pretty sure that Taazza.com, an indian memedigger with maps, is gonna get good traffic when they comes out of alpha. Arjun and Arun, brothers and partners of Taazza.com gave us an excellent demo of the website there in barcampbangalore.

More photos here and here.

I am always curious about “where this web 2.0 guys are from”. Web 2.0 Innovation Map from Furio maps geographical locations of more than 200 Web 2.0 startups. But, where in heavens the indian startups like Riya and PixRat are mapped?

BarCamp Bangalore is starting from tomorrow. Pooran is encouraging me to show up but I do not have the ticket yet

In The Wisdom of Browse, Derek is exploring how a group of people can be stupid and useless if not directed in proper way.

People are stupid in groups. Think about popularity for a moment. You know what the most popular TV show of all time is? Baywatch – a show with the primary distinguishing feature of slow-motion shots of Pamela Anderson in a swimsuit running down a beach. Think about mob behavior and our basest instincts. Think about the prom king and queen. If we learned anything in high school, it’s that there’s no better way for the crap to rise to the top than a popularity contest.

People are brilliant in groups. Crowds can also be wise. The famous example is to ask a group of people to guess the number of coins in a jar. Any single individual’s answer will most likely be wrong. But if you take all the answers and average them together, most of the time, they’re right (give or take a percent or two). Groups are also the foundation of democracy, which, for all it’s problems, is pretty much a great thing.

With the example of Digg, he is pointing out how a social network can get a mob behavior. The best example is when the Digg vs O’Reilly controversy broke out (Later, there came an explanation in Digg itself. But the wound was soo deep to heal).

I have always been positive about the Karma system in social networks. A “good guy” must be marked as a good guy by the network. Otherwise the value of being a good is lost.

BootCamp is the latest buzz from Apple. This software enables Apple machines to run Windows along with its supreme Mac OS X in a dual boot setup. But there was a question: Why should Apple let its rival Microsoft to run Windows on their machines? Cnet seems to have an answer: BootCamp is a gimmick - It just let the users to taste both the wines and then compare and decide ultimately.

When America’s doughboys returned from World War I, the question was how they’d ever remain on the farm after seeing Paris. When Windows users get a gander of the Mac, how many will remain loyal to Ctrl-Alt-Delete?

Seeing the latest news about crashing of BootCamp forcing me to believe this in the same way. Anand had posted something funny here earlier.

Yes. Animated favicons are on the rise. From Niall Kennedy to the latest Wikio, many use animated gifs as favicons instead of treditional .ico bitmaps. Since IE will never display favicons (even .ico files) anymore, why dont we exploit the new Firefox support for animated gifs as favicons?

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="icon" href="/animated_favicon.gif" type="image/x-icon" />


In FF, this gives more attention to the particular site tab, addressbar and in bookmarks. Suddenly you are more visible to the world

Update: Use FavIcon Generator from HTML-KIt to generate favicons from your own images. Yes. even scrolling text icons
There is a nice video tutorialon how to create your favicons and then upload to blogger

This year’s April Fool’s hoaxes started with Google Romance and aliens lurking around. WordPress joined the team with its all brand new WordPattern publishing platform. WordPattern is a combination of features of both WordPress and TextPattern. Ofcourse. It blinked that it was a joke.