A few days back, I stumbled onto this TEDTalk by Lawrence Lessig. It’s by far the most convincing description that I’ve come across of the state that our culture and law finds itself in today. Watch it and decide if you’d like to vote for drafting him into the Congress.

For a couple of weeks now I’ve been monitoring what I do on my Mac using two tracker tools: Wakoopa and RescueTime. Both have unique approaches to the theme of tracking. Wakoopa builds a social network around the applications that you use. It lets you build ‘teams’ of people and see what your friends have been using. The other two significant things that it does are statistical visualizations, and recommendations of apps based on what you’ve been using. So if you’ve been using a lot of TextEdit lately, it might recommend TextMate as a ’similar’ application. This, according to my guesswork, they do by matching application tags.

The other way to do these recommendations could be to match people based on their application sets (or better still, their activity sets. If app = Microsoft Word, then Activity = word processing); and then provide recommendations based on what other people who have similar appication/activity sets are using, that the current user isn’t.

Anyways, Wakoopa does provide a simple API to accessing its data, and that is a great thing to do. That’s something that RescueTime hasn’t done yet, but they promise to do the same soon on their site. RescueTime has a unique approach to this whole domain. They aren’t building a social network (at least till yet), and this is how they track your apps: If you are using a standard application, the RescueTime tracker records its usage as any other tracker. If, however, you are on a browser, the tracker records the website that you’re visiting as an ‘application’, which makes some sense in this era of online applications. You can then go to the website and assign ‘tags’ to applications. These can later be visualized to see how much time, for example, you spend ‘Watching Videos Online’.

So anyways, I’ve been itching to use the incredibly simple to use GChart APIs with an interesting enough data-set, and Wakoopa stats are sortof interesting (at least for me…), so last weekend I cooked up a script to make a pie chart of my recent application usage. Its available here, and at the point of writing this post, this is how my stats looked:

Which, I suppose, is a pretty reasonable graph. Half of what we do on our computers these days is more or less on the web (50% of which is on YouTube, which is, IMHO, the greatest time sink ever invented). Mail takes about 20%, and the actual work takes the rest. (Source after the jump)

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I got the link to this excellent post during my first InfoVis class at VT, it’s a great collection of Information Visualization projects on the web. A must-bookmark for anyone interested in visualizations. The web is like the melting pot for such applications, and that’s understandable, if not for anything else, then for the sheer number of data sets available to visualize.

As I was browsing through them, I enjoyed some more than the others, and that led me to wonder if I can setup an experiment to rate them. That’s pretty difficult though. If providing a “higher insight” is considered as the ultimate goal of a visualization, then it becomes rather hard to rate them. Insights are a function of so many things that even an experimental setup may find it hard to extract the “Interface driven insight” part of them. Especially when the visualizations themselves are about such diverse subjects. However, what attracts me to visualizations is the fact that they are so much like works of art, and hence, some of them just stand apart.

The stand apart for me was the Hans Rosling talk at TED. You’ve got to watch it.

Following up on the last post regarding better conversational experiences on blogs, I thought why not improve the experience on the blog, as long as it has to be there. So I’ve put in a mix of conversation-specific plugins and hacks for ease of commenting on this blog -

• Wordpress 2.1, for some evil reason, eats up all the line breaks one puts in the comment, and replaces it by the standard <p></p> combination. So as a stop-gap solution to having all the paragraphs in a comment mashed up together, I’ve increased the margin in their CSS for a feeling of visual separation.
• You can now subscribe to the future comments on a post that you comment on. All that you need to do, is to click the checkbox in the commenting form that says “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail”.
• Gravatars!
• If you’d like to quote someone’s comment, there’s a ‘Quote’ link in each comment’s header, that you can click to auto-fill that comment’s content as a quote within your comment. Or, if you’d like to quote some text from the post or from within a long comment, select the text, go to the comment field and click the link that says “quote selected text”. You can DOO it! (Yes, Rob Schneider is my favorite actor.)
• You’d notice, while commenting, that there’s a live preview just above the form that starts filling in as you type, providing a quick way to know what your comment would look like. This isn’t perfect yet- it recognizes line breaks and doesn’t render quotes as it should - but I’m working on it, and it’s good enough to give you a reasonable idea as to what your comment might look like.

 Have an idea as to how commenting can be made more intuitive? Comment on..

We’re very much in the middle of the Syndication revolution - Everything out there on the web can be syndicated  - Be it the latest news, your friends’ photos and videos, your favorite TV Show episodes, and so on. Even sites lacking any technological platform for publishing can be subscribed to using online tools.

Now in all this - perhaps the most popular type of feeds that we syndicate to are blog posts. And typically, they support commenting. In fact, commenting is an integral part of the blogging experience. The discussion adds mass to the content of the original post, sometimes even surpassing it in meaningful content. Or, it can go completely haywire and spread out into several branches of context. Either ways, it’s something without which blogging won’t be blogging.

So my rue is this - I would like to participate in the discussions on a blog post right from my newsreader. That implies two things-

1. I want to view the stream of comments along with the post. This isn’t hard to achieve, given that almost all blogging platforms provide RSS feeds for comments to posts, and a couple of newsreaders that support the display of those comments.
2. I want to be able to comment right from my newsreader. This is important because it makes the whole process of ‘participating’ with the said blog or news site much more intuitive for me, and, the newsreader can then keep track of my comments and conversations in a more organized way than I do currently through coComment or commentful. They’re really good tools, both of them, but they sporadically don’t work. coComment, for instance, is a very nice tool that integrates with a lot of social sites apart from just blogging platforms, but somehow for me it isn’t able to update the latest comments on a lot of them.

The second feature requires the website to publish an XML-RPC API (Here’s what XML-RPC means) similar to the ones that allow people to be able to post to their blog from desktop applications. Wordpress is the only blogging platform that I’ve worked with, and I’ve checked - it doesn’t have one. There is an XMLRPC for traceback, but nothing for commenting.

Is this something that just hasn’t been implemented because no one thought of it, or is it just that no one wants to have this - for fear for people not coming to the blog’s website for commenting? Or is the concern related to additional spam?

I think lack of visitors is a self-countering argument - While there may be lesser people visiting to comment on the site’s interface, there would actually be more people commenting and being active on the site - and the positive effect of that should balance out the concerns. I’m not sure if spam is a factor either - sure, the spammer now has one URL to attack - but the post id (That I suppose would be a parameter in the call to such a service) is still dynamic. And in any case, the interface just as secure as the rest of the site is to spammers. I’m not sure how captchas can be implemented in such a service - but I’m sure they can be.

Reading this on a newsreader? Click the post title, wait for the page to load, scroll to the bottom for my cute little commenting interface, and fill in your thoughts!