Modern Street

The Olympic Games is the only time when the world actually sits down to watch sports together. And as one of the millions who have been following the Games (although not as frequently as I wanted), Beijing 2008 is turning to be the most memorable Olympics so far (with a week to go).

Apart from Micheal Phelps, this is actually turning out to be pretty interesting for me, both for the records, twists, tantrums, scandals, controversies and all. The men’s 100m sprint was a good one, but regretfully, I didn’t catch it live. Neither did I catch the opening ceremony. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry folks; just got back after a short break (plus found I had some ISP problems).

For the past week, I could hardly go online and had to use a public computer for the most part. But will be blogging soon, again; promise! Read the rest of this entry »

A new search engine on the Web, called Cuil just launched recently amidst a lot of hype generated by thousands of blogs picking up on the story. The huge traffic flocking to try out the new search engine eventually led to a meltdown of the site’s servers. Even when I tried to use it a few days ago to search for a few terms, it crashed instead.

Now that things have cooled down a little, I just took a second look at Cuil, and found it lacking in many areas. The irrelevancy of the search results is the main gripe, when you consider that Cuil claims to index even more pages than Google as a new search engine. More than 120 billion web pages indexed is a lot of results indeed, but their main problem is relevancy. Read the rest of this entry »

Knol, Google’s answer to Wikipedia, finally got launched just a short while ago, looking somewhat more different compared to screenshots posted last year, when news first broke about it. In fact, Knoll has launched without much hype and fanfare, but my main interest is how it will turn out and evolve 6-12 months from now. There is a big difference now with Knol, compared to last year, when it seemed that only certain authors would get approved. Now, everyone can be a Knol publisher. And that’s the potential I see in Knol to get really big, notwithstanding the potential drawbacks in having a full fledged Web 2.0 concept, IF that’s what it has adopted. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress is that blog CMS that powers millions of blogs in the blogosphere. As a WordPress user, I can understand why many consider WordPress the best thing since sliced bread. But, there are some things about WordPress which annoy me. Of course, nothing is perfect, but at least we can keep working on them to make things better? For some, life is not the same without WordPress. The Web has been transformed by WordPress. Those are big shoes to fill. Despite that, WordPress does get on my nerves at times. So without further adieu, here are some of the top things about WordPress which I find annoying. Do you do too?

I just checked out the new virtual world game by Google, called Lively. Similar in concept to Second Life, only MUCH simpler and smaller, it has potential to get popular, but I’m surprised that it wasn’t more promoted. Oh yeah, that’s because it is still very much a Beta. Google has an advantage which Second Life doesn’t, namely it has the resources and server infrastructure to actually make the game playable by anyone everywhere - and it’s all free for now.

You log in with your Google account username and download the applet-like software, and you then have the choice of many types of “rooms” to explore. I visited the Mountain View room, and had a brief walkabout, but to be honest, the whole experience was quite boring (and filled with equally bored people). The text uttered by people ended up on speech bubbles which were not readily viewable. I couldn’t figure out if the computer terminals worked or not. Moving about was also slow and difficult. The keyboard navigation worked the opposite way. Read the rest of this entry »