Thats a cool idea - having RSS feeds in my Yahoo mail account. Why? Because I always check my mail everyday & I don’t need to open up a separate tab, sign in to a separate RSS aggregator/reader. This deeper integration of RSS into mail is a welcome one as 1) it increases the RSS awareness & 2) it helps me, the user.

Think aggregators offer much more functionality but lets see how Yahoo performs. Haven’t got a chance yet to try it as Yahoo Mail Beta isn’t avl to everyone )Update: I now have RSS feeds feature & I love it!)
Via Techcrunch

-Arvind

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From Robert Scoble - “Accidense is the word to describe what happens when people accidentally click on Google Adsense ads.”

What interested me was his thought on whether commercial sites track their advertising effectiveness by measuring how long a user’s browser sticks around at the site once they’d come clicking a Google Ad (and not clicking the back button immediately). Hmm, sure a matter of concern for advertisers & search engine marketers alike. May be Urchin aka Google Analytics provides such info.

Arvind

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Doc Searls, in one of his recent blog posts :

At the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, Mass, where I stayed in Boston a few days ago, their “free” Internet service is 56K, forcing serious users to pay $9.95 for broadband � which in my room was provided by both Ethernet and a very weak wi-fi signal. Half the clicks on links through either connection jump to a “loading” page. And the connection speed barely beat dial-up. Imagine being forced to unfurl promotional messages on a roll of toilet paper just to unlock the flush lever in a pay toilet that barely flushed in any case. At that same hotel, when I asked for improvements to the lousy bandwidth I was already paying for, the person behind the counter called over a manager who said, “What are you trying to do, get some email?” Wrong question. Especially at a hotel next door to MIT. Don’t these upscale hotels have any idea how much that kind of stupid service pisses off potentially good repeat business?

Either the upscale hotels better learn or end-up losing out to smaller but broadband-provided-free inns. It’s the same Goliath-David struggle everywhere, right?

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Got this link from a NYT article - http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/.

Carries home the point of what not to do on your site pages. Speaking of which, this blog page too can take some pointers from Jakob Nielsen’s Weblog Usability guidelines. We are working on it & you will see the changes soon. (Update: hey, we have now moved to WordPress & you can see those changes happening!)
-Arvind

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Zoho Planner can be seen in different ways - as an online ToDo list, a personal organizer, an online calendar for marking your appointments, your task manager, a friendly planner or whatever you look it as.

In addition to maintaining your ToDo lists, the latest update allows you to schedule appointments, has support for sending reminder mails for important tasks you would want to be reminded of & offers timezone support too. The last one comes particularly handy if you are a frequent flyer between timezones, allowing you to get your reminder emails correctly.

Zoho Planner is a tremendous asset for lawyers, doctors and other professionals who want to maintain their appointments with their clients. You can use it as your calendar for scheduling appointments. No software to install & it being accessible from a browser of any PC online, makes it even more powerful & flexible. Moreover, its free, shareable & very easy to use too.

Try the new Zoho Planner. Happy planning & organizing yourselves online.

Cheers,
The Zoho Planner Team

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Xbox 360 has been released.

So has SSE, the two-way RSS system that is being much talked about. See it here, here & here.

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http://www.iiiiiiii.com/

Funny site. Via Robert Scoble

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Hi,

With today’s update, you can email the documents that you have created to multiple email IDs from within Zoho Writer itself. And there are options too to send them as HTML (here again there are the inline and as attachment options), doc or PDF (sxw, OpenOffice’s doc format got dropped the last minute due to a minor issue & Ranjith says it’ll be avl in the next update).

Separate RSS feeds are now available, one for all the public docs & the other for public docs of a particular user.

In bug fixes:

Issue with Spell Checker (the tool couldn’t check some docs before) has been fixed. When a doc is shared with a user who hasn’t got an account with Zoho Writer, it’ll always be Read Only (even when its given Write permission). This too has been fixed.

Happy collaboration online.

And do visit the Zoho Writer forum - http://forums.zohowriter.com/

Cheers!!

Z

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Om Malik reported in Business 2.0 around 2 months back that Google is on a buying spree of fiber optic cable & he speculated it was for Google to build a national broadband network (he dubbed it the GoogleNet) which would provide free WiFi to USA & then to the world.

Now Robert X Cringley has a different viewpoint saying that Google will use the fiber optic cable itself (for connecting its growing network of datacenters to make a “giant processing and storage grid”).

The same follows for the rumor that Google, as a dark fiber buyer, will turn itself into some kind of super ISP. Won’t happen. And WHY it won’t happen is because ISPs are lousy businesses and building one as anything more than an experiment (as they are doing in San Francisco with wireless) would only hurt Google’s earnings.

So why buy-up all that fiber, then?

The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn’t just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

Which do you think is the case? Or, is it for both? Any other ideas of what Google would do with all that fiber?

-Arvind

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You can’t fold a sheet of paper in half more than eight times, no matter how large the sheet of paper may be

Heard this before? I heard it sometime when in school, promptly went back home, tried it with a newspaper sheet, found it can’t be done & accepted it as fact till I came across this article today.

Hmm, as the article ends, “It pays to question received wisdom, at least as far as paperfolding is concerned.”

And you know what? They are monetizing this concept proved by Britney Gallivan (who folded it 12 times) in 2001/2002. (Boing Boing had a post on this)

A related note : There’s this question posed in the book “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell - Take any size of paper & fold it 50 times over & over. How tall do you think the folded paper stack will be? And the answer : approximately equal to the Earth-Sun distance. (another piece of received wisdom, huh? Think over it. Its very much like the grain of rice & the chess board puzzle)

-Arvind

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