Few random thoughts...

I am out of sync with blogging, and I am writing this cos I need a creative outlet for my forced (??) joblessness, which is making me obsessively, compulsively improve my G K by tracking world affairs,indian affairs, and state -of-the -art research findings, on google news, bbc, ibnlive, timesofindia, and samachar.com

Knowledge acquistion is primarily driven by insecurity. Before, I can convince myself that I just stumbled on the quotation of the month, arising out years of introspection-somebody came up with this before- "Ignorance is a bliss" . As I type this, I see in my mind'eye ,the scene in Matrix where the baldie(Joe ..) bites meat, and tells this, with a musical score in the background. (forget the instrument- tom plays it when he is on clouds enroute heaven,in numerous Tom and Jerry cartoons) That's what I define the ill-effects of movie watching and mindless youtubing. Rarely is anything purely literary-straight out of mind, and into paper / blog. Association of quotations has been pathetically trivialized.
If Ceaser had told "Veni, Vedi ,Veci " on youtube, would it got a thousand clicks?A hundred clicks? ten? Who knows? What I really have learnt from youtubing is this -people love bullshit, and crave for the worst bullshit. If you season bullshit with the right amount humour, wordings, and video eating, you could become immortalized in no time. Under these dynamics, I really wonder if Caesar 's words could have had pagerank detect a couple of links to his words!

Well... coming back to obsessively, compulsively improving my GK. It really affronts my intellect when I read arcticles like this -
1)Giant Rodent!

2)Dinosaur dung

1->How does humanity stand to gain by knowing how much a dead rat weighed? 2->I only wish I could time travel, have a pet dino, feed it tonnes of laxatives, and travel back to present ... I could be the next billionaire in town!!!

I must make a proper compilation of great news, and really inspire folks with insightful reflections.

Mediocrity rules. And Bigtime. We really get sadistic pleasure seeing people suck, and goofing up

Here are some of my top fav's, that an average youtuber should be aware of

1)Sam Anderson
2) If you come today
3) Captain Vijaykanth
4)I personally believe
5) Forgetting National anthem
6) William Bang
7)Kashif Memon
8)T R English
9)Americans are NOT stupid
10) Car race..almost there!



Remarkably, humanity has been pretty slow in monetizing mediocrity.
Somehow, education, common sense, reasoning, has been trained and led us to believe otherwise.

But there is a big,bright, future ahead.

"Are you smarter than a fifth grader? " has made it's debut in India, with Shah Rukh as the host. IPL has impacted it's ratings, but nevertheless.

I was just wondering about the next great web-based application, that exploits people 's attraction to mediocrity.

Because there is none,atleast so far. This definitely is round the corner. Something that would make people squirm. Imagine content-restriction on videos in youtube, which makes you answer a random General knowledge question with timeout, and blocks that video with your IP Address for a couple of days, if you fail.

Conversations might go like this in the conceivable future (among a coupla 14 year kids, say)
:-

A- Hey,did you see that video of Miss South carolina ?
B- Err.. could'nt go past 30 secs. some problem with my internet connecton
A- OK, so you couldnt answer a simple question on relative velocities? What question did you get?
B-To be honest, it was some thing related to trigonometry.. and I'm not partcularly good at it.
A-Okie, what was the question?
B- blah blah
A- Blah blah blah.. that's it.. that was an easy question!!
B-OK, I'll watch Miss South Carolina, after a couple of days!

Tada!!

Education interspersed with entertainment interspersed some ego maintenance . Everyone happy?


One bad effect of reading news online in different web portals like ibnlive , timesofindia ,cnn etc is that , over the long run, we will fail to correctly judge news-worthiness of articles.

And we become GIGO machines(Garbage In,Garbage out)

A video that conveys what I want to say :-

Frog n Water


Excessive youtubing has been mind-numbing and addictive, but amidst the trash that pollutes both conventional news sites, and youtube too, youtube atleast gives a chance for content to be judged on its merit, than by a random 'editor'.

Watch this video of Calpernia Addams

This video was listed on the first page of youtube, sometime back.
Calpernia Addams, a transsexual hollywood personality, with humour and sarcasm, speaks about issues sensitive to her.This video has been viewed 850,000 + times, as I write this blog.

This video and it's view count probably exemplifies the true power of youtube, and power of content- to evoke emotions, get people involved in heated discussions, albeit lil unparliamentary.

Contrast the knowledge, information (???)propagation in youtube, and conventional research publications in journals,or conferences. This latter is steeply entrenched in formalism, and restrictive of the target audience.

Though tutorials, Tech magazine articles and survey papers improve the visibility and comprehensibility to a wider and curious audience, there definitely needs to be bridge between the two approaches. For the sake of comprehensibility, tech videos spend more effort on making content less dense-the youtube way. This definitely does won't help the info seeker to know more beyond the prelimnary stuff.

Imagine as you view a tech video on youtube, with an immersive view, you able to access related content web-pages,articles, images, interviews with leaders in the field.

If you are a normal student, you would have encountered this situation before- you enter the examination hall, you realize that you haven't studied a specific area. You ask your friend to give you a gist, and you get the gist of content in ten minutes ( a trailer of the movie!)- and ace the related question that came!

Analogically, would content squeezing from webpages in a video, be practical , and have impact?

Anyway... enough of crazy ideas and thoughts for now

rest in next.