Ron Paul : Got me thinking

Here is my story. As an active young blogger I follow politics but recently
few events hapened that got me really interested about the Presidential Race.
One of my good friends recently quit is Job and traveled cross country from
Los Angeles to New Hampshire to Support and participate in the Ron Paul campaign.
Crazy and foolish act I thought.

I later talked to my friend and he provided his reasoning.I was more surprised
that he was not alone and more of his friends had joined him in the campaign.

This got me thinking.Who is Ron Paul? and what is this all about.
So as usual I followed main stream media like CNN,FOX,MSNBC etc and it looks like this guy does not have a chance. But Wait lets check out the internet and see if this
story has a buzz and here you some of the numbers from different sites.

You Tube (Around 41,500 results)
Digg ( Has more than 10,000 diggs for some posts)
Technorati Ron Paul is one of the most searched for items

Google Trends
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ron+paul

Notice I am not comparing Ron Paul to other candidates. That is not the point
I am making. The point is that there seems to be more buzz,interest about him
on the internet than on traditional media.

I discussed this with my friends and there were different reasonings provided.

Some of the common one's

A media conspiracy.
A political conspiracy.
He has a bunch of bloggers working for him.
Young people like him.
People Hate Him.

As a practical personal I debated about this. One thing that occurred through this
process is that it got me more interested in the presidential race.

It also got me thinking more about traditional media versus the internet.
People kept mentioning that it is easier to game the system on the internet
than on traditional media channels.

I cannot concur to this idea simply based on the fact that the internet is all about
me and you. The people. How can we say that few people know better than the masses
on the internet. The internet also lends itself to self regulation.

Still unanswered questions. Do comment on this topic.
I would love to hear your reactions and wouldn't mind if you hate this piece

I have always received passionate responses on this topic.

Signing Off
Ravi

Pausing Google Web History

One of the things that I noticed is that when I am signed onto one of Google's services like gmail,orkut,blogger,etc and perform web searches on Google. Google collects my web history, the web history is the record of searches that you performed on Google.

My friend Rahul was freaking out that Google was collecting all this information and
he didnot want them too. Google does have a simple way to pause it from collecting
your web history, when this feature is enabled I believe all your searches are not
recorded.

Here are the instructions on how to pause your web history on google

1) Log On to Google Web History by clicking on the option Google Web History

2) You can delete all items from your webhistory using the clear webhistory button.

3) When this is done it will also pause your webhistory. Alternatively you can click
on the pause button to prevent your searches from being recorded.

4) Help section for the google web history feature


Help for Google Web History


It is nice to know that the Opt Out feature from Google is Simple.
As always there is debate on whether people should Opt In to such features or
Opt Out as shown above.

So If you want to pause your web history on Google, Go Ahead.

Am I paranoid or is this is something that people want :)

Ravi

Yahoo Pipes:Having Fun

I started playing around with Yahoo Pipes.
For information about Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo Pipes


Yahoo Pipes is a powerful framework for mashups, working with RSS,Feeds
and also data integration.

Some of the pipes that I Created.


Search for apartments on craigslist.



Flickr+Delicious.


I can see this as a useful tool and it is hosted by Yahoo.

Got to Go, Have Fun

Social Networking: Better Late then Never ?

For a long time I have been too lazy on social networks.
I decided to come out of hibernation and become active on orkut and facebook.

My Friends if you read the blog find me on orkut,facebook.

I get why people get hooked on to these sites.
It s kind of fun actually to track your friends find out what they are upto
and discover new friends.

I am looking forward to the SC game tonight.
Waiting to see our Q.B Booty has improved from last year.

In the season I am looking forward to SC vs Cal and SC vs Oregon.
I believe these are going to be make or break games for us.

Signing Off, Fight On !

Ravi

Social Networking and Monetizing them

Social Networks have always intrigued me.
They are great now I can keep in touch with friends,family,coworkers,discover ppl etc

Facebook,MySpace,LinkedIn,Orkut etc are great and useful sites.
Also Ning now allows anyone to create their own social network.

One thing about social networks that intrigues me is revenue generation.

The CPC,CPA etc methods work fine with click based systems.

Having worked with SEM Systems and also Local Search Engines I think we need
to have better systems for monetizing social networks.

Pretty soon I believe we will see behaviour targeting on social networks.
They will not just look for keywords but also look at our friends,interests,actions to determine which Ads to serve.

Maybe we will see different types of ads, widgets may serve the function of dynamic ads.

An Interesting article about this topic.

Fox Interactive Media NYTimes Article

One thing of note is that there are going to be privacy concerns especially with the way we can target users on social networks.

A personalization dream a privacy nightmare?

I believe we can still reap the benefits of personalization and protect our privacy.

Remains to be seen who is going to be the first one to one to come with something similar to
Google AdSense for Social Networks.

Let me know if you see interesting things in this space.

Late Night Blogging, Time to Sleep

Ravi

Personalization vs Privacy

This topic has always been of particular interest to me.

This ties to my research interests and here goes........



As we see companies like Yahoo,Google,Amazon provide better user experience and
benefits through personalization on one front, we start looking at the privacy concerns.


Can we provide personalization benefits while still honoring user privacy concerns?

As an example lets say I login to Gmail, use Google Search, Blog using Blogger,Picassa for pictures. Orkut for social networking,etc.......the list goes on, Google will have a more complete
picture of me. This would allow more targeted advertising, provide me better search results......



I do see the picture that personalization has very useful benefits. However what If I didnot
want all my activities to be linked, I would not want by blog to be tied to what I search.
Can I selectively Opt Out ?



I think we need to provide consumers the choice on what they want to be tracked and what they
dont want to be tracked. Also technically we should have obfuscation methods, opt out techniques for users to make the decisions



Also privacy violation is a huge liability for companies.
This should encourage them to work more closely with users to create a good user
experience while honoring their privacy concerns.


So in short I think we should start looking at technology to restrict what technology can do and provide users the CHOICE on how their information is tracked.



Here's a link to my research paper

http://www.isr.uci.edu/pep06/papers/PEP06_Chellappa.pdf


Let me know your thoughts on this.

Why Start Now?

Its is late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning when I finally start blogging.
The question is why now? I have excuses better late than never, etc.........

I guess part of it is feeling guilty for not being in touch with a bunch of my loco friends
from India. Another part is I do think I have a story to tell..........

I recently came back from a trip to Northern California and I enjoyed it a lot.
Having stayed in SoCal for 4 years I must agree that visiting Northern California ( Some ppl evidently hate the term NorCal) was fun.

I have heard of the famed SoCal-NorCal Battle. Personally I don't give a shit.
I love both NorCal and SoCal.

Now Getting back to the blog. Why this name? Hmmm
I guess it is part of my geekiness to obtain a very literal name for my Blog.

For Now some photos of my trip.