KK's Blog

Gone are the days when we had the luxury of thinking global, acting local. That was easier. 

Now we live in a world that's more complex and interconnected than ever before. 

Those of us privileged enough to be living in the first world (and yes, no matter how messy things seem, it's really still a privilege), could easily spend the day waking up in a house built by Romanians, put on clothes made in Bangladesh, drive a car conceived in Japan and assembled in South Africa, eat food grown in Mexico, wash it down from wine from New Zealand, having worked on a computer built in India all day long. 

More importantly, we are polluting the planet enough to cause draughts in Chile, desertification in Kenya, flooding in Malaysia and an ozone hole in Australia. These are not just possibilities anymore, but proven facts. 

So it's time to not just think global,  but also to act global. Your money and charity goes much further in the third world.

So why not donate to help secure the future of a child in Kenya this Christmas. Why not give back to the baby in Pakistan that our political choices have stunted the lives of. Care about the mother in Haiti who's house has just been washed away. And even stop to think about the turtles, lions, polar bears, woodpeckers and countless other species losing the only habitat they're equipped to live in. 

It’s been a while since I last posted but I have something that I think warrants discussing. So please, please do put down your thoughts and comments at the end.

Remember the first time you made a phone call as kid? Someone probably gave you some instructions/tips on how to introduce yourself and how to begin the conversation. I remember the time my dad saw an email I’d written to a friend and told me about syntax on computers – things like putting a space after a full stop etc. Just little things that are either told to us explicitly or we pick up ourselves. Point is there some very definite guidelines on how to go about communicating using these mediums.

So I want to discuss how we ought to do this in today’s world of constant connectivity. Most of us have smart phones which make us accessible at almost any instant. But how soon can/should you expect a response? How much is too much? Is there really such a thing as ‘Instant Messaging’? So to get the ball rolling here’s my own ‘priority list’ in terms of what type of communication I will respond first to on my phone. This is in descending order of response speed.

1.       Calls This is the easy one. We all answer calls at almost any point unless it’s a very important meeting ones in, you’ve just begun eating and are famished or you’re about to seal the deal with some hot chick/guy! And if you can’t answer the call – you call back. Of course things can get a little complicated when you think about all the rubbish sales calls you get these days. Another tricky one is international calls. It’s weird that they don’t really cost as much as we think but there’s some sort of a mind block on making too many of them unless you have a sweet int’l calling deal or are my parents and want the pleasure of speaking to me! [Skype (if you have a good enough always on connection) and the other VoIP providers fall into the same category as calls].

2.       Messages I try to respond to text messages as soon as I see them. Here too the same minor distractions apply:  CRAZY amounts of spammy messages may lead to me deleting something of substance in the process of clearing out my inbox. And for some weird reasons the pittance it costs to send a message pinches just a little bit when there are other free methods of messaging and package deals (which I’m almost always too lazy to have sorted out!).

3.       GTalk

This fantastic ‘instant messenger’ (and others like it) has many uses. ‘Ping’ to clarify an urgent question from a colleague at work, get asked about a report by your boss, or just to check on a friend’s plans for later that evening – the possibilities are endless. And that’s why things get complicated here too. Because sometimes you expect an instant response but hey, the other person may be driving or about to run across a busy road (naked) or having the worst day and in no mood to talk. And then there’s the whole dilemma around status messages. People with Gtalk on phones (most of my friends) are automatically set to an ‘Away’ status if they’re not actively using the phone. So is it ok to ping someone when they’re ‘Away’ or ‘Busy’? How soon can one expect a response? These are all the kinds of questions that haunt me at night!

[If you’ve never used a smart phone and/or don’t believe in having a 2/3/4G connection, you wouldn’t have experienced the full extent of this one or the next one.]

4.       Whatsapp This wonderful  ‘nearly-instant-messaging’ app has added a whole new dimension to mobile to mobile communications. Once it syncs with your list of contacts it provides a fantastic alternative to ‘texting’ (in the interest of clarity – that was number 2!) especially since it’s totally free. And not just that – it’s free to send pictures, videos, audio files and probably even the best way to send across contacts! But it is this latter functionality that means I’ll try and respond as soon as I can but I won’t put it over sitting down to coffee with a friend you see. So it’s cool to ‘watsapp’ anyone at most times, just don’t expect instant responses. Sorry whatsapp creators – I’m deeming it a ‘Not chat client’. So if I want to have a lengthy conversation with someone about multiple things, I think I’ll move to GTalk.

5.       FB Messaging

I joined FB when it was just about writing on people’s walls and sending the odd message when you had something private/controversial to tell. Now there’s a fancy timeline and the messaging shows up instantly and hence allows for a chat feature. I think everyone agrees that FB chat sucks as a chat client but the sheer number of contacts connected to it makes it an oft used messaging tool. So when you’re planning a meet up, is it cool to use FB messaging as a medium to make plans? Yes, totally. But is it fair to use it as a means to get in touch with someone urgently and figure out where they are, say? Not really. That’s what I want to point out. A thing like FB is there to visit when one has time (or not!) - it does not demand urgent replying so don’t blame me if I don’t reply to your message wondering where I am.

6.       Emails

This is another obvious one. I’ll respond to emails within 24 hours at work and maybe a little more slowly on non-work emails. If you need a quicker response, put ‘urgent’ in the subject line. I’ll then ‘star it’ in Gmail (a highly under used feature) and will try and reply the next minute I’m not doing something amazing and life changing (which is pretty much all the time).

Shamelessly just linking to this article on cracked.com (such an awesome site) because its exactly the kind of thing I'd want to write on this blog if I had the time and resources! But I really think its message is very important so I'm going to summarize (and paraphrase) it. And then add a couple of points of my own. As the article says - we're becoming prone to just reading headlines so here is a list of the main ('scientific') reasons those guys at cracked.com think the internet is changing us intrinsically:

On the internet you can easily mute the opinions of those you don't like/don't agree with and create 'thought bubbles' consisting of the voices of people sharing similar thoughts. They say that fish swimming around in curved bowls have a very warped perspective of life. Are you sure you aren't in a bowl or bubble of your own?  

Bad/mis-leading information now has a fantastic medium to spread and even diversify itself. Its like a global game of Chinese Whispers where everyone's playing and almost everyone can add their own bits and pieces.  Another aspect of this is that bad news, in particular poor experiences, come to light much more quickly. Think about your last visit to the doctor - how much more likely were you to blog/FB post/generally rant about having had a bad time than if the experience beat your expectations. I mentioned this earlier but I want to say it again - its becoming more and more important for us to be able to sift through all the information that's coming our way and strip the rubbish from the real, important stuff.  

I love that meme. In fact let me take this opportunity to say - I Love Memes! The Internet phenomenon that is - don't know too much about the biological ones! But more on that on some other post.

Like the meme, I also want to acknowledge how the net is full of useless crap too. Remember that video about the Paradox of Choice? Of having too much information and not knowing what to do with all of it? Well here's my list of Top 4 Worst Wastages of the Web (more mad alliteration skills!):

1.     Websites like this one – www.yyyyyyy.info. Just WTF is it going on there? The fact that someone is willing to pay some (if not a considerable amount of) money to keep such a site alive baffles me!

2.     Pages like this one -  http://runinfinity.com/calendar/india/5k. If you take a look at it, you'll realise that while it promises a calendar of all 5km runs happening in the country, it delivers nothing! Yes, I know there's a lot worse when it comes to spammy sites that survive on AdSense money but the fact that this information is not too hard to get and this site does everything but provide that, irks me.

3.     Some Yahoo!Answers - This one is hilarious. Do check it out and marvel at how stupid/funny some people can be!

4.     Most YouTube comments - Here is a nice little compilation of the different types of ridiculous comments you get. But really, its the insane, annoying political/religious ones that get me. Closer home, there’s the comments that follow most Rediff.com articles. In particular the ones about Cricket. These comments inevitably change to an India-Pakistan slander match post 6 comments, irrespective of the content of the article!

[This post is a continuation from the one about the best websites to listen to your favorite tunes].

Where to find out about music

Drowned In Sound and Pitchfork - Having access to millions of songs online is all good but where do you start? On this score there are literally thousands of music reviewers (the author too has indulged in this himself!) but my personal picks are the ones mentioned above. The former is more UK and Europe biased (and hence it gets my vote) while the latter is the big daddy of opinionated Indie Music reviews. Both sites will totally ignore music they don't deem worthy of reviewing (i.e. 98% of everything mainstream) so if you have an artist you like and want to see others that have been deemed similar by other users, try music-map.com!  It is not a site that has revolutionized the industry but is a little heard of discovery of mine and has led to a number of great 'finds' for me - so this one is my gift to you, readers! [Finally, some point in coming to this blog huh?!] And if you want to get comprehensive reviews for some newly discovered artists – metacritic.com compiles both critic’s and general user’s reviews of most artists/albums and gives you a quick snippet and score. A bit like what RottenTomatoes.com does for movies.  

SoundCloud - The great thing about the above two review sites (and I know a ton of others do this too) is that you can read a review and joy-of-joys, there's a player at the end of it that'll let you listen to the album or at worst - give you quick 30 second song snippets! This wonderful feature is often enabled by the power of SoundCloud. An online music sharing platform, it is a haven for small and upcoming (largely electro) artists to share their sounds and get their name out there. With a cool interface and easy to embed playlists it’s like the ultimate good-deed-done for the music sphere!  

SoundHound - The growth of smartphones has meant that we not only have a music device in our hands (check out Google Music Beta if you haven't heard about that awesome innovation) but also a means to identify that cool track the DJ's spinning or that song from the movie you're straining to guess the artist for. Shazam was the first major app to provide such a service, but SH with its similar artists, Youtube links and instantly available song lyrics goes one step beyond when it comes to telling you about that tune you're hearing.

This has gone on long enough already without me going into the plethora of smart radio stations out there and of course the easiest way to download music (illegal though it is) - Torrents! [This is not me recommending Mininova as a good clean warehouse of music torrents.] So forgive me for all that I have missed. Hope some of the above enriches your musical life and brings you some of the joy those sites have given me over the years.

 Berthold Auerbach (via a dear friend)

In case you doubted it - this is confirmation that the internet has revolutionized the music industry. Not that you doubted it, but yeah.

I've decided to split the post into two parts - one a list of some of the biggest Online Music Sources (or at least, my favorites) and another one, a list of some places to find out about good music these days.

Where to hear your favorite tunes

Back in the day, say about 2500 of them (that’s approx. 8 years ago, for those who are mathematically handicapped) when I first started to get serious about listening to music, there were online radios. Yahoo! Music was the best one I found - though for a while now Pandora has surpassed it as the world’s most popular online radio. Yahoo’s Launchcast player allowed you to mark songs as favorites and the engine generally kept churning out tunes within your chosen genre. But if you wanted to listen to a specific song by a particular artist, things were difficult. (See below for my experience with Last.fm). 

Spotify - I believe this is where things changed. A cool music streaming software, all that was required to get you in touch with millions of artists and their albums was an internet connection and a quick download of the software. Log in and you could listen to one song by any artist on infinite loop or create your own playlist to suit your mood. There is one catch though - besides the usual image/flash ads on the interface, there are audio ads that interrupt your listening experience every 7-8 songs. 

Grooveshark - The audio ad annoyance also (mad alliteration skills!) can be eliminated by going to Grooveshark.com. The sleek interface (normally with just one ad on the side), easy to use playlist that sits at the bottom of the page at all times, powerful search options and music recommendations (similiar artists etc.) make this the preferred choice of most serious music enthusiasts. And as if all that is not enough, it makes for easy sharing of songsand albums; all while it plays seemlessly, right from your browser. Upon doing some research I'm happy to find that Grooveshark also has the most millions of songs amongst this wiki list of online on-demand music providers.

Last.fm - Finally I'd be doing my early years in listening to music a real disservice if I wasn't to mention this quirky radio website. And I say quirky because it seemed to be the only place that gave me easy access to the more off-beat music I often wanted to hear before the days of Spotify and Grooveshark. Unlike those two, Last.fm didn't let you play just the songs you wanted to hear but instead you clicked on an artist’s radio station. That played 5-6 songs by them, then moved to similar artists and inevitably changed genres completely! 

The future is here. And it looks smart, clean and transparent.  Or does it?

This week Google uploaded a teaser video show-casing the work they're doing on Artificial Intelligence glasses. If you haven't watched that video yet, please do. Not only because its pretty cool, but also because the rest of this post will not make any sense otherwise!

A few things I'd like to point out here if I may:

Consider the 'conversation' the protagonist and his friend have upon meeting up one fine day. "Shall we meet up?" "Yes, at 2." "Are you here yet?" "Cool, let's go get a coffee."  The hero checks-in at the coffee place, picks up a coffee, and they part ways! OK so maybe a mundane conversation between two friends wouldn't fit in with this quick video but its a well documented fact that our conversations are getting shorter and shorter. And this video with its open ended title of 'One day...' only supports that view.  But then again maybe conversations are getting crisper? In any case, thanks to the internet and smartphones, they're certainly getting a lot more diverse. I for one can be found Whatsapping a friend in NY, while commenting on the FB post from a friend in Australia, all while waiting for a friend a little closer home to call [and killing my phones battery life in the process!].  

There's a million blog posts about how technological advances are making the possibility of the Terminator movie story line coming soon to a city near you more and more plausible. And one may say that this video contributes to that. Imagine if instead of showing the guy in the video that Strand Books is only a short walk away, the glasses were to recommend a taxi service (that's advertising with Google of course!). My guess is in the world of the video, the hero would just say yes!  Once again my take on it is, if we all stay aware and don't just accept things blindly, we'll be fine. What do you guys think?   

That guy at XKCD has been entertaining us with the quirks and joys of science/web/and modern life in general, for many a year.  I particularly liked this comic as it fits in with what I think this blog is going to be about - the impact of the internet/technology on our daily lives. Slightly exaggerated though the strip might be (I Love that!) it nicely depicts the downside (or upside - depending on how you look at it) of all this information we have at our fingertips thanks to the all-knowing Google Internet! Two additional points here:

It makes me think of something I read on how the first post/review on an important blog/opinion piece/product listing can highly influence what people take away from the article. Think about all those times you've read an article about a product you're not sure about, and unconsciously scrolled down to the comments section to see 'what people are saying about it'! [Note: if like me, you do this, a cautionary word - do Not let YT video comments influence your opinions!]  

I’ve spent this morning reading up on some of the many amazing points of interaction between the design/creative space and the super-fast-paced tech world. We are all aware of the rate at which tech innovations are coming through and revolutionizing.. well, everything (case in point: Tablets as we know them now, were a fictional thing of the future but 3 years ago!). We often complain about the rate of change - so its about time we gave due credit to some of the awesome stuff its inspiring/enabling. 

And this can be the starting point - http://www.projectrebrief.com/. Google does many awesome things that few people hear/care about. The web is what you make of it was one such example. But coming back to the point, the tech/web behemoth that makes 95% of its revenues through advertising, is spending some of its billions re-creating the advertising campaigns from the so called golden age of advertising - the age of the 'Mad Men' - for the web. Perhaps the coolest, most staggering example of this is of course the 'buy the world a coke' campaign. If you haven't seen it yet, click on this link and watch the 2min+ video - you will NOT regret it! Isn't that cool? If you have the time watch the other stuff they're doing through the YT Channel. 

Its not just Google either. A friend pointed me to Dulux's 'Let's color the world' project - the paint company's initiative to brighten the lives of some of the world's poorest communities. And in the process, make people think Dulux, when they think Paints. Have you heard of Ben & Jerry's new ice cream flavors? Did you know that Molson Coors has supposedly spent more on responsible drinking campaigns than it does on pushing its beers! Yes, needless to say there's something in it for the Corporate too! But my point is that its well worth it - both for the company AND for the community. In fact, the idealist in me believes that campaigns like Coke's will really break down cross-cultural/cross-national borders and eventually cut off the fuel that makes wars possible. Big companies with ample cash piles are the ones who can invest in such things and thus lead to better, more peaceful future. 

Its a bit of a stretch? A big hope? Well I for one, intend to stay optimistic. I want to finish off with another quote I saw yesterday (God bless the internet and the access it gives us!) - 'Most people who lived in the end of the 18th century had no idea that they were living through the industrial revolution. That was because it took several decades until this period in human history was awarded its status of 'The Industrial Revolution'.  It is highly likely that the same thing will happen 50 years down the road regarding the period in time we’re living through now.'

So here's to that revolution being one that makes the world a better place for one and all!