YuviSense: Codin Kid

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Shillika, by Ravages.

Awesome DOF from a DSLR that had me drooling over it.

Pic from the IndiBlogger meet, which I too attended. Report coming up soon!

Update: Oh noes, I’m not the Paperazzi! Atleast, not here - my dear Sano (that’s what I call my cam. Desperate, ain’t I? :P) is totally useless indoors. This is the tottally by this totally awesome photographer.

Update: You can digg this here.

This is Part II of my Engadget Analysis. Part I is here. In Part II, I’ll analyze their linking and what we can learn from it. Also, I’ve made a handy OPML file for you so that you can keep up with the top 20 sites that the Engadget folks have to keep up with to pick the best for us. Head down for the download link.

But before we start…

<blatantAdvertisement>I have a list of books I’d like to read in this Amazon Wishlist. If you like what you read, you can either buy me one of those books or donate to me (PayPal to yuvipanda@gmail.com). Also, custom analysis is available for quite a reasonable price, so if you want anything, ping me!</blatantAdvertisement>

Links

The same dataset that was used in Part I was used. So, we have the same 27,953 posts in 1,169 days at our disposal. Those 27,953 posts had a grand total of 117,739 links, at an average of 4 links a post, which is double the linkage of Scoble (at least last time I checked).

Most Linked To Domains

Here’re the top ten

Most links are back to themselves (as with Matt Cutts). In fact, it has about 25 times the number of links of it’s closest competitor (which incidentally happens to be EngadgetMobile, an offshoot of Engadget). Heck, 42% of all links were links to themselves! This makes a lot of sense, as they’re just linking back to previously run gadgets/stories that might be of interest. Here’s a graph showing the difference visually:

Links to stories and site

No.3 is also Engadget.com, but there’s a difference between finding a link to www.engadget.com and just plain ol’ Engadget.com. The difference is that the www.engadget.com link is copy pasted from somewhere and most probably links to a previous story, while just Engadget.com is hand-typed and most probably link to the site itself, rather than a particular story. The people who write the stories are savvy enough that whenever they want to visit Engadget, they’d type Engadget and press Ctrl + Enter rather than type the .com themselves. The mere idea of putting the totally unnecessary www prefix hasn’t even crossed their mind. So, when they are inserting a link to Engadget the site in their blog posts, their instincts would make completely sure that they would just type Engadget.com and forget about the www. So, if the link is to www.Engadget.com, it is to a story, while if it is missing the www, it is to the site itself J

A-List?

Also, in the Top Ten, 5 are owned by AOL (Engadget, EngadgetMobile, EngadgetHD & Joystiq), two by Google (64.233.179.104 the Google Cache and translate.google.com, the translation service), one is owned by Yahoo (Yahoo News) and one is owned by CNET (news.com). That leaves only one site in the top ten which is not owned by any major corporation, and it is akihabaranews.com. They’re a firsthand news source, located near Tokyo (or at least so they describe themselves in their about us page). This first hand source kinda surprised me, as I’ve actually never heard of them! (But maybe, that’s because I ain’t no Gadget Geek (Except when drooling over the Creative Vision M, that is))

Via Links

Via links identify where they found the material for the post. There won’t be a Via link if the post is found by a Press Release or is original content. Out of the 27,953 posts, 8,869 contain a Via Link identifying where they were found. The rest probably point to press releases & featured articles.

And here are the top ten sources:

AkihabaraNews tops the list with 387 posts, or around 1.3% of all Engadget Posts. Google Cache comes second, followed by Textually (Cell Phone News), Joystiq (Gaming News), I4U (Cell Phone News), DAPreview (Digital Audio), and TheRawFeed, RedFerret, WeMakeMoneyNotArt and Boing Boing (Trivia). The presence of four trivia sites in the top ten is because Trivia don’t come out in Press Releases. Also, Joystiq is pretty high up here because instead of having to dig through Gaming news themselves, the people at Engadget just let their friends at Joystiq do it for them.

Pervasiveness of Cell Phones

Also, the presence of 2 cellphone specific sites in the top ten, along with the fact that it was the category with the most number of posts, indicate that cell phone related news has crept into other news channels as well. Joystiq reports on Cell Phone Gaming news, DAPreview reviews MP3 players in Cell Phones and Boing Boing reports on Cell Phones being flushed down toilets. Cell Phones are just getting more pervasive, going into every area of technology. They are no longer a specialty. They are churned out by the million, bought by the million, posted by the thousands, but not exactly commented on by a lot. They’ve silently become the first computer many people would encounter. I would like one. Any PR people out there looking for someone in the young middle-class demographic that is targeted by so many Cell Phones?

Colorful Sources

When your top source is contributing just around 1% of your total posts, you know your sources are very varied. In fact, 969 unique domains have been listed as sources, with each domain contributing an average of 9 posts. However, of those 969, 489 proved to be the source of only 1 post and an additional 304 contributed less than 10 posts. Then there were 99 which contributed less than 25 posts, leaving us with just 79 sites which contributed more than 25 posts. Here’s a chart showing this:

Only a very small slice of that pie acts as the source for most of the posts on Engadget. That small blue colored slice with 8%. Let’s break it down further and have a look:

Note that this pie is a breakup of that small 8% slice in the pie above. So, an even smaller percentage acts as the source of most of the stuff. Which brings us to the next section about…

Dare to drink from the Fire hose? The Engadget20

Unrelated to TechCrunch20, Engadget20 is a list of 20 sites which Engadget cited as sources a considerable number of times (the yellow slice above). If you really want your daily fix of gadgetry undiluted by the kind folks at Engadget, then download the OPML file here and Go!

Read Links

Read Links are the stories themselves, while Via Links are a hat tip to the site that bought the site to Engadget’s notice. The Press Releases, the links to the product pages, the link to the cached copy of the blog post that was removed after 20 minutes are all put up in the Read Links.

Of the 27, 953 posts, 22,444 posts contain a Read Link, while the rest were probably Live Reports, Hands-on Galleries and Features.

Here’s the list of top ten most linked to domains in the Read Link:

Google Translate makes this list as well, showing that a lot of Gadget related sites are non-English. The usual big names are all here: Yahoo News, News.com, BBC, PC Magazine, NYTimes, and of course AkihabaraNews as well. BusinessWire and PRNewsWire are Press Release agencies. No surprises here except Google Translate.

A Total of 6,552 domains were in the Read link at least once, but 4,969 of them got only a single link, a further 1316 sites had less than 5 links and 420 sites had less than 25 links. That leaves us with just 120 sites with more than 25 links! Here’s the pie:

The number of sites which have at least 25 links is so small relatively that it doesn’t find any place in the chart. There is a 74% chance that Engadget will not link to a site more than once. J So, just because a new product by a new company shows up in Engadget, it doesn’t mean the company is not goanna kick the bucket. Also, the comparatively small number of sites which contribute most of the Reading Material shows the upperhand of the Press, Big Companies and the Press Releases. Press Releases ain’t yet dead people!

Takeaways

Here are the takeaways from today’s post:

· Each post has about 4 links on average

· Engadget links the most to themselves, with 42% of all links back to their own articles.

· AkihabaraNews is one of their major sources of news.

· Cell Phones are no longer a specialty. They’re just another form of a computer.

· Foreign Language sites are quite rampant, as evident by the generous use of Google Translate.

· There is a 74% chance that Engadget won’t link to the same site more than once.

· If you want your dose of gadgetry fix undiluted by the kind editorial staff at Engadget, you can grab this OPML file and read 20 blogs from which Engadget gets tipped off quite a bit. Be warned if you start feeling guilty that you can’t keep on top of the information inflow though.

What’s Next

This doesn’t quite end the series though. I tried doing a Gizmodo vs Engadget, but hit a brick wall when the Gizmodo server turned me up a blank page here. Hope to do that comparison post soon (Any ideas on getting a proper page turn up there?).

And, there’s bigger game afoot, atleast in terms of size. The processed raw data for Engadget was around 49 megabytes. Right now, my friggin freaky awesome friend Rob La Gesse (I’m just stacking up adjectives because I can’t think of anything exact to say) is using his servers to run an analysis for me that has unprocessed data run into around 7 gigabytes! I expect the processed data to be a file of around 4 gigabytes, which is the largest I’ve handled yet. My resources are constrained enough that even Engadget would be stretching them to their limits, and this new analysis would have just been impossible to think of. And, he’s even given me more access to more processing power, and that too with full administrative access to a smoking Server 2008 box. You rock Rob!

So, wait for that big analysis to hit next. I hope to learn quite a bit about System Administration and SQL Server 2005 from this adventure! Expect some technical details as well, along with some rants on School. (On an entirely off topic, mind-venting, tangential note: They’ve shifted to a new schedule that gives us 8 hours at school. 8 tiring hours L I can’t even think straight for a few hours after the ordeal is over. Made more daunting by the undue (and unneeded) pressure they’re putting on us. I might seem to be ranting out on this, but really, I would rather be learning to tune SQL Server than sit at School and memorize pieces of poetry or do manual mathematical calculations by hand. Who wouldn’t?)

But before you head over…

<blatantAdvertisement>I have a list of books I’d like to read in this Amazon Wishlist. If you like what you read, you can either buy me one of those books or donate to me (PayPal to yuvipandda@gmail.com). Also, custom analysis is available for quite a reasonable price, so if you want anything, ping me!</blatantAdvertisement>

The blog is now at a new host.  Some things may be a bit flaky - Yuvi is sleeping, and I’ll let things go as they are until he wakes up!

Though changing themes is trivial in Wordpress, it isn’t trivial once you factor in Yuvi’s pseudo-law: “Anything within reach of Yuvi inevitable suffers a screw up”. Recent screwups include using the word inevitable instead of the correcter inevitable, and then using the non-existant word “correcter”, breaking the comments when upgrading to Wordpress 2.2, and then screwing up a lot of things while trying to activate the newer Freshy 2.0 theme.

The new theme is up now, though I had to a use non-widgetized sidebar. I have no Idea who took the photo used in the header (It came with the theme), but it is a fantastic shot, with a razor thin Depth of Field. If you look carefully, the left portion of the fruit is in focus, while the right part isn’t. Wonderful.

Also, I changed the name of my blog from Yuvisense: Kid in Tech to Yuvisense: Codin Kid. I have a blog name changing fetish, as observed by the fact that the name of this poor blog has changed some 6 or 7 times since it started.

Oh, and Part I of StatBot: Analysis of Engadget is almost complete. Expect to see it soon!

Any bugs? Contact me!

Tried to update to Freshy 2.0 theme. Went awry (as usualy). I can never seem to upgrade anything without breaking something. This time, I was unable to use any widgets: Accessing the widgets page and hitting “Save” gives me just a 404. Shitty. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Just thought you guys might like to know.

I love Zooomr. It’s the only Web 2.0 service I regularly use, beside Meebo. And, Thomas Hawk is a fantastic photographer(and my photographic mentor) and they do fantastic PR.

And, they’re launching a new and much anticipated version, which should be live in a few hours…

I wrote about it here on TechZi.

Rock on.

[Full Disclosure: I wanted to write about my latest visit to a hospital like place which involved needles, but I wanted to drive traffic to TechZi, simply because I like David. I’ll write about the Hospital later]

I use Zooomr to host my photos(RSS), and am absolutely lovin it. But then, there are certainly room for loadsa improvement, and here are ten of them. Hey Kris, hopefully, all these are implemented in Mark III and that comes out fast.

So, here’s what I hope gets fixed in Zooomr:

1. Login and Authentication. OpenID is just too much for the normal guy. I couldn’t get any of my friends to signup, since it was a bit too complicated for them. They were used to an username/password combo, and the OpenID system just confuses them.
2. Licences. Right now, I have to view every photo individually and assign a licence to them, which sucks. Thomas says that it’ll be fixed in Mark III, so I’m waiting…
3. Easier Commenting. Quite a bit of my friends saw my photos, but none were able to comment, since they were not able to signup.
4. Speed. It’s pretty darn slow right now, and another reason to wait for Mark III.
5. Easier Posting to Blog. Right now, it takes me some 3 clicks to get HTML to post my photos on my blog, which sucks.
6. Ajax on displayed photos. I would like the same amount of AJAXy goodness that populates the Zooomr photo pages(LightBox, LightMap, Fave, etc) on my blog. That would rock.
7. Autoissual of API keys. Right now, I can’t post directly to Zooomr from the awesome Windows Live Writer, simply because a dev couldn’t get an API Key.
8. Custom Sets. Right now, SmartSets suck most of the time.
9. Forums, Groups and more community features. For example, If the Login issues get fixed, then I know a lot of people who would join a “St. Mary’s Community” for all the photos taken at my School. With the number of students with Digital Cameras growing, this turns essential. And, I certainly would join a “I love my PowerShot S3″ community:D
10. Site Colors. Can you figure out what’s the text here? I certainly can’t, and last time I checked, I ain’t colorblind.

And, still, Zooomr rocks. See the friggin cool way they’re marketing: Thomas showed me some linkluv both from his blog and the official Zooomr blog. Do you think I’ll dare to switch anytime?:D (No, it’s not the reason I’m staying with Zooomr). Thanks Thomas, Thanks Kristopher.

In other news, I’m working on the Engadget vs Gizmodo analysis, and the Engadget Scrapr is almost complete now. But, multithreaded programming is quite a headache, so I’m still trying to iron out some bugs, and Gizmodo looks to be more easily Scrappable than Engadget, so hopefully, I’ll be able to publish it before the end of next week. I could’ve finished this much earlier, but I am actually abandoning all of the code which analysed Scoble’s blog, and starting from scratch to build a more reusable, well architected tool, so it’s takin a bit longer. Sorry about that.

That, was the question that I had been asking myself for the past couple of months. Sure, the screenshots rock. Sure, the features rock. But, I was percieving it as a bit “complex”. That would be put into perspective if you get a bit of my background: I first heard about .NET when Visual Studio 2005 was in Beta 2, and I first heard about VB6 when .NET 1.1 had been launched. So, I’ve had it easy, especially in the IDE side: Everything had been done for me from Day 1. Not many bugs. Even the betas of VS2005 were pretty much smooth.

But, WPF? VS support was dismal to say the least, and the UI designer (Blend) looked more like Illustrator than Visual Studio. And, the XAML code? Grids, Stacks, whatnot! It seemed like I was trying to write a device driver in Java!

But, that was, until I saw this damn cool screencast from Channel9. It’s a bit old, and the bits used are a bit old as well, but after I saw that screencast, I’m hooked on. Complex? Nope. Would you say HTML is complex?:D No Designer? Who cares! I’ll use any XML editor, and the one that comes with Visual Studio has Intellisense as well. I digg WPF. My next application(for which I’m drawing prototypes during Chemistry class, so that I’m not wasting time), is in WPF.

And, when is the Channel9 Video embed gadget coming? Or, is it coming at all?:D Let’s see if anyone from Channel9 heads here, to the blog of this Y-Lister….

P.S: HeyRobert Scoble, have you forgotten about us developers? I don’t think I’ve seen any Developer oriented videos at PodTech or ScobleShow.

Just got back from the camp a few hours ago. It was life-changing, to say the least. A few weeks back, I used the word “broaden my horizons” in my “author” section of my website. At that time, I had no idea that I would be featured on Scobleizer, get a camera or meet Leprosy patients. Now, I truly feel that my horizons have broadened. Detailed report comin uo, after school…

Obligatory SuperMacro of a Flower Hosted on Zooomr

Most people seem to post a SuperMacro of a flower or some insect first, and I too am following suit. If you notice carefully, there is quite a bit of noise in the picture, because I accidentaly shot this one at ISO 200, even though the light was good enough for ISO 80(This one was taken in the morning, and I forgot to change the previous night’s settings). But still, I am pretty freaked out that I am able to produce images of this quality. I have around 1800 pictures waiting to be categorized, tagged and uploaded, and with school tomorrow, It’s goanna take some time for that to happen. So, please bear with me.

And, I have decided to use Zooomr for hosting my pictures over Flickr. Why?

• The lone programmer there is just two years older than me! And, he was dablling in HTML when he was 5. Friggin cool.
• They give away free Pro accounts to bloggers. It’s good for a year, but I hope to be able to earn enough to buy my own Zooomr Pro account by then.
• The features rock! And, with just one person to convince, new features get in fast.

Oh, and all of them are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. Notice that it is Attribution only: You could do whatever the heck you want with it, but just gimme a link. Thank you!

Here is are some more samples:

Last Sunset at the Camp Hosted on Zooomr

Happy Kids 1 Hosted on Zooomr

Last Sunset at the Camp Hosted on Zooomr

Two Things of Beauty are a Joy forever Hosted on Zooomr

Seed on my hand Hosted on Zooomr

Exif data available on clickthrough.

See ya soon! Comments on the Photos are welcome! Thanks!

I just changed my theme from Freshy by jide to Tulip Time by Highland Design. Though the old theme was pretty colorful and, well, “fresh”, It just wasted too much space for me. So, I was on the lookout for a three column theme, and after hitting upon a lot of themes, I finally found this theme. It was love at first sight, and kudos to John, especially considering that it was his first theme!

The cool thing about this theme being, It gives more prominence to the blogroll on my right, and the calendar. The calendar reminds me that I’ve to post more often, and the blogroll reminds me that I’ve to read more:D Hope I’m able to do both…

The only thing I added? Categories in the Blogroll now show up! And, the Meebo Me! Widget as well…

Show up, and comment!

Microsoft just got themselves a new home page.

Took ‘em long enough!

But, I think I like the new one better. The old one was pretty crowded and portalish, to say the least. The new one looks more like a blog’s home page. Heck, it even has a glass background with a collapsible sidebar! But, anyone think of any reason WHY the sidebar would be collapsed?

What do you think?

UPDATE: It seems that this one’s been on beta for quite some time.

At last, I have finished shifting my blog from Blogger to my own domain which is running Wordpress.You can find the new blog at http://blog.yuvisense.net and if you have subscribed to the RSS feed the feed URL(whoa thanks!), then just refresh it to http://blog.yuvisense.net/feed. I know it’s a PITA when you have to go around updating RSS feed URLs, but, hey that’s much better than changing that URL from your memory, right?

Shifting all the posts with comments from Blogger has mostly been a painless process, since Wordpress offers a built-in importer which simplifies a lot of things. But, this domain was registered almost 2 months ago(thanks to my cousin Sudar), but I’m goin live only today, for reasons that are so philosophical that I’ll keep them to another post. But suffice to say, the fact that I tried to categorize my posts twice and made 3 redesigns speaks a point…

Wordpress has been really excellent so far and has satisfied all my requirements. You get tons of themes and plug-ins. And the credit goes to the community. Right now I am playing with lot of themes and may be even this theme may change in a few days.

So guys welcome to the new version of my blog and do let me know your comments and suggestions. More content coming up soon. And, the categorization has not yet been completed…

P.S: I made this post by copying this post of my cousin Sudar’s blog verbatim and making modifications. Talk about content theft:D

I’ve been a journalist for almost 6 months now. A Journalist for my School Magazine, The Marian Star. I’m the One and Only Designer, One of the Editors, and an ocassional photographer(without a cam:D).

And, it’s been an awesome experience. I learnt lots of things, from Serif and Sans-Serif fonts to writing Reports and Headlines. And the peer-review process and bare-bones editing were fun and challenging as well. Inshort, joining the Marian Star (which happened by accident) is probably the best thing for me since sliced bread, since I got to do a whole lot of stuff, some of which you’ll be seeing in the days to come…

But, If I’ve been a Journalist for 5 months, then why haven’t I blogged about it before? Well, main reason being, I wanted to show some work for being there, so I had to wait till I had something significant, something interview-worthy. And now, since I have not one but two of those, I guess I can break the news…

As of now, we’ve published 7 Interviews, 6 with teachers from our school(including the Principal) and one with the General Manager of Lotte India, and we’ve some good ones in the works. We’ve also covered every major and minor event in our school, and littered the place with reports and surveys.

So today, I am publishing those 7 interviews. PDF format. Licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial licence.

PDF Alert!

At School

Our Principal, Fr. Paulraj

Our Assitant Headmistress, Ms. Selvi

Our Hawks House Master & Mr. Best-Teacher-ever, Mr. Nicholas

Our Owls House Master & Mr. Computer, Mr. Darius

Our Swifts House Master & Mr. Motivation, Mr. Arul Rajan

Our Eagles(my) House Master & Mr. Newly Married, Mr. Dominic

Outside

The General Manager of Lotte India, Mr. In Do Hwang

PDF versions for now, but I’m working on HTML versions of them as well…

And what do you think of the designs? With 20/20 hindsight, they all look crappy to me, since they were done when I was a noob and used (horror music) Microsoft Publisher. While there’s nothing wrong with that, and it certainly introduced me to designing on paper, I’ve overgrown it and my next interviews use the f’awesome Adobe InDesign.

So, feel the Design is Crappy? Flame me:D

Was I dead? Actually, I was not. The low posting frequency was caused by a mixture of overloaded workload doing work that I needn’t be doing and the exams…

Yea, the doggone stupid Quarterly exams are here. And, as usual, I finished French in about one-third the time alloted. So, what do I do?

Well, recently I’ve started watching Animax, and like it a lot. And, the effect of bLaugh and xkcd is not to be dismissed.

So, I got myself one more piece of paper, and drew these comical comics. Comical in the sense pathetic, but hey this’s the first time, and I think I did a pretty good time.

Disclaimer: I don’t intend to hurt anyone/anyone’s feelings in these comics/posts. If it seems to target you, please ignore it, because I didn’t intend it.

Anyway, here’s the first one:

But It’s Free!

How was that? Funny? Idiotic? Stupid? Waste of Bandwidth? Anything, just put up a bit down here, in the comments…

P.S. Licences coming up:D And, this is a precursor to something more, biggr….