Digging for Meaning

Gunda . rick-roll . three wolves moon . what is common in all these memes? all went viral and reached millions. true. all are immensely successful in creating a subculture around themselves. true. and all were so bad, that they were classic in some respect. and here's an insight that perhaps can be exploited to create brands online. who can forget mithun's 'do char cheh aath dus, bus'. or numerous people rickrolled online and offline. or the amazingly mediocre t-shit selling like hotcakes. (hmm.. i have never seen hotcakes sales figures really.. or a queue for buying it. where did this expression come from anyways.) all these examples treaded on a fine balance. an exactitude of badness that necessarily has to go beyond mediocrity. i will not ponder on the measures that need to be undertaken to be exactly bad enough to get viral, but rather lets take a little time to appreciate that it pays to be bad. (hmm.. by that logic i should get an increment in my salary.. ahh.. n...

The last post was sooo teel dear. Well, for the uninitiated teel dear (tl;dr) = Too long; didn’t read. In this twitter age, I know I have sinned with my preposterously long posts earlier in the blog. But let me assure you, I am trying to be rid of the disease, and I am a advocate for brevity. I had even started a community on orkut about it. btw, this blog is about the new proverbs that this digital age is creating and how and what they indicate. please do add to the list, any proverbs that has digital native connotation to it. 1. all your base are belong to us - This legendary statement connoting victory in gaming was born of bad translation of Japanese in an arcade game. The words though since have grown bigger and find relevance outside of gaming enthusiasts aswell. 2. Information wants to be free " - It is an expression that has come to be the unofficial motto of the free content movement. Its philosophical implications pervade all things digital and its shaping the way ...

Digital Natives (DNs) like their information served in 'multimedia' and not just one medium (like the ever so abundant text) and Yahoo knows it. Yahoo has come up with a new spruced up search interface called 'glue'. Glue essentially changes the way one uses the search utility, eliminating the need for a few clicks in certain instances, all the while making the result page much more interesting with videos, images, Y! answers, maps, news and any other relevant sources and multimedia being made available on the result page. The service hasn't been rolled out across geographies and queries yet though. As of now, it is only a Y! India feature with only a few categories of searches (sports, travel, entertainment, health, stocks, and tech). for eg. I wanted to know about good beaches in Konkan (where I plan to spend this weekend :D) and searched for 'konkan' and the result page threw up wikipedia's entry about konkan, news, y! answers, images along with the...

Being a digital native , my first instinct before doing anything is to google up the query instead of thinking it through myself # . so here I am, having decided the structure of the white paper that is to be written and poised to write the entry in this blog that should elucidate the start of the discussion, but instead am writing an entry thats a chronicle of my trek through numerous blogs and other interesting outposts on web related to digital native discussion. lest you think that this post would hence be any less valuable, think again, there are some interesting links that I came across during my scavenging. not everything is directly related to the query at hand, but as is the non-linear nature of surfing (funny, I am presenting this post in text - a linear logic, to advocate digital nativity, whose hallmark feature is being non linear. well until we have a better alternative, lets stick to text for now.) I would share some other interesting stuff as well, in no particular ord...