Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig is making his latest book available free on the Internet. The book can be downloaded online at free-culture.org/freecontent.

Reverse BPO

Indian company taps IBM in outsourcing deal - IBM plans to take over the information technology operations of Bharti Tele-Ventures, an Indian telecommunications company, in a deal that could be worth $750 million over 10 years.

Web Service Specs

Over at Burton Group Weblogs, Anne Thomas Manes (author of Web Services: A Manager's Guide) is writing about the current status of Web services standards and specifications. Good read for anyone who wants to keep up the pace with the everyday emerging standards.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Life in a Mall

This book review from Knowledge@Wharton caught my eye. Lots of interesting detail on why the malls are, the way they are.

In his new book, Call of the Mall, Paco Underhill explains that the reason the rest rooms in America's shopping malls are typically located at the end of a long, gloomy corridor : the suburban equivalent of a city alley : is because malls are built by real estate developers, not merchants.

Real estate developers, says Underhill, so resent having to dedicate any space to a non-revenue producing amenity, that they tuck it out of the way. If you are looking for a rest room at almost any mall in the U.S., Underhill advises, look for an uninviting, dimly-lit hallway. You're there. ....

Underhill explains why the stores closest to mall entrances tend to be occupied by hair salons or banks, not shops catering to impulse buyers: "When we enter any building we need a series of steps just to make the adjustment between out there and in here," he writes. "We need time to allow our eyes to adjust. We are not ready to make any buying decisions. If there is a sign close to the door, you won't read it."

Thus the best locations are further in the mall. And since the mall owner charges tenants a flat rent based on space plus a percentage of sales, it is in the mall's own interest to have the hottest stores in prime locations, says Underhill.

He says every mall has a food court because they prolong a shopper's stay. The food court is usually noisy and the offerings not exactly gourmet. But, he asks, "is there another place where the quasi-foodstuffs of Mexico, China, Italy, Thailand, Greece, Japan and South Philadelphia come together like this?"....

SOA Editor

Cape Clear has released a new version of their popular WSDL Editor called SOA Editor. Haven't tested it yet but according to Cape Clear, It is designed to help developers take a SOA-approach to SOA development!
Download link: Cape Clear's SOA Editor

Overview of the .NET CLR and Friends

Great to see, Sam will be presenting his highly regarded talk, .NET CLR and Friends, at the Maryland and Pennsylvania Microsoft Developer's UG on 29th April. Although, Shrewsbury is about 40 miles drive from Harrisburg but what the heck, How many times do you get to see a .Net guru so closely.

Blog Maverick [via Robert Scoble]

Mark Cuban has a blog. Although Mavericks are not my favorite team but if anyone has seen Mark during a game will know how passionate he is about his team and basketball. Great to see him writing and hopefully he will write more about the world of managing an NBA team and what goes on behind the scenes during the Draft.

Great CSS Articles

ALA is churning out some great CSS Articles over the last few issues. These are all real world problems and solutions that anyone can apply to his/her design.

CSS Drop Shadows: Much used, oft maligned but always popular, drop shadows are a staple of graphic design. Although easy to accomplish with image-editing software, they’re not of much use in the fast-changing world of web design … until now.

CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death: Say goodbye to old-school slicing and dicing when creating image maps, buttons, and navigation menus. Instead, say hello to a deceptively simple yet powerful sprite-based CSS solution.

This article combines several of the freshest CSS and markup methods the web design community has devised over the past two years, blending them into something shiny, smart, useful, and new.

Zebra Tables: While misused tables are becoming increasingly rare, the table retains a legitimate role in data formatting. A little CSS and JavaScript magic can make tables better at what they do best: displaying tabular data.

This one is for all designers who have ever wanted to differentiate table rows by color without hacking up their markup. Until all browsers correctly support all of CSS3, Zebra Tables are the answer.

Google and You

Couple of articles on how to improve your rankings on Google (in turn The WWW):

Help the Googlebot understand your web site
Case Study: Using a Weblog to Achieve #1 Rankings in Google

What is Scoble?

Over at .Net Weblogs, Cameron Reilly is asking,

I recently finished reading "The Tipping Point" and I came away from it wondering if Scoble is a connector? The ability of a popular blogger to create a memetic epidemic seems plausible. Especially if they are connected to other connectors. Are bloggers influential just because they are widely read? If Scoble says "read this book", will you read it? Well, I read "The Tipping Point" after I read about it on someone's blog and I've ordered quite a few other books from Amazon after reading about them in various blogs lately. I don't think this in itself is enough to cause a global epidemic. But the impact of this "word of mouth" promotion of new technologies is something I can imagine.

Well, For me, Scoble is definitely a Sneezer (read Unleashing the Ideavirus to find more about it). To all unintiated ones, A sneezer is a person who is believed when he tells large number of people about some new thing. So when, people like me and Cameron follow his blog(RSS) and finds a good review of software like Lookout, they try with full trust that this guy will not fool us. Scoble is a Powerful Sneezer.

Note: You can read an excerpt of Unleashing the Ideavirus book here which discusses exactly this topic of Sneezers.

Who is Mr. Enigma?

PCMag has the answer.

How to Give Feedback

Seth Godin provides rules of How to Give Feedback.

Give great feedback! Most people don't. Here are four rules for making your input count.

Does Microsoft .Net measure up?

Infoworld Reports:

Microsoft's bet-the-company initiative turns 4 this year. Are developers happier? Has the Windows experience improved? We take stock of .Net's tools and technologies for a top-to-bottom evaluation

Microsoft Home Magazine

Never knew about this site. Very well designed and colorful. Enjoy !!

Use WTO to bolster outsourcing - Vinod Khosla

According to Vinod Khosla, India must use WTO rules to protect the unfettered growth of U.S. technology outsourcing from protectionist attacks in an election year. He says:

"It's important for India that IT services and outsourcing be part of the open trade, global trade paradigm..." "...The WTO is about free trade and it's important that some of these things that are important to us be part of those agreements.."

Read more here. Also, note how the same news story gets different header on Reuters India (Use WTO to bolster outsourcing, says tech guru Vinod Khosla) and Reuters US (Use WTO to Bolster Outsourcing, Says Pro-Bush Tech Guru) websites.

Google Ads

Hopefully, You guys have noticed it, We have been running Google Ads on our website for slightly over a month now. The run has been great with Google Ads bringing quite some revenue (a year's website hosting costs covered already). Google pays by Click Through Ratio of the ads. What this means is that it won't pay for the number of impressions but instead will pay for the clicks on these ads. So for e.g. you had 50 impressions and only 5 people clicked the ads, you will get money for only 5 clicks. Now, we've not quite understood how Google calculates Click-Through amount to be given. It varies all the time it seems.

A very cool feature of Google Ads are the content specific ads. So for same javascript code that Google supplies you when you register for Google Adsense program, you get different ads on different pages. Well, this is expected of Google.

One more thing we can make out is that if the content is stagnant for some time, the revenues start dropping off. This is because the readership falls when we don't write anything new. So we now have one more motive to keep blogging.

Feels Great !!

Thanks to the wonderful guys at AWP, couple of days back I received the "Developing Microsoft Office Solutions : Answers for Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, and Office 97" book by Ken Bluttman. This is another book that I reviewed for AWP and it feels great seeing your name in the book. Needless to say, this book upholds the great technical content we all are familiar with coming out of AWP.

The book is very detailed and has very good coverage of Microsoft Office Object Models, Smart Tags and Infopath. The various case studies like, Generating "on-the-fly" Excel charts from imported XML data, Using InfoPath to overcome key XML processing limitations etc makes it even more worthier of a purchase.

I have written a more detailed review (slightly biased..:)) of this book under the Book Reviews section.

E-mail Escalation: Dispute Exacerbating Elements of Electronic Communication

HBS Working Knowledge points to an interesting paper on how E-Mails impact the process of conflict management and how the best way to resolve a dispute is to pick up the phone or just walkover and resolve the dispute face-to-face.

Why is it that e-mail emboldens people to new heights of rudeness, combativeness, and off-the-cuff stupidity? Why do small conflicts escalate into huge problems when e-mail is involved? Those questions are asked and answered in this paper by conflict expert Ray Friedman, a professor at Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. Friedman says that when we meet face-to-face, disputes are often safely negotiated thanks to our ability to interpret voice intonations, physical mannerisms, and facial expressions. That context is missing as we sit isolated in front of our computer launching pointed digital missives, which no amount of symbols can blunt. The answer? Handle your disputes by walking down the hallway and talking them out.

...India emerged as a great economic power...

Good to know, India is now getting recognised as Great Economic Power. Always On Ten top trends of 2003 places India at no. 3.

3. India emerged as a great economic power -- at last. Which country has the world's second biggest middle class? Not Germany. Not Japan. Not Russia. India.

Among its 1 billion consumers, anywhere from 150 million to 300 million are certifiably middle class and can afford a simple car or motorbike, electric appliances, perhaps a home. Of course, there is huge and desperate poverty, but India is rapidly growing and climbing out of slough.

For years after it gained independence from Britain in 1947, India was a massive pain to the United States, leaning to the left in politics and economics, throwing up trade barriers, severely limiting U.S. investment, and generally acting superior. Much of that has started to change, and India, while still socialist, is moving closer to the middle of the road. It also has been building a famously first-class education system, turning out tens of thousands of technological experts who work in the home country and throughout the world.

Now Indian workers are taking more and more jobs from America, and there could be some confrontations ahead, with U.S. labor demanding some form of protection.

Happy New Year

A Very Happy and Prosperous New Year to all of you !!