If you haven’t yet checked out my Twitter or Facebook stream, you have missed the noise (alright, whimper) about In Good Books.
In Good Books aims to be a site where you (yes, you precisely) can talk about a book you have loved or hated.

And if you haven’t read any book in the recent past, no problem. We’ve got you covered too. Just head over to www.InGoodBooks.com to check out the recommendations!

More about InGoodBooks here: http://www.ingoodbooks.com/about/

As always, feedback solicited. And welcome.

PS: Don’t go by the title of this post. We don’t review only Booker winners. We are also willing to allow you to talk about Five Point Someone. Yeah, we are that open about it.

Satisfly.com taps into the various social networks such as facebook, myspace and twitter to figure out the behavior of a person who has recently travelled by air.

By profiling such information and sharing it with the airlines, it aims to provide you, the passenger, with the ability to decide on the kind of person you would prefer as your seat mate. Satisfly stems from the problem that not everyone has good seat mates. And in long journeys, it becomes all the more important that the person sitting next to you does not get on your nerves. Step in Satisfly. They figure out a person’s on-flight behavior and needs and then categorize the person (along with the help of the airline, I suspect). Based on this profiling and categorization, they are then able to suggest a co-passenger to you with whom you might have a higher degree of comfort.

As of now Hawaiian airlines has tied up with Satisfly to improve their customer service and to ensure that no passenger is grumpy at the end of a long flight.

What next? Choose your preferred air hostesses/stewards perhaps? The world sure is evolving.
Link obtained via Economist.com

I have been on a mini-sabbatical of sorts from blogging. Amongst various reasons, the primary one is that of switching jobs. My new job is in an area which I am not too familiar with (the mobile space) and hence a lot of learning is required to be done.

Having said that, I believe that blogging worldwide is now moving towards micro-blogging, slowly but surely. People want to update their thoughts instantly and in as few sentences as possible. So, if you don’t have a blog yet, don’t fret,  you could just go straight ahead and become a micro-blogger.

If you do have a blog, then it makes all the more sense to supplement your online presence with something that is quicker and has a larger impact. A micro-blog is a logical next step.

“How do I start?”, you ask. Simple, I say. Just head over to the all new Wikyl.com (www.wikyl.com) and get your own microblog for free. Mine is accessible at http://wikyl.com/dhimant

And don’t forget to leave your feedback and thoughts on the new UI of Wikyl Somethings that still don’t work properly include the Groups application. However, the Twitter integration works just fine, so even if you have a Twitter account, just link it up to your Wikyl account and update only on one place, but get twice the impact!

Have a great day, ladies and gentlemen. It’s been drizzling in Bangalore the past few days, something that you could perhaps micro-blog about? (The last sentence was a bit of a stretch eh?)

Two of my friends, who are both brilliant in their work, have started a new website called Antya.com.

Antya has been started by my former colleagues Bharani (who is also a fellow ISB alumnus) and Sunny, an ex-Googler.

Antya provides a refreshing space in the saturated search engine market. While you can definitely search for all things you want, Antya offers you to discover new websites which are out there in some corner of the internet.

Their mission is simple: To make all brands & businesses discoverable to the end user.
Essentially, they are targeting to bring to the user all the niche websites that currently form the long-tail of the web.

Here’s wishing Bharani and Sunny all the very best with this new venture.

Stumbled upon an interesting website called BookCrossing. The website is interesting because of its underlying concept:

The “3 Rs” of BookCrossing…
1. Read a good book (you already know how to do that)
2. Register it here (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book
3. Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, “forget” it in a coffee shop, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records a journal entry for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it!

To clarify, the idea is that you register any of your books on the website, obtain an ID, put that ID in your book and go release that book into the wild world (leave it at the doctor’s, or on the bus, or just give it away to some stranger). The ID will contain instructions for the subsequent owner/reader of the book. If that person registers the ID at BookCrossing, you get a notification to let you know how far your book has wandered.

The site also claims that this is a fascinating exercise in karma and fate.

The statistics reveal that the site already has half a million members and close to 4 million books registered! That is quite a staggering number considering the fact that the site requires you to part with your books. Having said that, it would be interesting to know how many members of that site are Indians. We usually don’t have the luxury of the West of being able to give away our belongings for a little fun on the internet.

Now, if I was indeed a book lover, why on earth would I let go of my books? And if I was not a book lover, why would I register myself on this website?

Strange are the ways of man. Stranger are the ways of the internet.

I leave you with the following line from the website, which might in the end justify doing what the website asks you to do:
Books change people. People change the world.

A crash course on Web 2.0.

Video courtesy: Youtube (link sent-in via e-mail)