Akshay Surve

social|median harnesses social filtering to help you keep up-to-date with news that matters to you.

From their website:

socialmedian is a social news service that connects people with personalized news and information. socialmedian enables you to easily keep up-to-date on the news that matters to you and to people who share your interests.

Currently, they are in ALPHA (heard of web applications in BETA before? eg: Gmail. Alpha is a milestone just before BETA ;)

What I like about them the most is their approach. Jason the founder and his team at TrueSparrow are not churning up code all the time (like you would like to believe of a product in ALPHA) but constantly looking for feedback from their ALPHA users. At the time of writing this post they already had 2468 alpha users signed up and most of them active.

Now, it is this approach of theirs which I highly appreciate and when Jason announced the social|median design contest I had to pitch in.

I throughly enjoyed the whole experience of participating in the design contest while the product is in its ALPHA and probably help shape its vision/roadmap. My participation in the contest is a story in itself and it will probably unfold sometime soon on this blog (may be partially).

Interested in seeing my entry for the contest? For you all I have a special annotated version of the files I sent to Jason unlike the ones uploaded in the contest.

(I would recommend you to see the first and the third at its original size by clicking on the preview images below. The notes would also help you figure out what’s the application about.)

User’s signed in homepage:

User’s signed in homepage after clicking on expand profile:

Web 2.0 network on social|median:

You can go through all the entries here. To vote for me you can follow this link. I would highly appreciate if you take time out and make an informed decision by going through all the entries. Since, all the designs are also effectively ALPHA ;) do leave your comments here or on the individual design pages for the designs.

Thanks for taking time out and participating in the voting process. Looking forward for your feedback.

Update
Jason has been grateful and has extended some ALPHA invites to social|median for you! Grab them soon before they are gone. Leave me a message along with your email and I shall send you the code for the ALPHA invite.

Results are out:
Results are out and you can read more about it here. I didn’t win but I hope I did add value to the whole process. In all I am extremely happy with the contest and my entry for the feedback I received from fellow contestants, unknown friends (from what I noticed there were atleast 3 comments which went missing from that post after I read them. so if you see your feedback missing do push it to me on my email as I really value it) and well wishers. Thanks once again for your support.

Do use Wordpress? Heard of K2? If not, then you really have to give it a good look.

From the K2 website:

K2 is an advanced template for the blogging engine WordPress developed by Michael Heilemann, Chris J Davis, Zeo, Steve Lam and Ben Sherratt.

It won’t make you coffee, sing songs of sweet regret or sit at your bedside when you’re ill, but it might make life just a tad bit easier for you.

Think of it this way: Where WordPress is everything that goes on behind the scenes, K2 is everything that reaches the readers of your blog.

WordPress itself takes care of authenticating users, fetching and sending data to and from the database and provides you with the backend administration interface.

K2 on the other hand is the frontend of WordPress. It’s main concern is displaying the data fetches through WordPress in the right way at the right time. Furthermore, where more basic themes like Kubrick have little situational awareness, K2 cares about you and is always trying to make sure you are presented with exactly the tools and data you need.

K2 supports syles. Much like the main theme can be styled by using different CSS files.

K2 also has a stellar Sidebar Module(SBM) which is much like Wordpress Widgets on steroids. Though, Wordpress Widgets do have a more cleaner approach as they hook onto the Wordpress Plugin API. On the other hand, SBM has a better UI to configure and more granular control for the users. Couple it up with solid API for the programmer. You can even disable SBM from the K2 admin panel to support Wordpress Widgets.

So, here is my first SBM for K2.

Recent Category Posts - K2 Sidebar Module

Someone also had requested this as a sidebar module at the K2 forums.

I have been playing around with Erlang for some weekends now and I find it to be really interesting. I like the functional programming paradigm too. The syntax reminds me a little of Prolog (from my engineering days).

Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World is the Pickaxe book for Erlang written by Joe Amstrong. Joe designed and implemented the first version of Erlang in 1986.

What’s all this fuss about Erlang?. This and recent articles on reddit got me interested in Erlang.

Yariv Sadan has also developed a web framework on Erlang named ErlyWeb. ErlyWeb is in its 0.7 version and has some Rails kinda feel to it but doesn’t look as clean as Rails because its on Erlang. Not many people get it but its actually because of Ruby that Rails does most of its magic its said to do. ErlyWeb is a commendable effort and I really want to give it a fair shot before I form a opinion about it.

I have a very interesting project in mind where Erlang fits the bill perfectly. More about it sometime later ;)

I am here at the CodeCampMumbai and we are hitting our keyboards real hard at this time in the night(2:00am). It’s 8 of us here still remaining and the enthusiasm is contagious. Me and Pavan are sitting in the balcony with our laptops while Deepak, Kurund, Ankur, Fenil, Latesh and Varun are sitting inside. It’s chilly out here and you have the balmy breeze making us feel comfortable all the time. We can hear birds chirping even at this time in the night.

It feels sublime and I feel I should enjoy the moment and the code and not blog about it now ;)

‘Jaagte raho’ is hindi for ‘Keep Awake’

[FlashBack-Cut-1] Little less than a month back Ankur and me had a couple of mail exchanges over how we should try and bring the hacker/developer community together.

[FlashBack-Cut-2] During the closing session of BarCampMumbai2 there were some participants who were not satisfied with the technical depth of the sessions at the BarCamp. I took this opportunity and quickly created a simple CodeCampMumbai page on the barcamp wiki and announced the event on the stage.

[Present-Cut-3] Thus, emerged CodeCampMumbai and a format which is heavily influenced by some popular philosophies.

Here is what we have taken from other popular manifestos/cultures:

CodeCamps:

• By and For the Developer Community
• No Fluff – only Code

Read more: CodeCamp Manifesto

Hackathons:

• Race against time (24 hours)
• Do something cool/complex/brainy

Read more here, here and here.

BarCamps:

• Share and learn in a open environment
• No Spectators. Only Participants.

Read more here.

In short:
CodeCampMumbai caters to the community of CodeCampers, bound by the culture of Hackathons and is based upon open participative and collaborative nature of BarCamps.

Date:: 17th - 18th Nov 2007
Register here:: http://barcamp.org/CodeCampMumbai
Venue:: IIT-B Mumbai
Mailing list:: http://groups.google.com/group/codecampmumbai

If you love to code and code for the love of it you ought to be present. See you there ;)

Did I tell you that you can vote for anonimity.net at railsrumble.com?

Yes, you can!

If you feel like voting for anonimity.net or other apps follow this quick procedure:

• http://vote.railsrumble.com/signup
• activate your account
• visit: http://vote.railsrumble.com/teams/70/visit and vote
• browse to see other apps. i must say there are some awesome apps out there

Happy Voting!

I am taking part in the railsrumble live for the next 48 hours. I would be anonymous most of the time for the next 48 hours. To know why and follow to me live track anonymous serendipity » anonimity.net blog.

Ubuntu which means ‘Humanity to others’ is back with its latest version Ubuntu 7.04 whose release code name is ‘Fiesty Fawn’. It was released on my birthday April 19th. Isn’t it a cool birthday gift >? LoL I have kept my desktop for an upgrade to this new version and I am really excited about it.

I have been using Emacs for most of my ruby and rails programming. I tend to like it and now I can say that I am an Emacs addict. A week back I stumbled upon this article Pretty Emacs while search for some popular themes for Emacs. I tried installing Emacs from the repositories but the installation was never successful. Later I also followed posts GNU Emacs with XFT goodness and Emacs font joy.

Finally, I have it working(most probably) and here is my screenshot:

Looks Yummy! isn’t it?

U Thought I was busy with something all this while?

- Yup !

Here is what it was all about > A Report on The State of Search Engine Marketing in India

About the report from Pinstorm - News channel

This report is a first-of-its-kind in the field of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) business. You can expect to find some very interesting data, comparisons & revelations here.

• Find out where the SEM industry in India stands today.
• What sectors are hot.
• How much the key players in every sector are spending- Naukri vs Monster, HP vs Dell, Shaadi vs Jeevansathi. You name it, we have it.
• Are other players catching up with the giant eBay in the retail market?

Some coOL, funny and interesting tit-bits straight from the report:

Rs. 230 crores of ad spend on this media is aimed at Indians alone. Of this, about a third, over Rs. 70 crores is spent by Indian companies. For an industry that barely got off the ground a couple of years ago, it’s a huge leap.

A note of thanks. An enterprise of this scale wouldn’t have been possible without the help of some very smart people. A big hand to Dr. V. Vinay, Pinstorm’s technology guru (with flowing locks to match) who wrote much of the code and algorithms to make these calculations possible. A doff of the hat to Akshay Surve, Ansoo Gupta, Hanisha Vaswani, Harish TM, Indrojit Chaudhuri, Milan Zaveri, Netra Parikh, Nikhil Sheth, Ratan KK and Reshma Nayak - some of the other Pinstormers who temporarily gave up sleep and sanity to make this report happen. And to the redoubtable Subho Ray of the IAMAI, Doc, here’s to making history together!

Delhi is more expensive than Bangalore, which is more expensive than Mumbai. But only in search marketing terms.

So, here we are, many nights, many cups of Barista coffee, Punjab Sweet House samosas and Snack Shack sali botis, many lines of code and charts on Excel later.

You can download the report for free ;-) from here.