Something about Nothing

Not a proper demand, but just a wish for an additional feature in RSS aggregators - Bloglines or Google Reader, anyone.

Whenever any post is updated, the feed for that is sent out again, and the whole post appears in the aggregator. Now searching for the updated part is very difficult, unless the writer has explicitly used Update.

I want a feature in Bloglines/Google Reader that would highlight the updated part, or present the updated part in such a manner such that it is easily noticeable. And yes, there should be an additional utility, which allows me to ignore those updates that just changed the errata; I should be able to specify that this is the number of words that must have changed before fetching the feed again.

I know it’s a bad demand, but I am too lazy to search for updates and I also cannot ignore the item, as there may be a good, interesting, newsworthy update.

Does any RSS aggregator provide any such feature?

Technorati: Bloglines, Google Reader, RSS Aggregators

The Demand-and-Supply rule is not working. I keep on demanding, and no one seems to be listening. Anyways being a die-hard optimist, here is my next money minting idea.

Right now in India there is no dearth of people in the age-group 20-25 who are raking in moolah - lots and lots of money, with absolutely zilch responsibilities and who love to spend. Now every year they are faced with a huge dilemma. The Government takes away too much money in form of Income Tax; the best way to reduce Income Tax is to do investment. But being the pampered kids we usually are, these worldly matters escape us, unless there is some proper guidance.

What I suggest, is to build a website that would take my age, income, risk factor (whether I would like to take risks or play it safe), the type of returns I want (long term or short term), the life-policies that I hold, the amount I am willing to invest, my future plans (do I plan to buy a house soon or do I plan to go for more studies and such matters) and all necessary information as input and based on the returns of various Mutual Funds, Infrastructure Bonds, National Security Certificate, Fixed Deposits suggest to me the best or the most appropriate investment-plan.

Any takers?

Technorati: Business Idea, Investment, Income Tax, Online Investment

In a bid to become innovator of the century, here comes the next demand.

Cell-phones have made memorizing phone numbers obsolete. Five years back I could have rattled off 30-40 phone numbers without as much blinking an eye. These days I even store my own phone number on my cell-phone under the name ‘Me’, and believe me; I regularly have to use it. If I lose my phone book by accident (memory formatted or cell-phone theft) or design (buying a new cell-phone) the biggest concern is populating the phone book again. It is by far the most boring and most tedious job on earth!

There should be some site where I go & register and can store my entire phone book on that site. According to the volume I want to store I could be charged. If I wish I could even store my messages/profiles there. I buy a new cell-phone and punch in a unique code, and voila! all my data, phone book & messages & profiles are loaded.

This is sounding to me as a bad idea, but an idea that could make money. And please do not go into the technical details, I have no clue how this idea could materialize

Technorati: Business Idea, Cellphone, Phonebook

In continuation with my wants, here is another demand

Proper categorization. I am not talking about the web. In the web everything has proper categorization, I can specifically choose the category I want. I am talking about categorization on television.

Each program telecast on the television should be categorized under Movie, Sports, News, Music, Soaps, Comdey/Humour etc. And yes, there should be a specific category for Commercials too. I should be able to direct my television to keep the Sports category first, then Movies (with the subcategory English over subcategory Hindi), Music next and so on and the last category should be Commercials. As soon as the Commercials start in the cricket match I am seeing, that channel should jump to the last position in the viewing hierarchy and should come back to the first as soon as the match starts. There should be separate buttons on the remote for each category. Like when I click the ‘Movie’ button, I should be able to scan through all the movies that are going on currently. And apart from the channel scrolling, I should be able to directly scroll across categories. These categories should be standardized across all television sets and all telecasting channels.

(The idea to have Commercials as a tag and moving it to the end of hierarchy may not be plausible, since that is the major - or is it only? - source of revenue)

I think this is possible; is any television company doing this?

Software Developers & entrepreneurs of the world, please listen to the travail of a blogger.

Majority of the bloggers, somewhere in a corner of their hearts, hide a dream of becoming a writer. At least I do! Now I need a proper critic who will review all my articles with a cynic’s eye. I am not saying that the comments are useless; they really are the driving force behind any blog.

The comments I would get after I write anything would be something like ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I have no qualms on getting such comments, but what I would really love is an English professor going through the article I wrote and comments should be akin to ‘The structure of this statement was not good’, ‘could have used a bit more description for the brooding man’, ‘what is a gerund doing here!’ or ‘are you nuts? This adjective is not appropriate here’. I am not talking about the spell-check in Microsoft Word, or their favourite error message - ‘Consider revising’. I need more precise help, a software that would understand English, as a normal person or a critic or an English teacher would do and grade the article based on the quality of the English.

In short, I need a virtual English teacher, which would take English text as input and output the grade/score with comments.