Pensieve 2.0

So Kapil Sabil finally succeeded in nudging out Kolavari Di from Twitter trending topics ? Once more, one of the three musketeers of the Congress,the telecommunication minister, Kapil Sibal has raised shit-storm by asking Internet companies like Facebook,Google and others to impose censorship on Social Media to “take care of  sensibilities of our people”. It is not just Kolavari Di, other important news item such as Anna Hazare and his team gearing up for fresh protests against the government on the Lokpal Bill, the FDI issue and other such issues of real significance  have been put on back-burner as Sibal started the shit-storm by expressing desire to baby-sit more than 100 million Indian Internet users ! 


True, some content found on web are more than derogatory,they are vile and perverse but these people exist in physical world,amongst up.  It is ironic that in the age of Social Web, on which online anonymity is on a rapid decline,replaced by physical world identity and existing laws viewed more than capable of dealing with these sociopaths, a democratic government should even be thinking of regulating content on web. It is not as if the governments are as helpless or even honest. One just needs to go through Google Transparency Report to get a glimpse of what exactly Kapil Sibal's guidelines for social media really means. 

The month of October 2011 has seen demise of two towering figures from the world of computers, tributes for one of them have been pouring down on the web almost infectiously while a very few people are aware of the death of the other person whose contributions has been incalculable . Of  course, the first one is Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Inc and Pixar Animation Studios while the other is Dennis Ritchie who built Unix and C programming language. Together they represent the two ends of a spectrum- the digital and the physical world.

For sometime now social media as well as traditional media sites have been buzzing with information on Facebook undergoing profound change. Lately, creating a media hype before release of a product (Google+) or a major Facebook upgrade (video chatting feature)  has become an indispensible strategy but in this case I would wager that the change may really be profound. Facebook hasn't just changed the layout of the profile page, it has reinvented it too, incorporating various social web behaviour like listening to music or reading a book. The Gesture concept when properly applied may take us a whole level forward towards the Semantic Web. However,the idea of Facebook incorporating so much users data in their profiles is alarming , the privacy issue on Facebook gets more complicated and then there is the chance of Zuckerberg locking the users in.

Born 28th September 1907

Despite a recent surge in popularity triggered partly  by Bollywood movies,Shaheed Bhagat Singh continues to be ignored, misunderstood, misrepresented by the vast majority. The very first thing that comes to our mind when we hear the name is that of a young revolutionary who fearlessly and happily faced the gallows for the sake of the nation. But then, he was accompanied by his friends,fellow-revolutionaries, Sukhdev and Rajguru,who were executed along with him for the same offence. In fact, the list of his co-martyrs would include Chandrasekhar Azad, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan and many more, why does Bhagat Singh's name stand out from the rest ?