Welcome to An Unquiet Mind, a fountainhead of explorations at the intersection of reason and emotion.

Mahendra Palsule

December 8, 2009

Personal, blogging

19 comments

This is a good time to look at the highlights of 2009, and share some thoughts about the future.

Highlights Of 2009

This has been a busy year. 75 posts on An Unquiet Mind in 2009 with about 1,500 comments! 46 posts at MakeUseOf.com and 30 on my newly started tech blog, Skeptic Geek, both of which involve several hours of work. Have I become a writing machine? I hope not.

The biggest news was of course, setting up two blogs on my own domain here.Movies_thumb.jpg

The most popular series of posts here was undoubtedly the A-Z of Films Meme, now enshrined on its own page at Favorite Films A to Z. Thanks to all of you, for your participation, critique, suggestions, and involvement, that made it so memorable!

Unlike Krish Ashok and Asuph, I am not a good writer of humor. I did take a stab with my own attempts at satire, with Virtues of Politicians, Rulebook for Indian TV News Producers, The Straight Dope FAQ on Indian Elections 2009, and How To Become A Spiritual Guru.

There were two serious ethical inquiries that garnered a lot of feedback and commentary. The look at Religion vs. Gender Equality and Feminism remains one of the most popular posts. In Mentally Challenged, Raped, Pregnant. Abort?, we confronted difficult moral and legal issues surrounding the trial about an unfortunate victim.

Outside the blog, some of you have approached me via email occasionally for technical assistance with blogging, while I have had the fortune of meeting some of you in real life. Blogging has now permeated my real life. Some of you have placed trust in me, and I hope that I have respected your privacy despite solicitations for contact or other information.

The Social Networking Challenge

Blogging may be getting increasingly popular, but among my network of Indian Bloggers, it faces challenges from micro-blogging and social networking. From my blogroll, outstanding bloggers like Gauri (42), Rambodoc (A Twist of Word and Mind), Paul (Café Philos), Shefaly (La Vie Quotidienne), and Ruhi (Time and Again) have become sporadic. Some are active on Twitter, while others don’t use it at all. Some spend a lot of time inside Facebook, while others have recently started using it. Nita (A Wide Angle View of India) who is not into social-networking, is the most regular on her blog. Others, like Amreekan Desi, Priyank, Gauri, Atul, Prerna, Harini, and Poonam are fairly regular at blogging as well as online social networking in one form or another. Very few, like Asuph, seem to be able to strike A Fine Balance between blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

At present, I am pulled in multiple directions online. Apart from my two personal blogs here and my writing for MakeUseOf, I am active on two Twitter accounts (professionally as @ScepticGeek, personally as @Palsule). I also try to keep up with friends on Facebook, and now spend very little time on FriendFeed, once my beloved network.

I read all blog posts from all of you blogger friends, but I don’t spend time commenting on each of them as much as I’d like to do so. One of my goals for 2010 is to seek that elusive balance between my online activities, though I suspect it will always remain a struggle.

Blogroll Update

The concept of the blogroll held different meanings for different people, and now it has largely become meaningless. There is no point in me having you on my blogroll if you don’t read my blog or engage with me online and the same applies the other way around. There is no point in me sending visitors to your blog if you don’t blog regularly. I actually wonder if there are any such people who come to your blogs via mine. So, I am thinking of doing away with it altogether. Let me know your thoughts.

Blogging Networks

In my initial blogging days, I was an active blogger with Indian Mutiny, which has now gone into print media. Harsha, who introduced and pulled me to that network, no longer blogs himself. I had put a lot of effort and time into serious blogging for Indian Mutiny, particularly with my posts surrounding the Indo-US Nuclear Deal. Once bitten, twice shy, I have stayed away from networks like DesiPundit, DesiCritics, and BlogBharti.

However, current trends indicate that blog networks will play an important role in acting as a platform to take your blog to a wider audience. Some of you are active on these networks. I confess I am largely uneducated about these Indian blog networks and will appreciate your thoughts in this regard.

Subject Matters That Don’t Matter

Looking ahead to 2010, I see cynicism as one of the challenges for this blog. In my first two years, I wrote substantially on current affairs and politics. I have now realized that blogging about Indian politics doesn’t make an iota of difference to anyone in real life. Why take the time to write about it at all? Hence, at least at present, I don’t see myself writing much about current affairs and politics on this blog, except with satire.

I will continue to engage myself and my readers in fundamental issues within the spheres of society, ethics, democracy, psychology, and law. Writing is a means towards clarity of mind, and these posts and your comments help me refine my understanding of such issues.

A Time For Gratitude

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude for taking the time to read my blog posts, comment on them, disagree with my perspective, teach me new ways of thinking, and sharing your thoughts.

This blog is where an unquiet mind has shared itself, and you, my friends, have often made it quiet again. Thank you.

August 25, 2009

Personal, blogging

20 comments

this is the new home for An unquiet mind.

I have taken the plunge and decided to host my own blogs. My web presence will henceforth be at this new domain, where I am planning to maintain two separate blogs.

I was looking to consolidate my geek blog with my personal blog. I spent a lot of time thinking about and searching for a new domain name that would:

  • Reflect my personality
  • Be appropriate for both An Unquiet Mind’s character as well as a tech blog
  • Be available as a .com domain. This was the hardest part.

So finally, I am the proud new owner of www.skepticgeek.com.

The homepage is not yet hosted, since I am still figuring out how to optimally manage two blogs with Wordpress. The current plan is:

  1. http://skeptic.skepticgeek.com will be An Unquiet Mind
  2. http://geek.skepticgeek.com will be my geek blog
  3. www.skepticgeek.com may be either a static page or the home page of my geek blog.

I wanted to enable readers of both types to follow both blogs independently, including subscribing to a separate, specific RSS feed.

The URL redirection from Wordpress.com will be active for 1 year from today, after which I may discontinue it.

I request those of you who have me on their blogroll to update your links to point to http://skeptic.skepticgeek.com instead of http://mahendrap.wordpress.com.

Do let me know if you find any problems whatsoever with commenting, linking, navigating, etc.

How do you like my new domain name? All feedback and suggestions are most welcome, as always!

August 15, 2009

Personal, blogging

12 comments

Take a look at these numbers:

  • This is my 267th post.
  • There are 2962 authentic comments on this blog.
  • My posts have 203 tags in 39 categories.
  • Total views crossed 100K quite a while back.
    These numbers usually don’t mean much to me. But I always use a trick while climbing a mountain. When I am exhausted and feel like I can’t go up any further, I turn and look the other way around. Seeing how much ground we’ve covered and how much height we’ve attained, is a re-energizing technique that works.
    However, the need to look at these numbers now did not arise because I’m exhausted writing on this blog. Since I started An Unquiet Mind over two years back, I have written exclusively here. And now I’ve come to a fork in my path.300px-Janus-Vatican
    Discounting my professional writing at MakeUseOf.com, I have decided to start a separate personal blog exclusively focused on technology, specifically social networking and social media websites and technologies.
    Since I began a writing career, I realized that being an early adopter of new technologies, I needed to participate in online communities of like-minded technology enthusiasts and industry influencers.
    While Twitter has been one vehicle to achieve this, FriendFeed has been more empowering. To retain the intellectual flavor of An Unquiet Mind undiluted, I decided to post technology related content separately. Also, it did not make sense to direct the 90K+ MakeUseOf subscribers interested in cool websites, software, and internet tips to An Unquiet Mind!
    Since I am known as the Social Geek in these tech circles, my technology blog is of A Social Geek. I chose Posterous rather than Wordpress as a platform since it’s flexibility suits my needs better. Feel free to follow/subscribe to A Social Geek if you’re so inclined. Posts from there are also displayed in the sidebar here. Thus, my blogs reflects my two personae on Twitter – @SocialGeek maps to A Social Geek, @Palsule maps here.
    At this milestone I also decided to experiment with a different theme, primarily for one reason: it gave me the push to do the necessary housekeeping of this blog that has been on the backburner for a while. I have reorganized my categories, which are now displayed at the top. Hovering your mouse over them reveals sub-categories too.
    I think this will help An Unquiet Mind remain unquiet about things that matter. I think unquiet minds rule over matter, but never mind.

Image: Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings.

August 11, 2009

Personal, blogging

10 comments

Friends, thank you for visiting my blog and for your comments.

I met with an unfortunate accident end of last week, and hence will be out of action for a couple of weeks. Nothing serious, but I need to rest and recover. Thanks for visiting. I will be back soon.

After months of sitting on my computer on a backless settee, I began to realize that my back has a spinal cord, and that it's made up of individual vertebrae.

But that's not what this is about. While my new chair does indeed improve my posture, this is a new posturing using Posterous.com.

I am writing this email using Gmail, sending it to post@posterous.com and attaching the photo of my new chair. After I hit the send button, I sit back in my chair.

I expect Posterous will:

  • Post this email and the photo to my Posterous blog http://socialgeek.posterous.com
  • Post my photo to my Flickr photo stream
  • Post my photo to my Picasa web albums
  • Post this update to my Facebook account (I want to see how it does that, whether it just links, or uploads the photo, etc.)
  • Post this email and photo to my Wordpress.com blog – An Unquiet Mind
  • Post this update to my Friendfeed, which will then tweet an update on Twitter as @SocialGeek
  • Post this update as a tweet on Twitter as @Palsule

Just 1 Email. Now, let's see how it works!

Posted via email from SocialGeek

nextbigthing

A few weeks back, HyperActiveX asked me something on Twitter.

“What is your data flow? Have you mapped it yet?” or something to that effect. This had been on my mind for quite a few months and I always pushed it to the back burner. Quadrant I vs. Quadrant II. The usual story.

But his tweet pushed me over the edge. It led to two MakeUseOf.com posts (How to Define and Manage Your Social Networks), which weren’t popular, but were noticed by a few select people. So here’s a big thank you to HyperActiveX for goading me, and I now have my online social life mapped out on a page.

twitterfeed

Comments are closed for this post, since I want to consolidate/track comments (if any) on that page itself.

(Cartoons courtesy: Geek and Poke)

Many folks asked me for an update on Pune’s Blog Camp, after the previous photo-post. How was the experience? Was it worth it? Who was there?

Not being diplomatic, I can say that the experience was an interesting one for me, with positives and negatives. I had never been to any blog camp, bar camp, or Tweetup before, so I did not have any expectations, and that probably helped.logo-main-krity

There was an interesting discussion going on even before the blog camp in the comments to Navin Kabra’s PuneTech Why You Should Attend Pune Blog Camp post. At the other end of the spectrum, post-event, the insights from the camp led to Dhananjay Nene’s Why I was disappointed with Pune Blog Camp 2.

Some others have shared their experiences too. Sandeep has a largely positive thank you note at his blog The Mousetrap. Anant has a detailed write up on his blog, Rahul has an update on the Devil’s Workshop, Aniket has shared his awesome feeling about the camp at Melody in Dissonance, while Deep Ganatra raises an important concern about unintentional session-hijacking. Almost all of them have written about the various sessions that took place, so I will not repeat them. Nor will I remember the names of all the presenters! So I will just share a few of my thoughts. You can also read Pune Mirror and TOI’s coverage.

A word of thanks to the organizers is a must. Tarun Chandel led the tone of the camp beautifully, making people get comfortable with his opening presentation and stepping in to facilitate whenever he could. I think the facilitation needed more support – it seemed he was the only one intent on facilitating.

Meeting In Person

BlogCampPune 006There were a few specific people I wanted to meet and that was one of my motivations for going to the camp. There were a few surprises too. I knew about sites like Wogma and Track.in, and it was good to meet online entrepreneurs Meetu Kabra and Arun Prabhudesai in person. I met fellow Twitter contacts like Amit Paranjape, an entrepreneur who shares myriad interests like me, who was busy with his Smartphone throughout the camp as I’d expected! Dhananjay Nene, a software architect, was another Twitter contact and meeting him personally was a surprise as he wasn’t as old as he looked in his avatar!

Friends in need are friends on Friendfeed. I recognized Sandeep Gautam instantly, even if we had only recently started following each other on Friendfeed. Sandeep writes on psychology and neuroscience while being into software development and poetry, at The Mousetrap. Sneha Gore has done a survey-based research into motivations of young bloggers which I found interesting, and meeting Pune Mirror’s Vishal was also good.

Negatives

  • Despite what the self-analysis kit says, the camp was not centered around a theme or purpose. Blogging is a wide umbrella term for any camp to succeed without having a theme – SEO, journalism, the ubiquitous ‘musings’ – some theme is needed for greater audience-presenter harmony.
  • Despite all the marketing-SEO focused presentations, the Golden Rule of SEO was not emphasized at all, or I missed it altogether. Content is king. Period.BlogCampPune 005
  • No talk of the future of blogging. Yongfook, author of the popular open-source self-hosted Lifestreaming application SweetCron has proclaimed The Blog is Dead. Wired magazine advised not to start a new blog, and to pull the plug if you already had one. ReadWriteWeb asked if the future of blogging is lifetreaming. I thought these topics will come up in a ‘blog camp’, but either they didn’t or I missed them.
  • Sometimes, I felt disenchanted with the perspective of an SEO/Marketing oriented pro-blogger that looks at readers as pure numbers and statistics on a graph. Rather than a birds-eye view of traffic flowing on a freeway, I prefer seeking the company of people actually driving those cars – those who take the time to comment and share their ideas and opinions on my posts. But that’s just me.
  • Despite the monetization related talks, there was no talk about writing. I take the blame for this. As a professional writer who is making money out of writing on a blog, and not looking at promotion, marketing, or SEO, I could have talked about how you can earn money as a blog writer without being keen on SEO.

Positives

  • Meeting lots and lots of bloggers! And especially meeting the few I wrote about above.
  • The passion and entrepreneurship of youth that I witnessed was inspiring. Young people in their 20s have .com domains and are discussing SEO. Wow. I actually felt out of place.
  • Navin and Vishal’s presentation on what newspapers can learn from blogs and vice versa.
  • Sandeep’s presentation on niche science blogging.
  • Regional focus – Shantanu Oak talked about Devanagri spell-checking.
  • Seeing lots and lots of newbie or wannabe bloggers.

Lessons

  • BlogCampPune 016Bloggers should be on Twitter if they want to expand visibility of their blog.
  • Some folks try to make money out of blogging. The clever folks make money from bloggers.
  • The ‘blogger elite’ usually doesn’t comment on each other’s blogs. They use Twitter to keep in touch with each other.
  • I personally feel there should be disclaimers within the presentations on monetization, when a lot of impressionable young peo
    ple are in the audience. I could sense that many such people got the feeling that one can easily make money out of blogging, if one is geeky enough and knows a few ‘secrets’.
  • In a blog camp, the law of two feet is very important. I did it successfully – rather than being felt obliged to listen to sessions that I was not interested in, I preferred spending one-to-one time with people, which is what worked best for me.
  • If I go to a blog camp again, I will present. In retrospect, I could have shared:

A few days back, Asuph asked how one can reduce the page rank of one’s blog and I replied. I would have loved to see the reactions if this exchange had happened at the blog camp!

Thus, all in all, an interesting experience. Will I go to another camp? If it is not centered around a specific theme, definitely not. Else, depends on the theme!

Here are some photographs I managed to click at Blog Camp Pune 2 when I could disengage myself from the talks. Snaps are hosted on Flickr, please click to get higher resolutions. My thanks to all the ‘un’-organizers of the event for making this such a flawlessly smooth event!

BlogCampPune 002 BlogCampPune 003

BlogCampPune 004 BlogCampPune 005

BlogCampPune 006 BlogCampPune 007

BlogCampPune 011 BlogCampPune 013

BlogCampPune 015 BlogCampPune 016

June 9, 2009

Personal, blogging

6 comments

In the past few months, there have been many updates to the blog that I would like to summarize here.

Blog Updates

An Unquiet Mind, which got a tagline, has an updated About Myself page (again). The recent films series is now indexed in the Favorite Films A to Z page, which will also let you download or access the list online once the list is finished.

The sidebar includes a link to my Author Profile at MakeUseOf.com, from where you can subscribe to my MUO articles RSS feed. My FriendFeed updates are shown in the sidebar. This will show you my recent tweets and updates even if you are not using any of those services. Clicking on the FriendFeed widget will take you to my FriendFeed profile, from where you can connect with me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other web services you choose (even if you don’t use FriendFeed).

Blogroll Updates

  • 42: Litterateuse Gauri, who has a unique way with words
  • Dev’s World: A serious student and professional of film-making, who generously and meticulously shares his knowledge and wisdom
  • Gaizabonts: The multi-dimensional and prolific Atul Sabnis
  • Karma Calling: DotMom’s insightful and enjoyable experiences with family life and parenting
  • Life Rules!: Gauri Gharpure, who writes beautiful poetry, and whose blog I’ve yet to explore further
  • POV: Harini’s perspective on current affairs which usually resonates very well with me
  • Time and Again: Ruhi, who shares my passion for good cinema
  • Visceral Observations: Poonam, who should have been on my blogroll a long time back

Needless to say, these one line descriptions of blogs are not meant to encapsulate them – they are just the essence of what I’ve discovered so far.

Lastly, I wanted to mention that Nita had graciously wanted to bestow the Brilliant Weblog Award on An Unquiet Mind, at a time when I was on a hiatus for personal reasons. By being inactive at the time, I have relinquished the award, but I do want to say that your comments, emails, and remembrance always mean a lot to me.

Please do let me know if you have any suggestions, criticism, or any other feedback regarding the blog updates!

A lot of things have been happening at An Unquiet Mind. A journalist quoted me in the Hyderabad edition of The Hindu. AUM is now on Twitter here and you can see my tweets in the sidebar.

muologoI have been chosen to contribute to MakeUseOf.com on a trial basis. I have loved MUO since a long time, and I am eagerly looking forward to writing about “Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips”.

MakeUseOf.com has 54K+ subscribers, and is part of PC Magazine’s “Top 50 Blogs”.

This is my first foray into professional writing since 1996. Wish me luck! :-)

PS: Do you like the new About Myself?