Author: Pradeep

  • One of the reasons that I like reading Om Malik’s blog is because he puts into words what we feel in our guts, in terms of a trend that you see crystalizing but can’t yet put into words:

    This is just like how I felt when I experienced Google for the first time—even before it had made it to the market. After that first meeting with Google’s co-founders, established search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, and AltaVista suddenly felt antiquated.

    This shift matters more than you might think. Even the browser, that faithful window into the internet for the past three decades, is starting to feel like a relic. We’re moving from a document-centric web to something more fluid, where information flows naturally through conversation rather than being bound by pages or URLs.

    The atomization of information is unfolding rapidly. Artificial intelligence doesn’t just search; it synthesizes, contextualizes, and presents information in a user’s preferred format.

  • Utsav Mamoria has a great long read about how to live an intellectual life. He uses fantasy as a great storytelling tool to illustrate his point.

  • A challenge of blog questions

    Thejesh tagged me in a challenge of blog questions. I enjoyed reading his replies and I have never been tagged in such a challenge.

    Why did you start blogging in the first place?

    I started blogging because I was tired of crafting websites from HTML and I was not good with CSS. I loved the fact that I could choose a background and start writing. The focus moved from making to writing.

    There were times that I missed the making and tried to go back to it. There were times when the ghost of designing got into me and I would spend hours crafting my website. But, I felt that writing is where I should focus my energies on writing.

    What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

    The blog is presently hosted on WordPress. I think the reason is the same as the one above. I loved twiddling the controls behind the scenes of various blogging platforms. I realized, like above, that I should focus my energies on writing. So, I decided to stick to WordPress.

    I have hosted my blog posts on Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Posterous, Vox, Roller, Ghost, Blot, and finally on WordPress.

    How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

    I write my posts on two platforms. Most of the posts that you read here are on WordPress’ native Gutenberg editor or Visual editor.

    I write some of my posts using WordLand. I am using this tool to write the posts in my Status Updates category.

    When do you feel most inspired to write?

    Whenever I am not sleeping. I don’t think I can survive without writing.

    Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

    I usually only read once more after I complete writing. I let my thoughts simmer before I write the draft.

    What’s your favorite post on your blog?

    Some of my posts that I love are about things I do with my daughter (1,2) or ones about note making or Indian Philosophy.

    Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

    I am twiddling with the controls in the WordPress admin panel all the time. This is based on curiosity and not on anything as sophisticated as a plan. Making a blogroll is an area of interest.

    Who’s next?

    I want to tag these people not because they would take part in a challenge like this but because I would love to hear about how they write and think about the art of blogging.

  • Thank you for the shoutout, Dave Winer!

  • Om Malik has started a daily blog section. He is using WordLand to write there. Here is the announcement post for more details.

    Unlike him, my posts are interspersed with the other blog posts. You can identify posts written in WordLand by using the Status Updates category.

  • Weekly Notes 11/2025

    I have slowed down the rate at which I am consuming content this week. I have also reduced the sources from which I am consuming my content to feeds I have subscribed to.

    I fell into a spirituality rabbit hole with questions about Narasimha, kula devatas, and various practices performed in Kerala in the past. I fell into another rabbit hole about blogrolls and libraries.

    I also wrote the first in what I hope to be a weekly post on LinkedIn about technical writing.

    All this writing means I have not got any reading done other than my RSS feeds and a few Substack posts. I have not been able to follow space news since almost the beginning of February now.

    The recoverey after surgery seems to be going alright.

  • Om Malik writes on his blog, On my Om:

    When I went to see the Manila Pen Show’s website, every single one of the exhibitors was linked not to their website but to Instagram. These included some of the more traditional and sedate pen-makers from Japan. Earlier this morning, when reading Die Workwear’s piece about shirts, I realized that almost all the bespoke shirt makers, shoemakers, and others announce their trunk shows and new products on Instagram. And so do others who have something to say, sell, or shill.

    That is when it hit me — Instagram has gone from being “a photography community” to being a “visual information network.”

  • Doc Searls says we must return to calling the web, the Web.

    Same goes for The Internet. And The Net. The Web is the Web, not “the web”. We—the writers of the networked world—gave something up when we allowed the bishops of the AP and the Chicago Manual of Style to demote the Web from proper noun to lower-case status, down there with television and radio. Nobody invented “the television,” or “the radio.” Not even “the newspaper.” But somebody—Sir Tim Berners-Lee—invented the World Wide Web. With upper case letters. The WWW was not the www. Is it too late to bring the Web back as a proper noun? I don’t know. I do know that I’m never going to demote it in my own writing.

  • Clicking a link rabbit hole

    Manu spoke to James for his People and Blogs (P&B) series. This is one of the branches that I clicked through that went down a pretty interesting rabbit hole.

    One of the reasons I wanted to read James’ blog after reading the interview was because he is a technical writer, just like me. I loved his blogroll, called Wander. There were many pages that I loved wandering around on.

    Another implementation of a blogroll that this reminded me about was the one on Doc Searls’ blog. This dynamic blogroll on his blog’s right side bar is built by Dave Winer and uses some OPML magic.

    The Library Movement

    One of the blogs I found on James’ Wander page was Marisabel’s Konfetti Explorations. One of the recent blog post entries was about the 5 Laws of Library Science, formulated by S R Ranganathan.

    When I searched to learn more about Ranganathan, who I had heard about earlier in various contexts, I learnt that he was one of the founders of the Madras Library Association, founded in 1928.

    I was looking for other library associations that may have been active in India. I found that the Kerala Library Association was started quite late in 1972. The association is credited as one of the reasons for Kerala having one of the highest literacy rates in India.

    Puthuvayil Narayana Panicker, known as the father of the library and literacy movement in Kerala, is credited with establishing libraries across the state in the 1990s.

    I was surprised to learn that Maharashtra is one of the earliest such associations to be formed, founded in 1921.

    There is also an Indian Library Association, formed in 1933. Looking at the website tells you that the organisation prioritizes the people running the organization and not the libraries or the library movement in India.

    As a counterpoint, look at the website of the Free Libraries Network. They are running a fundraiser that ends tomorrow which offers various Indian authors offering services in return for a donation.

    The search term suggested a news item on the same page about a group of students who started an open library in Pune. This seems to have sparked autorickshaw drivers, bloggers, professionals, etc. who maintained similar open libraries in their own spaces.

    A search for similar open libraries or for a list of them took me to the page of the Open Library project. The Wikipedia page of the Open Library project says:

    Open Library is an online project intended to create “one web page for every book ever published”. Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Hargrave Malamud. Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization.

    A perusal of the Open Library blog led me to reading posts by someone called mek, who turns out to be Mek Karpeles, according to the same Wikipedia page above.

    A search helped me find Mek’s MediaWiki based website. Once upon a time, when I was a Wikipedia editor, I too had wished I had had such a website. Kirk had such a wiki, but I can’t find it now. Another thing that I have not fully explored but loved is Mek’s blogroll.

    And thus the journey goes on, in a Web not intermediated by social media websites. When you click on links not only to find what’s there but not knowing how it will look like. That was the Web that I entered in 2004 and its good to be back there again.

    Anu Atluru said this better than me in a note on Substack:

    I wish publications in the Substack app had as much personality as they do on web. I get the standardization but it makes the vibe less personal, less like stepping into the writer’s world, and more like modern “social media” sameness.

    This rabbit hole helped me learn more about libraries and blogrolls. Maybe they are similar? I already have a library worth of books under my children’s bed in storage. I want to implement some kind of blogroll on this blog as well.

    That may need clicking on another link rabbit hole.

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  • "And it’s sometimes surprising to me how insightful my younger self could be, which I think is explained largely by the fact that most of my writing is written at peak states of clarity, while most of my life is lived in the moderately muddled middle. I’m a generally wiser 34-year-old than my 25-year-old self was, but when my 25yo self was having a peak experience, he was typically wiser in that moment than I am on average day today. And the great thing about writing, journalling and so on is that we get to integrate our peak state wisdom into our ordinary lives."

    – for future reference, visakanv's frame studies, Visakan Veerasamy