.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

With sites like facebook.com and myspace.com taking over the Internet it makes it easier for people to keep in touch by leaving messages on each others “Walls” (facebook). What I notice is also that while this Web 2.0 concept is taking over, it makes it harder to be an outsider, by not having an account or just having a standalone blog of your own on the Internet.

As an example, my wife, sisters, brother and lots of friends all have facebook or myspace accounts. While almost not a week goes by without receiving invites to facebook or similar sites and despite verbal attempts of convincing me to join this movement from my wife and sisters, I am very content with just having a blog that I have full control over. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with these sites and while I am sure there are some valuable content being generated through this crowd sourcing, it does not really attract me since it a) does not give me full control over what I can do on it and being a techie I like being able to poke around things as much as I want to and b) being on such sites in my experience you also end up engaging in a lot of (semi addictive) frivolous activities, e.g. graffiti a friend’s wall or virtually poke each other, (which I am sure is fun, but I just don’t have the time for it).

So the question becomes, do you ignore the wisdom of these crowds and stay outside or do you go with if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them? While not joining these sites may not make me as visible or accessible to friends and other contacts who would like to get updates on my life and in turn also not give me access to theirs, some of which can be friends from a very long time ago that you wonder what they are up to these days, I think there is a middle ground and example of that can be another site like LinkedIn.com. That site may not be as ‘cool’ or happening as other fun social sites, but it gets the job done for me.

Or maybe take a more old-fashioned approach, find out their email or phone number and call/write them to get updates, but I guess in today’s world that can be a little passé, or better put, in a world where we travel a lot and its so easy to stay in touch through the Internet, we tend to have a large circle of contacts around the globe and we don’t necessarily have the time or are not that interested to do one on one emails/calls with them and are just content with coming across whatever they broadcast to the world about their lives.

If I had to complain about one thing why I avoid IE7 and prefer Firefox it would be because of its way of handling tabs. I want to open new tabs when I type in a new URL, or open a bookmark, I want it opened in a new tab. Further I miss not having built in spell check like firefox. It goes of course beyond that, but these were my top two pains which made me choose FireFox. Just came across a link for IE7Pro which takes many steps towards coming close to FireFox (in my opinion at least). See screen shots below [via Public Sector Developer]

I have previously written on the wonderful service that Callwave provides. Now, they have a widget for iGoogle so you can access your voicemail box directly from the web. *love* it.

Most of time I share about fun stuff/sites that apply only to US, so here is one for my Swedish peops. Hot off the press: Google maps now fully covers Sweden, including routing, local info such as restaurants, banks etc. Here is an example that was not possible until today. As I understand it, all info comes from the yellow pages site among others.

For those who regularly search on one particular term using many different websites, sputtr.com should be useful.

Update: Notes on final decision can be read here

Update: The Pentax K10D is now in the race too as I have discovered that it is a bit of undiscovered gem among DSLRs. On the other hand D40X is out and so is D200. D40X out because it simply is a D80 wanna-be and in a sense this article summarizes why I decided to drop it. D200 I dropped because in a nutshell the only difference between D80 and D200 is that D200 is sealed against dust. Not enough to make me want to pay the price differance.

For a few years now I have had my eye on a DSLR, and the time for buying one has come. I have narrowed it down to to Nikon as the brand I like the most. Now, its down to two models (D200 is a little out of my price range) and for the life of me, I can’t get a straight answer either way. The search is still ongoing so feel free to chime in if you have any thoughts. So far this is the best summary I have found.