Let’s try this again shall we…

Ok. I admit. I slack very effectively. So it definitely does not help when my entire initial focal point emerged out of me raging over some issue only to find myself filled with apathy on the same topic a while later. This dawned on me later as I raged over multiple issues ( PS4 being shitty as hell, Go’s sudden undeserved popularity, Apple talking trash on GS4, GOOGLE READER!) only to dial back to frustration, then annoyance and finally a resigned acceptance. I still definitely would get worked up when these are discussed, but I guess the crest of the wave is now gone.

And then, there was the other impetus to get me back – my previous professional website on my university’s domain got taken down by my alma mater as I’ve been out of college for more than a year now. Way to go, yanking off the 100 megs of static site storage they’d graciously given us. I decided I’d at least resurrect the content by a quick and dirty solution of hosting those pages using one of the many dropbox based meta-hosters but haven’t really done that yet either. Add to that another item- to post discussion centric  posts to quora pages and get some involvement – the stack just keeps getting bigger.

So after arriving back to square one (or backtracking all the way to the root), I’ve decided to let the blog stick to its name. The charter now is to post refined thought provoking posts with a clear intent to keep away from nerd baiting and troll feeding. So with all lousy explanations having been posted, lets try this again, shall we?

Bias against bias

This is a “guest” post.

The problem with “logical” rants is that you don’t always realize your own cognitive biases. (Case in point: “the total opposite of all majority of the douchebags“)

In the online medium, if you are popular enough to attract sane minds, you are likely to get called out on your B(ia)S in the comments. But then, you are also likely to attract trolls (Goodwin’s Law). My guest posts in this blog will hopefully offer some regularization for the OP’s rants. I will try to keep things logical and short (and mildly humorous if I can manage that).

So this blog is essentially the rants of a coder on all things tech with a guest contributor to play the devil’s advocate for those rants. Although there are no specific plans yet, you can expect co-authored posts or a follow-up critical posts to offer differing opinions.

First things First. Er… Second

• If the About page was not disclosure enough – I work for Microsoft Corporation.
• All views and opinions expressed in this blog (by me) are entirely my own and do not reflect that of my employer(s) by any means.
• I’m likely to be an investor in one or more of technology companies that might be touched upon at one point or another. Rest assured, It’ll not influence my content.
• There will be minimal to no attempts made to preserve political correctness beyond general cleanness of language.
• I’m a jerk – if you troll me on the comments, I reserve the right to kick you out.
• If I know you and you want to post something related and useful or something unrelated and super fun, send me an email / facebook message.
• And last but not the least, A warm welcome to @arangana for choosing to get here as a guest writer (or a guest troll IMHO).
• I might be lying about the warmth portion of the previous statement.

Who will review the reviews?

What’s the first thing you do when you do when you want to buy a new gadget? If you’re answer was not searching for reviews you are most likely a Fanboy (collectively represents both Fanboys and Fangirls – I’m no sexist. Also used generically, not just the people with crazies for Apple or Android or anything else) and there’s no convincing you one way or the other with words, actions or anything else except a lobotomy. However, most normal folk end up deciding what device they want to get based on what the collective wisdom of the internet has to say about it.

To give you some background, I browse a few thousand articles on technology everyday (with innumerable repetitions obviously since there definitely isn’t that much unique content under news on a daily basis – talk about information overload) and my weapon of choice is RSS with subscriptions to the staple Gizmodo, TheVerge, TechCrunch, TechMeme, Slashdot etc. and the not so common Ars Technica, VentureBeat etc. Its a couple hour investment every day that spans ten minute to half hour sessions distributed round the day. As Peter Griffin would say, what grinds my gears is the extent of bias in reporting and to a larger extent, in reviews of products, services etc.

If you read all the top rated reviews for the iPad Mini, you would be left believing that it’s simply the best tablet ever in terms of the size, feature set and just about everything. Some others would tell you that even if you had an iPad currently, the mini would fill in a neat little “niche” of reading in the bed. It was simply amazing how everybody except Jimmy Kemmel had failed to see the futility of the entire thing.

On a related note, consider the entire TechCrunch drama that happened over the last year – its founder Mike Arrington and Apple Fanboy extraordinaire MG Siegler were asked by AOL, its parent company, to bugger off  following the fact that they were trying their hand at becoming VCs and that it could lead to conflicts of interest in  their reporting – they cried and left and came back a year later declaring that everyone’s biased and that there’s no reason they shouldn’t be. That, to me, was the last straw and maybe the inspiration of this post.

So here’s what I decided to do – get real data on these reviewers. I’ll be running some data analysis to get some insight on the bias factor for some of the most well known reviewers – a sentiment analysis for certain key terms / brands and lets see where that takes us from there. One thing that I might consider is to write a program to aggregate these reviews and extracts information while stripping off the bias with an inverse weight score applied to each review based on previous analysis results for the reviewer (If these posts resemble anything like the original, I’ll close down this blog and crawl under a rock).

Everything is up in the air at the moment, but I’m mad enough to know that I’ll get to it – sooner rather than later. So end of story, this post is just a beginning.

Where it takes us, we’ll know when we arrive.

Foo Bar Baz…

Honestly, I’ve never been interested in the idea of blogging. It has always seemed to me like a colossal waste of time and effort to write something that in all odds, is not going to get read. Certainly, there’s the allure to the fact that it presents an enormous opportunity for expression of thoughts and having a good discussion (or more likely a flame war), but in spite of it I was held back by the inertia that stemmed from the fact that I could hardly get myself to read another person’s blog – especially someone I knew.

Before I sound overly hypocritical, I would definitely like to take the easy way out and call this entire effort an experiment – a personal beta test, if you would prefer that. And to make sure that this is actually something worthwhile that I would want to maintain and at least come back myself, I decided to center it around something I care about deeply and insanely – technology and the blogosphere surrounding it. The premise is to have a blog that covers today’s technology industry and presents opinions from the perspective of a person who thoroughly understands the underpinnings – the total opposite of all majority of the douchebags who write online regarding tech news. (You can expect a post pretty soon about that).

And I totally get the convenience aspect of blogging by now – I built a website from scratch and that only took me like a couple weeks before I could make a single post. And since my hosting (UCLA) wouldn’t let me have a CMS, I had to write a script to auto-generate templates for any new content I wanted to add and from there on, it was a downward spiral in terms of maintaining my interest level in developing it. And with this, I totally love the option of changing themes instantly for when I get too bored with the current design.

And before I forget, A big Thanks to all those people who pushed me to do this to lessen my time for ranting about shit happenings in tech.

Let’s get this thing started shall we…