Entries tagged “water”

I've really been enjoying the response to my recent blog posts — here are some more thoughtful replies.

Rafe Colburn, one of my favorite bloggers for a decade now, followed up my Apple and secrecy post with "Apple vs. my preconceived notions":

In one scenario, this is a bubble of sorts. Apple may be doing OK now, but they’re headed for a big crash when people get sick of their behavior. In another scenario — one that I think is, sadly, more likely, Apple continues as they are, adjusting when it must to address reality, but only in the most minimal way.

I've also really been enjoying watching Dave Winer's work recently. In the past we were both too young and stubborn to realize we're amused by a lot of the same things (There's my refrain of "We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves" again!) but these days it is just plain entertaining to watch Dave go. My amusement is amply covered in "Anil's belly laugh", which mentions my response to Dave's latest bit of hacking. As I mentioned on my Twitter account, I also recorded an episode of the Bad Hair Day podcast with Dave and Marshall Kirkpatrick last week.

Speaking of podcasts, This Week in Google is a new one featuring Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis and Internet Hero Gina Trapani. This week, they had a very nice look at The Pushbutton Web towards the end of the show. I'm delighted how many people have told me they found that post valuable or useful in talking about this whole area of innovation. Since I'm a lousy coder, writing blog posts like that is the most helpful thing I can do.

Finally, as it's come up in several contexts lately, it's probably worth repeating the key point of a post I wrote two years ago, which attracted some attention then but is probably even more relevant today. The core concept is about "The Watery Web":

It's not true to say that Facebook is the new AOL, and it's oversimplification to say that Facebook's API is the new [MSN] Blackbird, or the new [AOL] Rainman. But Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.

Thanks, as always to people who've responded to what I've written, and especially to all of those who've taken these posts as starting points and expanded the ideas into some truly inspiring creations.

For the first two weeks in February, I joined my family in a trip to India. Though I was born here in the U.S., we used to go back to visit family in India pretty regularly when I was a kid. But then I got older, was always busy, and before I knew it, it had been 25 years since I'd visited. It was well past time to remedy that oversight, and perhaps the single thing that drew me back the most was the idea of visiting the village where my father was born and raised.

During our brief visit there, my father and his brothers took me on a walk through the rice paddies that surround their village. Our family owns all of the paddies from their house until the nearby river. Along the way, I stopped to quickly take this shot of the Shiva temple that the village uses for worship.

I still have vague memories of accompanying my grandfather once or twice on his near-daily walks to this temple when I was a kid. His walks to the temple continued until he was well into his 80s and perhaps his 90s.

The green in the foreground is unretouched, the actual vibrant color of a newly-planted second crop of basmati rice. Historically, this region of western Orissa was plagued by recurring droughts. A single rice crop was a blessing, just enough to provide sustenance in an area where a family of four often earns the equivalent of less than $500 a year.

But in recent years, a combination of government-planned irrigation projects and the serendipitous discovery of some precious gemstones in the region funded a pump system that enables a second annual crop. This second crop meant many villagers could go from just putting food in their mouths to actually making a little bit of money. Nearly every home in the village was made of mud when I lived there as a child, but on this visit nearly every home had been rebuilt with brick, with some even sprouting second stories. The village school had been rebuild and classes extended all the way to high school instead of ending at the fourth grade.

The style of temple shown here is very typical of the architecture of village temples in our state; We saw similar mandirs in honor of Shiva, Rama, a few Krishna temples, and other various deities in the many villages we drove by during our trip. I didn't actually go in this temple, but I spend some time walking in the nearby rice paddies that are still being planted and harvested in my name.