Abhi Yerra

I grew up on the internet! When the net was taking off it became my haven for information. As my generation grows up we are not going to be turning to printed newspaper for news. This is not a fault of the newspapers, but their inability to understand this change taking place.

The printed newspaper had been a fine way to transmit news and opinion in the analog world. However, we no longer live in a analog world and increasingly the death of the printed newspaper is imminent. My generation is tied to the online world in ways that people could not have imagined when the web becoming commonplace in the 90’s. We increasingly have short attention spans where the speed at which we get our information is limited to the speed of the internet connection that we have.

News and information, from gossip to business news, travels at such speed that the printed newspaper will not be able to weather it. The printed newspaper is a static entity: once printed we don’t see updates until the next one comes out. However, how do you deal with news in an ever changing society when news becomes obsolete five minutes after it comes out? Printed newspapers can’t deal with that.

When I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal I was hoping that the paper would be something I’d read everyday. However, there is so much information that I don’t digest in the paper that increasingly I feel like a large part of the paper is just a toilet for Stalin. I tend to read the paper online because it gives a convenient way to cherry pick the information that you want to read or feel interested in without feeling like your destroying the environment by not reading everything in the paper.

In the next 10 or so years the printed newspaper will largely die off in the form that it is now and will be a comodity that one goes online to find. The problem as it is now is how do you monitize print journalim in an online world where people are largely appatetic to paying.

Google makes its foray into web infrastructure with Google App Engine. So what the cool and what’s not?

The cool thing is that it gives you access to to Google’s Authentication System, a DataStore that is probably using BigTable, and there is a “free account [which] can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.” Also, it has support for Django which is a pretty nice web framework.

The not so cool things are that it is currently limited to Python, which I don’t really mind, but Ruby and other languages would be nice to have. Further, Django’s model framework is useless if you are trying to deploy an app on here and elsewhere. Hopefully, Django will add that abstraction sometime soon.

Now that we know the route of the Olympic Torch in San Francisco on April 9th, let’s plan out the battle plans for the protests. Well the objective is to get good pictures on the day so I think the best places for pictures of protests will be wherever there will be a large gathering of people.

The event will start at 1 p.m. and it will take the torch about an hour and a half to traverse the approximately 6-mile route, according to Giselle Barry, the spokeswoman for Newsom.

Mayor Gavin Newsom said an area in front of the Ferry Building – the route’s end point – will be designated for protesters. No groups will need a permit to protest, he said, adding that more protesters are expected along the route than in the designated areas.

Officials said protesters will also be allowed in Union Square, Portsmouth Square, Civic Center and Washington Square, although those areas are generally far from the torch’s announced route.

So what are you waiting for? Plan out your protest gear and oh yeah get ready for the torch!

Update 4/8/2008, 4:13 AM: It has started. Apparently, they may change the route of the torch in response to the Paris and London events which haven’t been going so well. Especially in Paris where the torch was put out several times by protesters.

Update 4/8/2008, 8:49PM: There are more updates with Protestors building steam in S.F, the Torch arrived in S.F. It apparently was treated like a visit from a head of state.

In trying to not be lazy and do something with my life I am going to start working on a new project called TrayTwo (the site will be up soon). I am trying to do what others have done which is to do internet publishing and video. We are going to start off with Hops & Barley a beer review site first and see where that leads us.

Hopefully, this will be fun. Right now the task at hand is to do the following:

• make a logo and intro video
• make a website
• start recording the first video review