Emotion and rational thinking are two sides of a same coin. If I had thought rationally I am sure I would not commenced blogging activity. Running a blog for three years with frequent posts is a small feat. Over the years euphoria of owning a blog vanes and I am pestered for 'deliverable' by my own rational mind. I am in a dilemma whether to have leisure life or pursue passion or work hard for career advancement. This post will unravel my mind and factors that pull (to continue the blog) and push (to windup) me will be elaborated. Hope you enjoy!
Genesis
Blog is concatenation of two words Web and log (weB-LOG). Log is another term for diary. Blog functions as an online diary. Unlike typical diary most of the blogs are thrown open to public for reading and allows viewers to post their comments. In the inception, this blog functioned as an online storehouse of favoured Web links. Each Web link accompanied a small note for easy reference. Next, articles were written on search keyword (ex. gigapixel camera, SIFT) and Web resources appended in the end of the article. As days progressed number of articles present in the blog increased. Articles exhibited a pattern in style and content. The pattern became a guideline for upcoming posts. Objectives of blog formulated over a period of time.
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| A thinking man in a moving train (Image Courtesy: Wikipedia) |
Need for meta-resource
Objectives of this blog are twofold. Be a provider of meta-resource i.e. to provide data on Web resources rather than being resource by itself and be a provider of frameworks or viewpoints to comprehend Digital Image Processing concepts. Articles are expected to be clear, concise, birds’ eye view about a topic and to provide links to good Web resources related to the topic. This blog is written in simple English and jargons are kept to bare minimum. It is assumed that readers of this blog have either science or electronics engineering background. A survey states that online readers i.e. general public are reluctant to read articles that have more than 400 words. To explore a topic in length and breadth two pages are required and in terms of word count it is over 1000 words. Article size won't be a problem for technical readers. This blog is highly influenced by 'creative commons' concept. So, content is free from copy right.
Internet is a huge repository for digital documents. It has grown leaps and bounds within four decades of inception. But finding 'right' document in Internet haystack is a real challenge. Usually most relevant documents to the search keyword are downloaded. Then from the downloaded documents information is extracted. Sifting downloaded resources (documents) is time consuming and cognitive intensive activity. Till now we don't have a solution for these cumbersome processes. Search engines like Google are very sensitive to search keywords i.e. poorly formed keyword will give irrelevant documents. Domain knowledge is a prerequisite for appropriate keyword construction. This makes novice to acquire 'right' information a difficult proposition. Solutions like human edited directory services 'dmoz.org' are not very popular. 'Semantic Web' can only improve the life of novice but it is still in infancy. Until then, blogs that provide meta-resource have a day.
Internet possesses huge amount of information and acts as a 24x7 medium for the users. Human beings are fond of information. But they give more weightage to knowledge. Researchers should improve the potent of Internet so as to impart knowledge to humans. Knowledge accrual occurs when a person churn (think) the information present in the mind for long time. Constant bombardment of new information in frequent intervals excites humans but hinder knowledge gathering. Knowledge is the key ingredient in problem solving and huge pile of information hampers decision making process. Articles in this blog behave as 'tourist guides.' It's primary objective to provide a framework (knowledge like) of a topic in a lucid and comprehensible manner.
Apart from Websites, Internet contains resources like open access journals, pirated e-books, Power Point Presentation (PPT). This blog operates on a niche area where above stated resources are not able to fill. It is not competing with existing Web resources but supplement them. Books invariablely very verbose (minimum 400 pages), dwell on basic principles and reading on computer screen is cumbersome. Few books discuss about latest technologies but they are very costly and too technical. Journal articles are meant for specialists and require scholarly reading. So, an average reader can't read beyond 'introduction' section. In western countries, course teachers almost use PPT to deliver the lecture to their students. Bulleted points present in the PPT are elaborated by course instructor. PPTs are uploaded in their respective university Web sites sans audio. Thus we get only a skeleton of an topic from PPT. Lecture video contain audio. But course instructor 'accent' is a big challenge. For example, Indians are comfortable with British English but not with American or Australian English. Video subtitles may mitigate the problem to an extent. Next, Videos are bandwidth hungry and by nature sequential. So, quickly going through a video is not possible.
Platform - Blog
A book that contains collection of related articles are called digest. A Web technology that allows publication of digest online is yet to arrive. Building a professional Website requires programming skill, consumes time for site maintenance and costly affair. Database and professional styling features are not offered in free Website hosting servers. They insert advertisement in the Website to mop revenue. At last content providers end up in an amateurish Website with intrusive advertisements. Website visibility is another great problem. Website content should be tuned properly or else search engines will fail to notice. Thus site will be practically invisible to the digital world. Traditional Website users or viewers are expected to pick information they want (like buffet system) from the site. This method is called 'pull technology' in computer science parlance. Digest behaves like television or radio and pushes the content to the users. Blogspot from Google comes with lots of writer friendly features. It takes less time to post an article. Blog in a way mimics push technology. Advertisements are optional. Blog visibility assured as Google itself a widely used search engine.
Writing articles on Wikipedia would give much scope for content creators or writers. In Wikipedia editing an article is permitted. Writers are expected to allow revisions on their work. They have to follow Wikipedia writing style only. Articles with personal opinions and analogies will be flagged. Main objective of Wikipedia is to provide information and not concept or idea.
In this post genesis and objectives of this blog are presented. It deals about the need to emphasize knowledge accrual rather than information gathering. It discusses about use of blogspot Website to host it contents. Upcoming post will discuss the motives that drove to commence a blog.
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