the really short story

Khyati showed me a site that runs a contest for the best short story. The only catch is that the story needs to be really short. 140 characters to be precise. A typical SMS limit.

My first thought was that it's interesting, but I wondered if it would be any good.

So I visited their winners page and am now eating my words :D

Sample this!

'The baby's fine,' the midwife says, touching her hand. 'Bit of a scare there, but he's a little fighter. Have you decided on a name yet, Mrs Hitler?'

By Uta Coutts, Hitchin, Hertfordshire

'I love you,' she says just before he places the pillow over her face and presses down, hard. As her cancer-gaunt body stills, he feels his heart break.

By Uta from Hitchin in Hertfordshire

'Aren't you the musical one son' said Dad. 'Don't know where you get it from.' Mum's blush rose as the postman passed the window, whistling tunefully.

By Julie Forest

'I'm home' I yelled, entering the house. No response. In the kitchen my wife sobbed and hugged our son. 'Daddy's dead' she whispered, looking through me.

By Gail Lockwood

Visit the site for more.


I propose a short story contest on my blog. Lemme invite a judge. Who knows, there may be prizes :)

war of sponsored links

Okay so Airtel and Big TV and TataSky are all busy shoving their plans down our throats and I'm not sure who's really winning. But Airtel sure has all the right moves.

A search for tatasky or bigtv resulted in an Airtel sponsored link each time :)

Are the rest of them sleeping?

PS: I did find tatasky+ sponsored links in some searches. So only bigtv is asleep then.

back to basics

In a world of clutter, how does one little shop in Bandra stand out?


Whenever I go by SV Road Bandra, I can't help but notice this little shop that is in the buisiness of healing broken bones.


It's such a simple, clutter breaking... and err.. pretty straightforward shop sign :D


1. It visually depicts the services offered
2. Is understandable even if you are illiterate, thereby increasing number of possible customers :D
3. Shows smiling faces signifying positive results
4. Shows that it's for both men and women, so women need not shy away

Anything else I missed out? :D

Next time you go by the road, try ignoring the shop with the weird picture of a man and woman with broken arms. You just cant :)

PS: I had to juggle with the steering wheel and the camera in a Bandra jam, but thankfully I managed a decent shot.

I <3 Tag Clouds

I must confess I love tag clouds. I think they’re an amazing way to visually compare factors. They show the importance of one factor by making it bigger than the other words and often even changing the colour of less important factors.

Wikipedia says: “ A tag cloud is a visual depiction of the word content of a site. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color.[1] Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.”

Brand Tags

Recently I was introduced to Brand Tags. Yes, I know it’s been around forever and most of you use it already… blah blah
For those who don’t know brandtags read on.
It’s a cool little site (experiment) which asks visitors to type in one word that they associate with a particular brand name. So if Colgate pops up you type in one word that you most relate to the brand (I said white).


You can also go through the brand list and see what people have to say about a brand. And it’s all shown to you in the form of a cool tag cloud like this one for casio ---------------------------------->>>

There is an option for you to add your brand to the list to see what people have to say about it.


Wordle

I found wordle through Gautam and I think it’s very cool.

All you need to do it type out words and the ones that occur most in your write-up will be showcased prominently in your tag cloud. It’s fun and looks very cool.

It’s great for client presentations when you want to show brand perception findings. For example I can put the findings of a recent FGD done for a hospital to showcase what people generally think of hospitals-




PS: this is a wordle of this post :)