Last weekend we relaunched a brand new, squeaky clean, Cynapse.com.

At Cynapse, our constant endavour has been to help our audience do more with their lives. We concentrate on the domains of productivity, collaboration and information management with inventions that use the ubiquitious nature of the Internet to their advantage.

The new design embodies this philosophy and also throws some light on the fabulous team that makes it all possible.

Here’s yet another Google Adwords Advertisor ranting against Google’s Click Fraud rules and policies.

He’s upset enough to have dedicated a blogger blog about it. And he’s posting screenshots straight from his Google Adwords interface detailing the click through rate reports that he’s getting. He says he’s even getting clicks from the same IP on the same advertisement of his, 2 seconds apart.

Makes one wonder how Google’s going to protect it’s squeaky clean, ethically correct image, especially in the long run. And whether it really is that clean anyway.

Took the opportunity over the weekend to change a few things in my Social Bookmarking section on my site.

I’ve removed a few buttons and I’ve added a few more. If you don’t like the new mix, I am known to (sometimes) take suggestions. Do tell.

For a detailed list of changes (and some thoughts), read on…
Took the opportunity over the weekend to change a few things in my Social Bookmarking section on my site.

I’ve removed a few buttons and I’ve added a few more. If you don’t the mix, I am known to (sometimes) take heed to suggestions. Do tell.

Removed

Backflip: I didn’t end up liking this one, so I’ve removed it.

BlinkBits: Spammed out.

CiteULike: This is for citations and academically oriented people. I’m not one of them.

De.lirio.us: This one shut down and moved to Simpy.

GiveaLink: Hmmm…… didn’t like this one too much.

LookLater: For private bookmarking, not suitable for posting on blog posts.

Squidoo: For creating published lenses. Not really suitable, either.

Zurpy: Can’t find a way to access public bookmarks. I think this one is private-only as well.

Added


Blabb: Cool ajax based social bookmarking site.

BM Access: Nice one.

Bookmark Tracker: Slightly klunky looks, but the content is nice.

The Butterfly Project: Ok. I like the name. And Dutch people. Go figure.

i89: Cool concept, let’s you create short URLs at *.i89.us. Gives away cash prizes for the best linkers.

IndiaGram: Indian Social Bookmarking site.

IndiaMarks: Another Indian Social Bookmarking site.

IndianPad: Yet another Indian Social Bookmarking site.

iTalkNews: Comprehensive point based ranking system. Users earn XP points for whatever they do. Relatively spam free.

Memigo: Uses a “bloggy” feel, while calling itself a forum.

Some Thoughts
I’ve only done these changes on my site template. The blogger and wordpress templates continue to be the way they were. I’m waiting for some feedback on my move to remove (and also not include) some sites. Some of these were spam filled, some not really suitable, and some  shut down.

The proliferation of Indian Social Bookmarking sites (Is this a global trend? Are there small sites popping up with local links as I speak?) is quite amazing to see. The content add on these sites is slower than the biggies, but it is definitely relevant - usually.

Monetization of the user’s experience seems to be the new way to get the links in. Simpy does it by offering adsense revenue, i89 does it with cash prizes, I wonder if the biggies are going to have to adopt this strategy as well.

Some sites don’t have favicons at all (i89); some screwed up in .ico to .png transparency. I’ve fixed these where I could. If anybody wants to contribute with better looking icons, I’d be very appreciative.

I’ve reduced the font on the tooltip by one size and also removed extra spacing in between the icons. It should come that teensy-weensy bit down faster to you now. And it looks a little neater as well. Tell me what you think.

Shoutouts
A great big shoutout to 3spots for maintaining THE most comprehensive lists of these things. I used the 3spots blog for reference and opinion forming.

I’ve always considered Kevin Smith to be one of my favorite movie directors / writers / comics artists and when I came across this public interview on YouTube, I just couldn’t resist posting it.

One word of caution, though. The video does contain what some would consider to be “foul” language (as is typical with Smith), so please put on your headphones if you’re gonna listen to this in your office cubicle or something.

Kevin Smith is one of the most irreverent people in hollywood and his devil-may-care, straight up, common-man attitude is what I like about him the most.

In this interview he describes his outrageous experiences where he was hired by Warner bros. to write a movie script for Superman Lives way back in 1996 or so. He describes how the producer wanted him to write in a part for a Brainiac sidekick and also giant spiders and Superman fighting polar bears around the Fortress of Solitude! The video is quite funny, do watch it. It’s a bit longish, at 19 minutes plus, I suggest you let it buffer completely before you play.

One more thing I liked about this particular video is the way Smith brings out how a movie scriptwriter’s original draft gets distorted in the hollywood producer’s warped wants instead of sticking to the script. Sort of goes along with my short discourse on movie making in my Terminator 2 Ultimate edition post.

Here’s a new social bookmarking site with a brand new twist / speil.

It’s called Nooz and it’s

Rojo

’s attempt at getting at the huge number of teenybopper (I use that term loosely and as a pun) users of MySpace.

You need to have a

MySpace

account to register on Nooz. Justification for this comes from the admittedly nice integration that Nooz pulls off. It picks up all your photo information and other details straight from your MySpace URL!

Coming from the Rojo team, it’s no surprise when it picks up all the links you Rojo Mojo’d on (I

love

saying that! ) and lists them as your Nooz. Yes, you can submit your own links and bookmarklets are present for that as well.

Shortly I’ll be figuring out the submit URL parameters for it and adding it to my

social bookmarking

template (yes, I’ll add it to the

Blogger

and

Wordpress

templates too).

I left the

best

for last.

One of the cool new things they’re trying (you might just begin to see a lot more of this type of thing) to do is to offer several types of tickers and blocks of links that point to your Rojo/Nooz items. My Nooz ticker is shown above. Nooz recommends that users display it in their About me section in MySpace. What they don’t say is that it works on

any

site. Including my own Amieo based one.

Edit: I just skinned the ticker courtesy this NooZ Faq page.

Delerious which announced a merger / handover to Simpy earlier has finally finished the migration they started some time back.

Simpy gets all the delirious users. And all the “delicious” links they kept there. Delirious gets to wash its hands clean of all user and site maintenance hassles and quit with a clean image, rather than fold over.

All in all, I think that’s a very good attempt to make a win-win situation out of the whole thing.

In the meanwhile, de.lirio.us is no longer accepting new submissions and is redirecting users to go to this Simpy page.

Simpy is one of the first Social Bookmarking sites to offer users revenue - by placing Google Adsense ads with the user’s Adsense number on the user’s bookmark lists.

orkut scraps seem to be new way for otherwise disconnected people to communicate, publicly.

Judging by the way that tools are springing up for people to use orkut beyond orkut’s primitive user interface features it looks like the orkut team is going to quickly have to look beyond it’s immediate roadmap to figure out a whole new era of unforeseen activity load.

Although I’m somewhat of a non user of orkut (I checked out the beta early, and moved out early too), I went out on a mission - to figure out and see how it’s huge populace actually uses orkut, and what tools are available for power orkut users.

Some Background
The orkut social community, while plagued by constant problems (everybody say “Bad, bad server. No donut for you.”), has continued to thrive. A whopping 69 percent of all orkut users are Brazilian. Indians come in a third, at nearly 5% of the orkut populace, just after America’s 12 percent. The huge population and the activity of the members is most visible in the amount and the frequency of scrapbook entries that any popular orkut member has.

Lacking any popular publishing, personal activity centers (other than forum participation on it’s communities) the fact that orkut continues to gain the interest of new users and sustain activity of existing users suprises me. Comparison with any current social network leaves orkut far behind when it comes to features and functionality.

One of the key activity centers is each member’s scrapbook. This originates from one of the most popular pastimes on orkut; the act of surfing user profiles. One of the most popular navigation mechanisms of orkut is by clicking member picture thumbnails and then clicking on the thumbnails of their friends, and so on. Upon arriving at an interesting profile a member may leave an entry in the user’s guestbook. This has become all the more prevalent after the names of members visiting a user’s profile are displayed to the user right on his/her orkut homepage.

orkut Scrap Tools
Necessity is the mother of all invention, a wise man once said, and orkut proves to be no exception. Upon some searching, I found these two tools:

Scrapboy! (the scrapboy website)
This free tool made by the dubious “Scrapboy media corporation” is the one that’s more interesting. It tries to solve the problem of scrapbooks in orkut by allowing you to “Scrap instantly”. My jibe on the name aside, the desktop application is quite promising. Scrapboy has it’s own community on orkut, but doesn’t seem to have attained it’s popularity potential. Yet. It also seems, like the rest of orkut, to have it’s own problems - it’s owner / maintainer tries to help new users use it, where else, but on his own scrapbook!

Scrapboy is a biggish download - 20 mb plus, but then, that’s prety much the standard size of an installer if you pack the entire Microsoft dot net runtime inside.

Note: I mean “dubious” in the most wholesome, Internetish sort of way. The intent is to jest, and play on a pun, rather than harm.

Orkut scrap helper (link to addon’s page)
The other tool I found happens to be a Firefox addon by Ajay Martin. There’s very little detail on what it does, again a common falling of the more obscure Firefox extensions. Ajay maintains (or used to, at least) a LiveJournal weblog here.

I don’t have much more to say about the extension, will update here when I use it a little more.

Update: Orkut ScrapEasy (addon download page)
Just found another tool made by Karthik Veeramani. I’ve not tested it but it does seem to work, at least from the comments on the Firefox addons site. Karthik’s also made a ScrapEasy Greasemonkey script, you’ll need to install Greasemonkey first, for that.

My thoughts
I’ve been somewhat of an avid follower of the evolution of social networks and online social intellectual property based communities and I’ve never really been able let go of the feeling that orkut is probably quite confusing a place for new users. People join up when invited by friends and then spend enough time to satisfy their need for vanity (or their need to tell others what they think about themselves) by filling in the comprehensive profiling area in orkut. Then it’s pretty much a submitting of scraps routine. There really is not much more to do, on orkut. Apart from playing inane games (comment-on-previous-poster’s-avatar and other combinations) that is. I would think that over all this time, a lot more possible activities would have sprung up on orkut. In comparison with other social networks, which allow users to maintain their own “spaces” among other gimmickery, orkut is quite restrictive and at times, unpredictable.

Throughout it’s history, orkut has had it’s bad patches. First there was a spate of flood bots, then the javascript wars took over. Then the hoaxes to get everyone to change their nationality.

I’ve observed that social networks that have some sort of API and openness tend to flourish more - Flickr is a shining example of this. The amount of applications, and the places and methods people use Flickr is really surprising. Heck, even I wrote a flickr desktop gadget myself, along with Apurva.

orkut, though, steadfastly refuses to open it’s doors to general public - it remains member-invite only. The lack of any sort of API (at least on cursory examination) and infrequent updates to functionality are another problem in my opinion.

If any of these tools succeed in their mission to enable people to both read and post to scrapbooks and forums in communities quickly and easily, and attain sufficient popularity, orkut will have quite a few problems if it maintains it’s stance. Load, for one. Usability, for another. Imagine what it’d be like to use the basic orkut interface if the scrapbook view became similar to a chatlog, that too a one-sided one, for a really large number of users. The casual or new orkut user would be even more confused than he currently gets when he uses the site.

I would view that failure to be systemic in impact. Failure to evolve and adapt spells sure doom in the current online social world.

My point?
I’d be quite a lot more inclined to use these tools if I thought that orkut had anything to offer for me apart from the casual old acquaintaince dropping by to say “Hi!”. You might derive more benefit than me, of course. Do try out these tools if you do.

Recently I had the pleasure of acquiring the “Ultimate” edition of the Terminator 2 DVD. Now this is something else.

This DVD features an amount of extended footage that is really, really astonishing to see.

The total running time of the extended movie is 156 mins, that’s nearly 2 and a half hours!

There are a whole lot of bonus features in the DVD as well, including
documentaries, director commentaries, etc. But you can go and read
about them on the back of the DVD cover - I won’t stress on these at
all. Everybody else does that.

What I will stress on, in great detail in fact, is the whole lot of footage which never made it to the theatrical release.

A discourse on Movie Making
First, a discourse on movie making, though. And the business. Feel free to skim through this if you’re not really interested in the background.

Most movies rarely, if ever, reflect the director’s complete original vision of the movie. Any movie gets this whole lot of impact from various other factors. Censors, for one. The censor certification that is awarded to a movie has a *huge* potential impact on the revenue generated by it.

And let’s face it, people. Movie-making and showbusiness on the whole, just like any other business *must* make money. And if the censorship body goes ahead and gives a movie like Terminator 2 a “R” rating or even the ultimate restricted one, the dreaded NC-17 rating, a huge chunk of target audience won’t get to see the movie in the movie hall, the intended place for you to watch. Yes, the kids, teenyboppers and the teenagers, *all* of whom don’t get to watch it. No matter what you do with your home system, you and your entire buying might cannot match the performance that you’ll get even in the crappiest theatre as compared to your cutesy teeny bopper home theater system. All apologies to you if you own one of these
.

Alright. On with the extended scenes, already!

Some of the scenes that were removed are so essential to the main story it leaves me wondering how we ever “got” the original story at all. Anyways, here’s the list of extended footage that I found on the DVD. Your mileage may vary but if it does you’ll be seeing more, not less.

One word of caution. If you are actually going to get the DVD (I’ve listed some options at the bottom) then I suggest you skim over the spoilers and buy it straight away. The cinematic experience of seeing these for the first time, embedded right into the story of the main movie was quite overwhelming / exhilarating.

And so I must put up my standard SPOILER WARNING! ! ! ! Do NOT read beyond this point if you wish to enjoy the movie. Really.

The list
#1 Sarah and Kyle dream sequence: Kyle Reese actually comes and talks to Sarah and reminds her that “The future is not set”. He goes on to tell her that her son (John) is in danger and she must protect him. Kyle disappears, Sarah runs after him only to find herself exiting the building into the familiar park fence nightmare scene.

#2 T1000 searches John Connor’s room: I’m not particularly sure of this, but I don’t really recall the liquid metal terminator searching John’s room and finding his hidden box of information and photos on his Mom.

#3 T800 brain opening sequence: When the Terminator (T800) and John rescue Sarah from the asylum they ultimately land up in a garage where they rest for the night. Before resting, in the movie, the Terminator fixes wounds on Sarah and she reciprocates. That’s where the scene ends in the theatrical release. In this version, John asks the terminator if he can “learn” new things. T800 replies by saying that he has a neural net “learning” processor, but Skynet shuts off the learning programming before sending Terminators out on the field. Then there is surreal sequence where Sarah peels off a section of the T800’s scalp, and with step-by-step instructions from the Terminator himself, proceeds to remove his CPU. What happens next is even better. But I’m not telling. Go buy the DVD.

#4 Terminator training, John Connor style: John befriends the T800. We saw small parts of this in the theatrical release. All of you are now required to exclaim most emphatically, “Astalavista, Baby!” and “No Problemo!”.

What you didn’t see is small scenes (microscenes?) from the footage where there’s even more of these. John tries to teach the Terminator how to smile. That particular scene is hilarious!

#5 Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson’s explanation: Dr. Dyson is at the finishing stages of developing a prototype of the copy of the neural net processor (from the original movie). There’s a whole, long scene where his wife gets a full explanation from Dyson, telling her in detail of what his vision of the processor is, and why he’s trying to build it. This scene added a whole lot of perspective “humanness” to the Dyson character that was not present in the original release. Feels all the more endearing when Dyson, in a desperate attempt to atone for sins he’s not yet done, takes his own life in a huge C4 explosion in his Cyberdyne office.

Microscenes!

But that’s not it! I’ve only put down the long scenes that I do happen to figure out. Throughout the movie one can find these microscenes that were cropped out during final editing. Together these add up to quite a lot of footage.

This includes:
Gore: All the fights in the movie are more elaborate. Take the example of when Sarah knocks out the guard with a broken off broom stick. You’ll see a spray of blood that was just not visible in the theatrical release. A must see for the hard-core / cult enthusiasts.

Snippets of extra footage in the scene where John and T are checking out weapons in Enrique’s mexican hideout.

Snippets of extra footage in Cyberdyne systems

T1000 screwing up footage: T1000’s hand gets stuck to a railing and  his feet get deformed in the metal foundry in the ending climax. The “stuck” parts take on the color of railing and metal floor as well.

A lot more detailed Terminator fight scenes: All the Terminator fight scenes are much more detailed (and gory) than the theatrical release. The scene where the T1000 takes out the T800’s main power source in the climax is particularly detailed and much longer.

“I need a vacation”: Some parts are dedicated to the whole “learning” Terminator bit. The terminator (T800) tries to smile, it ultimately cracks jokes like “I need a vacation” after killing off the T1000. I think these were rightly removed, since they provide too much and too out-of-place comic relief to the whole movie.

The Alternate ending
Ah yes, we come to the alternate ending, the one thing that not a lot of people know about Terminator 2. After the Terminator (T800) kills himself, there’s a whole flash-forward scene where John Connor is grown up and playing with his kid in a park (the same park?) while Sarah watches. And narrates her conclusion, in which she says that the nuclear war never happened and they lived happily ever after. Or thereabouts.

Why was this scene eliminated completely? Ever heard of this movie called Terminator 3? How would that get made then, hmmm……?

How do you get it?
Hmm……. I don’t think you should hesitate. Just go for buying it straight from Amazon. They’ve got several copies at different prices, the cheapest one was only 4 dollars and change, last time I checked.

UK residents could also buy from Shop UK.

The Indians seem to pretty much be stuck with buying the VCD on ebay.in. No wonder there’s so much BitTorrent and eDonkey activity on the Internet. But I digress. The Indian option seems to pretty much still be restricted to going to the local DVD wallah and begging him to get it for them. Or the cousin/friend in the US can help. Or you can go ahead and buy from Amazon. Like the rest of the world.

Incidentally, Ebay.in has Terminator 3 DVDs available!

What else can you get?
Not done shopping yet?

Even more goodies available for you!

Buy.com is accepting pre-orders for the Blu-Ray version.

Entertainment Earth sells a life size endoskeleton T800 arm.

StuffKidsLike.com sells an 8″ tall beautiful resin doll of the T800 as well.

My Conclusion
A must have for every memorabilia / collectors showcase, this particular DVD is not to be missed.

Highly recommended.