Luyi Chen’s blog

I am helping Stanford ATI to do fellow recruitment this year. In this post I will dump some information about the program, so I can link to this from other places later.

What is Stanford ATI?

ATI is a student organization in Stanford. Accompanied by a course in enigeering school, ATI sends out 6 to 8 students to Asia companies do global internship every year in summer since 1999. They also select the same ammount of local students to help Stanford students to finish their overseas programs.

Local students will team with Stanford students to attend summer internship and help with the annual conference. This is an oppertunity for local students to cooperate with foreign students and learn how to do an overseas program.

Who am I?

My name is Chen Luyi. I am graduating PhD student in SJTU. I am one of the ATI co-directors in Shanghai this year. I will be responsible for seeking qualified local students and help them perform well in the program. I was an ATI fellow two years ago.

How to apply?

This is not a job recruitment. So a formal resume is not necessary. But if you send me, I will read it carefully. What’s more, I would like you to write a short application letter including the following points:

1. What’s you unique qualification? This is important to standing out from your peers and forming the teams afterwards.
2. Do you have any experience to show us that you have great understanding of entrepreneurship and full of ideas? We want you to provide more details in this section.
3. Please describe a new idea about anything, for example a new web2.0 startup or anything else. I would like to know how you refine your ideas. So it doesn’t have to be a finished proposal. Only some analysis is enough.
4. Tell me what have you learned about ATI and its history. Yes, I know we haven’t prepare a good homepage for you. But if you want to join us, you should collect some information about the program first. There are lots of tools out there, like google and technorati, etc. After you have done these homework, and you still want to join. Great, welcome!

The application to me is limited to SJTU students. We will select 2 students from SJTU this year. (My email is lychen@sjtu.edu.cn)

Where to get more information?

ATI home http://www.stanford.edu/group/ati/
My unofficial thoughts http://www.chenluyi.com
Forum http://groups.google.com/group/ati2006sjtu

So any open question should post to ati2006sjtu group. Before you post, please search old posts first.

Disclaimer: What I wrote about ATI in my blog only represent my personal thoughts. They are not official annoucement from Stanford ATI.

Thanks to Matthew. I’v got my personalized megite page here. This is made from my bloglines subscriptions. So they should be what’s hot in my reading list.

As my first glance, there’re some posts from blogs that never updated, like some from TechEd blog. Megite shows these posts are from 4 hours ago, but actually they are months old. Because they never show up in bloglines, I haven’t removed these feeds. But never mind, let’s keep watching. I believe this is a one time problem.

I haven’t checked TailRank for a few months. But I recently found some big changes in the service. I cannot tell whether these changes attract me now. I just log them for further investigation.

1. Tailrank doesn’t try to recommend new post for individual. Rather they try to filter out good posts from you own subscriptions. The old local view url still works, but it’s missing from the homepage. So users are not encouraged to use them.
2. Tailrank looks more like memeorandum now. It has cutted most of the features since the beginning. These feature includes the social view, blog recommendation, user promotion etc. More earlier, there’s even a wikipedia filter.
3. The import feature is improved. Now users can import individual weblogs. But there’s no easy way for user to add weblogs from Tailrank homepage directly. Even after following the source link of the weblog, I didn’t find anything like an add button.

These are significant changes. There’re also many small ones as well. The speed of the service is still a problem.

Steve Rubel said Tailrank’s index is better than memeorandum. Maybe I should try to do some link search with Tailrank later.

update: Robert Scoble says, “Cause I don’t want more stuff coming at me. I have my 840+ feeds for that. I want a tool to see what bloggers are finding important and so far Memeorandum is better for me.” This seems that Tailrank is going the right way. They are trying to be a good filter, rather than bring more stuff to readers.

According to this page, Gmail chat only works under http currently, although it will support https going forward. That’s why I never saw this feature tuned on in my account.

update: It’s available over https now.

Today I got an invitation to Ma.gnolia. It looks like an online bookmark with rich social network support. After reading the about page, it seems it’s another supporter of people powered search.

It has bookmarklet. So you can save links directly into your Ma.gnolia account. There’s also a greasemonkey script to add links from del.icio.us.

It’s difficult to test a link service when you don’t have many links in your account. What if link services can synchronize with each other. Then they can fight based on feature not link and user base.