After posting three consecutive 'heavy' articles, let me take a break, and discuss about a lighter issue - Given a pair of socks, which one would you wear on your left/right foot?
Initially, I thought there were no such left and right foot socks, until a friend of mine, asked me how to identify it, couple of years ago!. From that time onwards, I became conscious while wearing the socks, thinking of which one to wear for the right and left foot :) So, one fine day, I consulted our modern-age gurus - Google and Yahoo for answers :)
I started with searches in Google whose results pointed to companies that were manufacturing socks and marketing as "Anatomically designed for left and right foot". I got a few hints, that some companies were making specialized socks for left and right foot, especially for athletes, but otherwise, there is no such concept!. But, when I checked for the same query in Yahoo answers, to my surprise , I found the same question being asked by 2 or 3 users in the past one year!. However, when I went through the answers, to those queries, I was thoroughly confused, as each user had their own opinion, and often contradictory with the previous user, or post!.
So, again I returned to google, rephrased my queries (my first query was left-socks and right-socks; and my final query was "Is there a left-foot sock and right-foot sock") and the initial scanning of the results proved that there were some companies that were making such specially designed socks for athletes, and its there I discovered the phrase "anatomically designed for right and left-foot", and were charging around 9 UK Pounds for a pair of socks!.
The lesson to take-away from this exercise, is that when there are no obvious answers, everyone tries to provide their own answer and adds to your confusion. This could be a factor to the detractors of online social networking. The problem occurs when things are always fuzzy and not obvious, and the chances of even obvious things turning fuzzy may increase, over time, when more people enter the online world and give different and often contradictory suggestions! A simple way to illustrate this is when you try to discover a person, whom you might be knowing already - and you use their name to discover that person say in Facebook or Orkut, you may be staring at a huge list of similar looking names. This might not have been the case, when these sites were in their infancy stages.
