Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The main item on our first full day in Italy was a guided tour of the Vatican. As I said earlier, our hotel was close to all the tourist spots of Rome, so we walked to the Vatican. Along the way, we stumbled upon an obscure, easy to miss church. Even that had such beautiful art on the walls and ceiling as well as mosaics. It would turn out to be a preview of the excellence of Italian art during all our trip.   Our group guide (about 10-12 people) was a part-time archaeologist. She pointed out that the Vatican is a separate country, not a part of the “ Republic of Italy” (I’d see that Italians everywhere take pride that since ancient times , they’ve been a republic, not a monarchy). The guides give everyone a radio receiver and earphones so you can hear the guide in crowded, noisy places even if you wander off or fall behind.   Right before going to the main part of the Vatican, our guide stopped us at an open area, and pulled out some chart paper sized prints of diffe...

In case you don’t know what hashtags (symbol: #) are used for on Twitter, read this paragraph; but if you know what they are, move on to the next paragraph. Hashtags were created by Chris Messina in 2007 as a way to “tag” a tweet as being about a particular topic or event. Tagging this way then makes search easy. It is left to users to use the hashtag appropriately because indiscriminate usage would just garble everything up. An example of hashtags are used is: “The growth of #socialmedia has been exponential”. Ok, so now onto the topic of this blog. When we talk about the old meeting the new, I don’t think anyone had in mind the Vatican combining indulgences (an indulgence is what the Church sold granted to Catholics to reduce the time they spent in purgatory; or in Monopoly lingo, a Get Out Of Hell Free card) with Twitter. So how does it work? The Vatican announced that one of the ways to get an indulgence now includes following the Pope on Twitter! Imagine that: this is ...