Getting Things Done Wallpapers for Desktop and Mobile Phones

Love GTD? Make that your desktop or mobile phone background so you always remember the core principles of GTD.

Stefanos Karagos has created some beautiful wallpapers for fans of David Allen's Getting Things Done workflow. They are available for the desktop or the iphone here.

  

Some more motivational desktop backgrounds by Stefanos are available here.

The wallpapers are done in MindManager, Photoshop and PowerPoint. If you have a copy of MindManager, you can download the mindmap version here.

Related: Download Windows Vista Wallpapers

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For Start-Ups Who Want Some Positive Review on TechCrunch

It's a fact that a review on TechCrunch can really make or break Web 2.0 startups.

To win a positive (or even neutral) review on TechCrunch, you just don't need to build a solid product, you should also pray to God that TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington is in some good mood while he's blogging about you.

Here's what Mike told PC Magazine recently - "sometimes I wake up and I'm in a pissed off mood and I trash a company. You're never going to do that when you have an editorial process. And while maybe that's unfair to the company, it adds a little bit of color and flavor to what we do, which I think engages the readers so far. "

TechCrunch is no doubt an influential online publication but it's still very much a personal blog.

PC Magazine [via apscout] Picture Credit: Chesh

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Firefox Running Slow? Make It Fast Again Without Re-Installation

Problem: You cannot imagine life without Firefox but over time, your favorite browser keeps getting slower and slower.

Not only is it slow, Firefox sometimes hangs for no reason, consumes a large amount of memory and CPU usage can climb to 90% or more when you have multiple tabs open simultaneously.

You have uninstalled most of the extensions and toolbars, deleted all the cookies and internet temporary files, cleared up the file download queue and disabled the background check for software updates - but none of this has helped you speed-up Firefox.

Solution: This is a common problem especially if you have been running Firefox for some time - I don't know why Firefox slows down but here's a small trick to rejuvenate the aged copy of Firefox without doing a fresh install.

Step 1: Start Firefox and export your bookmarks as a file on your hard-drive (we'll need them later).

Step 2: Type firefox.exe - P in the Run box of Windows. (see screenshot)

Step 3: Click the Create Profile button without making any modifications to your existing profile (which is normally called "default")

Now when you Start Firefox in the new profile, you are very likely to be impressed with the speed. You can import the bookmarks that you saved in Step 1. If you have made any changes to the Firefox Dictionary, copy the persdict.dat word list file from the old profile folder to the new one.

Yes, there won't be any old Firefox add-ons in the new profile but the browser will be extremely quick and won't hog the CPU - just the way you want Firefox to run on your computer.

And if you ever need to revert to the old profile, just type Firefox -P again and click the old profile. Nothing is lost.

Some more Firefox Tips and Tricks:

» Tweaks for Firefox Search Bar
» Firefox Extensions That You Thought Were Safe
» Fixes for Firefox Memory Problems

This article is written by Amit Agarwal, a professional blogger and technology columnist. You can subscribe to Digital Inspiration feeds here

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Add Picture Frames to Your Digital Photos Online

flauntR is a new web based image editor - extremely fast and works in the browser. It's layout looks no different from any desktop based software.

While the basic image editing features in FlauntR are no different from other online image editing tools, what impressed the most are the variety of photo frames, textures and light effects that you can apply to digital images in a click.

These small but very creative effects suddenly make your boring photos look very interesting.

Related: Photoshop Express, Add Border Effects to Photos

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Tumblr Bookmarklet for WordPress Blogs; Post Stuff Quickly

Tumblr is probably the easiest and fastest way to publish blog posts online - select anything on the current web page (be it text, video or pictures) and they will be on your Tumblelog almost instantly via the Tumblr Instant Post Bookmarklet.

Unfortunately, that quick posting bookmarklet can only be used for publishing on Tumblr.com - there's no way to integrate Tumblr with your existing WordPress or Blogger Blog.

However, here's some good news for WordPress bloggers - there's a new Tumblr inspired bookmarklet for WordPress that allows you to quickly post photos, videos and blocks of text from web pages to your WordPress blog just like Tumblr. See Screenshot:

You install the Tumblr Quick Post plugin like any other WordPress plugin and it will provide you a bookmarklet that you can add to the browser toolbar.

When you click the Quickpost bookmarklet from any web site, a new window will pop up. The URL of the page you're on, linked with the title of the page, will automatically be transferred to the editor in that window. You can do almost everything you do with the default editor of WordPress and create a new post for your blog.

The only issue is that if you tumblelog a photo on the web, this Quick Post plugin will hotlink to that image - that's different behavior from Tumblr where a copy of the image is uploaded to your Tumblr account.

QuickPost | Developer Home

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Google Warez Search Engine

It takes lot of effort for websites to rank high in Google web search results - you require lot of incoming links, unique content, good reputation and sometimes a decent PageRank as well.

However, warez sites (that illegally distribute pirated software) seem to have discovered a way to trick Google.

Do a search for "adobe cs3 master collection" on Google.com and you'll be so much surprised to know that five out the top ten results on the first page are linking to underground sites. (enlarge the screenshot)

Other than Amazon and CNET, none of the reputable websites that review Adobe software in detail (like PC World, PC Magazine, Photoshop User or Adobe Labs) have managed to score a place on the first page of Google courtesy these warez websites.

And Adobe Creative Suite 3 is probably one of the best selling software - you can easily guess that by looking at the density of Adsense Ads on the search page.

Google may not be the next Baidu but they quickly need to get rid of this spam which is dangerous both for the general visitors and the software companies.

Related: Downloads Adobe CS3 Wallpapers

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Record Skype Calls and SkypeCasts with Skype Recorder

Skype Recorder is a simple tool for recording podcast interviews, skypecasts and voice calls made through Skype as MP3 or Windows Media audio files.

Skype Recorder will start the recording by itself as soon as you start talking on Skype. Once the conversation is over, Skype Recorder will encode the audio recording to your preferred audio format.

It has an in-built audio player, so you can replay your Skype recording immediately and decide whether you want to keep it or just delete it.

Skype Recorder is Windows only and costs ~$14 but you can have it for free in the next 24 hours via GiveAway website here.

Our favorite pick is still Pamela Skype Recorder though the free version will let you record Skype and SkypeOut phone calls upto 15 minutes.

Record Skype Calls - This has more details options for recording skype audio and video conversations.

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Add A Picture To Your LinkedIn Profile; Help People Recognize You

Your work colleagues, old classmates and friends will now have no problems finding you on LinkedIn even if there exist a dozen profiles with the same name as yours.

Starting tomorrow, LinkedIn members will be able to upload a photograph to their profiles. You can control if the photos become visible in your public profile page or just your approved connections can see the picture. Thanks Adam.

Click here to connect with me on LinkedIn.

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Fix for Excel 2007 Calculation Error Coming Very Soon

If you are an Excel 2007 user, try this:

Type =77.1*850 in any cell and press Enter. Excel 2007 would return a value of 100,000 instead of 65,535.

Any combination of numbers that should calculate to 65535 will show 100000 in Excel 2007.

Excel Team says the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel’s memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet.  Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains “=850*77.1”, and A2 contains “=A1*2”, A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070).

I am not sure if that's correct because when I type =B1+1 in the cell C1, I get 100001 and not 65536 as per the official explanation.

Anyway, David Gainer confirmed that this bug was introduced in the Excel 2007 version and a fix for the calculation issue would be available on Microsoft Download Center very soon. It's already under testing.

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Fix Blogger Sitemap XML Warnings Inside Google Webmaster

Though you can easily redirect Blogger Feeds to FeedBurner now, this has a side effect - you will see some warnings when you submit the Sitemaps file (xxx.blogspot.com/atom.xml) to Google Webmaster Tools. (see screenshot)

The following Sitemap warning messages are shown in the Google WebMaster Tools control when using Blogger feeds with FeedBurner:

Line: 2 Invalid XML: too many tags - Too many tags describing this tag.
Line: 2 Incorrect namespace - Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn't properly declare the namespace.

It's like a catch 22 situation - you submit the blogger generated atom.xml file to Google Sitemaps but it's redirected to the FeedBurner feed and that causes invalid XML errors.

Fortunately there's a simple fix - just delete the existing sitemap and submit a new web sitemap that has the following URL:

http://xxx.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false [replace xxx with your blog name]

The secret redirect parameter in blogger feeds will offer you the best of both worlds. You XML Feeds will still be redirected to FeedBurner but for Google Sitemaps, the redirection won't happen at all.

Here's the webmaster console with the new sitemap URL - no warnings anymore though the feed format has changed from RSS to ATOM (that should not bother you).

You can find solutions to most of your FeedBurner problems in our FeedBurner FAQ Guide.

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Microsoft Office 2007 Contacting Server For Information

When you try to copy paste some text from a web page to a Word 2007 document, the application freezes for few seconds and the message in status bar says "Contacting the server for Information. Press ESC to cancel."

This annoying behavior, also present in Outlook 2007 and other Office programs, mostly occurs when the clipboard has HTML formatted content (like when you copy content from a website to the clipboard).

Would anyone know how to get rid of this permanent? Which server is Office 2007 trying to connect when you working in a local environment outside any network.

One of the possible solutions is to do a "Paste Special" (click the down pointing arrow near the Paste Icon) and select "Unformatted Text" instead of the default "HTML format". Or you could have the Scrubber running in the tray that auto converts clipboard text in plain format.

Favorite Microsoft Office Command - Format Painter

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Closed An IE Browser Tab By Mistake? Get It Back Easily

If you accidentally close a tab in Firefox, you can easily retrieve it by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T.

If you do the same mistake in Opera, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Z will help you reopen the most recently closed tab. Or click the Trash icon near the toolbar to see a list of closed tabs arranged in reverse chronological order.

Coming to Internet Explorer, there's no inbuilt feature to restore closed tabs but there's a free add-in called IE7 Open Last Closed Tab that makes your IE 7 behave just like Firefox or Opera.

You can click Alt+X in IE and it will open up the most recently closed tab - the add-in is worth installing because you never know when you may need it. Available at Download.com

Related: Recover Websites if IE Hangs | Add IE 7 Quick Tabs in Firefox

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A Convenient Case For All Your Memory Cards

If you carry multiple Flash memory cards of different formats, the Elecom card reader is a perfect thing for you.

Elecom MR-C12 series has numerous slots for housing a variety of Flash memory cards that may be from your mobile phone, PDA, digital camera or other devices.

As in the figure, the card reader attaches to the computer via USB port so you don't have to worry about slipping the SD Card in the Compact Flash slot or vice versa.

More details on Elecom website. It's currently available only in Japan but others can grab the Kingston MobileLite which is similar though not so sleek as the Elecom thing. Thanks GBM.

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Winners of Screencasting Software Give Away!

Thank you everyone who participated in the software giveaway! - We received 112 responses and deciding the winners was no easy job.

Here’s the list of five winners in no particular order - each of them gets a full licensed version of ALLCapture 2.0 screencasting software from Balesio.

Congratulations and do stay tuned for more such events in the future.

Announcing Winners of Screencasting Software Give Away!

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Automatically Download Satellite Images from Google Maps

Google Maps Image Downloader is a Windows-only tool that lets you auto download satellite images from Google Maps between two locations anywhere in the world.

To use Google Maps Image Downloader, you will first need to specify the latitude and longitude of the two locations on the Google Map, then specify the zoom level and click download.

The software also comes with an image stitching tool that will create a large panorama or a wallpaper by stitching these individual tile images of Google Maps.

You can get the latitude and longitude co-ordinations of any location on Google Map using this tool here.

The free version of Google Images Downloader is limited to a maximum zoom level of 13 so you'll probably miss the high resolution satellite imagery of Google Maps.

Invest $25 bucks only if you're sure that Google Maps Image Downloader isn't violating any of Google Maps policies especially the one that says - "you may not use Google Maps in a manner which gives you or any other person access to mass downloads or bulk feeds of numerical latitude and longitude coordinates."

Available at aaaasoft.com.

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Embed Flickr Photostreams in Web Pages as a Flash Slideshow

Want to display Flicks photos in web pages as a Flash slideshow? Look no further than PictoBrowser.

Here's a sample Flickr Photo slideshow generated just using PictoBrowser - all the pictures are displayed as thumbnail images in the lower navigation bar, you can also read the descriptions of individual images by hovering the mouse over the thumbnail.

To get started, you type your (or someone else's) Flickr user name and then select the tags or photo sets that you would like to embed in web pages. The default dimensions of the Flash slideshow is 500x580 but you are free to customize that as in the case above.

It's so good and impressive that Yahoo! should consider making PictoBrowser a native feature of Flickr. For geeks, there's another method for creating Flickr Slideshows.

Related: Flickr Photo URLs Demystified

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Say Cheese - This Sony Digital Camera Clicks Only Smiling Faces

Say Cheese else the new Sony cameras won't capture your photographs.

These affordable Cyber-shot DSC-T Series cameras have a special "Smile Shutter" mode that can recognize facial expressions like smiles, grin or a hearty laugh.

If there are several subjects in the frame, you can specify the smiling face that you want to take as the main subject - or let the Smile Shutter choose the main subject and take the picture.

The 8-megapixel, DSC-T70 and DSC-T200 Cyber-shot cameras won't lets you click until the selected subject smiles. Watch video.

Related: Lose Weight With HP Digital Camera

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Amanda Congdon - The Perfect Match for Mobuzz TV

Amanda Congdon, the famous vlogger who joined ABC News after her split with Rocketboom, is now moving out of ABC as well.

There are two versions of the story - some say that Amanda has been let go by ABCNews.com while Amanda says that she herself decided not to continue at ABC as she is taking up a new digital project after her ABC contract expires.

The excellent MobuzzTV, an English video blog similar to RocketBoom, are also looking for an anchor ever since the departure of Karina Stenquist. Susan Hickey then stepped in but for a very brief period. The most recent episodes were anchored by Anil De Mello who is infact the producer of the show.

[Imagine Andrew Baron acting in Rocketboom while Joanne Colan is away]

Am not sure about the latest assignment of Amanda but MobuzzTV looks like a perfect place for her. The show is massively popular (Alexa says that MobuzzTV has a higher reach on the web than RocketBoom) and the format is quite similar to what Amanda has been doing for years - it's a short 2-3 minute tech video produced daily.

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Password Protect Hyperlinks Before You Share Them Via Email

A lot of companies read emails sent by their employees. If you are also worried that someone in your office may be secretly reading your email messages, here's something you can do to at least prevent the email snoopers at work from visiting links (URLs) that you share in your emails - use a password.

HideLinks is an online service that helps you password protect any web URL easily. You type in the URL and a password - HideLinks will then generate a new wrapper URL that you can pass in the email message.

The email recipients (or the snooper) will have to type the same password in order to visit the actual website.

Just make sure you don't put the password in the same email message as that will defeat the whole purpose.

HideLinks hidelinks.com can also be used to shorten the length of hyperlinks similar to TinyURL or URLTea.com.

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Create Videos from Photos and Screen Captures - QlipBoard

QlipBoard is free application that lets you create movies from photos and screenshot images. The interesting part is that QlipBoard has an in-built screen capture feature and voice recorder.

The images (or screen captures) appear in the timeline of QlipBoard (like most other video editors) so you just have to drag-n-drop to change the position of any image frame in the timeline. Further, you can easily record voice narrations, annotate or add text to images.

And all your pen highlighter movements over the screenshot are recorded as part of the movie itself - so as you speak and move the cursor pen over the image, the exact movements are captured by Qlip Board.

You may think of QlipBoard as a blend of Microsoft Photostory ^# and SnagIt. The free version of QlipBoad is supported by advertising.

Overall, the software interface is not very intuitive but the application is still useful for creating screencast movies, photo slide shows or for annotating images.

Get QlipBoard at www.qlipmedia.com [Thanks Murali at Hindu]

Related: Turns Boring Video Clips & Still Pictures into Movies

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When You Click An Adsense Ad On Your Own Website by Mistake

What is the first thing you would do if you accidentally clicked your own Adsense ads that are displayed on your website?

As an honest Adsense publisher, you are likely to send an email to Google Adsense support with the URL of the web page where you clicked your own ads and probably the reason (like the mouse was so sluggish).

Yes, it's important that you don't click your own Google Ads else there's an element of risk that Google may disable your Adsense account but do not get too worried if the click was made due to an error.

Here's a standard response from Adsense support when publishers make honest confessions:

Thanks for letting us know about the clicks on your ads. We appreciate your honesty and your efforts to keep your account in good standing.

Although publishers are not permitted to click on their own ads for any reason, we do understand that accidental clicks may occur, so we don't require that you contact us every time you click on your ads.

It further says - If you were clicking your ads out of interest or to see who was advertising on your site, we suggest the AdSense preview tool as an alternative. This tool will allow you to check the destination of ads on your page without the risk of generating invalid clicks.

AdSense Publisher support team also says - "Because we closely monitor all account activity using engineering systems and thorough human analysis, chances are we've already detected your clicks on your ads and discounted them. While these clicks still show in your reports, we filter out their associated earnings so that advertisers aren't charged."

Related: Online Adsense Preview Tool

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A YouTube Download Manager Similar to Real Video Player 11

 

Some may recall the Real Player 11 software [review] that lets you download streaming web videos in a click. When you are watching a video on say YouTube, Real Player 11 adds a "Download this video" hover button near the video player - you just have to click this button to initiate the video download process.

Orbit Downloader is a free download manager that not only offers a similar approach as Real Player 11 but also extends it to Flash Animation movies, audio files and other media content embedded in web pages. And Orbit works with practically all web browsers including Maxthon and Opera.

As you see in the screen capture above, Orbit adds a small button when you hover the mouse over the YouTube player - click that button to download the video or song to your hard drive. And since Orbit is a full fledged download manager, it can make multiple connections to the same file so it can download faster.

Not just YouTube or Yahoo! videos, Orbit can be used with MySpace music, Pandora or even Rapidshare files. It also supports the RTSP and MMS protocols so you can try grabbing those programs on BBC and CNN.

www.orbitdownloader.com | download.com

Related: Easiest Way to Download YouTube Videos

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Is Your Computer Connecting To Websites Without Your Knowledge

If you are worried that some programs on your PC are secretly making connections to websites in the background, here's a quick tip that uses a simple DOS command to detect and prevent such suspicious activity:

1. Type cmd in your Windows Run box.

2. Type "netstat -b 5 > activity.txt" and press enter. After say 2 minutes, press Ctrl+C.

3. Type "activity.txt" on the command line to open the log file in notepad (or your default text editor)

The file activity.txt will have a log of all process that made a connection to the Internet in the last two minutes. It will also show which process connected to which website in this time. And not just the web browsers (like iexplore.exe or opera.exe), the log will also show your IM clients, download managers, email programs or any software that requires a net connection.

Scroll though the activity.txt file and look for any process names or website addresses that you are not aware of. If you track one , go to the task manager (or Process Explorer) to find the location of the executable on your computer and eliminate it.

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Microsoft Releases Office 2003 SP3; Slipstream Your Installer CD

Microsoft today released Service Pack 3 for Microsoft Office 2003 (link).

The service pack includes all patches and updates released for Microsoft Office 2003 since SP2. Some notable changes include:

1. Office 2003 programs can no longer open or save certain file formats like PPT created in PowerPoint 97 or before.

2. The Fast Save setting in Microsoft Office Word has been removed.

Here's a guide to slipstream SP2 into your Office 2003 installation CD - the procedure to slipstream SP3 into Office 2003 should be similar though the file names will be different. [the installer is Office2003SP3-kb923618-FullFile-enu.exe]

No new feature is introduced in Office 2003 SP3 expect that it now lets you install add-ins in Microsoft Office Access 2003 on a Windows Vista-based computer.

Once your Office 2003 files are successfully patch with SP3, the version numbers of major executables like Excel.exe, WinWord.exe, PowerPoint.exe should say 11.0.8169.0 while that of Msaccess.exe will be 11.0.8166.0.

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pfingo - Get an International Phone Number With FAX, Voicemail..

pfingo is a new service that provides a personal phone number for you to make (or receive) phone calls from a PC (or Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone) to any landline or mobile phone number in the world.

You just have to install a small software called pfingoTALK softphone (see screenshot) onto your computer or mobile phone.

Other than talk, the pfingoTALK client lets you send or receive SMS message using the computer, the voicemails reach you as .WAV files in email and you can also send and receive faxes from the computer.

If there're any missed calls, you will be notified via email and an SMS.

pfingo provides a Singapore based number (3-series), but if you have clients or friends in UK, US or Australia, you can get a fixed-line number of that country and friends can therefore reach you at local rates without paying international charges.

While the subscription charges are around 60 cents per month, you can use it for 6 months without paying any fee.You get a free number and can accept incoming calls from any other number in the world. You can also make unlimited outgoing calls to other pfingoTALK numbers for free.

I have been trying pfingoTALK softphone since March this year under a closed test and it has left me impressed - the voice quality is at par with other VoIP clients like Skype or Yahoo! Messenger and calls get through almost instantly. www.pfingo.com

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Create A Tag Cloud Based On The Content of Your Blog or Website

Tag Clouds, you have seen them on delicious, Technorati or Flickr, are an easy way to get people explore your site deeper. Here's a sample tag cloud that uses Google AJAX Search.

Tag Clouds (provided they are not cluttered and display just the relevant words) help visitors quickly visualize what your website is all about since the topics you frequently cover are mentioned in bold or relatively bigger fonts.

WordPress community already offers some excellent plugins for generating tag clouds (like the Ultimate Warrior) plus the upcoming release, WP 2.3, has inbuilt support for tagging.

However, if you are on Blogger or have a non-blog website, there's no reason that you should miss Tag Clouds.

Here's how to add a good looking tag cloud to your Blogger blog:

1. Type your Blogger feed address in RainMaker 

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xyz/posts/default?max-results=999

Remember to replace xyz with your Blog ID. This URL will retrieve your latest 999 posts and supply that for analysis to RainMaker.

2. For the word link, type the following (where xxx is your blog name, e.g. labnol)

http://xxx.blogspot.com/search?q=%%enc_word%%

3. You can change the default font size, tag cloud dimension background image and colors to fit your site theme.

4. Now the tricky part. Once you have generated the tag cloud using RainMaker, right click over your tag cloud and click "View HTML source" - that the code you need to copy paste in your site.

Tip for Tag Clouds - If you really want visitors to spend more time on your site via Tag Clouds, always keep the number of words in Tag Cloud to an absolute minimum and that there is sufficient space around each word.

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New York Times Makes TimesSelect Available Without Subscription

Good News. New York Times has decided to break the subscription firewall and provide TimesSelect content for free. If you are a paying TimesSelect subscriber, you will receive a prorated refund.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Times columnist Thomas Friedman had earlier criticized TimesSelect saying "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it’s cut me off from a lot, a lot of people, especially because I have a lot of people reading me overseas, like in India ... I feel totally cut off from my audience."

Thank NYT. Request your web design team to consider removing the double-click feature as well.

Related: Read Wall Street Journal Premium Content for Free

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Google Docs Adds Web Based Version of PowerPoint 1.0

Google today launched a "very basic" PowerPoint clone that lets you create Presentations inside the web browser. Other than creating presentations from scratch, you can also upload your existing PPT and PPS slideshows into Google PowerPoint.

The new Google tool, which surprising doesn't have any name (they call it Google Docs presentations feature), is available at documents.google.com or can also be accessed from docs.google.com. It's also available for Google Apps customers.

Microsoft PowerPoint is celebrating it's 20th birthday this year but should the Redmond giant lose sleep with Google making inroads into the Presentation arena. Probably not because Google is more focused on building a tool that eases delivery of presentations online, not creating them.

The winning feature in Google PowerPoint is integration with Google Talk - while you are delivering a live presentation online, the presenter and attendees can text chat in real time via Google Talk.

Google provides no option to embed PowerPoint slideshows in web pages. You can export a presentation to zipped HTML but that functionality is broken as of now.

Related: A Real Contender for Google PowerPoint

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Did Google Relax Rules for Mahalo To Join Premium Adsense Club

Mahalo is now a premium Adsense publisher meaning they get permission from Google to display custom Ad formats on their web pages among other benefits.

Related: Premium Adsense publisher privileges

Normally, Google invites only those websites to the Adsense Premium club that average more more than 20 million page views a month. If Mahalo has managed to cross that number in such a short span of time, hats off to Jason Calacanis.

There are, however, some doubts. For instance, TechCrunch of Michael Arrington averages around 4 million page views a month and he is no Premium Adsense Publisher. Same holds good for Pete Cashmore of Mashable though he gets even more traffic that TechCrunch.

   

Is Mahalo getting 4x the monthly traffic of Mashable or TechCrunch? While Mahalo web stats are not public, the Alexa and Compete graphs paint a very different picture (click to enlarge)

As per Alexa or Compete, Mahalo may not be anywhere near the "20 million a month" - that make one wonder what made Google present them the Adsense Premium Crown? Did Google relax the minimum qualification criteria for Adsense or is Mahalo really getting that high traffic? If yes, maybe it's time for us to stop referring to Alexa and Compete altogether.

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Want to do More With Firefox? Get The New HyperWords

Say you are reading a blog or website inside Firefox and encounter some name (or an unknown term) that you would like to explore deeper.

You will probably visit Wikipedia to read more about that person and search Flickr or Google Images for some photos. And if the text on the webpage is not in your native language, you'll copy paste that into Babel or Google Translate.

Is that the way to work on the internet ? Well, that's a perfect approach but a bit inefficient. Enter HyperWords that lets you do all this and more without you having to visit any other site - the information will be fetched right in your current webpage with a simple click.

With HyperWords, you can select any plain text on the web page and do some amazing things - say you choose Flickr or Google Images from the context menu and it will show you the best matching picture in the menu itself. Same for Wikipedia entries.

The best part is about translation - you select a text and HyperWord will do inline translation meaning the actual text on the webpage will be replaced with the translate version. And it's fast.

If you have never heard of HyperWords for Firefox before, download it now and you'll love it. If you are an old HyperWords fan, get the new version 3.0 which is still in beta but adds some very useful features.

Sorry IE and Opera users, you'll miss this. Watch the HyperWords demo video below and visit HyperWords.net to install the extension.

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More Ways to Upload Presentations & PDF Files to Slideshare

SlideShare, an online service for hosting PowerPoint and PDF documents, has registered an extremely impressive growth ever since its debut last year. (see this recent Alexa snapshot)

Related: Comparison of PowerPoint Hosting Services

SlideShare have added some new email+web based options for uploading PDF and PPTs that makes the service all the more attractive.

For instance, if you want to move your presentations from Scribd to SlideShare, just type their URLs here and SlideShare will automatically make a copy in your SlideShare account.

[Like Scribd, Slideshare also lets you upload Presentations anonymously.]

Another addition is the email based uploader (a similar feature exists in Google Docs). You just have to send the presentations as email attachments to a specified address for uploading them onto SlideShare.

Wishlist - Now that Slideshare has bulk upload, they may consider adding another feature that allows members to download multiple presentations in a batch.

Related: Upload PDFs to Scribd Directly from the Web

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Adsense Referrals - How to Pick Relevant Products That Convert

Unlike the regular Adsense ads (CPC or CPM)where Google automatically picks relevant ads based on the content, Adsense Referrals (CPA) require some effort on the part of Adsense publishers because they have to manually select products from the vast Adsense inventory that is changing almost everyday.

How do you find the Adsense Referral Ads that are likely to become popular among your visitors ?

I have been using the Adsense Referrals (Text Links) program (here, here and here) for over a month now and have had an overall positive experience so far. Here are a few simple things that I learned in the process and they may even help you improve earnings from the Adsense Referrals program:

Step 1: When generating code for your Adsense Referrals, pick the categories / products that are most relevant to your readers (for my case, categories that convert include computer software, Internet, Online Communities, Photos and Video products.)

Step 2: Check the option that says "Pick best performing ads" but refrain from using Image only ads in Referrals as that is very likely to impact the performance.

Step 3: Run the campaign on your site for around a week. Then open the Advanced Reports from your Adsense Dashboard and make the following selections - Referrals (in product), "Last 7 Days" (in date range) and Product Data (in Show).

As shown in the screenshot below, display this Adsense Referrals report grouped by Products (or both Date and Products) so you know exactly what referrals have worked well for you. You can then recreate your Adsense Referrals code from scratch and this time, just add the products that have performed in the last seven days.

The probability of site visitors getting interested in this filtered set will be much much higher translating into more revenue for you.

This is however not a one time exercise since Adsense Inventory is frequently changing and you may have to fine-tune your Referral campaigns every week for best performance. Read some additional tips on Using Adsense Referrals.

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Google Developing GMail Offline Version Using Google Gears

A report, citing highly placed sources, says that Google has developed an offline version of Gmail that is likely to be made available within this year.  

Like Google Reader which lets you work offline using Google Gears, GMail users will be able to interact with their GMail account even when they don't have an active Internet connection.

This news, that Google is developing GMail Offline, is reported by a prominent Indian newspaper though the Google spokeswoman in India officially denied such a thing.

While it's a definite possibility that Google is working to enable Gmail for Offline access via Google Gears, there are some bits that I will take with a grain of salt.

For instance, the report says that you would have to download a GMail software client for that would automatically synchronize with the Gmail server. Why? Google Gears works inside a web browser and do not require any additional software. Or is Google developing a standalone desktop client for GMail like Outlook. Both the cases look slightly doubtful.

Last month, another newspaper in India reported, citing sources close to Google, that the Google Phone will hit the global market in two weeks time but there has been no development so far. In fact, analysts are denying that Google will release a GPhone since it doesn't fit their business model.

GMail Tip: Powerful GMail Search Commands

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Blogger Play and Bloglines Wall of Images

Blogger Play is a self-running slideshow of photographs recently uploaded on Blogspot blogs. Other than the image, you also get to read a short excerpt of the accompanying blog post and the profile of the blogger. Excellent implementation.

Bloglines offers a similar feature called Image Wall but that's not limited to Blogger Photos - they show recent images from virtually all blogs that are indexed by Bloglines.

A small concern with such projects is that you are never too sure about stuff that may appear on your screen. While Blogger Play is only showing images from blogs that satisfy the SafeSearch criteria, Bloglines Image wall sources images from the entire space and therefore not recommended for family viewing.

Will your photos appear in the Blogger slideshow ? If your blog on Blogger is listed as public, any image you upload to your Blogger account may be added to the Blogger Play queue.

Wishlist - They should offer categories in Blogger Play - say someone wants to see a slideshow of photos that where uploaded on blogspot blogs only related to Gadgets or Cooking or something else. That would make this project all the more interesting.

Related: Create Website Slideshow

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Most Creative Flickr and YouTube Search Engine Ever

oSkope will leave you impressed for sure. It's an extremely innovative online tool to help you browse and search YouTube videos, Flickr photos and more with minimal paging.

When you type a keyword, oSkope pulls thumbnail images of the results and arranges them on the screen like a deck of playing cards spread out on a physical table.

You can click the thumbnails of Flickr Photos or YouTube videos to watch them inline. The thumbnails can be easily in different styles like a stack, pile or plotted as a graph (useful for comparison of price vs Amazon sales rank).

In its beta version, oSkope allows to search for products and images on popular web services like Amazon, Ebay, YouTube or Flickr. More services will be added soon. oskope.com

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How to Extract Pictures from PowerPoint Photo Slideshows

Ques: Your have a PowerPoint presentation (PPT, PPTX or PPS) that contains lot of pictures embedded in the slides. Is there an easy method to save these images out of the presentation ?



As an example, let's take the above PowerPoint presentation that contains unseen aerial photographs of the World Trade Center captured by a military chopper on 9-11.

To extract pictures from the PPT slideshow, all you have to do is export the Powerpoint Presentation as an HTML web page. Choose File -> Save As and select .html from the File Format drop down.

PowerPoint will automatically extract every picture embedded in the PPT file and save it to the local folder. The same technique is also used to extract sound from presentations.

Alternatively, you may choose File -> Save As and choose an image format like JPG or PNG - this will save the entire presentation slides as numbered images.

Related: How to Compress PowerPoint Files

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Make Flowchart Diagrams in the Browser with Draw Anywhere

If Google every wanted to add a Microsoft Visio like flowcharting application to their Google Office suite, they'll have plenty of good options to choose from.

Draw Anywhere is a new web based tool for creating flow charts, org charts and other drawings online. Like the Picnick image editing, DrawAnywhere is done in Flash and sports an extremely responsive interface.

You can either save your Flowcharts online or export the diagrams as images and PDF files. drawanywhere.com

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Let Firefox Turn Off The Computer When All Files Have Downloaded

Say it's midnight and you want to call it a day. But the issue is that you are downloading some huge files from the Internet via Firefox (see screenshot) and at your current internet speed, the download will take another two hours to finish.

You could either cancel the downloads, or leave the computer in running state (forget environment), or just install Auto Shutdown from mozilla.org.

As the name suggest, this extension will turn off the computer automatically as soon as Firefox has downloaded all the pending files in the queue.

If you not using Firefox, try the shutdown command in Windows that will turn off the computer after the given time. For instance, if you want to turn off the computer in next two hours, type the following in Windows Run box:

shutdown -s -t 7200 [7200 = 2 hours]

The Auto Shutdown extension of Firefox internally executes the same command.

Related: Shut Down Your Computer Quickly

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Stretch YouTube Videos To Fit the Browser Window, Better Than Full Screen

You already know about the Full Screen mode in YouTube video player that scales the current video to fill the entire desktop screen.

The one big problem with full screen mode in YouTube player is that you cannot do anything else on the computer while the video is playing - you have the exit the FullScreen before initiating any other task.

 

There's however an excellent alternative to FullScreen and that's about auto resizing the video player to fit the browser window. When you resize the browser window, the dimensions of YouTube Video player will change accordingly.

Here's how you fit the YouTube video in the browser window:

Say a YouTube Video URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4

To watch this clip in a resizable browser window without switching to Full Screen, just rewrite the above URL a http://www.youtube.com/v/vr3x_RRJdd4

In other words, just append the YouTube video ID to this URL www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID and maximize your browser. You can then easily switch to other tabs, open new applications or do anything else while the YouTube clip is still playing in the maximum possible screen area.

[This is in response to a question posted on the forums - "How can I send a YouTube Video so that when the person receives it there will not be any other videos in the sidebars that can be opened." ]

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An Ergonomic Laptop Mouse That Stores Your Files & Documents

Microsoft today unveiled the Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 for your notebook computer. The unique feature of this ergonomic mouse is the USB transceiver that doubles as a 1 GB Flash drive - so you have one less device to carry while on the move and it also frees up an additional USB port on your laptop.

Another improvement over the Wireless 8000 Laser mouse is the charger - earlier they had a separate rechargeable base but with Mobile Memory Mouse 8000, the mouse can be connected using a magnetic cord to the UBS transceiver without requiring a separate power supply. Details here.

Related: Microsoft Desktop 7000 vs Natural Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard

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Why Use Acrobat PDF Writer Instead of Non-Adobe Converters

The marketplace is flooded with non-Adobe PDF writers that promise to convert practically every file format into PDF.

Like Acrobat, you can install these third-party PDF generators [1, 2, 3] as virtual printers and create PDF files from any application that has the Print button. Some services go a step further - you send them a file as an email attachment and they'll mail it back to you as a PDF.

That's not all. WordPerfect and OpenOffice have in-built PDF printers. Microsoft released a free PDF add-in for all popular Office 2007 programs except Outlook. Then there are online suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office that allow you to save documents as PDF inside the browser without requiring any add-in.

When there a zillion Acrobat alternatives for creating PDF, why spend a few hundred dollars for buying a single license of Adobe Acrobat? Rick Borstein of Adobe offers some official reasons [PDF] for using Acrobat PDF software:

1. Adobe supports PDF files opened in the free Adobe Reader only if the PDF was created by an Adobe product.

2. Adobe makes the best, most compact, most accepted PDF files. Clones often don't do everything necessary in all cases to meet court standards.

3. Adobe PDF is structured (tagged) allowing your firm to meet government Section 508 accessibility requirements.

4. Only Adobe allows you to Reader-enable a PDF so that users of the free Adobe Reader can fill and save PDF forms locally for offline use, review, comment or markup, type anywhere in the PDF document using the Typewriter tool and digitally sign PDF documents.

5. New standards around PDF will always appear in Adobe products first. One recent example: PDF/A (PDF for Archive), an ISO standard adopted by the US Federal Court system, the NARA (National Archive and Records Administration), and the Library of Congress as the standard format for archiving digital documents.

6. Adobe offers OCR, creation, watermarks, redaction (delete sensitive or confidential text and images), bates numbering, review, etc. all in one package, not spread across several packages or requiring additional products.

So should you uninstall that free PDF converter and shell out $300 for Acrobat Professional ? Well if you are an enterprise user or in the legal industry or work in teams gathering comments and reviews from colleagues and customers, the answer is mostly yes. ISO has ratified PDF/Archive as the standard for long-term preservation of electronic records

But if you are like most of us and create PDFs for personal use because they retain the formatting and layout or just because PDF files are safe from editing, then the free Acrobat clone in your computer can stay without problems.

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DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement - Sample Template

If you discover your content published illegally on another website without permission or attribution, the first step is to send a polite email to the owner of the website. 

If the website owner fails to respond to your email requesting removal of plagiarized content, it may be time for you to send a formal DMCA letter to his web hosting company and also to his advertising partner(s) (like Google Adsense) that are helping him monetize content which is actually owned by you.

While web hosting firms and online advertising companies will immediately comply to your requests, they will also ask you to send them DMCA notices in a proper format with all the necessary details and proof.

Let's take a fictional case - Mr John Q. Public of www.mycontent.com finds his content on another website called www.copypaste.com.  Following is a Sample DMCA Notice that John can submit to the web host of copypaste.com and also to Google.

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Subject: Notice of Copyright Infringement

The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on www.mycontent.com/page1.html and www.mycontent.com/page2.html

The URLs where our copyrighted material is located include www.copypaste.com/abc.html and www.copypaste.com/xyz.com

You can reach me at myemail@mycontent.com for further information or clarification. My phone number is +1-202-393-3984 and my mailing address is John Q Public, 323, Park Avenue, Willcity 39232 CA.

The email address of the website owner, who has reprinted our content illegally, is alex@copypaste.com.

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

John Q Public
September 11, 2007 [14:50]

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If your DMCA Notification letter meets all the requirements, the web host will expeditiously delete (or ask the customer to remove) that material.

While most web hosting companies will accept your DMCA notices via email, Google (for Blogger and Adsense) requires you to snail mail or fax the DMCA document with your signatures.

As a workaround, you can take a picture of your signature and paste that as in image in the Word Processor. Then you fax the document to Google DMCA department via Skype, Email or online.

More on Online Content Plagiarism.

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