If you exchange a couple of email messages with another GMail user, Google Talk assumes that the person at the other end is a known contact and will automatically add him (or her) to your friends list.
That's the reason why many of us have long list of buddies in Google Talk (watch this video).
If the list has grown too big, try Google Talk bankruptcy - remove all existing friends from Google Talk in one go and make a fresh start.
Google Talk Friends List Getting Out of Hand? Try Bankruptcy
Read review of Camtasia Studio 5 (with screenshots)
TechSmith have just released released Camtasia Studio 5. The software works on Microsoft Windows Windows XP and Vista.
The Camtasia Studio trial is fully-functional and runs for 30 days after installation. A free, 60-day account for Screencast.com is also included in the trial.
Camtasia Studio 5 is quite nicely integrated with the Screencast.com, an online service like YouTube but for sharing screencast videos. Unlike other online video hosting services, Screencast.com retains the original video quality and size of the uploaded screencast.
Internet World Maps - Visualize the popularity of Internet and Social Networking across various countries and continents. The full list includes seven interesting World Maps.
Distractions are always present when using a computer.
For instance, you are watching a YouTube video but hate the desktop screensaver that gets activated every few minutes. Or you are writing an important Excel sheet and suddenly there's a notification in the system tray that says "Your friend Rick is Online" or that "You a new email."
Here's a real scenario - I am writing this blog post in Windows Live Writer and there's Outlook, Google Talk, Firefox in the background all competing for attention.
All these little things make it tough to focus on the task at hand. If you also find yourself in a similar situation and wish you could work on the computer sans distractions, a little utility called Zorro for Windows can help you here.
Get Zorro 1.4 for Windows and stop paying attention to stuff that's not important at that point of time. And similar to Mouse Spotlight, Zorro can be a great help when giving presentations and you want the audience to concentrate on a particular area of the slide or screen. Thanks Martin.
Related: Write Without Distractions
Google is not against text link advertising, they just don't want sites to pass link juice to advertisers. Read Matt's take on the issue:
You want my links for traffic.. totally fine..just don't make it so they affect search engines..so that's why we say use nofollow..or use a redirect which is through robots.txt
Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.
Two months ago, we saw that organic search rankings of a Page Rank 7 website were penalized by Google for selling text links. The ban was quickly lifted (in less than a week) after the site owner removed the paid links.
Now another instance has surfaced where Google penalized the PageRank of a site after detecting paid links.
The Stanford Daily website, which is part of Standford University, was a PR 9 website but with the recent update, Google has dropped the to PR7. The reason, you guessed it right, is paid text links.
Danny Sullivan, who discovered the drop, talked to Google about the issue and Google confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links.
Not just PageRank, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached, to prevent them from ranking well.
Not everyone here may agree with the rules imposed by Google Government but there's no denying that Google is the single largest source of search traffic to most websites today.
By selling paid links on your site (without using nofollow), you may be making money in the short run but once the search rankings and PageRank is penalized by Google, the incoming search traffic and link selling power of your site will dilute anyway.
You may not believe your eyes but the image above is not a photograph, it's just a painting of a non-real person done using airbrush, not Photoshop.
Dru Blair took around 70 hours to paint this beautiful photorealistic image - look at the eyes, skin tones, hair curls.. they look so real.
Dru has the details on how he completed this painting dubbed "Tica" - Photorealism at its best.
Related: Fake or Real Photos
Do you know that 120,000 new weblogs are created worldwide each day. That the most popular blogging language is Japanese, not English. That more than 1.5 million blog posts are published each day.
But things have seriously changed at Technorati this year - Richard Jalichandra is the new Technorati CEO and the last State of the Blogosphere quarterly report was released in April 2007, that's more six months ago.
Now the world (and mainstream media) have no concrete idea about the growth of blogging during this period except that Technorati is currently tracking 108 million blogs - that number was 70 million six months ago.
Anyone in the Technorati Team reading this - please don't break the ritual that Dave has been following since October 2004. The blogging community is eagerly waiting for those green graphs and numbers.
Related: Gaming Technorati Favorites, Understand Technorati Cosmos
