Stumpedia: The human powered search engine

Stumpedia.com is a social search engine that relies on human participation to index, organize, and review the world wide web. The guided search model is dependent on crowdsourcing and the benefits of social media participation.

I don't believe Stumpedia can give more relevant search results than Google or Yahoo!, but it is interesting to see how far this model can go. Stumpedia just released its new feature - Instant Answers, where we can get real people to help us in real time provided there are somebody online.

Earth Day 2008: Eco-friendly logos

Major search engines changed their logo in support of Earth Day.

Google


Yahoo


AOL


And most surprisingly, green Flock browser...


You can download Flock Eco-Edition from here.

Oosah: A hub to manage your online media

Oosah offers free 2 GB online storage space. But it is more than a storage service, it is well integrated with YouTube, Facebook, Picasa and Flickr where you can drag-and-drop a media file from Oosah to the other social network accounts. Basically, it serve as a hub where you can manage all your online media files from one place. The third party integrations reduce the problem of login into multiple accounts and perform various tasks by some degrees.

Another important feature is that, Oosah allows you to share your Oosah-hosted files as a widget which can be embedded into blogs or social network profiles.

Baywords: Uncensored blogging service

Excerpts from Baywords.com:

Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.

I wonder where the service will bring us. Luckily the service does not allow contents that break Swedish laws, so there probably won't be any drug-use, or any illegal activity blogs. But I wonder how people will use this kind of service, so I checked through the list of BayWords blogs, many of blogs are in foreign languages which I don't understand, otherwise, I haven't see anything too weird so far.

The service is powered by WordPress. Since it is just launched last week, it does not have the bells-and-whistles of other blogging platform yet. Nevertheless, Baywords have 10,000 blogs registered within 3 days, eliminating those blogs with only single testing post, I guess number of active blogs are around 5,000.

WidgetBox:Thousands of widgets for Facebook, Blogger and more

WidgetBox directories listing thousands of widgets which can be embed into your blog, social network profile and web page. The widgets are mostly user-generated, many of them are pretty cool.

Embedding a widget is very simple, you simply tell WidgetBox the desired target platform (Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace etc), and WidgetBox will provide you the embeddable code. Another alternative is to use the installer tool from WidgetBox to install the widget to your web page.

The best part of the service is that it is so easy to create my own new widget. Simply feed any content (whether it is Flash, RSS feed, Google gadget or a web page) then WidgetBox will turn it into a widget which can be easily share with others. No prgramming knowledge is required. The only limitation is the styling: The output widget is functional but does not look very attractive.

Google Earth 4.3: Still ahead of Microsoft Virtual Earth

A couple of days ago, I watched a video demo on the new Windows Live Maps, which introduces the 3D rendering of Birds Eye view. And now, it appears Google Earth 4.3 is doing the same thing too.

Google Earth is doing more, it even allows us to adjust the time in order to watch the sunrise and sunset in Google Earth. Also, Google Earth has the Street View feature, which I don't think Microsoft Virtual Earth has it. On the other hand, Windows Live Maps has some nice enhancements on traffic info. Specifically, Windows Live Maps will suggest a rerouting to you based on heavy traffic.

Below is the video demo of Google Earth 4.3.

Start your own video wiki at WikiVideo

Wikipedia is undoubtedly a very successful wiki project. Since then, many web companies join the wiki market to allow you to start your own wiki. Among the most popular ones are:

PbWiki - recently, PbWiki introduced the version 2.0. It has some nice features, but the data storage limit for free version is too limiting.

Google Site - it is part of Google Apps. Hence you need a Google Apps account in order to use it. To sign up for Google Apps account, you need to own a domain name, e.g. www.myCompany.com. Besides this restriction, it is a good choice too.

Wikia - everything is good except I cannot remove the footer that Wikia puts in.

Wetpaint - In my mind, this is the best wiki host. It has the best structure, thus it is easier for users to navigate within the wiki. It offers some very nice looking skins too. Again, same as Wikia, I can't remove the footer Wetpaint puts in.

But recently, there is a new startup joins the market called WikiVideo, which allows you to create a video/audio wiki. It comes with two languages, English version, and Italian version. Unlike other wiki sites, which you can only embed a video into a page, WikiVideo hosts your videos, i.e. you can uploads you videos directly to WikiVideo.

WikiVideo accepts all the popular video formats (AVI, MPG, WMV, MOV, MP4...). But the most interesting feature is, it doesn't convert your videos into FLV like YouTube. It simply displays the video on the web page as it is, which may be or may not be a good thing. The recommended file size is 20-100 MB, but I am not sure whether this is a strict rule or not.

Zemanta: A content suggestion engine for blogging

Zemanta is a content suggestion engine that suggest contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags. You can add the suggested contents to your blog post which you can then edit. It also builds links to related stories. Generally, Zemanta try to search only inside Open content database (e.g. Wikipedia etc), CC licensed Flickr images, etc. You can download Zemanta from here, it works with Firefox and TypePad, Wordpress and Blogger.

It is hard to describe the power of Zemanta in words, just watch the demo video below to get the idea...


I believe the service will increase relevance and add better contents to your blog posts which ultimately satisfy your readers even more...I will start Zematize my postings in near future...

PicApp: Get the best images for your blog

PicApp is an image search engine that search for images that you can use in your website / blog legally for free. You don't get the image, but PicApp provides the JavaScript snippet to embed into your web page. In addition, you can share the image by emailing the images or add them to your favourite social bookmarking service.

I tried several keywords, the search results are generally okay, depending on what you want to search for. It return irrelevant results sometimes. If you key in more specific terms like Asian celebrities names, it is likely you get no result.

One thing that annoyed me is the website disables the right-click menu of the web browser, so I can't do things like 'Open Link in New Tab'.

YouConvertIt: Online file conversion tool

YouConvertIt is a web application that can convert convert your document, video or audio files into another file format, e.g. from DOC to PDF, WMV to MP3 etc. You can use the service without signup an account. Simply upload a file, YouConvertIt will give you a list of possible conversions. Select a desire file format, then YouConvertIt will convert the file and send you a download link to the converted file via email.

YouConvertIt allows you to download YouTube, MetaCafe and Google Video without installing any browser plugins or desktop application too. Simply specify the URL and click download it, You can download the video as FLV file. The only inconvenient part is, the downloaded file has no file extension, You have to put back the ".FLV" myself.

Another option is to convert the online video to a specified file format before download. For example, you can specify to convert the YouTube video to WMV. YouConvertIt will convert the Flash Video to WMV then send you an email containing a link to download the end result.

I tried YouConvertIt a couple of times. It is pretty good except I have to wait for a long time to receive the emails containing the download links. So, don't use it when you are in urgent.

Quintara: A cloud search widget

It is fun to play around with Quintara search widget. I key in a search keyword. Quintara returns relevant keywords and arrange them as cloud. I move my mouse over a keyword, and it drills down to more keywords, i.e. I search by discovering relevant terms and refining my keywords. I can save the refined cloud to my local PC, and best of all, I can share it by embedding the cloud to my blog!!!

Below is a Quitara widget, with 'Silverlight' as my search keyword.

Viscosity: The Modern Art Generator

Viscosity is the winner of Best Art Award at this year's SXSW festival. Viscosity is an online abstract art application, and it took years of efforts to develop it. I just checked it out, it is easy to use, it is fun, it is beautiful and it is free!! Here are few samples I took from Viscosity's gallery...

Web-based FTP Clients

AnyClient is a Java based web application. Although not as powerful as a desktop application, it is convenient when you occasionally need to connect to FTP site from other PCs (the only condition is the PC must have Java installed). Another good thing is, AnyClient requires no sign up. Note that if you are behind a proxy or a firewall that does not allow traffic on port 21, you won't be able to use this tool.

Other alternatives are net2ftp, 01ftp, and jscape.

Microsoft prepares 'Albany' to compete with Google Docs

As more and more desktop applications are moving to the web, Microsoft is planning a low-end hosted and productivity suite to compete with similar services like Google Documents, Zoho, etc. Although it is unclear how low-end it is, Albany will combine Office, Office Live Workspaces, Windows Live OneCare, and the Windows Live suite of services. With the strong presence of Microsoft in desktop arena, it will be interesting to see how much this online complement can hurt other competitors.

Source: InfoWorld

Adobe Photoshop Express: Yet another web based image editing application?

In my mind, Adobe products are always expensive, even more expensive than Microsoft products, and suddenly here is a free version of Adobe Photoshop called Adobe Photoshop Express.....

Due to the pressures from highly popular web based image editing applications like Picnik and many others, Adobe released Photoshop Express for free and trying to mess up the market share a bit, but will Adobe success? Or is it just yet another web based image editing application?

There are getting more and more players in this market, a quick scan through my del.icio.us bookmarks, I find dozens of online image editing apps...since I always don't tag my bookmarks properly, there could be some I have missed:

List of Online Image Editing Applications

• Adobe Photoshop Express
• Aviary - More than image editing, include video editing and music writing, etc. It is still in closed beta
  
• FotoFlexer - it is recently revamped with new look and feel (just announced a few days ago). I think FotoFlexer is the biggest competitor to Picnik
• FlauntR - This one is VERY rich in functionality, making me feel like it is a desktop app
  
• Graphita -It comes with tons of objects. Simply drag and drop the objects to decorate your photos
• Lunapic
  
• Mixbook - not really an image editing app. It has a set of rich layout templates to let you arrange your photos in beautifu photo book
• Mypictr - image clipping service
  
• Onlinephototool.com - most uncreative name. It is Java based
• Phixr
  
• Picnik - probably the most popular web based image editing app but I don't have any material to prove it
• Pic resize
  
• Pikifx - tons of built in photo effects
• Pikipimp - Amother app with tons of built in objects. Simply drag and drop them. But I like Graphita more
  
• Pixer
• Pixenate
  
• Rsizr - it has seam carving capability (I will talk more about seam carving in future posts)
  
• Scrapblog - not really an image editing app. It allows you to combine videos, photos, audio and text into one thing, i.e. it is some sort of multimedia blogging service, I have seen many creative multimedia scraps there
• Snipshot - AJAX based
  
• Splashup - The screenshots look fairly similar to Adobe Photoshop
• Wiredness
• XMG Image - Photo editing + Image hosting

22 items in my list..

UPDATE: I missed another one: PicBite - Allow you to annotate images with speech bubbles

EatLime: Share your file instantly even while you still uploading it

For most of the free file sharing / hosting web services that I know of, I usually try it for the first time and never return to it again. The reason is simple, most services have serious limitations which I can't tolerate, e.g. file size limit (usually 10 MB per file), non-permanent storage (The file will be removed automatically when there is 'no demand', but how to measure demand? No download in 7 days? 1 month?), and the most annoying one is the awkward download page (The advertisements are too intense, and the download link is located at less obvious place). Oh yeah, some services even change the file extensions!!!

But, speaking of EatLime, I am not saying it is the file sharing service I am looking for, I blog about it because I found it rather interesting, it offers something which competing services do not have - EatLime allows your friends to begin downloading the file as soon as you start uploading it, i.e. I don't have to wait for the file to finish uploading before they begin downloading.

Another feature I like about EatLime is, I don't have to sign up an account in order to use the service. The file size limit is 100 MB per file, which is good enough for me. However, after registration, the file size limit is 1GB.

Turn yourself into a movie star

Oddcast 3D Videostar is offering an impressive technology that allow users to import their faces into movie clips and replace those of movie stars. No word on when the service will be available, but the samples available at Oddcast website look fantastic. If this service is open to the public and is easy to use, I guess there will be many interesting video collages appear on YouTube soon.

3D social networking platform

So, if you haven't feel tired of this social networking buzz, you might want to check this out, RipLounge, a browser based 3D social networking platform which bring more interactive online experience to you.



Judging from the demo video, I guess the creator plays The Sims too much.

RipLounge will be available publicly next month.

Source: TechCrunch

Del.icio.us 2.0 is coming

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. Since it was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, it seems del.icio.us has no further development and the current web design looks very outdated. However, the usage continue to increase steadily. Currently, it has about 3 million registered users and 100 million unique URLs bookmarked.

So, what is coming in del.icio.us 2.0?

Item 1:
del.ico.us will be rebranding to Delicious.com. If you try
http://www.delicious.com now, the URL redirects you to http://del.icio.us. This change is a good thing since it is easier to type.

Item 2:
Integrating Delicious results into Yahoo search. I am not sure whether this is important to you or not. If I want to search the web, I rather go to Google Search.

Item 3:
Needless to say, Delicious 2.0 will feature new look and feel. The screenshots below are the preview version and may change in the final release.





Looking at the screenshots, we can see that there is a new sorting feature (e.g. sort alphabetically, sort by popularity, etc). Another obvious change is the addition of People menu item, which I am not sure what it is for. Probably a service to facilitate follow up or share bookmarks with others. And, I like the small screenshot displayed with the bookmarks, it reminds me the content of the website easily.

Delicious 2.0 is still in preview version. No news regarding the final release date. For more information, please go to here.

How to convert a web page into PDF file?

There is a free online service available to achieve this purpose: htm2pdf.

One important note, your converted files are published at htm2pdf website which are publicly available for anyone. So, in case you want to convert a confidential file, this service is not for you. In addition, sometimes the conversion failed but there is no reason given.