When Google and YouTube announced the big buyout recently, many people were upset that they would not be getting a share of the U$1.65 billion. After all, it was users’ videos which made the site so huge. Are you still looking to get a little bit of cash from your video content? If so, then you should check out Metacafe.

Since you can now create your own animated GIFs, maybe you’ll also want to create custom Flash banners or multimedia presentations, right? Why not give Toufee a try. Toufee allows you to create movies, banners, e-cards, and presentations with an intuitive point and click editor powered by Flash. You can even import images from Flickr or videos from YouTube if you wish and the final product is no more than a few hundred Kb of data so even users on a dialup connection can take advantage of what you’ve created. Want to add speech to your presentation? No problem! Toufee has a built-in text-to-speech engine so you don’t have to waste time uploading audio. When you’re done, you’ll receive a link which you can use to share your work with a friend via e-mail, or you can get code to embed it onto your blog or MySpace page.

A few years ago, the OS X Aqua look was hot, and I belonged to a community of users which modified their Windows (and sometimes Linux) desktops to look like Apple’s new OS. We had people writing applications to clone OS X features (some which Apple shut down), some writing themes, others drawing up new icons. Recently, I decided I was growing tired of the default Ubuntu desktop so I figured I’d start modifying it, and I came upon Lauri Taimila’s site which has a very handy guide to making Ubuntu look like OS X. It’s not exact, and some of the links in the guide seem to have gone missing, but overall, I’m quite happy with the conversion, and it was fairly easy to do. In the end, you’ll have much of the eye candy available to Mac users and your desktop will look a whole lot better than all that brown.

As your site grows in popularity you are bound to face some downtime with your site, particularly if you end up getting dugg or slashdotted. Once your site reaches its bandwidth limit, users will start seeing error messages and may end up forgetting about your site and not coming now. There is a new service cleverly called L8ter which should help out. If you find a site that’s down, but that you’d like to come back to, simply head over to L8ter and enter the link of the site as well as your e-mail address. L8ter will then query the site until it comes back up, then inform you, via e-mail so you can go back to it and check it out. Additionally, L8ter offers a Firefox extension called Monitor with L8ter, so you can monitor a site right from your browser. Like all great things, it’s 100% free.

By now, many of you have probably learned how to use Google’s advanced search features, and some of you may even be able to create custom search strings to find any kind of data you want. If you’re not sure what I mean about custom search strings, then you can check out this blog post which explains it pretty effectively. While you could use these custom search strings to find a particular file, you may not want to type them out in a search box or even bother remembering how to create them. No problem! Why not use Briefli? Briefli lets you create custom search strings visually by entering a search term, and then selecting a file type and file extension. Briefli will then query Google and you’ll be able to reach the deepest bowels of the Internet to find whatever your heart desires.