Metacafe offering cash for video sharing
Submitted on October 30th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Resources and Video
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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.
Metacafe isn’t entirely new, but it is, in my opinion, one of the better alternatives to YouTube out there, and the site has just announced a Producer Rewards program which aims to pay its user for posting popular content. Content is rated by pageviews and user rating with payments starting at 20,000 pageviews (U$100) and a rating of 3 or higher (out of 5). Videos with 200,000 pageviews can earn U$1000, and those with 2,000,000 will earn U$10,000. Not bad for a little bit of homemade video!
Social activity sites are on the up and up
Submitted on October 30th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Resources and Services
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With social bookmarking and sharing being all the rage nowadays, it was only a matter of time before event sharing sites began cropping up. We’ve covered a few like ZVents and a few others before, but many more have started up since. Minger.net has a good article which takes a look at 19 different social activity services and offers a nice and quick overview of each.
Find images on Flickr by drawing them
Submitted on October 30th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Graphics and Services
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I know many of you who follow this site are avid Flickr users, and are always looking for some cool new tools to use. How about being able to search through the vast collections of Flickr photos by sketching out what it is you want to see? Retrievr lets you do just that.
Retrievr provides you with a blank box in which you can create sketches, as well as a couple of tools to customize the sketch. These tools include being able to change the size of the brush as well as the paint color. As you start sketching in the blank box, Retrievr will automatically start searching through Flickr for images which match the same basic design pattern. I say basic because you may not find exactly what you need, but it sure is fun, and opens up many possibilities for the future.
Facebook adds sharing features
Submitted on October 29th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Bookmarking and Services
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While Facebook already has had some cool social features other sites like MySpace lack (like setting relationships to other people), it had been missing any kind of sharing capabilities, until now. Users can now share links, blog posts, videos, images, and more. There is even a browser bookmarklet to make it all easier. If you’re afraid of shares showing up on your Feed, don’t worry, it won’t as all shared items appear under a My Shares link in the sidebar. By the way, if you’re on Facebook, feel free to add me as a friend.
Toufee helps you build presentations in a flash
Submitted on October 29th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Resources and Services and Video
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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.
Vox brings fun back to blogging
Submitted on October 29th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Services and Blogging and Video
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Vox is a brand new blogging service from the good folks at SixApart, well known for other blogging products such as the bloggin community LiveJournal, and the blogging platforms MovableType, and TypePad. Vox makes blogging simple and fun, and is in many respects similar to a MySpace page (minus the horrendous coding). Sign up for a free account, and select one of 150 different themes for your blog. Next, you can set various privacy settings so you’re in complete control over who can view your blog posts and pictures. With all that set up, you’ll want to have your friends and family join Vox, or you can become part of one of many neighborhoods and make new friends. The key part here being the last, and with so many social sites of these sort popping up I wonder how successful Vox will be. Still, Vox is beautiful and is a great alternative to other bloated services of it’s kind.
Microsoft releases Defender
Submitted on October 29th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Software and Windows and Security
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I wrote about Microsoft AntiSpyware back in May of last year, while the product was still in early beta stages. Since then, Microsoft has changed the name of the application from AntiSpyware to Defender, and after many, many months in closed beta, has finally released it to the public.
Microsoft Defender is a fantastic application and actually works quite well, maybe due in part to the fact that it wasn’t developed entirely in-house, as Defender is the result of Microsoft buying out antispyware company GIANT. Regardless, Defender is quite polished, and for the months that I used the product, I never had to worry about any kind of spyware invading my system. Thanks to its integration with Windows, Defender also blocks popups and keeps you informed of security updates, all for free.
Give Safari search as you type functionality w/ Inquisitor
Submitted on October 29th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Browsers and The Mac Side and Services
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Inquisitor is a superb Mac application which integrates into the Safari browser. If you’re an OS X user, chances are you know about Spotlight, the search as you type search system. Inquisitor works in much the same way but in your browser, so that as you type search queries into the Safari search box, you get possible results popping up immediately. While previous versions had to be bought, the latest version is completely free.
If you’d like to see how it works, or if you’d like to play with it and don’t have a Mac, then why not try Inquisitor Beta, a web-based version of the application which search through Google, A9, Amazon, and other popular search engines. Like it’s Safari-only brother, the web-based version is also free.
[Via Digg]
Yahoo! updates Bookmarks and it’s delicious
Submitted on October 29th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Bookmarking and Services
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Yahoo! Bookmarks has been around the Yahoo! stable for quite some time now, and those of you who may have tried it may remember that it was basically simply a list of web addresses which was tied to your Yahoo! account. Not anymore, as Yahoo!’s redesigned Bookmarks into a much more feature-filled product with a completely redesigned site, the addition of tags, site thumbnails, and the ability to move bookmarks into folders. If you haven’t yet tried Bookmarks, it may be worth a look.
Why Yahoo! owns three different social bookmarking sites makes no sense to me (if you’re wondering, they own del.icio.us, MyWeb, and the aforementioned Bookmarks, but I’m hoping there’s an actual strategy here. Bookmarks is a step in the right direction though.
Manage Firefox tabs with Showcase
Submitted on October 29th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Productivity and Browsers and Software
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Showcase is one of those Firefox extensions which aren’t essential, but which add a little bit of eye candy and make the browser just a little bit more useful. If you have browsing habits like mine, then chances are that you keep at least 5, sometimes 10-20+, tabs open at once. Managing such a large number of tabs can be a little daunting, but not with Showcase.
Showcase shows you thumbnail images of all open tabs. If you want to switch to a particular tab, just click on its thumbnail and you’re taken there, or you can select multiple tabs by holding CTRL on your keyboard and selecting those tabs. Showcase can show tabs in a tab, a new window, or in the Firefox sidebar. The extension is free and open-source and should work all Firefox version up to 2.0.
