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Google Picasa or Windows Photo Gallery - Which is Better?

Like Picasa from Google, Windows Live Photo Gallery is free desktop software from Microsoft for managing your pictures and videos - the software works on both XP and Windows Vista.

Having worked with both the software for some time now, here's a quick review and comparison of Windows Live Photo Gallery with Picasa (do not confuse Picasa desktop software with Picasa Web Albums).

Round 1: Interface & Ease of Use - Both Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery have a pleasant and intuitive interface with basic photo editing capabilities. You can zoom, rotate, search, add ratings, tags and text captions to your photographs very easily. In Picasa, it is possible to select multiple images from different file folders by holding then on to the image tray but in Windows Photo Gallery, you can select images only from the current folder.

Round 2: Speed - When it comes to speed, Windows Photo Gallery wins over Picasa by a huge margin. Picasa, in the last few months, has become extremely slow - the software sometimes even freezes while importing new media content into the library. Windows Live Photo Gallery is lightning fast when you compare the start-up speed or when it process new photographs.

Round 3: Screen Saver - Picasa Screensaver (now known as the Google Photos Screensaver) allows you to add live photo streams (like Flickr RSS Feeds, Yahoo! News Photos) while in Windows Live Photo Gallery, only the local photos appear in the slideshow. Unlike Windows Live Screensaver, Google Picasa Screensaver supports dual monitor screen - alternate photos appear simultaneously on both the screens.

Round 4: Download Video Clips, Pictures from Digital Camera - Windows Live Photo Gallery taken an intelligent approach here - the moment you connect your still camera to the computer, Windows Gallery will logically group the photos based on the date when the photos where clicked. That makes selecting and transferring photos from the camera to the hard drive a snap. And unlike Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery is again very fast.

Round 5: Bells & Whistles - There are some features which are unique to both the photo management software. Picasa lets you create large wall posters from your images, photo collages, web galleries or even small movie clips from your still photos. You get none of this in Windows Live Photo Gallery but for an excellent Photo Stitcher that will help you build panoramic photos automatically or even Google Maps wallpapers.

Round 6: Integration with External Services - In Picasa, you can upload images to Picasa Web Albums, videos to Google Videos or photo blog in Blogger. In Windows Live Photo Gallery, pictures can be uploaded to Windows Live Spaces while videos go to MSN Soapbox, a YouTube like video sharing services from Microsoft.

Flickr vs Picasa Web - Which is better for Storing Images.

Conclusion - Windows Live Photo Gallery is extremely fast and efficient. It works so well when it comes to downloading photographs from the digital camera. You can also this as the default image viewer on Windows.

Picasa is a solid application with pretty good features but very slow. If speed is not a concern and you are a Blogger or Picasa Web Albums user, this may be the way to go.

Remove Callouts and Arrow Markers in Google Maps Screenshots

When you search Google Maps for an address or driving directions, Google Maps shows you the address location with a colored arrow marker and a callout window that has links to driving directions, photographs, review and more.

If you were to take a screen capture of Google Maps without these arrows and callout information window, here's a tip:
To just hide the Callout window, click anywhere on the Google Map outside the arrow marker. To bring that information window back, click the arrow marker again.
To remove both the marker and callout window forever from the screen, right click over the arrow and select "clear search results" from the onscreen popup menu.
Related: Make Wallpaper from Google Maps
Caution: Google Policy says that you must get written permission from Google to reuse any images (instructive or illustrative screenshots) from Google Maps and Google Earth as they do not own the copyright to all of the imagery or information supplied on these platforms.

Weekly Technology Podcast - Episode 2

Facebook People Search Engine Is Live for Outsiders
Non Facebook members can use the public search box on Facebook's home page to find friends who may have public profiles on Facebook and contact them.
Download Your Favorite Blogs and Websites for Offline Reading
Webaroo then creates an offline copy of the site that you can browse or search as if you are connected. Based on your settings, Webaroo periodically checks the original web pages for modification and if there are any, the software automatically updates the local cache.
Share Your Favorite Webpages on Social Bookmarking Sites
Shareaholic make it extremely easy for you to share web pages on the popular social websites - just right click over any webpage and select your favorite bookmarking service from the Firefox contextual menu where you want to share that page.
Yahoo! Mail Better Than Google GMail or Hotmail
Walt Mossberg of WSJ says that the new Yahoo! Mail is better than Google email and the new Windows Live Hotmail.
Increase Google Adsense Income with Simple but Effective Tweaks
Use Google Adsense Sandbox to see image and Flash ads that are likely to appear on your web pages for visitors from different countries across the world.
How to Find Email Addresses of People Who Plagiarize Content
If the person is blogging under an alias (say "PeterCool008") - search for that term on Google. It's very likely that he has used the same alias when registering on other web forums and social networking websites.
Microsoft Attorneys Knock the Door of Windows AutoPatcher
Microsoft announced XP SP2 in August 2004 and have have released hundreds of security updates and hotfixes since then.
The Most Time Saving Firefox Features That We Often Overlook
Open any website in Firefox that you love and press Ctrl+D to bookmark the site. Now scroll to that website name in Firefox Bookmarks menu, right click and select Properties. Type any text in the Keyword field and click OK.
Should You Enable Adsense Whitelist (Allowed Sites Option) ?
With Adsense Whitelist in place, you miss an opportunity to monetize this indirect traffic though the visitors will still see Google ads on your web pages, advertisers will be charged by Google but the Adsense revenue won't be shared with you.
Keep All your Office, Home and Notebook Computers in Sync
Your goal is to sync the data (music, documents, photos, etc) scattered across multiple computers or even directly access files stored on computer A from computer B.

Turn Your Mouse Pointer Into a SpotLight for Presentations

Spotlights are commonly used in concerts and musical theaters to focus an audience's attention on a performer as he moves around the stage.

MouseLight has borrowed the concept from theatres and applied it your computer where the actor is the mouse cursor and the stage is the desktop screen.

Also see: More useful tools for presenters

When you are doing a PowerPoint presentation or a software demonstration and want the audience to focus on some specific area of the screen, MouseLight puts a circular spotlight around your cursor and highlights that area allowing your audience to follow you - the rest of the screen outside the spotlight circle is dimmed automatically.

There's another advantage of MouseLight - If you are work on a large screen or a dual monitor, it's so common that you keep losing track of the mouse pointer. With MouseLight, just press the hotkey and you'll immediately know where the cursor is placed on the screen. No guesswork required.

MouseLight is available for Windows only, Mac users have a similar application called Mouseposé.

Related: Do Live Presentations without a Projector

Screenshot of Adobe Photoshop Express - Web Based Photoshop

Screenshot of online Adobe Photoshop Express, edit images in the Web Browser [click to enlarge]

Fauxto, Picnic and other online photo editors may soon find the going very tough is Adobe is all set to introduce a very cool online version of Adobe Photoshop (called Photoshop Express) that's free and requires just a web browser with the Flash plug-in.

Bruce earlier said that the web version of Photoshop may not be as feature-rich as the desktop Photoshop but still offers better image editing options than the existing desktop image editors - Photoshop Express is something in between Picasa and Photoshop.

John Loiacono, senior VP of creative solutions at Adobe, showed this screenshot of the Online Photoshop application at the ongoing Photoshop World conference in Las Vegas. Thanks John Nack.

FeedBurner Ads Losing Charm Ever Since Google Acquired Them

FeedBurner RSS Income

Like Google Adsense, FeedBurner Ads Network (FAN) never had a problem finding advertisers and their payout is pretty high - some ad campaigns on Computer & Technology channel can cost advertisers up to $10 CPM (FeedBurner's share is 35%).

And while Adsense is only for websites, FAN lets you monetize web content as well as RSS feeds.

But there's a small problem - you may have a good RSS subscriber base and dozens of advertisers may be running campaigns on your site / feed, that may not always translate into revenue.

In the graph, the red line shows the average number of RSS subscribers of this blog in the last 12 months while the blue line depicts the advertising revenue generated by FeedBurner each month.

As you can see, the site traffic + RSS subscriber base has increased and there are around 10-12 active ad campaigns all this time but the advertising income from FAN is constantly headed south, more so in the last 3-4 months and that's exactly the period when FeedBurner became part of Google.

Can that just be a coincidence?

Unfortunately, there are still no good alternative to FeedBurner for monetizing RSS feeds. Let's hope Google makes this service attractive as before (for Publishers, from the monetization point of view).

Get Dr. Dobbs Journal and MSDN Magazine for Free

Some very interesting news for software developers.

You can now subscribe to the digital editions of Microsoft MSDN Magazine and Dr. Dobb's Journal for free. MSDN is primarily for programmers who are using Microsoft technologies while the Dr Dobb's covers almost all languages and platforms.

Just login using your Windows Live ID to subscribe to MSDN Magazine and Dr. Dobbs Journal Digital editions. [Update: This offer is no longer valid]

The issues of Dr Dobb's Journal and MSDN Magazine are also available for download in PDF format.

And if you are based in India, you also stand a chance to win an XBOX 360 or Zune if you subscribe to these electronic magazines before October 15.

Windows Live Writer Supports Blogger Photos, YouTube

As expected, Microsoft today released a new build of Windows Live Writer - it's still a beta product but with some welcome improvements.

I find the new release of Windows Live Writer is more fast and responsive than the previous versions. Here's a quick recap of some other very useful features added in WLW v2008:

1. Upload Images to Blogger Directly - If you have a blog hosted on Blogger, you can include local photos in your blog posts and Windows Live Writer will automatically upload them to your Google Picasa web account.

2. Debugging made simple: If you are trying to publish a new blog post or retrieving some existing post for editing but WLP is not getting through, you can find the root of the problem from WLW log file.

The Log file has been there since day 1 but now WLW makes it extremely simple to view it in your default text editor. Goto Help -> About -> Show Log File.

3. Print / Print Preview - You can print blog posts directly from WLW just like you would do inside Microsoft Word or any word processor.

4. Embed YouTube Videos in Blogs - Earlier you had to download a separate Insert Video plugin to embed web videos in your blog posts but now that feature is inbuilt - just type the video URL and WLW will automatically generate the embed code. Pretty handy. More Windows Live Writer Plugins.

Windows Live Writer supports YouTube, Splashcast, Brightcove, Google Video, MySpace, Revver and MSN Soapbox.

Maximum Number of Google Adsense Ads Allowed on a Page

Google Adsense allows a maximum of three standard ad units, two Adsense for Search boxes, three Adsense link units ~~and three Adsense referral units~~ to be placed on any web page.

The program policy says:

Currently, AdSense publishers may place up to three AdSense for content units on one web page. you may also place a maximum of three link units and two search boxes on each web page.

You may place up to three link units on a page, in addition to the three standard ad units and two search boxes that.

If you place more than one ad unit on a page, our system will display unique ads to each ad unit. Because the system automatically displays an optimal number of highly targeted Google ads on each page, in some cases, the maximum number of ads may not always appear. In this case, the ad unit will be displayed as a transparent box or will contain any alternative ad or colour specified in the ad code.

The Adsense Bible also says - "No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant."

Related: Adsense Tips for Improving Revenue

Synchronize Files, Folders across Multiple Computers Automatically

Imagine a scenario where you have multiple computers that are all connected to the internet - the home desktop runs Windows and contains all your music and family photos, the office computer stores official documents but while traveling, you prefer to carry the Macbook.

Your goal is sync the data (music, documents, photos, etc) scattered across multiple computers or even directly access files stored on computer A from computer B. For instance, if you add some new photos to your home computer, they should also become available in your Macbook pictures folder as well so that you can enjoy the pictures while on the move.

Similarly if you have work from both office and home, the documents on the Office computer should be accessible for editing from the home computer and once edited, it should automatically replace the outdated version sitting on the office desktop.

The Solution - When your files are scattered across computers and you hate transferring data via CDs, FTP, email attachments or USB cables, a neat time-saving solution is FolderShare - a free software utility from Microsoft that can synchronize the contents of folders on different computers over the internet.

To get started, you download the FolderShare software on each of the computers that you want to synchronize and then select the folders that you would like to keep in sync - a good example is the "My Documents" folder.

Update: Folder Share is no longer available but a good alternative is SkyDrive or Dropbox.

FolderShare runs in the background and automatically syncs files across different computers. If a particular machine is offline, the document will be synched the next time you connect it to the web.
Other than sync, FolderShare can also be used to download files in shared folders from any computer remotely via the web browser (similar to PurpleNova or Dekoh).

There are absolutely no limitations expect that the maximum size of individual files should not exceed 2 GB. Windows Live FolderShare is a perfect alternative to online backup services like Mozy or IDrive - the moment you connect your computers to the net, content of one computer are automatically backed on the hard drive of the other computer(s) that may be located in the nearby room, your office or somewhere else.

And though FolderShare is from Microsoft stable, it supports file sharing on both Mac and Windows computers.

Related: Synchronize File Folders with Good Sync

Use Facebook People Search Engine

Facebook today added public search listings meaning. if you agree, your name and profile picture will appear in organic search results when people look for your name.

See: Reverse Email Search with Facebook

A simple Google search for "inurl:www.facebook.com/p/" suggests that there are over 26.5k public profiles on Facebook already.

There's more - outsiders or non Facebook members can use the public search box on Facebook's home page to find friends who may have public profiles on Facebook and contact them.

How Do Search Engines Discover Facebook Profiles ?
Normally search engines like Google or Yahoo! discover new web pages only when they are linked from another website that's already in the index of search engines.

Would anyone have a clue how Google would discover your Facebook public profile when it's not hyperlinked from any other site.

Related: Most Innovative Facebook Groups

New Version of Windows Live Writer 1.0 Coming Very Soon

Bloggers rejoice! You can expect to download and play with the final release of Windows Live Writer 1.0 as early as this week.

The New York Times gave a small hint when it said that the new Windows Live Software Suite will be the first full release and that the Windows Live installer includes the Windows Live Writer blogging application.

Now we have an indirect confirmation from Joe Cheng who is the main Microsoft developer at the Windows Live Writer team.

Joe probably configured the new Windows Live Writer 1.0 release to work with his blog and that led to a style-detection Temporary Post. Though the post is deleted from the main blog, it stills exists in the cache of my newsreader. (see screenshot)

windows live writer

A temp post is normally created by WLW when you update your blog style. In Joe's case, the blog theme is same as before so he probably did a fresh installation of WLW 1.0. Can't wait to see what goes in the new release.

Like Flickr, Yahoo! Unites MyBlogLog With a Single Login

One less username / password combination to remember.

MyBlogLog users will soon be able to use their Yahoo! IDs for logging onto their MyBlogLog accounts. This integrations news comes just eight months after Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog.

Robyn says that they will be merging all MyBlogLog accounts with their owner’s Yahoo! accounts later this week.

Contrast that with del.icio.us which became part of Yahoo! family in 2005 but is still a very separate product. Surprisingly, even after acquiring del.icio.us years ago, Yahoo! is still maintaining a clone service called Yahoo! MyWeb.

Countries Where Web 2.0 and Blogging Craze is Popular

Wondering which countries in the world have the largest number of people following the Web 2.0 and blogging phenomenon. We can get some good pointers indirectly by looking at the traffic of TechCrunch, CNET (for tech, Web 2.0) and ProBlogger (for Blogging).

People who enjoy the latest innovations in the world of web 2.0, tech start-ups and blogging are very likely to be following these sites.

Recently, this widely-read trio embedded the new maps.amung.us mapping widget that displays, in real time, their recent site traffic on a World Map. It was used only on one of their pages but still, it's a fairly good indicator of their traffic per country.

Here's a recent snapshot from each of their widgets suggesting the bulk of tech & blogging crazy users is concentrated in North America, Europe, Australia and South / South-East Asia. Russia, China and Africa are not active in these maps probably because these sites primarily cater to English speaking audiences.

TechCrunch Visitors:

CNET Visitors:

Problogger Visitors:

Rafe Needleman adds: I have a love/hate relationship with widgets like whos.amung.us, Feedjit and MyBlogLog. Site managers who are thinking of adding these need to be aware that they can expose information about traffic and users to the general public.

Download Individual Installers for Windows Live Programs

Some people are not too happy with the new Windows Live Suite that packs every software under a single installer and suggests changing your browser homepage / default search engine at the time of installation.

If you also prefer to download standalone MSI installers for different Windows Live products separately rather than the common installer, here are the links for all WL software:

Download Windows Live Writer wlwriter.exe
Download Windows Live Messenger wlmessenger.exe
Download Windows Live Toolbar wltoolbar.exe
Download Windows Live Photo Gallery wlphotogallery.exe
Download Windows Live Mail Desktop wlmail.exe

Disclaimer: I haven't tried running the standalone Windows Live installers myself. The above download links were found in the WindowsUpdate.log file that exists in the default Windows Installation folder. Use at your own risk.

Find Any Email in GMail With Simple Search Commands

While some GMail users download email locally to Outlook or Thunderbird and then use Windows desktop search to find emails, GMail itself offers some very powerful search capabilities. Let's explore the most useful Gmail search filters and their usage:

Q: I have hundreds of unread emails in my Gmail Inbox but not all of them show up on the main page. Can I bring up view in GMail containing only unread messages.
A: label:inbox is:unread

Q: My boss sent me a PDF document last month that I can no longer locate in the Inbox. Can you help me find it.
A: from:Name_Of_Boss filename:pdf after:2007/07/01 [yyyy/mm/dd]

Q: I received an email from Paypal support last week. I am not sure if I deleted the message, archived it or marked it as Spam.
A: from:Paypal in:anywhere

Q: I have dozens of unread email messages in the Inbox but I am in a hurry to check them all. Show me just the messages that are for me.
A: is:unread after:2007/09/03 to:your.email@address.com

Q: Ryan is a good friend who send me pretty interesting PowerPoint / Word files that often have inspirational quotes, beautiful natural landscapes and funny slide shows of Cats. I love it all but they take too much space.
A: from:Ryan has:attachment [Select all and then delete]

Q. I accidentally deleted an important email message from a colleague. My GMail trash is already overflowing. How do I retrieve that particular message.
A: label:trash Name_Of_Your_Colleague

Q: I use GMail to automatically backup my WordPress blog. The database backup are stored via email attachments as Zips. Since I am running short on GMail storage, I would like to delete all backups that are older than two weeks.
A: filename:.zip before:2007/08/15 wordpress

Q: While chatting over Google Talk, Veronica sent me a link to her Flickr pictures.
A: in:chat from:veronica flickr.com

Q: Show me all emails from my Boss that he marked Urgent or Important in the subject.
A: from:Boss_Name subject:(Urgent OR Important)

Q. I have two contacts in GMail with similar names - Peter King and Peter King Junior. Can I see emails the received from the former contact.
A: from:Peter King -Junior

Search Shortcuts: Instead of typing label:unread, you can simply type l:^u

Important: Unlike Google web search, GMail won't suggest search results that contain plurals or misspellings of your search query. For instance, a search for "computer" will only show email with that exact word - you won't see messages containing the word "computers".

CNN Breaking News E-Mail Alerts and Advertising Dollars

[Click on the CNN Breaking News email alert screenshot for large preview]

Like Google News Alerts, CNN too offers an email alert service to help readers track news topics of their interest - they get an instant email each time a story is published on CNN that matches some pre-defined keywords.

But there's a small problem with the CNN implementation - the email message has no links where the subscriber can click to visit either the CNN homepage or the story page that's mentioned in the alert message.

If you're reading the email alert in GMail, you are likely to see an ad on the right that points to CNN.com. (see screenshot)

GMail users, who may be feeling a bit lazy to type the CNN URL in their web browsers, are extremely likely to take a shortcut - they'll click that convenient Google ad to visit the CNN website for reading the full story content online.

And for CNN, that's equivalent to wasting ad dollars. They are buying traffic through online ads which could have easily come to them for free had they put a simple link in their breaking news email alert messages.

Should You Enable Adsense Whitelist (Allowed Sites Option) ?

Google has recently introduced an Allowed Sites feature which can be accessed from the AdSense Setup tab of your AdSense dashboard.

Adsense publishers can now specify a Whitelist or website URLs where the Google Ads should be displayed. For instance, if you enabled Allowed Site only for abc.com and use your Adsense Publisher ID to display ads on xyz.com, the Google ads will still display though you won't generate any revenue from the clicks or impressions.

Google probably introduced this setting to prevent cases of Adsense Theft where someone takes your Adsense ID (google_ad_client) and uses it on another inappropriate site. This has happened with us as well when a porn website was displaying Google ads using our publisher ID - Google quickly sent a warning email but the matter was resolved in few hours.

Are you planning to turn on the Allowed Sites option? As an Adsense Publisher myself, I'll probably leave that untouched mainly because a part of traffic coming to this site originates from Google/Yahoo cache (when the main site is inaccessible), online translation services like Babelfish (for non-English visitors) and from proxy servers (where the site may be banned). And some social sites / web directories display external content inside frames.

With Adsense Whitelist in place, you miss an opportunity to monetize this indirect traffic though the visitors will still see Google ads on your web pages, advertisers will be charged by Google but the Adsense revenue won't be shared with you.

If you are really worried that other illegal sites are using your Adsense publisher ID, you can easily detect that using Adsense channels.

How to Find Email Addresses of People Who Plagiarize Content

Content plagiarism is a serious concern on the Internet. You spent an entire day writing that comprehensive review of the Nikon DSLR only to realize that an hour later, some lesser-known websites and blogs have reprinted your article word-by-word without giving you any credit.

To get your content removed from the another website, the first step (that works in 99% of the cases) is to send a friendly email to the owner of that site.

But sometimes finding the email address of the person, who ripped off your content, may be the toughest part. Here are some indirect tricks to help you locate email addresses of offenders.

Step 1. If the offending site is self hosted, you are very likely to find the email address of the website owner through the public whois database. I prefer DomJax for quick retrieval of website registry information.

If the website is self hosted but the whois information is private, try the following query on Google (replace xyz with the actual site address) xyz.com -inurl:xyz.com - This might show up some real email addresses for that domain.

Step 2. If the site is hosted on Blogger, WordPress or other blogging platforms, leave a comment in any of the blog posts. Most bloggers generally read and respond to user comments.

Step 3. Now the trickiest part - there's no "Contact Us" form on the website and there's place for you to write comments. Well, don't give up yet because you still have good options:

3(a). Use Technorati or Google Blog search to find other sites / blogs linking to that offending site. It's quite possible that the offender may be maintaining multiple websites that are cross-linked for maximum Google Juice. There are chances that contact information is available on one of his/her legit sites.

3(b). If the person is blogging under an alias (say "PeterCool008") - search for that term on Google. It's very likely that he has used the same alias when registering on other web forums and social networking websites.

See: Writing DMCA Complaint to Google

Never quit - I know it takes some effort to track down the plagiarists but that should not deter you from actively pursuing your case. Remember that search engines, including Google, still have issues figuring out the original source of web documents.

Overcome Email Overload with the 2-Minute Rule and more

The two-minute rule: "Anything you can finish in two minutes you should do right then."

Andrea Coombes of Marketwatch offers three tips in this video for dealing with email overload inspired by productivity gurus - David Allen of Getting Things Done and Merlin Mann of 43 Folders.

Related: Inbox Zero Presentation