Create A Tag Cloud Based On The Content of Your Blog or Website

Tag Clouds, you have seen them on delicious, Technorati or Flickr, are an easy way to get people explore your site deeper. Here's a sample tag cloud that uses Google AJAX Search.

Tag Clouds (provided they are not cluttered and display just the relevant words) help visitors quickly visualize what your website is all about since the topics you frequently cover are mentioned in bold or relatively bigger fonts.

WordPress community already offers some excellent plugins for generating tag clouds (like the Ultimate Warrior) plus the upcoming release, WP 2.3, has inbuilt support for tagging.

However, if you are on Blogger or have a non-blog website, there's no reason that you should miss Tag Clouds.

Here's how to add a good looking tag cloud to your Blogger blog:

1. Type your Blogger feed address in RainMaker 

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xyz/posts/default?max-results=999

Remember to replace xyz with your Blog ID. This URL will retrieve your latest 999 posts and supply that for analysis to RainMaker.

2. For the word link, type the following (where xxx is your blog name, e.g. labnol)

http://xxx.blogspot.com/search?q=%%enc_word%%

3. You can change the default font size, tag cloud dimension background image and colors to fit your site theme.

4. Now the tricky part. Once you have generated the tag cloud using RainMaker, right click over your tag cloud and click "View HTML source" - that the code you need to copy paste in your site.

Tip for Tag Clouds - If you really want visitors to spend more time on your site via Tag Clouds, always keep the number of words in Tag Cloud to an absolute minimum and that there is sufficient space around each word.

New York Times Makes TimesSelect Available Without Subscription

Good News. New York Times has decided to break the subscription firewall and provide TimesSelect content for free. If you are a paying TimesSelect subscriber, you will receive a prorated refund.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Times columnist Thomas Friedman had earlier criticized TimesSelect saying "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it’s cut me off from a lot, a lot of people, especially because I have a lot of people reading me overseas, like in India ... I feel totally cut off from my audience."

Thank NYT. Request your web design team to consider removing the double-click feature as well.

Related: Read Wall Street Journal Premium Content for Free

Google Docs Adds Web Based Version of PowerPoint 1.0

Google today launched a "very basic" PowerPoint clone that lets you create Presentations inside the web browser. Other than creating presentations from scratch, you can also upload your existing PPT and PPS slideshows into Google PowerPoint.

The new Google tool, which surprising doesn't have any name (they call it Google Docs presentations feature), is available at documents.google.com or can also be accessed from docs.google.com. It's also available for Google Apps customers.

Microsoft PowerPoint is celebrating it's 20th birthday this year but should the Redmond giant lose sleep with Google making inroads into the Presentation arena. Probably not because Google is more focused on building a tool that eases delivery of presentations online, not creating them.

The winning feature in Google PowerPoint is integration with Google Talk - while you are delivering a live presentation online, the presenter and attendees can text chat in real time via Google Talk.

Google provides no option to embed PowerPoint slideshows in web pages. You can export a presentation to zipped HTML but that functionality is broken as of now.

Related: A Real Contender for Google PowerPoint

Did Google Relax Rules for Mahalo To Join Premium Adsense Club

Mahalo is now a premium Adsense publisher meaning they get permission from Google to display custom Ad formats on their web pages among other benefits.

Related: Premium Adsense publisher privileges

Normally, Google invites only those websites to the Adsense Premium club that average more more than 20 million page views a month. If Mahalo has managed to cross that number in such a short span of time, hats off to Jason Calacanis.

There are, however, some doubts. For instance, TechCrunch of Michael Arrington averages around 4 million page views a month and he is no Premium Adsense Publisher. Same holds good for Pete Cashmore of Mashable though he gets even more traffic that TechCrunch.

   

Is Mahalo getting 4x the monthly traffic of Mashable or TechCrunch? While Mahalo web stats are not public, the Alexa and Compete graphs paint a very different picture (click to enlarge)

As per Alexa or Compete, Mahalo may not be anywhere near the "20 million a month" - that make one wonder what made Google present them the Adsense Premium Crown? Did Google relax the minimum qualification criteria for Adsense or is Mahalo really getting that high traffic? If yes, maybe it's time for us to stop referring to Alexa and Compete altogether.

Want to do More With Firefox? Get The New HyperWords

Say you are reading a blog or website inside Firefox and encounter some name (or an unknown term) that you would like to explore deeper.

You will probably visit Wikipedia to read more about that person and search Flickr or Google Images for some photos. And if the text on the webpage is not in your native language, you'll copy paste that into Babel or Google Translate.

Is that the way to work on the internet ? Well, that's a perfect approach but a bit inefficient. Enter HyperWords that lets you do all this and more without you having to visit any other site - the information will be fetched right in your current webpage with a simple click.

With HyperWords, you can select any plain text on the web page and do some amazing things - say you choose Flickr or Google Images from the context menu and it will show you the best matching picture in the menu itself. Same for Wikipedia entries.

The best part is about translation - you select a text and HyperWord will do inline translation meaning the actual text on the webpage will be replaced with the translate version. And it's fast.

If you have never heard of HyperWords for Firefox before, download it now and you'll love it. If you are an old HyperWords fan, get the new version 3.0 which is still in beta but adds some very useful features.

Sorry IE and Opera users, you'll miss this. Watch the HyperWords demo video below and visit HyperWords.net to install the extension.

More Ways to Upload Presentations & PDF Files to Slideshare

SlideShare, an online service for hosting PowerPoint and PDF documents, has registered an extremely impressive growth ever since its debut last year. (see this recent Alexa snapshot)

Related: Comparison of PowerPoint Hosting Services

SlideShare have added some new email+web based options for uploading PDF and PPTs that makes the service all the more attractive.

For instance, if you want to move your presentations from Scribd to SlideShare, just type their URLs here and SlideShare will automatically make a copy in your SlideShare account.

[Like Scribd, Slideshare also lets you upload Presentations anonymously.]

Another addition is the email based uploader (a similar feature exists in Google Docs). You just have to send the presentations as email attachments to a specified address for uploading them onto SlideShare.

Wishlist - Now that Slideshare has bulk upload, they may consider adding another feature that allows members to download multiple presentations in a batch.

Related: Upload PDFs to Scribd Directly from the Web

Adsense Referrals - How to Pick Relevant Products That Convert

Unlike the regular Adsense ads (CPC or CPM)where Google automatically picks relevant ads based on the content, Adsense Referrals (CPA) require some effort on the part of Adsense publishers because they have to manually select products from the vast Adsense inventory that is changing almost everyday.

How do you find the Adsense Referral Ads that are likely to become popular among your visitors ?

I have been using the Adsense Referrals (Text Links) program (here, here and here) for over a month now and have had an overall positive experience so far. Here are a few simple things that I learned in the process and they may even help you improve earnings from the Adsense Referrals program:

Step 1: When generating code for your Adsense Referrals, pick the categories / products that are most relevant to your readers (for my case, categories that convert include computer software, Internet, Online Communities, Photos and Video products.)

Step 2: Check the option that says "Pick best performing ads" but refrain from using Image only ads in Referrals as that is very likely to impact the performance.

Step 3: Run the campaign on your site for around a week. Then open the Advanced Reports from your Adsense Dashboard and make the following selections - Referrals (in product), "Last 7 Days" (in date range) and Product Data (in Show).

As shown in the screenshot below, display this Adsense Referrals report grouped by Products (or both Date and Products) so you know exactly what referrals have worked well for you. You can then recreate your Adsense Referrals code from scratch and this time, just add the products that have performed in the last seven days.

The probability of site visitors getting interested in this filtered set will be much much higher translating into more revenue for you.

This is however not a one time exercise since Adsense Inventory is frequently changing and you may have to fine-tune your Referral campaigns every week for best performance. Read some additional tips on Using Adsense Referrals.

Google Developing GMail Offline Version Using Google Gears

A report, citing highly placed sources, says that Google has developed an offline version of Gmail that is likely to be made available within this year.  

Like Google Reader which lets you work offline using Google Gears, GMail users will be able to interact with their GMail account even when they don't have an active Internet connection.

This news, that Google is developing GMail Offline, is reported by a prominent Indian newspaper though the Google spokeswoman in India officially denied such a thing.

While it's a definite possibility that Google is working to enable Gmail for Offline access via Google Gears, there are some bits that I will take with a grain of salt.

For instance, the report says that you would have to download a GMail software client for that would automatically synchronize with the Gmail server. Why? Google Gears works inside a web browser and do not require any additional software. Or is Google developing a standalone desktop client for GMail like Outlook. Both the cases look slightly doubtful.

Last month, another newspaper in India reported, citing sources close to Google, that the Google Phone will hit the global market in two weeks time but there has been no development so far. In fact, analysts are denying that Google will release a GPhone since it doesn't fit their business model.

GMail Tip: Powerful GMail Search Commands

Blogger Play and Bloglines Wall of Images

Blogger Play is a self-running slideshow of photographs recently uploaded on Blogspot blogs. Other than the image, you also get to read a short excerpt of the accompanying blog post and the profile of the blogger. Excellent implementation.

Bloglines offers a similar feature called Image Wall but that's not limited to Blogger Photos - they show recent images from virtually all blogs that are indexed by Bloglines.

A small concern with such projects is that you are never too sure about stuff that may appear on your screen. While Blogger Play is only showing images from blogs that satisfy the SafeSearch criteria, Bloglines Image wall sources images from the entire space and therefore not recommended for family viewing.

Will your photos appear in the Blogger slideshow ? If your blog on Blogger is listed as public, any image you upload to your Blogger account may be added to the Blogger Play queue.

Wishlist - They should offer categories in Blogger Play - say someone wants to see a slideshow of photos that where uploaded on blogspot blogs only related to Gadgets or Cooking or something else. That would make this project all the more interesting.

Related: Create Website Slideshow

Most Creative Flickr and YouTube Search Engine Ever

oSkope will leave you impressed for sure. It's an extremely innovative online tool to help you browse and search YouTube videos, Flickr photos and more with minimal paging.

When you type a keyword, oSkope pulls thumbnail images of the results and arranges them on the screen like a deck of playing cards spread out on a physical table.

You can click the thumbnails of Flickr Photos or YouTube videos to watch them inline. The thumbnails can be easily in different styles like a stack, pile or plotted as a graph (useful for comparison of price vs Amazon sales rank).

In its beta version, oSkope allows to search for products and images on popular web services like Amazon, Ebay, YouTube or Flickr. More services will be added soon. oskope.com

How to Extract Pictures from PowerPoint Photo Slideshows

Ques: Your have a PowerPoint presentation (PPT, PPTX or PPS) that contains lot of pictures embedded in the slides. Is there an easy method to save these images out of the presentation ?



As an example, let's take the above PowerPoint presentation that contains unseen aerial photographs of the World Trade Center captured by a military chopper on 9-11.

To extract pictures from the PPT slideshow, all you have to do is export the Powerpoint Presentation as an HTML web page. Choose File -> Save As and select .html from the File Format drop down.

PowerPoint will automatically extract every picture embedded in the PPT file and save it to the local folder. The same technique is also used to extract sound from presentations.

Alternatively, you may choose File -> Save As and choose an image format like JPG or PNG - this will save the entire presentation slides as numbered images.

Related: How to Compress PowerPoint Files

Make Flowchart Diagrams in the Browser with Draw Anywhere

If Google every wanted to add a Microsoft Visio like flowcharting application to their Google Office suite, they'll have plenty of good options to choose from.

Draw Anywhere is a new web based tool for creating flow charts, org charts and other drawings online. Like the Picnick image editing, DrawAnywhere is done in Flash and sports an extremely responsive interface.

You can either save your Flowcharts online or export the diagrams as images and PDF files. drawanywhere.com

Firefox Can Turn Off The Computer After Downloading Complete

Say it's midnight and you want to call it a day. But the issue is that you are downloading some huge files from the Internet via Firefox and at your current internet speed, the download will take another two hours to finish.

You could either cancel the downloads, or leave the computer in running state (think environment), or just install Auto Shutdown from mozilla.org.

As the name suggest, this extension will turn off the computer automatically as soon as Firefox has downloaded all the pending files in the queue.

If you not using Firefox, try the shutdown command in Windows that will turn off the computer after the given time. For instance, if you want to turn off the computer in next two hours, type the following in Windows Run box:

shutdown -s -t 7200 [7200 = 2 hours]

The Auto Shutdown extension of Firefox internally executes the same command.

Related: Shut Down Your Computer Quickly

Stretch YouTube Videos To Fit the Browser Window, Better Than Full Screen

You already know about the Full Screen mode in YouTube video player that scales the current video to fill the entire desktop screen.

The one big problem with full screen mode in YouTube player is that you cannot do anything else on the computer while the video is playing - you have the exit the FullScreen before initiating any other task.

There's however an excellent alternative to Full Screen mode and that's about auto resizing the video player to fit the browser window. When you resize the browser window, the dimensions of YouTube Video player will change accordingly.

Here's how you fit the YouTube video in the browser window:

Say a YouTube Video URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4

To watch this clip in a resizable browser window without switching to Full Screen, just rewrite the above URL a http://www.youtube.com/v/vr3x_RRJdd4

In other words, just append the YouTube video ID to this URL www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID and stretch your browser window. You can then easily switch to other tabs, open new applications or do anything else while the YouTube clip is still playing in the maximum possible screen area.

Laptop Mouse with a USB Storage Drive

Microsoft today unveiled the Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 for your laptop computer.

The unique feature of this ergonomic mouse is the USB transceiver that doubles as a 1 GB Flash drive - so you have one less device to carry while on the move and it also frees up an additional USB port on your laptop.

Another improvement over the Wireless 8000 Laser mouse is the charger - earlier they had a separate rechargeable base but with Mobile Memory Mouse 8000, the mouse can be connected using a magnetic cord to the UBS transceiver without requiring a separate power supply.

Related: Microsoft Desktop 7000 vs Natural Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard

Why Use Adobe Acrobat Instead of other PDF Converters

The marketplace is flooded with PDF writers that promise to convert any file format into PDF.

Like Acrobat, you can install these third-party PDF generators as virtual printers and create PDF files from any application that has the Print button. Some services allow you to convert files by email - you send them a file as an email attachment and they'll mail it back to you as a PDF.

That's not all. WordPerfect and OpenOffice have in-built PDF printers. Microsoft released a free PDF add-in for all popular Office 2007 programs except Outlook. Then there are online suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office that allow you to save documents as PDF inside the browser without requiring any add-ins.

When there are so may Acrobat alternatives for creating PDF files, why spend a few hundred dollars for buying a single license of Adobe Acrobat? Adobe offers some reasons for using Adobe Acrobat software:

1. Adobe supports PDF files opened in the free Adobe Reader only if the PDF was created by an Adobe product.
2. Adobe makes the most compact and most accepted PDF files. Clones often don't do everything necessary in all cases to meet court standards.
3. Adobe PDF is structured (tagged) allowing your firm to meet government Section 508 accessibility requirements.
4. Only Adobe allows you to Reader-enable a PDF so that users of the free Adobe Reader can fill and save PDF forms locally for offline use, review, comment or markup, type anywhere in the PDF document using the Typewriter tool and digitally sign PDF documents.
5. New standards around PDF will always appear in Adobe products first. One recent example: PDF/A (PDF for Archive), an ISO standard adopted by the US Federal Court system, the NARA (National Archive and Records Administration), and the Library of Congress as the standard format for archiving digital documents.
6. Adobe offers OCR, creation, watermarks, redaction (delete sensitive or confidential text and images), bates numbering, review, etc. all in one package, not spread across several packages or requiring additional products.

So should you uninstall that free PDF converter and shell out $300 for Acrobat Professional ? Well if you are an enterprise user or in the legal industry or work in teams gathering comments and reviews from colleagues and customers, the answer is mostly yes.

ISO has ratified PDF/Archive as the standard for long-term preservation of electronic records. But if you are like most of us and create PDFs for personal use because they retain the formatting and layout or just because PDF files are safe from editing, then the free Acrobat clone in your computer can stay without problems.

DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement - Sample Template

If you discover your content published illegally on another website without permission or attribution, the first step is to send a polite email to the owner of the website.

If the website owner fails to respond to your email requesting removal of plagiarized content, it may be time for you to send a formal DMCA letter to his web hosting company and also to his advertising partner(s) (like Google Adsense) that are helping him monetize content which is actually owned by you.

While web hosting firms and online advertising companies will immediately comply to your requests, they will also ask you to send them DMCA notices in a proper format with all the necessary details and proof.

Let's take a fictional case - Mr John Q. Public of www.mycontent.com finds his content on another website called www.copypaste.com.

Following is a Sample DMCA Notice that John can submit to the web host of copypaste.com and also to Google.

---

Subject: Notice of Copyright Infringement

The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on www.mycontent.com/page1.html and www.mycontent.com/page2.html


The URLs where our copyrighted material is located include www.copypaste.com/abc.html and www.copypaste.com/xyz.com

You can reach me at myemail@mycontent.com for further information or clarification. My phone number is +1-202-393-3984 and my mailing address is John Q Public, 323, Park Avenue, Willcity 39232 CA.

The email address of the website owner, who has reprinted our content illegally, is alex@copypaste.com.

I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.


John Q Public
February 11, 2010 [14:50]

---

If your DMCA Notification letter meets all the requirements, the web host will expeditiously delete (or ask the customer to remove) that material.

While most web hosting companies will accept your DMCA notices via email, Google (for Blogger and Adsense) requires you to snail mail or fax the DMCA document with your signatures.

As a workaround, you can take a picture of your signature and paste that as in image in the Word Processor. Then you fax the document to Google DMCA department via Skype, Email or online.

More on Online Content Plagiarism.

Manage Multiple Accounts on the Web Without Logging Off

Do you have several accounts on GMail but dislike logging off from one account to check emails in another account. For instance, you and your wife use the home computer for checking emails and one has to log off before the other person can log-in. (See: GMail Multiple Sign-in)

Or do you want to use Google Web Search anonymously without them recording your search habits. But at the same time, you want to remain logged into other secure Google services like Google Notebook, Blogger or GMail.

If answer to any of the above is yes, you will love CookieSwap Firefox extension. Most websites use Cookies to store your login information and you can have just one cookie per website per web browser but with CookieSwap, you can maintain multiple cookie profile and switch between them in a click.

You can create a profile that logs into your Gmail account but when you want to Google, just switch the profile. You stay logged into GMail but with still anonymously surf on Google.

Get CookieSwap from addons.mozilla.org

Related: How to View or Delete Cookies of Any Website

Sync Facebook Photos with Microsoft Outlook Contacts

If some of your Microsoft Outlook contacts are also Facebook friends, you will find OutSync pretty useful.

OutSync takes the profile photos of your friends from Facebook and adds them to the matching entries in your Microsoft Outlook Contacts List. The utility also lets you to selectively update Outlook contacts.

Update: OutSync is no longer active but you can use Yahoo Mail to export email address of Facebook Friends which you can then import into Outlook using CSV format.

You can then sync Outlook with your mobile phone and see photos of your friends appear during calls instead of the plain text names.

OutSync works with Outlook 2003 or 2007. It was originally written by Mel Sampat, a Program Manager in the Windows Mobile team at Microsoft.

The main benefit of OutSync is for users who sync their smartphones with Exchange or Outlook. Updated contacts are copied to your iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android or BlackBerry devices, and their photos appear during phone calls.

See more Outlook add-ins for social networking.

How to Embed Large Photos In Web Pages

Say you have an extremely long screenshot image or a high resolution photograph (like a 360° panoramic image) that you want to embed in web pages.

The standard IMG tag may not be the best approach when inserting really big photos because 1) wide images break the layout of your web page as they span outside the standard width and 2) large images are heavy in size so you web page loading time will become much higher.

If you were to insert such a big image in you web page, a very neat option is Zoomify which you can see in action below - your visitors can view (or even zoom, pan and scroll) the gigantic image in full resolution without leaving the current web page.

Update: Zoomify is no longer free but you embed large images using Google Maps tiles or with the help of zoom.it.

And since Zoomify renders the image in Flash, it's another good alternative for webmaster to prevent casual downloading of their images. Like Google Maps, the large image loads in tiles and only the visible portions are downloaded on the visitor's computer so the waiting time is reduced quite a bit.

You download a small executable from Zoomify website and pass on the image that would embed in the web page. Zoomify will slice it into tiles and you can upload the to any web space. Then you add a small Flash code to your web page that embed the Zoomify Flash image viewer. That's it. Everything is configurable including the initial zoom, menu bar, etc.

Zoomify is a commercial software but they provide a free version called Zoomify Express which is good enough for most of us - no restrictions, no image watermarks. Available for both Mac and Windows.