Jago

Say Cheese - This Sony Digital Camera Clicks Only Smiling Faces

sony smiling camera Say Cheese else the new Sony cameras won't capture your photographs.

These affordable Cyber-shot DSC-T Series cameras have a special "Smile Shutter" mode that can recognize facial expressions like smiles, grin or a hearty laugh.

If there are several subjects in the frame, you can specify the smiling face that you want to take as the main subject - or let the Smile Shutter choose the main subject and take the picture.

The 8-megapixel, DSC-T70 and DSC-T200 Cyber-shot cameras won't lets you click until the selected subject smiles. Watch video.

Amanda Congdon - The Perfect Match for Mobuzz TV

amanda congdon feed tshirt

Amanda Congdon, the famous vlogger who joined ABC News after her split with Rocketboom, is now moving out of ABC as well.

There are two versions of the story - some say that Amanda has been let go by ABCNews.com while Amanda says that she herself decided not to continue at ABC as she is taking up a new digital project after her ABC contract expires.

The excellent MobuzzTV, an English video blog similar to RocketBoom, are also looking for an anchor ever since the departure of Karina Stenquist. Susan Hickey then stepped in but for a very brief period. The most recent episodes were anchored by Anil De Mello who is infact the producer of the show.

[Imagine Andrew Baron acting in Rocketboom while Joanne Colan is away]

mobuzz-vs-rocketboom

Am not sure about the latest assignment of Amanda but MobuzzTV looks like a perfect place for her. The show is massively popular (Alexa says that MobuzzTV has a higher reach on the web than RocketBoom) and the format is quite similar to what Amanda has been doing for years - it's a short 2-3 minute tech video produced daily.

Password Protect Hyperlinks Before You Share Them Via Email

A lot of companies read emails sent by their employees. If you are also worried that someone in your office may be secretly reading your email messages, here's something you can do to at least prevent the email snoopers at work from visiting links (URLs) that you share in your emails - use a password.

password protect websites

HideLinks is an online service that helps you password protect any web URL easily. You type in the URL and a password - HideLinks will then generate a new wrapper URL that you can pass in the email message.

The email recipients (or the snooper) will have to type the same password in order to visit the actual website.

Just make sure you don't put the password in the same email message as that will defeat the whole purpose.

HideLinks hidelinks.com can also be used to shorten the length of hyperlinks similar to TinyURL or URLTea.com.

Create Videos from Photos and Screen Captures - QlipBoard

QlipBoard is free application that lets you create movies from photos and screenshot images. The interesting part is that QlipBoard has an in-built screen capture feature and voice recorder.

The images (or screen captures) appear in the timeline of QlipBoard (like most other video editors) so you just have to drag-n-drop to change the position of any image frame in the timeline. Further, you can easily record voice narrations, annotate or add text to images.

screen capture movies

And all your pen highlighter movements over the screenshot are recorded as part of the movie itself - so as you speak and move the cursor pen over the image, the exact movements are captured by Qlip Board.

You may think of QlipBoard as a blend of Microsoft Photostory ^# and SnagIt. The free version of QlipBoad is supported by advertising.

Overall, the software interface is not very intuitive but the application is still useful for creating screencast movies, photo slide shows or for annotating images.

Get QlipBoard at www.qlipmedia.com [Thanks Murali at Hindu]

When You Click An Adsense Ad On Your Own Website by Mistake

What is the first thing you would do if you accidentally clicked your own Adsense ads that are displayed on your website?

As an honest Adsense publisher, you are likely to send an email to Google Adsense support with the URL of the web page where you clicked your own ads and probably the reason (like the mouse was so sluggish).

Yes, it's important that you don't click your own Google Ads else there's an element of risk that Google may disable your Adsense account but do not get too worried if the click was made due to an error.

Here's a standard response from Adsense support when publishers make honest confessions:

Thanks for letting us know about the clicks on your ads. We appreciate your honesty and your efforts to keep your account in good standing.

Although publishers are not permitted to click on their own ads for any reason, we do understand that accidental clicks may occur, so we don't require that you contact us every time you click on your ads.

It further says - If you were clicking your ads out of interest or to see who was advertising on your site, we suggest the AdSense preview tool as an alternative. This tool will allow you to check the destination of ads on your page without the risk of generating invalid clicks.

AdSense Publisher support team also says - "Because we closely monitor all account activity using engineering systems and thorough human analysis, chances are we've already detected your clicks on your ads and discounted them. While these clicks still show in your reports, we filter out their associated earnings so that advertisers aren't charged."

Is Your Computer Connecting To Websites Without Your Knowledge

If you are worried that some hidden or unknown programs on your Windows PC are secretly making connections to websites in the background, you can use a simple DOS command to detect and prevent such suspicious activity:

1. Open the Windows Start Menu and search for Command Prompt. Right-click and choose "Run as Administrator". Alternatively, you can cmd in your Windows Run box to quickly open the command prompt.

2. The command prompt will by default open itself in the Windows System directory. Use the cd command to switch to the root directory

c:\windows\sytem32> cd \

3. Now type "netstat -b 5 > activity.txt" and press enter. After say 2 minutes, press Ctrl+C.

4. Type "activity.txt" on the command line to open the log file in notepad (or your default text editor)

Which Programs are Connecting to the Internet?

The file activity.txt will have a log of all processes (or Windows programs) that made a connection to the Internet in the last two minutes. It will also show which process connected to which website during this time.

And not just the web browsers (like iexplore.exe or chrome.exe), the log will also show your IM clients, download managers, email programs or any software that requires a net connection.

Scroll though the activity.txt file and look for any process names or website addresses that you are not aware of. If you track one, open Windows task manager (or Process Explorer) to find the location of the executable on your computer and close it.

Microsoft Releases Office 2003 SP3; Slipstream Your Installer CD

Microsoft today released Service Pack 3 for Microsoft Office 2003 (link).

The service pack includes all patches and updates released for Microsoft Office 2003 since SP2. Some notable changes include:

1. Office 2003 programs can no longer open or save certain file formats like PPT created in PowerPoint 97 or before.

2. The Fast Save setting in Microsoft Office Word has been removed.

Here's a guide to slipstream SP2 into your Office 2003 installation CD - the procedure to slipstream SP3 into Office 2003 should be similar though the file names will be different. [the installer is Office2003SP3-kb923618-FullFile-enu.exe]

No new feature is introduced in Office 2003 SP3 expect that it now lets you install add-ins in Microsoft Office Access 2003 on a Windows Vista-based computer.

Once your Office 2003 files are successfully patch with SP3, the version numbers of major executables like Excel.exe, WinWord.exe, PowerPoint.exe should say 11.0.8169.0 while that of Msaccess.exe will be 11.0.8166.0.

Get an International Phone Number With FAX and Voicemail

pfingo is a new service that provides a personal phone number for you to make (or receive) phone calls from a PC (or Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone) to any landline or mobile phone number in the world.

See: How to Get a Local US Phone Number

You just have to install a small software called pfingoTALK softphone onto your computer or mobile phone.

Other than talk, the pfingoTALK client lets you send or receive SMS message using the computer, the voicemails reach you as .WAV files in email and you can also send and receive faxes from the computer.If there're any missed calls, you will be notified via email and an SMS.

pfingo provides a Singapore based number (3-series), but if you have clients or friends in UK, US or Australia, you can get a fixed-line number of that country and friends can therefore reach you at local rates without paying international charges.

While the subscription charges are around 60 cents per month, you can use it for 6 months without paying any fee.You get a free number and can accept incoming calls from any other number in the world. You can also make unlimited outgoing calls to other pfingoTALK numbers for free.

Also see: How to Use Google Voice Outside US

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

make tag clouds online

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.

digital inspiration tag cloud 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

free new york times 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.

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.

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.

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.

firefox hyperwords demo

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.

Adsense Referrals - How to Pick Relevant Products That Convert

tips for adsense referrals 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

gmail offline view 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.

flickr youtube video search engine

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