Never Forget at Evernote

Ever had the need to want to capture something you need to remember but haven’t been able to. Step up to the plate, Evernote. At Evernote you can capture information on all sorts of devices and have it stored at Evernote. Completely accessible anytime, anywhere. Pretty cool eh!

You can capture text, webpages, photos and heaps of other stuff using pretty much any device you like. Evernote runs it through there recognition technology. You can tag the stuff to make it easy to find later. You can get stuff onto Evernote in almost any way imaginable.

Evernote has done a brilliant job with an innovate, easy to use and very useful service.

Have you tried it? What did you think?

Feedly Me This

Alright, having a personalised home page is not exactly a new thing but Feedly is doing it slightly differently. What Feedly is attempting to do is create a social kind of personalised home page and all for Firefox 3.

What Feedly does is take a real time summary of your interests, what your friends recommend and more and then sticks it on the page. What this means is you have a homepage which makes a great starting point as it has everything you are into right there waiting for you to click. The way it uses social tools to populate the page is brilliant and the end result means a more relevant page just for you.

Ok all sounds good in theory but why not check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Browsers On Speed

What is your browser of choice? My personal favourite is Firefox. But wait, just how quick are the various browsers out there. Well Lifehacker have put them through there paces are the results are interesting.

In terms of startup time, Opera was the winner, with my much love Firefox 2nd. Ok I can live with that. Javascript & CSS load was tested. Safari & Opera came out equal top but next was Firefox by a whisker. Now a big one, the memory use test. Yipee, Firefox was the winner here. I must say that the Firefox results were with Firefox 3 RC 3.

So as you can see not all browsers are equal. What do you look for in a browser? What browser do you use?

Air Hockey Playing Robot

After all these years mankind has finally developed a useful robot. It plays Air Hockey! I new there was a reason for investing all that time and money into robotics. So without further a due, here is a robot playing air hockey.

Google Take Over More Off The Internet

Google are taking over more off the Internet. Well that is what it feels like to me anyway. Yahoo and Google have just agreed a deal which will see some Google advertising appear next to Yahoo search results. This is a pretty big deal. Google are runaway leaders in online advertising and this move will just increase their stranglehold.

Yahoo have been pretty desperate to do what it takes to make sure Microsoft does not get any kind of foothold in their company. This move is another step to ensure that does not happen. Off course Yahoo will also make some significant cash out of it, but really should they be getting this close to the “opposition”. Ultaimtely the public will lose out. The more Google spread over the net the less competition there is and this is always a bad thing.

How long before Yahoo ditches their own search engine and uses Google search results?

The Life Streaming Race

Life Streaming has really taken off in the last few months and is the latest craze for many on the Internet. The most popular of these services out there is FriendFeed and as reported by the NY Press is growing 3 fold per month. Impressive!

For those of you who don’t know life streaming is basicly having the feeds from all sorts of services you use “feed” into one place so people can catch up there on everything you are doing. The whole concept is brilliant. You can easily choose people you follow, pick through stuff you like, comment and so forth. Now there are plenty of sites out there doing this sort of thing but in my experience FriendFeed has the momentum, the user base and the features I like.

Check me out on FriendFeed.

What do you like about Life Streaming?

Steve Jobs KeyNote The Quick Version

Ok I couldn't resist doing something around Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC. So here it is, the 107 minute keynote wrapped up into 60 seconds.

Snap and Trade With Photrade

Do you take amazing photos, upload them to the Internet and then find people using them all over the place. While for most people that is not really an issue sometimes it would be nice to have a bit more control around this sort of thing and maybe even make a little money on the side. Enter Photrade.

What Photrade does it does well. The “concept” may not be new but Photrade have implement it nicely. To put it simply, take photo, upload to Photrade, others can use your photo and you earn some cash. Nice! Photrade put ads strategically over the images. I like the way it does this as the image is a single jpg file. This means you don’t have to worry about flash or java. Very nicely done!

Photrade looks very promising and certainly worth checking out. What are your thoughts?

Amazon Was Out For The Count

If you have been up with the news lately you will know that Amazon was out for the count a couple of days back. It was not just any old outage they were out for a few hours. Ok international sites and web services were not affected but the main site was. Now this is huge for Amazon and huge for us. Not that it cost me anything but Amazon would have lost quite a bit. I did hear $31,000 a minute from someone. Almost what I get paid 

So what exactly happened. Well here are the facts from Gigaom

1. Traffic to https://www.amazon.com was getting there. So DNS was configured properly to send traffic to Amazon’s data centers. Global server load balancing (GSLB) is the first line of defense when a data center goes off the air. Either GSLB didn’t detect that the main data center was down, or there was no spare to which it could send visitors.
2. When traffic hit the data center, the load balancer wasn’t redirecting it. This is the second line of defense, designed to catch visitors who weren’t sent elsewhere by GSLB.
3. If some of the servers died, the load balancer should have taken them out of rotation. Either it didn’t detect the error, or all the servers were out. This is the third line of defense.
4. Most companies have an “apology page” that the load balancer serves when all servers are down. This is the fourth line of defense, and it didn’t work either.
5. The HTTP 1.1 message users saw shows something that “speaks” HTTP was on the other end. So this probably wasn’t a router or firewall.

So what are your thoughts on the Amazon outage? Do you think heads should roll?

Google Favicon Is A Big Deal

Apparantly the new Google Favicon is quite a big deal. According to Mashable it looks like Google went through quite a process to come up with there latest Favicon. Have you seen it yet? It’s that funny little “g” you see in the address bar of your browser when visting google.

Now the feedback I have seen around this favicon has been less than favourable. Who knew something so little could create such a reaction. Anyway those who don’t like it will be relieved to know that it is not a done deal. The Favicon could yet be changed again after feedback. So all you need to do is let Google know what you think. The VP’s at Google are listening to you.

Do you like the new Favicon?

Guide To Using YouTube Annotations

If you have been keeping up with YouTube news you would have heard about there new annotations feature. In a nutshell it is putting test on you video where ever you want. Confused, well don't be. Here is a great video that shows you how to use YouTube annotations.

Downside to the video, they disabled the embed function. So you will have to click this link and view at YouTube itself.

What do you think of the new annotations feature?

Digg Also Rans Get a Second Chance

How many times do the good stories on Digg almost get to the front page but fail with the finish line in site. More often than you think. Now these stories are getting a second chance thanks to a new site called popFail.

The idea of popFail is simple. If you have a story you think is good but didn’t get the kudos you felt it deserved on Digg then you can submit it to popFail. Now you can become an official contributor at popFail as well. I guess the idea here is to ensure that only good stuff appears on the site. Anyway the site looks quite good and should be a place where you can find some gems that you may otherwise have missed.

What are your thoughts about popFail or indeed Digg itself?

2035: This is the Internet

Just what will the Internet be like in 2035. Well to answer that question is very much crystal ball gazing. Giving how fast the Internet changes any predictions will probably be off the mark. Anyway Vint Cert has given his predictions at a media roundtable.

He talks about Broadband speeds and how much quicker they are going to get. This is a given as we continually desire and demand quicker. The faster it goes the more we will do on the Internet. Like many I predict the demise of TV as speeds really ramp up.

Yes Vint touches on Internet enabled handheld devices. My take on this is that we are on the brink of an explosion here. The adoption of Internet handheld devices is really going to take off and in the future it will be the norm, again with super quick speeds.

So the future of the internet in a summary is super quick and super mobile and super great. I know too many supers!

What do you see as the future for the Internet?

Plurk Your Life Away

Have you heard of Plurk? Well it’s a site where you can put your life online in the form of Micro Blogging. Ok think Twitter but done differently. One of the big points of difference is that your “Plurks” (that is what I have chosen to call them) appear in a timeline which you can easily scroll back and forwards on.

I guess that is why there catch line is “your life, on the line”. I get it now (bit slow on it). Anyway I think the site has been put together nicely but it doesn’t grab you if you know what I mean. I still think Twitter will remain the king of the micro blogging service. That said Plurk “probably” won’t suffer under the strain that Twitter has so it could be a viable alternative. It is certainly worth giving a go.

Have you tried it? What did you think?

In case you wanted to look me up, I am spuds on plurk

Adobe Enters Office Market

Adobe has launched itself into the online office market (well almost). They have released an online office suite today minus a spreadsheet package at Acrobat.com. Never mind what they have done is very slick and I’m sure the spreadsheet will come eventually.

So just what did they release. Well first off there is Buzzword which is the flagship product. Guess what it is......Ok it’s a word processor but I’m sure you figured that out already. As stated it is pure Adobe in terms being very nicely designed and totally slick. Puts other online word processor to shame on the design front. Adobe have implement this very nicely using Flash and Flex. It is also very easy to setup documents up for collaboration at various levels.

Other products in the suite are Connect Now which is a online whiteboard/conferencing tool. Share which as the name suggest allows you to share documents with others but with a twist. No need to email off large documents. Finally there is MyFiles which is where you can store your stuff. Up to 5GB in fact.

Adobe have done a great job here with a very nicely designed, sleek and well thought out offering. Once the spreadsheet package is added then I think they could become a serious player in the office suite market. Another nail in Microsoft’s coffin!

What do you think of Adobes Office Suite?

Could This Be An Actual Alien On Tape

Judge for yourself but Larry King thinks so. Is this really footage of an Alien caught on tape.

Hiding From Google

Oh no, shock horror you discover all sorts of information about you by doing a search in Google. Yikes what do you do. You want it removed. Ok hold your horses, you have heard this is next to impossible. Is it possible to become unGoogable. Well according to The Times it sort of is.

So what do you do when you want references to you removed from Google? First off, take down the post that has your name on it or contact the site that has published information about you and ask for that to be removed. Eventually this should have the effect of these references being removed from Google (it may take a while though). Asking people to take down information about you though will not always work. At the end of the day you cannot control what people put online.

Sorry if you were hoping for some miracle here but it’s just not possible. Anyone have some ideas on how to hide form Google? If so please share.

Could Google Want to Acquire You?

When it comes to acquisitions, Google have made a few in their time. RWW have written about what Google looks for in an acquisition. Do you have what it takes? They can buy this blog anytime they like. Seriously though if Google takes a liking to you then you could be in for a serious pay day.

Imagination and innovation has to be the key. You want to be doing something a little different, something that is able to grow and be expanded upon and something where you have actually used your brain and thought long and hard about what you are doing. Oh and normally if you start off in your garage then that seems to work to. (don’t all great start-ups start in the garage?). Oh and the big one, whatever you are doing must be free.

Are you doing anything that Google might be interested in? Go on share with us.

Facebook Doesn’t Like Homeschooled Kids

Wow looks like Facebook has it in for Homeschooled kids. Ok not quite this dramatic but Homeschooled kids are unable to join Facebook. This is actually due a policy whereby they need a valid school email address. Facebook use this as a way of “validating” their identity. Eg. If you have a valid school email address then you must be ok (right!).

So what is a homeschooler to do? My suggestion is actually start going to school. Alright a bit drastic. You are either homeschooled because there is no nearby school to go to or you have made a deliberate choice to be homeschooled. Anyway back to what to do. Maybe all the homeschoolers could get a petition together and lobby Facebook to change the rules. Maybe you could register homeschool as a valid school domain and then homeschoolers could get an email address there. I don’t really know.

Anyway I understand what Facebook are trying to do here but I don’t know that it has the desired effect. There has to be a better way, doesn’t there?

Look forward to your comments about this.

A Facelift for Reddit

After a few years of being stuck in a time warp, Reddit has broken free with a bit of a facelift. In fact they have been stuck in this time warp since 2005 so it is well overdue. Now I wouldn’t say they have gone crazy or anything but the changes they have made do give the site better usability. Some of the features for example that you used to have to hunt for are now a lot easier to find.

One thing I really like is how you can now customize Reddit around the topics you are interested in. This means you get on your homepage the topics you want. It is very easy to change this to.

This site is also now a lot easier to read. It used to be, how shall I put it, painful! Now it is not so. The site is much easier to read now and not so painful on the eyes.

Check out the redesign for yourself. Let me know what you think?