Guess the Most Expensive Part of Google Homepage

Open the Google website, type some query in the search box (e.g. Yahoo) and click the “I am Feeling Lucky” button. Google will automatically transport you to the Yahoo! homepage bypassing the search results page.

Thus you save some important time (few microseconds) and don’t have to perform an extra mouse click but Google just lost a google chance to monetize your visit.

Marisa Mayer says that less than 1 percent of Google searches are done through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button but some estimates suggest that Google could be losing $110 million of advertising revenue due to that button because people are skipping results pages that have Google ads.

Despite the indirect cost, this very expensive “feeling lucky” button will stay on the Google homepage.

Download Comodo Firewall Pro 3 - The Best Personal Firewall

Comodo has just released a new version of Comodo Firewall Pro 3 - it’s clearly one of the most popular firewall programs for Windows XP and Vista.

Like rival ZoneAlarm, Comodo Firewall prevents programs (executables) from connecting to the Internet without your knowledge and also filters incoming traffic that may not be safe. Whenever the firewall detects some fishy behaviour, you are informed with a pop-up alert. (see screenshot)

Comodo Firewall Pro 3 is absolutely free with no strings attached. The company makes money from selling digital certificates and use their firewall product to build a brand.

Comodo Firewall 3 features a new Clean PC Mode that takes a profile of your computer and all the installed software and registers them as safe. Any new software applications that you install or runn will be denied access to the PC unless you grant permission.

Download Comodo Firewall Pro 3 at commodo.com | Thanks Aditya

Some Orkut Members Do Not Like Dogs, PETA Doesn’t Like This

Orkut has close to a thousand communities that are about “dogs” - 99% of these “dog” communities are about loving the animal but there’s one that says “I hate dogs”. (see screen-shot)

This has enraged animal rights group PETA and they have now asked Google to delete such content from Orkut and ban the community.

That’s not all - they have also called the Indian police to take action against Orkut members who are part of the “anti-dog” group and have admitted (in Orkut forums) to acts of violence against dogs.

Upload a Batch of Images to Flickr.com from the Desktop

Yahoo! today released an all new uploader software (v 3.0) that lets you organize and upload pictures to your Flickr account right from the desktop.

You can very easily add titles, tags, set privacy options or arrange your pictures in Flickr sets while staying offline.

Related: Publish Pictures on Flickr from Windows Gallery

And as the Flickr uploader is processing one batch of photographs, you can add more jobs to the queue. Pretty impressive and big improved over the previous version.

Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is compatible with both Windows and Mac. Following are the direct download links:

For Windows: FlickrUploadr-3.0b2.exe
For Mac: FlickrUploadr-3.0b2.dmg

Leopard Powers Over Windows OS Sales for October in Japan

Apple recently released its one-of-a-kind operating system, Mac OS X Leopard, which was a major it already in its first weekend of sales. But, just announced today, Leopard made a record-breaking moment that will go down in Apple history. This has been something Mac users have been wanting to happen for over two decades.

In Japan, OS X sales went up to 60.5% market share year-on year in the month of October. That was enough to take Microsoft's position of the top spot.

Macworld.co.uk says:

"In the six days after Leopard's 26 October launch, combined single-user licence (46 per cent) and family pack (7.9 per cent) sales accounted for 53.9 per cent of the total OS-only market in Japan.

However, at Microsoft, Windows sales fell from 75.3 per cent to 28.7 per cent."

OS X Leopard is doing quite well for Apple, obviously.

New YouTube Player To Stream Better Quality Videos

The one big reason why I prefer Blip.tv over YouTube is that the former preserves the quality of the original video. On the other hand, YouTube automatically resizes the video clips (to 320×240) and also reduces the quality during the encoding process.

But here’s some interesting news for content producers as well as YouTube viewers - when a video is upload onto YouTube servers, it is encoded into low-res Flash video but at the same time, YouTube also stores the original video clip in its native resolution.

YouTube is now testing a new video player that detects your internet connection speed and stream higher quality video if your prefer so. According to Webware, high-quality YouTube video clips will be available to everyone within three months.

Considering that all popular TV show episodes, movie trailers and music videos are already present on YouTube, this move from Google could bring delight to millions who have replaced their TV sets with the YouTube player.

Apple iPhone Vs Windows Mobile Phone

Inspired by the Mac vs PC ads, this one is for smart phones - iPhone vs Windows Mobile

Provide Visitors An Easy Option To Promote Your Blog on the Web

ShareThis, the green sharing icon which you’ll
probably find in most WordPress blogs, is now available for Blogger platform or any other website.

With a single line of Javascript code, you can help website visitors promote your blog content on social websites like Digg, Delicious, Facebook, etc. Other than social web sharing, ShareThis will let readers forward your stuff via email/SMS while staying on the page.

Now the most wonderful part about ShareThis - when readers share your web content, ShareThis tracks and provides your this information through charts and reports.

share facebook

You therefore know what content is popular among your readers and how they are interacting with various social services.

AddThis also provides something similar in a drop-down CSS menu but with ShareThis, you can decide what services should appear in the menu and their order.

Get ShareThis | Developer Blog

Update: If you are on Classic Blogger template, ShareThis will work without problems but for the XML templates of new blogger, consider replacing characters like <, & and > with their respective HTML codes (<, & and >).

Connect Google Talk With Yahoo! or Windows Live Messenger

Yahoo! Messenger and MSN (Windows Live) Messenger users can chat with each other easily without changing clients. Similarly, Google is working with AOL to allow users of Google Talk connect with their AIM buddies. (Skype?)

Now consider a completely different scenario - how do Google Talk users talk to their friends who are using Windows Live or Yahoo! Messenger ?

Related: Web Based Instant Messengers

Here’s a a possible solution to make voice-over IP calls between Google Talk, MSN/Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger for free.

1. If you are on Google Talk and want to voice chat with someone on Yahoo!, add service@gtalk2voip.com as your Gtalk friend and then send the following message to your new buddy:

CALL xyz@yahoo.com [use your friends Yahoo! ID instead of xyz]

2. If you are on Yahoo! Messenger and want to connect with a Google Talk user, add gtalk2voip@yahoo.com to your Yahoo! buddy list and send the following message:

CALL xyz@gmail.com [use your friends Google Talk ID instead of xyz]

For more details visit GTalk2VoIP and their blog. Thanks Nash and Ash.

There are rumors that a new version of Windows Live Version is in the works that will connect to Google Talk and AOL Messenger but this is likely to support only text chat, not voice calls.

ZoneAlarm Firewall with Anti-Spyware is Free Today

Check Point Software, the developers of popular ZoneAlarm software, are giving away a fully licensed copy of ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware for free until Nov 14 (05:00 PST).

This software comes with the legendary ZoneAlarm firewall, spyware scanner and an year of free updates but no anti-virus scanner or identity theft protection.

Download ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware here.

The Spy Camera in Orkut - Who Viewed My Profile

Orkut has a little spying feature called “profile visits” that automatically shows a list of people who have recently viewed your profile page on Orkut. The person may or may not be your Orkut friend.

What’s interesting about the Orkut spy camera is that it can only work both ways - so if you are interested in knowing about people who are checking your Orkut profile, you must also show them your visits to their profiles.

You can enable / disable Orkut profile visits through the Privacy option under Settings.

LinkedIn too provides a “Who Viewed My Profile” feature but there you get the option to know about people who viewed your profile without disclosing your visits.

Adobe Buzzword Word Processor Now Available To All

Adobe Buzzword, the web based word process that created quite a buzz, is now open for public without requiring any invitation code.

Buzzword can export you documents as Microsoft Word (.doc), Office 2003 xml or RTF files. It’s surprising that there’s no export for PDF or Flash Paper especially when they both are Adobe technologies.

Make sure that you don’t type obscene or pornographic content into your Word documents as that’s prohibited according to Buzzword’s TOS. [getbuzzword.com]

Quiz Time: Identify These Ten Famous Web Personalities

Q 1. She is an actress and a musician but what made her famous on the web was her role in a search engine.

Q 2. This son of a former Nigerian President is one of the most famous bloggers at Microsoft.

Q 3. Can you recognize the James Bond look alike in this photograph. He also worked at CNET for some time.

Q 4. The most well known SEO who also works for About.com / The New York Times.

Q 5. Identify this very famous Daddy of the Internet.

Q 6. This is probably the busiest blogging office in the world. Identify the blogtrepreneur.

Q 7. This US senator once referred to the Internet as a “series of tubes”.

Q 8. This man wrote a software that now exists on the desktop of virtually every graphic designer across the world.

Q 9. He is one of the most famous AdSense publishers making millions of dollars from a single website.

Q 10. This former Googler has never written a line of code but GOOG stock options have made him a multi-millionaire.

You can leave your answers in the comments section.

If U cant find out the answers..... here they are take a look.

Q1 - Janina Gavankar: Papi in The L Word…
Q2 - Dare Obasanjo: Program Manager of the Microsoft Contacts Team
Q3 - Matthew Charles Mullenweg of the WordPress and Akismet fame
Q4 - Marshall Simmonds from NY Times
Q5 - Bob Parson of GoDaddy
Q6 - Michael Arrington of TechCrunch
Q7 - Theodore Fulton Stevens (Ted Stevens): Longest serving Republican in the Senate
Q8 - Thomas Knoll: Father of Photoshop
Q9 - Markus Frind of PlentyOfFish
Q10 - Charlie Ayers: Former executive chef of Google who had cooked for the likes of Sultan of Brunei, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Colin Powell etc.

:)

1. Janina Gavankar :Ms. Dewey inwww.msdewey.com
2. Dare Obasanjo : www.carnage4life.spaces.live.com
3. Matthew Mullenweg : www.photomatt.net
4. Marshall Simmonds
5. Bob Parson : www.godaddy.com
6. Michael Arrington : www.techcrunch.com
7. Ted Stevens
8. Thomas Knoll : Adobe Photoshop
9. Markus Frind : www.plentyoffish.com
10. Charlie Ayers :Ex chef Google Inc

free call from pc to mobile...

f u want to make free calls from net to mobiles try out GIZMO CALL . here registration is free and u get 10 min. calls everyday free.




u can call anywhere in the world by using it .but there is one restriction,the maximum call duration can be only 3min/call.after registration u have to download a flash plugin and u ready for call ...
so start now..............

Add google gadgets to your blog !

for decorating ur blog a can add google gadgets to ur blog. like google talk,google search,google calender,live tv and many more interesting gadgets are present here.so start now and add ur favourite gadgets to ur blog

source :- google gadgets

Free e-learning through NPTEL

Learning through net is increased day by day .if u want to
read articles and take virtual classes on engineering topics
on internet dont worry.....the IITians brings NPTEL (National
Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning ) for u .
This is a free learning site dsigned by IIT and IISc professers.
In few months ago this site is only for iit and iim student but
now anybody access this site and download his interested
topics( in video classes format).NPTEL contains app 100 topics
lectures based on enginering like comp. science,mechanical engg
electrical engg etc...
so start now ur virtual classes by IIt professers on ur favourite
topic.
best of luck !!!!

source :- NPTEL

Add photos in orkut scraps.....

a good news for orkut users ,now they can add photos,videos,podcast and html embeddable objects in scraps..

for photos just write the web address of that picture and post scrap it will appear in ur friends scrap books .for more details click on the scrap tips icon in ur scrapbook page.

Tricks on windows.....

check out new tricks on windows
--------------------------------------
1.Add your Photos in My Computer Properties:

Todo this:

1. Open Notepad.

2. Type the following:[General]Manufacturer="Abdul Kader"
Model=HP d530 SFF(DC578AV)[Support Information]Line1=
Your Ph NoLine2= Your Address.....

3. Save as "oeminfo.ini" in the System32 folder.(Without Quote)

4. Create a bmp file(Your Photo) and save it the System32 folder
as "oemlogo.bmp"(Without Quote).

5. Now Check your My Computer Properties

Increase Internet Speed using Notepad:

1. Open Notepad.
2. Copy the following code to the Notepad.[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\
Parameters] "SackOpts"=dword:00000001"TcpWindowSize"=
dword:0005ae4c"Tcp1323Opts"=dword:00000003"DefaultTTL"=
dword:00000040"EnablePMTUBHDetect"=dword:00000000"
EnablePMTUDiscovery"=dword:00000001"GlobalMaxTcpWindowSize"
=dword:0005ae4c
3. Save the file as NetSpeed.reg or what ever name you want but the
extension should be .reg.
4. If you run the file means it asks for "Do you want to add the following

entry to the registry"
5. Press Yes
6. Reboot your PC.
7. Feel the difference...

Note:Editing the Registry will cause the System unstable. Please take a
Proper Back-Up before editing with Registries. Author will not be
responsible for any liabilities

Every time give a new Email Id to Your Friends

Now Friends the very first Trick Of Gmail that I Love the most.So, it goes like this, say you have a email id anoopdreams@gmail.com
If Your Friends wants to send you a mail then they will send it at this email address.
Now, Let there be three friends of yours, there may be many, just talk about three at present.
amit shyam
If you want to give your friends a unique email id For amit It could be anoopdreams+amit@gmail.com
For Shyam It could be anoopdreams+shyam@gmail.com
So, its simple you could add anything after the initial mail by adding a "+" sign.
As all these Email Addresses anoopdreams+amit@gmail.com , anoopdreams+shyam@gmail.com are the same as anoopdreams@gmail.com.
If you have a girlfriend then impress her that how much you love her by showing her name mail id.
Note: This only works when you are sending mails, Not for logging into your account.
Enjoy.....

Death-Meter

Death-Meter
This is kinda freaky, though obviously it's not true.It's just for fun.
Try it out...

Death-Meter

According to this, I'm supposed to be dying on 02nd Oct, 2068 :)

Get your Website Indexed by Google, and Yahoo on Day 1 !!

In this article i'll be explaining a very simple method to get your new website indexed by Google, MSN, Yahoo, and all major search engines right away . You have just spent hours and hours creating a site with good content and a good looking page layout, but have no visitors to see it. In fact your site is no where to be found on any of the search engines, even if you type in the site's URL. An easy way to fix this problem is to join a webmaster forum, or ANY forum which will let you place your site's URL in your signature. Join a popular, high page ranked forum site and and go to your profile to create a signature. In your signature include your URL (in clickable form) and a short descrition of your site, being sure to use keywords that are important and relevant to your site.
Try if possible to use your best keywords in the clickable URL. Keywords in the URL are considered much more important by the search engines than just standard text in the description. Your next step is to just START POSTING!! This is also helpful in link building, because each one of your posts will count as a link in the eyes of the search engine. By using this method, you can quickly and easily be indexed by all major search engines and are a step closer to getting a steady stream of traffic to your site. Learn more about strategies like this and other easy SEO methods at the site Improving Pagerank.

How To Stop PC from rebooting automatically

MY computer has been rebooting itself for seemingly no reason. When it restarts there's usually a message saying it's recovered from a serious error. What's the matter?
Your computer is probably overheating, which usually happens if you’re using a program that demands a lot of processing power — like a game or graphics application.
If your CPU runs at over 60 degrees your computer may shut down automatically to prevent the CPU from burning out. It's possible that the fins on the heat sink under the CPU are covered in dust, restricting airflow and preventing decent cooling. Cleaning the fins may well reduce the CPU temperature.
Try Google to find a lot of free utility that tells you at what temperature your CPU and harddrives are operating.If overheating isn’t the problem, bad memory is probably the culprit. Open the PC case, remove or replace on RAM stick and run your computer for a while.
If your computer doesn’t reboot, you've found the source of your problem.If your problem does recur though, repeat the process for each RAM stick until you find the faulty memory.

search yahoo & google at the same time

most of the people use google and yahoo for searching any topic on net .both r different sites and both r the great search engine of the world.google has it's own criteria for search results and yahoo has others .....but now gahooyoogle brings a better option for searching any topic it provide both results(yahoo & google) at a single page .so i think it is more useful to reach better results

Multiple login in google talk

I wonder why this feature is not by default included in Google Talk. One can login
simultaneously to more than one account. Unlike yahoo multiple login no need of
registry editing here.

Follow these simple steps.........

* Create a shortcut of your Google talk.
* Right click the shortcut ----> choose Properties.
* In the "Target" you will find this "C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe"
* Now at the end of target add this "/nomutex" without the quotes. It should be like this
"C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe" /nomutex There is a space
after googletalk.exe"

Thats it .Click OK and you can open more than one Google talk.

Amazing, isn't it?

Story about ORKUT

THE ORKUT STORY
"Orkut is an online trusted community Web site designed for friends. The main goal of our service is to make the social life of yourself and your friends more active and stimulating, " according to the Web site, which states that the service is "in affiliation with Google."Orkut was launched on January 22, 2004 ,Thursday. The service sent out thousands of invitations to welcome individuals by Google when orkut was started , Google became interested in owning a social-networking service.When its $30 million offer to buy Friendster was spurned, it wanted a social networking site of it's own.Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google had all ready built one for Affinity Engines(AEI) called inCircle. Buyukkokten, was working on user interface design for Google. He decided to build this site as the independent project ,the outgrowth of a company policy whereby engineers can spend 20% of their time working on personal interests.(contd. ..in the below site)Buyukkokten, with the help of a few other engineers, developed this site out of his passion for social networking services & Googles needs. This new site was extremely similar to the earlier one ,inCircle which he had build for AEI. It also had the same 9 bugs as that of inCircle. Google decided to name it after hiM. So it was called ORKUT.COM., as Buyukkokten was tough to spell/speak.AEI Filed a suit against Google but Google shrugged off All the allegations. Despite all this and Some allegations by Overture ,Orkut became a huge success. (contd...in the below site)
For the full story & more info about him visit
http://www.orkutfounder.blogspot.com/


Some more info that is fake Some other Cool Facts about this guy :
* He gets $12 from Google when every person registers to this website.
* He also gets $10 when you add somebody as a friend.
* He gets $8 when your friend's friend adds you as a friend & gets $6 if anybody adds you as friend in the resulting chain.
* He gets $5 when you scrap somebody & $4 when somebody scraps you.
* He also gets $200 for each photograph you upload on Orkut.
* He gets $2.5 when you add your friend in the crush-list or in the hot-list.
* He gets $2 when you become some body's fan.
* He gets $1.5 when somebody else becomes your fan.
* He even gets $1 every time you log out of Orkut.
* He gets $0.5 every time you just change your profile-photograph.
* He also gets $0.5 every time you read your friend's scrap-book & $0.5 every time you view your friend's friend-list.


orkut is owned by Google. ORKUT BUYUKKOTEN is paid his normal salary + a small amount of profit (less than 10 %). not so much AS mentioned ABOVE.

Posted at 11:43 AM by anoop.

Interact With Facebook Friends on Any Web Page

CommentAnywhere allows you to interact with your Facebook friends and networks directly on any and all web pages, without leaving the page.

With CommentAnywhere, you can post comments, photos and videos directly on any webpage and share them with your Facebook friends and networks.

You can also read and respond to commentary created by your friends as you browse.

The CommentAnywhere Mini Feed displays previews of the last five posts you have made using CommentAnywhere in your Facebook profile along with a link to the URL on which the commentary was placed.

Google Apps - The Future Looks Interesting

Google Apps (formerly, Google Apps for Your Domain) is an integrated suite of Google applications that includes an email program, a WYSIWYG webpage editor, online calendar, instant messaging client with voice capabilities and a web-based word processor cum spreadsheet software.

Business organisations, educational institutions and even individuals (like you and me) can use the Google Apps service for free (though a premier edition is also available). And since Google Apps require little or no technical expertise, it may be a blessing for small business owners who have little or no budget for IT.

The various components of Google Apps (like calendar, email, spreadsheet, word processor, etc) are hosted on Google servers and so the end users are saved from the hassles of installing or upgrading software at their end. Administrators can access and manage user accounts though a web-based control panel.

The virtual collaboration features of Google Docs are far superior and user-friendly than what is currently offered by Microsoft Office applications.

To get started with Google Apps, you’ll need a web domain name. Recently, Google partnered with registrars, Go Daddy and eNom, to sell domain names at $10/year. Domains bought through Google come bundled with Google Apps requiring no configuration by the owners. The downside is that India specific domain like .in or .co.in cannot be purchased via Google yet, though they can still be integrated with Google Apps.

If you are planning to use an existing web domain with Google Apps, just make sure that you have access to your DNS settings, which is generally available with the domain host.

Google Apps is available in two flavours – the standard (aka free) edition and a premier (aka paid) edition. The premier edition subscribers are given 10GB of email storage space (as opposed to 2GB+ in the free edition) and a 99.9% uptime guarantee for email.

Other premium facilities include access to 24/7 support by phone, the ability to hide all contextual advertisements on Google services and several advanced features tailored for the enterprise.

The premier edition doesn’t come cheap—it costs a whopping $50 per user account per year - but the good news is that most families, business owners and individuals will be quite content with the offerings of the standard edition because, except for telephone support and small inboxes, Google is providing the same applications in both the editions.

Google Apps service is a runaway success and much of that can be attributed to Gmail, the web-based email program of Google. In an era when 86% of all email messages that hit our inboxes are spam, Gmail is equipped with some of best spam filtering algorithms that have proved to be very effective in keeping spam out of our mailboxes.

Other than anti-spam technology, Gmail provides more than 2 GB of storage space even in the free edition of Google Apps. If your employees or family members prefer a desktop mail client like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird instead of the AJAX based web interface of Gmail, they can still use their desktop software with Gmail using the POP access feature of Gmail which is again free for all users.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is another useful application bundled with Google Apps that may change the way you write and share documents with co-workers and clients. Think of it as an online version of Microsoft Word or Excel software—the look n’ feel and features are quite similar to Microsoft software except that you compose documents inside a web browser and data is stored online (on Google servers) so it can be accessed from any computer that is connected to the internet.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is tightly integrated with GTalk, the instant messaging client from Google. Workers in various locations can edit the same document / spreadsheet simultaneously – they can open a chat window and discuss /review changes made by other authors in real time.

The next big question is whether companies should ditch Microsoft Office in favour of Google Apps? Well, it’s a no-brainer that Google Apps pose a real threat to Microsoft Office, the cash cow of Redmond. The virtual collaboration features of Google Docs are far superior and user-friendly than what is currently offered by Microsoft Office applications.

There are some downsides as well. Google Apps doesn’t have any PowerPoint style software for creating presentations. Secondly, all your confidential data (in form of spreadsheets and Word documents) are stored on Google servers outside the firewall of your company. That may not be to the liking of some companies.

Microsoft is also readying a Google Apps like hosted service (dubbed ‘Office Live’) that is currently available only in the US, Japan and few other nations. Microsoft Office Live services will also offer internet-based applications, branded email and website but unlike Google Apps, the Microsoft online service will seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Office software.

The future looks interesting. [tags]gmail, google apps, google, web office[/tags]

Full List of Yahoo! Smileys or Emoticons for Yahoo Messenger

This is the complete list of emoticons that will work with your Yahoo! Messenger chat client - more animated smileys will be added in the coming weeks according to Yahoo! IM blog.

You can either select these smiley icons from the emoticon menu or type the keyboard shortcuts as a text message in the IM chat box. Enjoy.

Surprise Yahoo! Messenger Friends Who Pretend to be Offline

You want to chat with a buddy on Yahoo! Messenger but his status on Yahoo! says Off-Line.

There are two possibilities here - your friend could be really offline or he may have logged into Yahoo! Messenger in “Invisible Mode” to avoid interruptions.

(Yahoo! Messenger has a Stealth settings feature that lets you choose the people who see you as online and offline.)

You can however beat that mask easily with services like Xeeber or VNGrabber that reveal the exact status of your Yahoo! Messenger friends or any other Yahoo! user.

All you have to do is type the Yahoo! Messenger username and you will instantly know the exact online status of that person. Time to put on your detective gloves.

Visit XeeBer.com and VNGrabber.com

YouTube - $1.65b, Facebook - $10b, Wall Street Journal - Only $5b

Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 - It was (and still) the most popular video sharing website on the internet with around 72 million unique visitors each month. But YouTube wasn’t making any money and future monetizion was difficult as most content uploaded on YouTube was not considered advertiser-friendly.

Another hot property Facebook is denying rumours of selling the company, Peter Thiel of Facebook has indicated that Facebook worth is over $8 billion with over 30 million users and over 15 billion page views every month.

Contrast these numbers with $5.6 billion that Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation paid to buy Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. WSJ has the cream of journalist and writers, read and respected by everyone around and they also have around a million paying subscribers who pay as much as $99 yearly for reading the paper online.

Maybe Internet properties are vastly over-valued.

Is This is a Painting of Jesus Christ or Osama Bin Laden

The “double vision” print depicts both Jesus Christ and Osama bin Laden, in a Christ-like pose, depending on which side the viewer looks at the artwork.

Favorite Blogs

Martin at GHacks is doing an interesting experiment - he has created a blog feed dependency list (like a mind map) to help people discover related links. He is kind enough to put my blog in his list of favorites.

To keep the ball rolling, here are the ten blogs and bloggers who I really enjoy reading - they’ll always have something unique and interesting to share. This list is no particular order.

John Dowdell - Adobe employee, excellent perspective

Robin Good - New Media and Online Collaboration expert

Allen Stern - Social Media, Web Apps, Online Video

ILuvNUFC - Best collection of interesting stuff online

Long Zheng - All things Microsoft

John Tropea - Great understanding of RSS, blogs, wikis and more

Dr. Taraneh Razavi - Dr. Google

Lisa Barone - Search Engine Optimization

Jeremy Wagstaff - WSJ Journalist, Great tech blogger

Steve Hodson - Technology and Internet blogger

Write Orkut Scraps in Hindi by Typing English Characters

Orkut is already quite popular in India and Google has take another good step to bring in non-English users to the online community.

Like Blogger, you can how scrap your Orkut friends in Hindi using the English keyboard. As you type Roman (English) alphabets in the scrapbook, these words are automatically converted to Hindi.

Orkut uses Unicode to encode the Hindi characters in your scrap.

This feature requires a live internet connection, as all the transliteration is done on Google’s servers and sent back to your browser while you work on your scrap.

This English to Hindi transliteration feature (not translation) attempts to accurately match the sounds of the letters between the two alphabets. If you find that it’s incorrect, however, you can fix it.

How to Say No When Friends Ask to Borrow Money

Really Simple - When a friend in needs asks for a sum for money on loan, you can politely refuse saying - “I wish I could, but as a rule, I don’t lend money to friends.”

It works because you are not singling out this person as untrustworthy. Never lend money to friends and you won’t get a reputation as a walking, breathing ATM.

Why You Shouldn’t Feel Guilty: Lending any amount of money can cause problems. It can change the nature of your relationship if the person doesn’t pay you back.

Bill Gates’ Favorite Things - Speech Recognition, Handwriting, Tablet PCs

CNET - Bill Gates continues to lobby hard inside Microsoft for investment in speech and handwriting recognition, though neither has been a huge financial success for Microsoft. The Tablet PC, a frequent staple of Gates’ Comdex keynote speeches in the 1990s, remains a fairly niche product. And though the ability to control PCs through voice is built into Vista, the feature has gotten scant attention.

Another challenge is using software to become more productive. If, say, you have an hour free on your schedule, Gates believes an intelligent agent should be able to look at your calendar and prioritize some of the top tasks and messages that you might want to tackle.

"As we take the magic of software to new things, it's OK to be too early. We don't want to be in too late."

--Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft

Ask Orkut Friends a Question - New Feature Inspired by LinkedIn Answers

The first application for Orkut - Google has added a new feature in Orkut that’s very similar to LinkedIn Answers - you can post a question in your Orkut profile and ask friends to provide an answer.

You can either open the question to your entire Orkut friend network or a select group of friends.

Here’s something that will leave you impressed - when you type a question, Google will automatically suggest relevant categories based on the text of your question. When I typed “How to cook Dal Makhni at home”, the system was smart enough to suggest me the “Cooking and Recipes” category.

This is also significant because it’s the first application on Orkut platform (code named mobius).

After 3D, now smell and interact in 6D movie

Gone are the days of seeing movies with 3D glasses, the concept is soon going to change wih the advent of 6D movie. The City of Taj, Agra would have the first such type of theatre in Asia, to be opened by by Adlabs Cinemas in partnership with Cinema Park Network.

Watching a 6D movie would be a unique and multi-sensory experience for the movie-lovers. Apart from the usual audio-visual show, one could even smell, touch, ride and interact. This is called 6D experience which is brought by specially designed smart chairs. These chairs are equipped with back, leg and butt ticklers, neck and face air blast, water spray, stereo speakers and scent and wind effect. Each participant will have a personal remote and a small LCD screen enabling him to interact with others.

The film titled “India in Motion” would be the first 6D show to be viewed in Agra. It would be a edutainment experience for students, educational institutes, human resources department, tourists and families.

So be prepared for the new experience that is soon going to tickle you. But not sure about how Indian viewers would look at it, considering they are still keen on watching Bollywood flicks rather than watch a 25-min documentary, because cinema viewing is still a phenomenon where families go as a picnic to see movie, eat, shop and enjoy.

Tough times for Vodafone in India, Essar playing spoilsport

India is not an easy place to work with. With just months before formally launching the ‘Vodafone’ brand in India, the company is getting to face several legal and corporate issues.

Earlier this week, Vodafone Essar received an income tax notice for tax claims of around $1.7 billion. And now, its 33% partner, Essar has filed for a nationwide telecom licence under the name ShippingStop.com, which is a fully owned subsidiary of BPL Mobile. This step may have a business conflict and may not go down well with Vodafone.

Previously, BPL Mobile was acquired by Hutch-Essar but due to regulatory issues of spectrum transfer, the deal got cancelled. Essar has a 9.9% direct stake in BPL below the 10% limit. It also owns stake in BPL through series of fund associated with Essar. Now, the entire issue of the ownership of BPL is under arbitration.

But the move of Essar may not get any favourable response from the authorities as it is already a part of big telecom combine and has a retail telecom venture. A case in this regard is when Tata Telecom had to give up its stake in Idea Cellular when it applied for a separate licence.

But one positive for Essar may be the fact that TRAI is in favour of doing away with number of operators in a circle. As a result of which, several companies like Parsvnath Developers, Swan Telecom, Datacom Solutions, S Tel, Idea Cellular, Cheetah Corporate Services, Bycell Telecom, Spice Communications and HFCL Infotel have sought for Unified Access licenses.

Rising Rupee, Falling Dollar - Zero Sum Game?

The Indian rupee is close to its 9 year high against US Dollar, and scores of news has been written about it in the pink newspapers and business channels. They are mostly sympathic towards the Indian IT companies and how they has been adversely affected by its fall (1% of rupee apprecation means 0.75% fall in earnings).

Apart from IT sector, sectors like commodities (metals, petrochemicals), pharma, textiles are the other major losers. On the flip side, sectors such as refining and marketing companies, engineering, auto and aviation sector, gains as their costs decrease in rupee terms.

The Goverment and RBI though is pleased with the rising rupee, as they get to curb inflation. Rupee appreciation is aiding in increased supply of goods and services locally as imports are becoming cheaper and exports expensive, thus reducing inflation.

But the above argument may hold good for developed nations like USA, UK where most of the goods are imported whether its clothes, vegetables or tea. But India imports mostly capital intensive goods such as machinery, which hardly have an effect on inflation. Another major import, crude oil is highly regulated by government, so it may not make much impact.

For India, exports leads to employment, and export led companies may be forced to take a tight hand in their expansion plans due to decrease in expected earnings, which may be a bad signal for the growth-led image of the country.

Google phone coming soon

A move into the hardware business would be a huge shift for the Internet search giant - and promises to turn the cell phone industry on its head. Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram reports.

SAN FRANCISCO (Fortune) -- Google built its empire on the search engine business, and now it appears to be quietly working on the product that Wall Street analysts say will help company shares break the $700 mark - the mobile phone.

Just hours after Lehman Brothers issued a report Tuesday stating that the so-called Gphone "could launch as early as February 2008," Google (Charts, Fortune 500) announced it purchased Jaiku, a Helsinki-based company that develops blogging software for the mobile phone.

"The mobile world has much greater reach than the wired Internet," says Avi Greengart, a principal analyst with research firm Current Analysis. "Google sees this as the future."

Google's bold entry into the cell phone market promises to shake up the $127 billion wireless industry. The company has made no secret that it believes mobile phones should be free to consumers, where revenues are generated through advertising and no single carrier has a lock on users.

In the short run, the Gphone also threatens to dethrone the Apple iPhone as the wireless industry's newest star. Google and Apple (Charts, Fortune 500) have worked closely in the past, but the Gphone could test that cozy relationship and force Apple to make the iPhone a more open device than it is today.

A Google spokesperson would not comment on the company's plans, but there's no question that the Internet giant has ambitious plans for the mobile market.

Google comes calling

The company has focused heavily in recent years on developing services like Gmail, video, search and map applications for cell phones. Now Google is signaling plans to bid on an upcoming auction of wireless spectrum.

CEO Eric Schmidt told analysts last year that Google sees the mobile market as its biggest growth opportunity.

"The key for Google is getting better distribution," Greengart says. "They already have several of their applications ported for mobile use, but the problem is that consumers have to go and download them themselves, and in many cases they don't do that."

That's why many are speculating that Google is making its own handheld device for the masses. Lehman analyst Doug Anmuth says the Google phone will be a "low-priced, simple form factor handset with an operating system specifically designed for Internet applications."

Anmuth, in a research report, said that a Gphone prototype has been developed and that Taiwan's HTC Corp. is the phone's likely manufacturer.

How Can I Watch Live TV on my Mobile Phone ?

With the new DVB-H-enabled Nokia N77, you can watch live TV channels on your mobile phone without requiring any external livetv software.

DVB-H offers smoother and clearer TV picture than 3G streaming. Program contents and guides are offered by providers while consumers select the channel they want to watch.

HandiTV is another program for watching Live TV on Windows Mobile phones. It’s a one time purchase allowing you to watch CNN News, MSNBC, NBC, BBC, Bloomberg, MSNBC and other news channels on your mobile phone.

Flo TV is a subscription based service to watch TV programs on cell phones. It supports FOX, NBC, ESPN, MTV, CBS and most other popular sports channels. Flo TV is currently only available for US subscribers.

Think You Are Addicted to YouTube Videos? Take a Quick Test

Evolution of Dance, bride cuts hair, Shakira spoof, Diet Coke with Mentos, Lonely girl, South Park, Rajnikanth dancing kid, embarrassed Simpsons.. do these very famous web videos ring a bell? Dan Meth has produced a wonderful 3 minute animated video which features probably all the YouTube clips that have gone viral till date. If you can identify even half the characters and internet personalities that are mentioned in this - Internet People, consider yourself an official YouTube addict. Download full video in QuickTime (.m4v) or Windows (.wmv) format.

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 FullScreen 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 maximize your browser. 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.

Closed An IE Browser Tab By Mistake? Get It Back Easily If you accidentally close a tab in Firefox, you can easily retrieve it by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T. If you do the same mistake in Opera, Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Z will help you reopen the most recently closed tab. Or click the Trash icon near the toolbar to see a list of closed tabs arranged in reverse chronological order. Coming to Internet Explorer, there's no inbuilt feature to restore closed tabs but there's a free add-in called IE7 Open Last Closed Tab that makes your IE 7 behave just like Firefox or Opera. You can click Alt+X in IE and it will open up the most recently closed tab - the add-in is worth installing because you never know when you may need it. Available at Download.com

Firefox Running Slow? Make It Fast Again Without Re-Installation

Problem: You cannot imagine life without Firefox but over time, your favorite browser keeps getting slower and slower. Not only is it slow, Firefox sometimes hangs for no reason, consumes a large amount of memory and CPU usage can climb to 90% or more when you have multiple tabs open simultaneously. You have uninstalled most of the extensions and toolbars, deleted all the cookies and internet temporary files, cleared up the file download queue and disabled the background check for software updates - but none of this has helped you speed-up Firefox. Solution: This is a common problem especially if you have been running Firefox for some time - I don't know why Firefox slows down but here's a small trick to rejuvenate the aged copy of Firefox without doing a fresh install. Step 1: Start Firefox and export your bookmarks as a file on your hard-drive (we'll need them later). Step 2: Type firefox.exe - P in the Run box of Windows. (see screenshot) Step 3: Click the Create Profile button without making any modifications to your existing profile (which is normally called "default") Now when you Start Firefox in the new profile, you are very likely to be impressed with the speed. You can import the bookmarks that you saved in Step 1. If you have made any changes to the Firefox Dictionary, copy the persdict.dat word list file from the old profile folder to the new one. Yes, there won't be any old Firefox add-ons in the new profile but the browser will be extremely quick and won't hog the CPU - just the way you want Firefox to run on your computer. And if you ever need to revert to the old profile, just type Firefox -P again and click the old profile. Nothing is lost.

Access Your Orkut Account from Facebook, Write Scraps and more

Something very interesting for web users who are active on both Facebook and Orkut. You can now easily integrate your Orkut account with your Facebook profile courtesy a new Orkut app for Facebook that's not developed by Google but an Amazon employee - Jeetu Mirchandani. The best part about the Orkut Application is that you need not supply your Google Account or password, just type the full URL of your Orkut Profile and that's sufficient to bring your Orkut data into Facebook. Once you add the application, you can read the Orkut scrapbook of anyone, write new scraps, browse photos uploaded by other Orkut friends and more. Add Orkut to Facebook here - you won't feel the need to visit Orkut.com as this Facebook app will let you do everything with Orkut without leaving Facebook. And it's a good way to expose your community of Orkut friends to Facebook friends (and vice-versa). Facebook friends, who are not on Orkut, can know about your Orkut community without ever visiting that site. They can also view the Photos and Videos that you have shared on Orkut. How much fun. Read some workarounds on how to access Orkut, Facebook and other restricted websites at school or work. Imagine what happens to Facebook traffic if someone develops a similar Facebook app for the MySpace crowd. You can already check your GMail email message inside Facebook using FMail app.

The Image That You See Here Is Not a Photograph You may not believe your eyes but the image above is not a photograph, it's just a painting of a non-real person done using airbrush, not Photoshop. Dru Blair took around 70 hours to paint this beautiful photorealistic image - look at the eyes, skin tones, hair curls.. they look so real. Dru has the details on how he completed this painting dubbed "Tica" - Photorealism at its best.

Internet World Maps - Visualize the popularity of Internet and Social Networking across various countries and continents. The full list includes seven interesting World Maps.

Create a Photo Collage Using Pictures of Your Facebook Friends

We earlier asked you to spot a secret Easter Egg in Facebook that lets you create a photo collage of your Facebook Friends in two seconds flat.

Well, it’s an extremely simple process - just follow the step below:

Step 1: Login into your Facebook account and click the Friends tab.

Step 2: Select the drop-down box and click the list separator (–) in that drop down that’s also highlighted in the screenshot below.

Voila! You Facebook friends collage is right on your computer screen. If you have a long list of Facebook friend, it could span across several folds. Save that as an image using some screen capture application that supports auto-scrolling.

Can You Spot This Secret Feature In Facebook ?

Here's a simple question for anyone who has been on Facebook for some time now.

How do you create a photo collage of your Facebook Friends (as shown above) without using any of the available Facebook Apps or third-party tools.

And no matter how large your Facebook friends list is, the whole process should not take more than 2 seconds.

Hint: This secret feature is available right inside Facebook though Mark Zuckerberg and his team never told us about it.

Answer: Once you finish exploring all the options in Facebook, Read the Next Highlights coming.....

Add Ratings To Your Blog Posts for Instant Feedback from Readers

Blogs that are on Blogger, WordPress or TypePad can now add the wonderful outbrain star ratings widget to their blog posts. This ratings widget has been under a closed beta for some time but they finally made a public release today. It's light, requires no registration and very intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post. Even if you have a regular website that's not a blog, this ratings widget can be installed on your site as well. You need such a rating widget to get feedback from all those reader who are subscribed to your blog aren't contributing to the discussion because they are probably too lazy to write a comment. Give them a system like this ratings widget that requires no effort and they'll be happy to say if enjoyed or disliked reading your blog post. Get Ratings Widget here. Developer Blog is here. If you are using Windows Live Writer to insert ratings in your blog posts, make sure you remove the link breaks from javascript else this may not work.

Google, now a household name associated with ‘web search’, remains the top search engine on the internet followed by a distant second, Yahoo. The word ‘google’ is so popular that it even enjoys a place in the Merriam Webster dictionary meaning “to use the Google search engine to retrieve information on the internet.”

Sporting an extremely clean homepage, Google executes your search queries at lightning speed and the search results are relevant most of the times. If you frame your search queries right, you are very likely to find the information you are looking for.

However, there’s life beyond Google and Yahoo!—there exists dozens of specialised search engines that are extremely efficient and innovative though not very popular.

Let’s discover some of these hidden or unexplored gems on the internet that are not Google:

Truveo (from AOL) is “the” search engine that helps you find video content from all video sharing websites (like YouTube, blip.tv), content portals (like CNet, iVillage) and most mainstream media websites (like CNBC, BBC, Reuters). Truveo indexes web videos in near real time so you can safely rely on it for timely searches. [Review of Truveo]

Like Truveo, Blinkx TV is another innovative service that indexes almost all the video content on the web. What’s very impressive about Blinkx is that it also indexes the audio portion of the video and transcribes that to text using speech recognition—that makes Blinkx search results more relevant (you can search by lyrics of the song). And Blinkx shows short preview clips for every search result without you having to load the full video in the browser. [Review of Blinkx]

Discussions on message boards are generally in the question and answer format (like how to enable Bluetooth in BlackBerry) where knowledgeable or experienced members help resolve the problems faced by newbies who started the thread. While big players like Google or Yahoo do index these web forums, they do not offer the option to restrict search result to only ‘discussion threads’—that’s where Omgili can help.

Omgili is a specialised search engine that limits itself only to discussions happening on public internet forums and online mailing lists—it won’t index the regular web pages and is therefore a good place to find quick solutions to problems related to software, gadgets, programming languages or something else.

Coming to people search, Pipl and Spock rule the web. Type in any name and Pipl.com will extract every bit of information about that person from the web in seconds. Pipl will also show profile summaries (from Flickr, Amazon), research publications, web search results and recent news stories (if any) that relate to the person you are searching for. [Review of Pipl]

Spock is a new but promising player in the people search market—it pulls content from most social networking sites and also allows anyone to create their own profile on the web (along with photographs). Even Facebook now allows outsiders to search the profiles of millions of Facebook members that are public.

For searching content published on blogs (and other sites that offer RSS feeds), Ask Blog Search is one of the favourites because the results are almost spam free and can be sorted by date or popularity. Ask provides live previews so you can read the linked story by just hovering the mouse over the search results without visiting the main site. Technorati and IceRocket are also very good alternatives to Google Blog Search.

There aren’t any perfect search engines on the web. Google may return relevant results for some set of queries but Yahoo! or Windows Live may be a better fit for another set of words.

Meta Search, that combines search results from other web search engines, are therefore useful alternatives to regular search engines because you get the best of everything.

For instance, sites like AfterVote and Dogpile let you search the same query on Yahoo, Google and MSN simultaneously from one convenient location. You can also compare the results from various sources to find the search engine that returns the most relevant results for your queries.

And if you are looking for some good fun during search, try Ms Dewey at msdewey.com—it’s a very interesting interface for Windows Live search where you feel as if a real person is helping you search the internet. She even gets bored and makes funny actions when idle