Author: Amit Banerjee

Welcome to Webby Wednesdays – a brief compilation of some useful web services which we found useful during the course of this week.

Creately: Create and Collaborate on Online Diagrams

Do you find yourself helpless when you have to make a proposal to some distant client? May be the customer is unable to understand your idea and approach, and a mere IM chat produces less results. That’s when you need Creately – a new web service which let’s you create diagrams, flow charts and strategy diagrams online.

There are lot of similar tools out there but what sets Creately apart is the easy to use interface and a wide range of already available templates. You can quickly create project diagrams, business strategies and let other members collaborate on the diagram from any part of the world.

The site supports a lot of objects and logical blocks which can be added in your diagram with little effort. You can revert back to an earlier state of the diagram anytime, because Creately saves revision history of all your charts.

Here is a wonderful screencast which briefly describes the useful features of Creately:

Lifeyo: Build Websites The Easy way

Want to create a small website for your company or business? Don’t have enough knowledge or expertise on coding and customization? Check out Lifeyo – a website which makes it super easy to create blogs and websites. Neither you need to  find a web hosting service and manage the web server on your own, nor you need to install any kind of software to run your website.

All you get is an easy to use interface to build pages and content for your blog or website. The entire management of your site remains in Lifeyo’s hands and you need not worry about database failures, scheduled backups and losing your site due to technical glitches.

Lifeyo provides a free domain name such as abc.lifeyo.com, but if you want to have a custom domain name, you have to pay them $50 a year. This is quite cheap, as compared to other hosting providers who will provide you with more space but at the cost of more pricing.

InfoSpinner: Find The Geographical Location of an IP Address

IP address stands for internet protocol address and it can be used to find the geographical location of a person who is using the internet from some part of the world. Wouldn’t it be a great idea if you could track the location of a specific IP address directly on Google Maps?

Enter InfoSpinner – a simple yet useful web service which can be used to find the geographical location of IP addresses on Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Windows Live.

Apart from the name of the city, this site can also be used to find out the zip code, latitude, longitude, country of origin etc. So if you are receiving spam comments in your blog from a particular IP, you can check in which city the spammer lives.

SleepingTime: Find When your Twitter Friends Sleep

You may wonder whether some of the tweeples, who post hundreds of tweets every day ever go to bed? Sleepingtime can tell when your Twitter friends sleep. Just enter the Twitter username of the friend and the site returns a predicted sleeping pattern of the friend.

The tool analyzes the tweeting pattern of your friend and combines it with the time zone information from the profile to predict the sleeping time of a user. However, the site does not work for private accounts.

On each wednesday, we will come up with a brief roundup of new web tools which provide value and add something extra to your daily technology. Stay tuned!

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Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

Digg is already planning a design makeover, but now they have rolled out major changes in their widgets and official buttons for blogs and websites.

The newer Digg buttons work the same way as the older ones. A reader can click the button to submit a blog post to the Digg site, where other users can vote on the story and spread the word about it. However, the newer buttons comes in different sizes and formats, so bloggers have more choice now.

Implementing the New Digg Buttons in Your Blog

The new Digg buttons requires that you place a single <script> tag before </head> tag of your blog template or theme. Then you can use <a> tags to call the script used in the header. If you want to implement multiple Digg buttons on your website, simply add an additional <a> tag. Do not use multiple <script> tags in your theme.

<script src="http://widgets.digg.com/buttons.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

The Medium Digg button : Simply copy and paste the following code in your website’s source to integrate a medium sized Digg button.

<a class="DiggThisButton DiggMedium"></a>

The Large Digg Button: The large button looks good and if you get a lot of Diggs, use the following code to add a large Digg button in your blog or website.

<a class="DiggThisButton DiggLarge"></a>

The Compact Digg Button: The following code will show a compact “Digg this” button in your website. This button would suit good if you use a lot of other buttons and have really less place in the blog template for social media promotion.

<a class="DiggThisButton DiggCompact"></a>

The Digg Icon: Didn’t liked this one, however some of you may want to use it. You can show a tiny “Digg” icon using the following code:

<a class="DiggThisButton DiggIcon"></a>

Features of the New Digg Buttons

The new Digg buttons have some features worth pointing out:

1. Faster load time: Digg is chasing speed and that reflects in their recent developments. The new buttons load faster which is one of the major reason why you should consider a switch.

2. More Button Sizes: No longer you have to embed a large Digg button if your site do not have that extra space. With the availability of 3 new formats, customizing the “Digg” button is child’s play.

3. Auto Upgrades: The newer buttons will automatically upgrade when there is a new release, so there is no dirty hand coding, deleting old stuff and adding new codes. One code does it all.

4. The User Stays on your site after Digging: This is the much desired feature. After Digging a post, the user will remain in your site. From now on, you can expect a better bounce rate from Digg traffic.

The Digg Widget Generator

The Digg widget generator displays the latest Dugged posts of your site like a widget, which can be embedded anywhere in your site. You can completely customize the look and feel of the widget, adjust colors, width and other parameters.

If your blog receives a lot of Diggs, using this widget is a must because it will encourage your readers to vote the stories that are already popular and may be you can make it to the first page of Digg. More information can be found on the Digg blog.

Don’t miss these Related Posts:

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• BloggyBits: Display Twitter, Digg and Flickr Updates On Your Blog
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• Techie Buzz Banned By Digg
• Digg, Twitter and Facebook WordPress Themes

Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

When we need to know the Google PageRank or Alexa Rank of a webpage, we have to use tools like Google Toolbar or Alexa toolbar. The toolbars are good but they reveal the Google PageRank or Alexa Rank only after you visit the website or page. What if we can see the ranks from the search engine result pages and then decide which one to visit and which one to skip? What if we can compare the ranks of some pages of a website directly from the SERP’s?

Enter Linkextend – a useful Firefox add-on which makes it dead easy to compare the Google PageRank and Alexa Rank of webpages from SERP’s (Search engine result pages). Currently this add-on works with Google and Yahoo searches, which is quite enough to get started.

During installation you can choose to show the following features:

1. Enable the Linkextend toolbar
2. Enable context menu, which shows ratings for every link you click.
3. Enable “Safety Filter”, which shows whether a site is malicious or not.
4. Enable “Kidsafe”, which determines whether a site contains adult content which may be not suitable for children.
5. Enable Google PageRank and Alexa Rank

After the add-on is installed, go to Google and search for any keyword of your choice. You will see the Google PR, Alexa Rank and the thumbnail of the webpage as shown below

This is useful, because you can compare the Google PageRank of webpages who are ranked high for a particular term or phrase. Suppose you want to compare the Google PageRank and Alexa Rank of sites which rank high for the term “property deals”. A quick search reveals the following results

Left click the “SiteTraffic” button and it will show detailed information about that particular page as shown below:

You can see the incoming links, related links, traffic details, compete rank and much more important stuff. Additionally, the add-on displays whether the site is suitable for kids or serve malicious content.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Linkextend is an all in one solution for bloggers and webmasters who compare the inside stats of websites regularly. The toolbar installation is optional and thus you can use this add-on without cluttering your browser. Nothing earth shaking, but consider it as a better replacement for the Google and Alexa Toolbar.

Techie Buzz rating: 3/5 (Good).

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Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

Mozilla labs has just released an experimental add-on which let’s you import contacts and email addresses of your friends right inside Firefox. The contacts are listed in a “Contacts” panel and integrate with local and web based address books to concatenate all the contacts at one place. Right now, the add-on works with Gmail, Twitter, Google Apps and personal address books.

To get started, install the contacts add-on and restart Firefox. Click “Tools” from the Firefox menu and choose “Contacts”.

This will open a new browser tab and you will see options to import your Twitter and Gmail contacts as shown below

Click the import buttons provided next to a service and all the contacts will be imported in the Firefox contact manager.Once the contacts are listed, you can click on the email links to launch a new compose message with your default email application – Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird or Gmail.

The good thing about the add-on is that you can import contacts from Gmail and Google Apps accounts and can view the email address even if you are offline. If you face problems importing the Twitter contacts, first try saving the username and password of your Twitter account in Firefox.

This add-on looks impressive and will be useful if you find yourself forgetting email addresses of people very often. Note that the native address book import is implemented for Os X only. More information about the add-on can be found on the project page.

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Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

Welcome to Webby Wednesdays – a brief compilation of some useful web services which we found useful during the course of this week.

Todo.ly – A Simple online Task Manager to manage To do lists

Todo.ly is a simple online to-do list manager with a very easy to use interface. You can organize tasks in groups and set custom filters to prioritize tasks. Other features includes marking a due date to a task and adding it in one of your projects or task list.

You can see the entire hierarchy of tasks and projects in the online dashboard and drag and drop tasks from the sidebar into the projects column. The task manager is web based and you need not download or install anything to get started.

MyFavi.com – Add Thumbnails to Manage Bookmarks the Better Way

You have stored a lot of bookmarks in your browser and chances are that you have forgotten which bookmark leads to which site. When you visit a bookmark after a long time, you have no idea what the page is all about. MyFavi.com let’s you get out of this mess by adding thumbnails next to your browser bookmarks.

You can import a whole collection of bookmarks from an HTML file and the site supports all the popular browsers – Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. The site looks good and can be used to open most used bookmarks when you are surfing on a public computer.

WhySpamme – Quickly Create Disposable Email Addresses

Some websites and download hubs often require you to sign up and create an account before you can download torrents, movies or start a new thread on a forum. Using your primary email address to sign up in these one time websites is obviously a bad idea. You will use the site only once and god knows how many emails or newsletters you will receive eventually.

The best way out – create one time disposable email addresses and use them to sign up on those forums, download sites etc. Whyspam.me creates a disposable email address for you in seconds. You can forward emails from the disposable email address to your real email address. If you get a lot of spam emails, just delete the disposable email address and create a new one and the primary email address is kept safe.

ILovePDF.com – Split and Merge PDF Files online

IlovePDF is a simple tool which can be used to merge and split PDF files online. The site let’s you upload up to 10 PDF documents from your computer and then merge them into a single file. You have to upload the files in the same order in which you want them to be merged. Individual files can have a maximum size of 8MB and once the processing is complete, you will be given a download link of the merged document.

Splitting the files is also quite easy. Once you have uploaded the document, select the page ranges where you want the document to split. Next, click “Split PDF” and individual files will download in your computer one by one.

On each wednesday, we will come up with a brief roundup of new web tools which provide value and add something extra to your daily technology. Stay tuned!

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Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

Would you like to automatically update your Google talk status messages with tweets from your profile? It might be a good idea to change Google talk status messages with your tweets as this will let your IM buddies know what you are doing.

Twitter2Gtalk helps you achieve just the same. You can connect your Google talk and Twitter accounts and cross post Tweets as Google talk status messages. The app will change the status messages every 30 minutes, so there is nothing to worry if you tweet quite often.

To get started, login to Twitter2Gtalk website with your Google account and enter the password of your Gtalk account. Next, enter your Twitter username as shown below:

That’s it. Now your Google talk buddies will see your tweets as status messages every 30 minutes. However, tweets that start with ‘@’ will not be sent to GTalk.

This app can be really useful. Say you are attending a seminar and want your friends to know how the seminar is going. You update your Twitter profile from the mobile phone and the tweet is set as the status message of your Google talk account. As for bloggers, it’s a great way to promote their posts among their Google talk friends network. Also read: how to schedule Facebook status messages.

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Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

Digg, the popular social news voting site is soon going to reveal an entire makeover and you can spot the sneak page at http://digg.com/new.

If you look carefully at the above screenshot, you can already spot a few changes. The voting thumbnails have grown bigger and there is a left column placed just to the left of the posts which contains links to popular stories, recent diggs and trending topics.

The redesign is expected to be live in a few weeks and as of now, the Digg team is preparing an email list to notify people when the redesign is implemented.

Earlier today, Mashable broke an Interview with Digg CEO – Jay Adelson where Adelson describes that the new design is expected to be more “clean” and “user friendly”. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

The site is shifting towards a personalization model, where the homepage will be based on characters like a user’s interests, location, who they follow not only on Digg but services like Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook (Facebook), and other “signals” from around the web like retweets, Facebook shares, and more.

The new Digg plans to support Twitter login followed by Google, Yahoo, Open ID and would be geared towards encouraging more submissions every day.

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Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

Do you know that you can read old newspapers online? With Google news, reading old newspapers is as quick as opening the news archive search page and picking the newspaper you want to read.

Today, Google news team has added a new feature which lets you read old newspapers in “Browsed mode”. This will let you view other editions of that same newspaper, if available.

For example: Here is an article published on Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on July 21,1969 about Man’s first step on the moon. Google news has archived this version and if you want to read other editions of the same newspaper, click “Browse this newspaper” as shown below:

This will open a new page consisting of all the other versions of the newspaper found in Google news archive. If a version is not available, you will be shown an empty column as shown below:

The feature added is quite useful, as you can see all the versions of a particular newspaper at one place. Archiving all the older versions would take some time and you might not get results for a particular date. Here is an interesting forum discussion related to Google news archives. Thanks SeoRoundtable.

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• How To Request Your Blog/Website To Be Included In Google News?

Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

You can use Google docs to create, upload and add collaborative features on your documents, spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations but what if you want to collaborate with someone who doesn’t use Google Docs at all?

In such situations, online collaboration tools like CrocDoc might help. The site lets you upload documents, presentations, PDF’s; anyone can add notes, comments and collaboration mark up.

To get started with CrocDoc, visit the site and upload your document. There are no limitations on the size and number of documents you can upload.

After the upload is complete, you will be given a unique URL of the document. Send the link to anyone whom you wish to add collaborative features and the document can be viewed from their browser.

There are some basic markup options available with CrocDoc. You can add sticky notes and highlight or strike through words in the document. If you want to add additional text, click the “Write in the margin” button. This will allow you to add texts outside the document text area.

Anyone can download the original copy of the document, provided they know the URL. CrocDoc is a great tool for editors needing to manage writers who prefer to use MS Word or don’t have much knowledge of blogging platforms and editors. The Editor of a blog can just upload the document at Crocdoc, add corrections and send back the URL to the writers.

CrocDoc also allows you to embed the document on a webpage by providing an iframe source.

The pro version of CrocDoc has some more features like – keeping a list of documents for ready reference, managing document histories, password protecting documents and more.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Overall, CrocDoc looks good, but the feature set is very basic. You can add markups but you can’t add text or modify the original document in any way. This makes the collaboration incomplete, if John can collaborate on Harry’s document using CrocDoc, at least John should get the rights to add sentences, images and other stuff.

I would like to see a free sign up option being included so that users can see the history of documents from their account.

Techie Buzz rating: 3/5 (Good).

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• Insert Flickr Images In Word Documents

Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

Have you ever tried to measure the length of Windows right click context menu? As more and more programs are installed, the right click context menu is populated with unnecessary items which you don’t use often. Another disadvantage is that Windows provides no easy way to add items in the right click context menu.

That’s when you need tools like Right Click Extender. Right Click Extender is a freeware utility for Windows which let’s you add custom entries in the right click context menu. You can add shortcuts for commonly used tasks such as:

• Move an item to a custom folder.
• Copy an item to a custom folder.
• Open the Registry editor.
• Open the Task Manager and Administrative tools.
• Open the Control panel.
• Open the Command prompt
• Hide/Unhide files and folders.
• Encrypt or decrypt a document.

Using the application is simple. Download Right Click Extender and unzip the files in your computer. Double click the Right Click Extender icon and select the settings which you want to be shown in the right click context menu.

Hit the “Apply” button and all the selected functions are added to the right click context menu. You can remove specific entries from the program settings by unchecking the respective checkboxes at a later time.

The program doesn’t requires any installation and thus can be used from a removable drive.

Techie Buzz Verdict

The application looks good and has all the important functions which we can use to customize the right click menu and make it more useful.  What about removing the unnecessary entries which are already listed? I can’t remove them using this program, which makes me less happy recommending it. I have to use other programs like ShellExView to remove the older entries.

Techie Buzz rating: 3.5/5 (Very good)

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• Clean Up and Organize Windows Start Menu Items into Custom Folders

Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

Do you remember Google Search Wiki? It was a feature which allowed users to promote specific links in search result pages. SearchWiki allowed users to customize search results with their own rankings, by voting or removing links etc.

Not anymore, since Searchwiki has been replaced by a new feature called “Stars”. “Starred items” in search results makes it easier to bookmark and discover favorite links and content from the web.

Using “Stars” in search result pages is pure fun. Perform a query at Google and star a link which you think is good content.

The next time you search the same phrase on Google, the starred results appear right at the top of your results as shown below:

This is useful, because you don’t have to remember or bookmark anything. If you love “Chicken sandwhich” and search for “sandwhich recipes” on Google, chances are that you will see the relevant results which were starred some weeks ago. The starred results also sync with Google Bookmarks and if you use Google toolbar, you can quickly star items from the toolbar button.

I think Searchwiki and Starred items are good ways to organize personalized results but the latter is much smooth and easy to use. If the content is good, a user may not like to change the order of search results. Instead, he is more likely to bookmark the link for future refrence, which is why “Starred items” have replaced the Searchwiki feature.

Searchwiki fans need not worry as all the Searchwiki edits are preserved in their Google account. Please note that “Starred results” are available only when you are signed in to your Google account.

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Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

There are so many tools to help you learn about the topics which are currently popular among web users. Some of the very popular services include Google Trends, Twitter search etc. Using different websites can be problematic and if you want a simpler option, check out TrendsBuzz.

TrendsBuzz aims to accumulate the top searches that are popular among the search engines, microblogging sites and News sources. If you are a blogger, you can use this tool to learn which topics are currently popular, do your research, blog about them and win traffic.

The home page contains different sections that list the popular keywords and searches on the different search engines.

Sources include: Google search, Yahoo Buzz, Twitter search, New York Times, Search.com, Alexa hot topics, Wordtracker keywords and Bing search. Do you need anything more?

The best part of TrendsBuzz is that the results are updated in real time. A good idea would be to load TrendsBuzz in the bookmarks sidebar and keep an eye on the rising searches. The site also lets you refine your searches to specific sites. For example: if you want to know the popular search terms at Google.com, just click “All Google Hot trends” and you can see the most popular searches at Google.

You can also use the search box to check whether a search term is popular in the search engines or not. The site also contains an impressive archive page, which you can use to see the searches that were popular on a past date.

Techie Buzz Verdict

TrendsBuzz requires no signups, is simple to navigate and there aren’t any advertisements. One addition would have been perfect – the ability to add custom sites in the source list. I would love to see Techmeme, Google News and a couple of other sources to be included in the source list. Overall, a nice tool which should be bookmarked and used whenever necessary.

Techie Buzz Verdict: 4/5 (Excellent).

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• Google Blog Search Gets A Facelift, Adds Content Browser, Trends and Categorization

Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

If you are an active social media user and want to display all your social profiles and online identities on a single page, Flavours.me might help. It’s a free web tool which can be used to create a portral for all your social networking accounts. (see example)

I know Friendfeed and Facebook can be used to display all your social profiles, but here are a few reasons why you might like to stick with Flavours.me:

• You can not tweak the design of the page in Friendfeed and Facebook.
• You can not show the page to someone who does not have an account on Friendfeed or Facebook.

So it’s clear that Friendfeed and Facebook are not the best options to create a simple display board for all your online profiles, blogs and so forth. Let’s see what Flavours.me has to offer.

Once you have signed up with Flavours.me, click the design link and you can choose the pattern of the page which you are going to create. There are three templates available – basic, widescreen and accordion.

Once you have selected the template, navigate to the backgrounds, colors and fonts tab to select the design of your Flavours.me page. You can upload an image or choose a custom color as the page background. The font colors and other design attributes can be completely customized and that gives the service an upper hand.

Next, click the “Services” link to add all the social accounts you own. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr, WordPress, Linkedin, Last.fm, Blogger, Posterous, Netflix, Etsy, GoodReads and RSS.

Note: Clicking a social network icon will take you to the respective social site and you will have to grant access to the application.

The premium feature lets you see the stats from the Flavours.me dashboard and use a custom domain for the profile page.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Flavours.me is a simple tool to quickly create a splash page for all your social accounts. I would love to see more services being integrated such as Ping.fm and Friendfeed.

Techie Buzz Verdict: 5/5 (Perfect).

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Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

Tweetmeme has released a “Follow” button which lets you quickly add a “Follow me” link in your blog so that other people can start following your tweets.

The button works quite the same way as the “Retweet button”. Clicking the button opens a pop-up window which redirects to the Tweetmeme page of your profile. If someone is already following you on Twitter, he will be shown a “Following” status instead of “Follow”.

The button is available in three different sizes: standard, compact and basic.

Adding the TweetMeme Follow Button in Your Blog

Adding the follow button in your blog is quite simple. Copy any one of the following codes and paste it in your blog template. Remember to replace “yourtwitterusername” with your Twitter user name.

The standard button: The standard button shows your profile image as well the follower count in text. The profile image is small but it’s the best option to choose from the lot.

code:

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_screen_name = 'yourtwitterusername';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/follow.js"></script>

The compact button: The compact button saves space by just displaying the follow button and a small profile image of yours. Ideal placement would be just after the end of your post or in the navigation menu of your blog template.

code:

<script type="text/javascript">

tweetmeme_screen_name = 'yourtwitterusername';
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/follow.js"></script>

The square button: The square button hides the follow button and shows a bigger profile image but I would recomend not to use it because it has a lesser “Appeal” when compared with it’s counterparts.

code:

<script type="text/javascript">

tweetmeme_screen_name = 'yourtwitterusername';
tweetmeme_style = 'square';
tweetmeme_size = '50';
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/follow.js"></script>

WordPress bloggers can get the Tweetmeme Follow plugin here.

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Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

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So what’s keeping the Google Buzz team busy these days? Security issues, criticism and fall of expectations? Wait, they have recently faced a lawsuit from a federal court in USA.

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Acording to a report by SFgate, a class action complaint has been filed in SanJose federal court against Google Inc, for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The complaint is filed because Google Buzz shared personal data of users without their consent. The case was filed on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a law firm employee from San Francisco.

Now, what’s this “personal data” shared in Google Buzz which resulted in violating the CFAA act?

Google Buzz, as you may know lets users post updates, links, photos ,videos from Gmail. Integrating the social circle with Gmail sounds like a good idea but the followers are pre selected based on whom you interact with most often. This is determined by your chat buddies and the people whom you email frequently.

So far so good, but those people could automatically see all the other followers and information shared in other Google services such as Google Reader and Picasa.

Here is a case study:

One woman complained that this configuration allowed her abusive ex-husband and his friends to begin following private comments she had been sharing with her boyfriend  on Google Reader,  a free Web content aggregation service also hooked into Buzz.

Eva Hibnick, is trying to bring the complaint on behalf of all Gmail users whose accounts were automatically linked to their Buzz profiles. On this issue, a Google spokesperson said

We haven’t yet been served, so we can’t comment on the suit until we’ve had a chance to review it.

The Google public policy blog has a couple of posts, in the past few weeks how to control privacy with Google Buzz by removing Buzz from profiles and the like. Meanwhile, check out the ultimate list of Google Buzz tips and tricks.

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Many blogs are difficult to read and navigate. Sometimes they aren’t compatible with your browser or use poor color combinations. Dark backgrounds, small fonts and catchy colors make blogs hard to read. Whenever I see a page with a black background and green fonts, I close the window.

There may be some websites that are so good, you hate to miss out on them. You want to read them but the poor design makes it difficult. If you use Internet Explorer, the IE Surfgear add-on may help you solve this problem.

The add-on can increase the font size and remove dark background colors and images from web pages. This gives you a clutter free and easy to read environment. Once the add-on is installed, you’ll see three new buttons on the toolbar after you re-start Internet Explorer.

When you land on a page with a bad design, hit those three buttons one by one. The add-on  first removes background textures, then alters the fonts to fixed size and resets the text colors.

Following is an example of a page where I used the add-in to remove the background image:

The extension works with Internet Explorer 5 through Internet Explorer 8. A similar tool which we discussed earlier are TOC Monkey script and Clippable (browser bookmarklet).

Techie Buzz Verdict

The extension wipes out clutter from web pages but what about the other browsers? I would love to see SurfGear working on other browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. The add-on is fine but it feels tiring when you have to install different add-ons for different browsers, just for a small purpose.

Techie Buzz rating: 2/5 (Average).

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There may be reasons why you face frequent problems while trying to view YouTube videos on the web. Some of the very common problems are:

• You are using a slow internet connection such as wireless router or a wi-fi network.
• You have connectivity problems and the video ceases while buffering because of a lost network connection.

YouTube has rolled out a “Test video page” which can analyze connection and playback problems encountered while viewing YouTube videos. The “Test video” can be found here and it displays the video fps, dropped fps and the speed of the data stream in real time.

Some interesting stats are also shown on the same page which includes the speed of your ISP, the average speed of internet connection in your country and how it differes from the rest of the world. (also read: Tips to increase slow Dial up connection speed).

I live in Kolkata, India and use a Broadband connection. Here is the graph which I saw on the YouTube Test Video page:

As you can see, the ISP speed in my city is nearly the same as compared to other states in my country. However, the average Global ISP speed is much higher as compared to Indian states or cities.

Among the many factors which affect the video playback are ISP speed, the distance of your computer from Google Servers, your computer configuration, other devices in your network and Internet connected appliances. By enabling the video speed data, YouTube aims to inform the users about the reasons of speed issues and slow video playbacks. More information can be found on the video speed FAQ page.

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