In what is probably the funniest Facebook app ever invented, EnemyBook is now on the scene where you can collect your enemies in your Facebook account.
The application doesn't seem to have any cruel overtones - it's more tongue-in-cheek than anything else. You can add George W Bush or Mark Zuckerberg for example. But what is REALLY amusing about EnemyBook is that you can specify why a particular person is your enemy. So you can choose from options like "He killed my family" or "she insulted my honour" or just a straight-forward "I don't know this enemy but I hate them already"!
You can even tell your Facebook contacts to make your enemy their enemy, and if that wasn't enough, you can flip the finger at your enemy!
My writing gig at Google Tutor is starting slowly. Check out my first two posts (and of course subscribe to the RSS feed!). Maybe you'd even like to leave a comment on each post?
If you have any Google news stories / leads you'd like me to follow up on Google Tutor, just send them onto me and I will see if I can make a story out of it. I am of course looking for stories on my own but I can't cover everywhere. So if you see anything, drop me a line and if the story makes GT, I'll credit you.
I felt the cold mist brush against my face as I woke this morning. The gloom and dread pressed down on me relentlessly and I wondered if it was Monday. I turned warily in the bed to face my girlfriend who was standing at the side of the bed. With a solemn look, she proclaimed "the computer is dead. some kind of blue screen". (cue hysterical screaming from me).
I don't know what happened to the computer but eventually many hours later, we got it to start and Windows slowly limped into action like a wheelchair-bound granny on steroids. We are probably going to have to re-install Windows XP this weekend. When it tells you that you need to approve the system root directory to go into your start-up process, that generally isn't a good omen....
But during the "wilderness hours" (the time when the computer was in its electronic coma), I wandered about aimlessly. As someone who spends most of his day online, I suddenly found myself at a loss. Should I go outside and sample some of that "fresh air" that I've heard so much about? Should I finally go and see the new bakery around the corner for the first time that opened its doors three years ago? Or maybe I could start to wash the dishes from two weeks ago? The possibilities were boundless, the world so open! I was free! free! free!
But then the internet came back. "wonder what's on Digg?" I thought, and I sat down.
Panic over. Whew. Hope that doesn't happen again. I don't think my heart can stand another shock. No internet? Doesn't bear thinking about.
I must be a real sucker for punishment. After two failed previous attempts to switch my blog to Wordpress, I am now on round 3 - and I am getting my ass roundly whipped.
For the past couple of days, I have been reading up online on various Wordpress plug-ins and I have been scrutinising the Wordpress set-up to work it all out. At the moment I am using Blogger and if you are in the same boat, let me tell you that Wordpress may be a very robust blogging platform to use - but it is a real bitch to set up. I have stuck with Blogger until now because I like my applications to be easy and straight-forward. Click a button and it's done. With Wordpress, it's click several buttons and then work out how you managed to crash half the set-up.
I got a theme uploaded and that was a real achievement for me. In fact I was so happy to get that done that I stopped for a cold beer to celebrate! But after that, it was all banging the keyboard in frustration.
Ah well, hopefully I'll get the damn thing set up for next Christmas.....!
Just a quick note to say that the Better Than Therapy.net URL is temporarily down. Until today it was only a re-direction URL to the camelotonline.net domain. However, I have now upgraded the Better Than Therapy URL to a proper website and I plan to start using Wordpress, rather than Blogger. So for the next few days, access to this blog will only be via http://www.camelotonline.net/blog/btt.html
I'll let you know when the Better Than Therapy domain is live and up and running.
As well as writing for MakeUseOf.com, I will now also be writing for Google Tutor. I am a big Google follower and so I am excited to be working with Google Tutor, so I can follow and report on Google news and developments.
I am hoping to get my first piece onto Google Tutor within a couple of days or so. Check the site soon, better still subscribe to the Google Tutor RSS feed!
Textaway - a free SMS service for US mobile phones. The site promises to allow non-US users to send SMS's soon. One to keep an eye on as I personally send a lot of SMS's.
The Software Patch - find patches for all your installed applications (if there are any new patches available)
The British Museum - one of the best museums in the world and my own personal favourite.
Random.org - lots of random generators. I especially like the random coin flipper. Very inventive.
Ceehive - Ceehive is an online community for creative competitions. Share photos, recipes, t shirt designs, and more.
Cooking by Numbers - a rather interesting page where you tick what you have in your cupboards and the site suggests dishes you can make with those ingedients. It's Carrot Surprise for me tonight!
Crowdvine - CrowdVine is a free social networking site that lets anyone create and customize a social network for their organization, event, or alumni group. FeedYes - Automatically generated RSS feeds for any page on the web. Just type the URL of any page, and FeedYes gives you the feed. Annoyances - Annoyances.org is the most complete collection of information assembled for and by actual users of Microsoft Windows. Based on the book of the same name (of which I have a copy).
Hot Scripts - thousands of scripts that you can use for your website.
What if Google Talk was to do a Pidgin or a Trillian?
Friday, October 12, 2007
I've just been tidying up my contact lists for Google Talk and Pidgin and I realised just now that the Google Talk interface is much more aesthetically pleasing and nicer to use, compared to Pidgin's offering.
Don't get me wrong, Pidgin is also a fantastic and robust application, but when it comes to layout and style, Google Talk is just that much nicer. Then I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could import all my contacts from Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and AIM over to Google Talk? Crazy? Maybe not.
I think it would be a huge adrenalin shot in the arm for Google Talk if they would go the same route as Pidgin or Trillian by becoming a multi-client chat platform. By allowing users to import all their other chat contacts into Google Talk, I can see a lot of users preferring the lighter, better designed Google Talk as their one-stop default chat program.
What do you think? Is there space in the market for another multi-client chat platform?
After more than a day of trying, I have finally managed to download the new Radiohead album from their website.
For those of you who haven't heard, Radiohead is offering their new album for download from their website - and you get to choose how much you want to pay. If you want to pay nothing, that's OK too (just enter 0.00 in the amount box). You will then get a link to click on which activates the downloading of a zip file containing the 10 track album, called In Rainbows.
You also have the option of buying an expensive CD set if you want that instead.
But the allure of a very cheap / free album has sent millions of people to the website which is resulting in the site slowing to a grinding halt. Pages are frequently crashing and you are sitting in queues for ever and ever waiting your turn. However, if you are calm and patient, you will finally get through in the end.
But what slightly irritated me was the fact that they wanted my name, address, mobile phone number and email address. So I am probably going to get bombarded with spam mail for the rest of my life.
Now that I have the album, I have to say that the music is quite interesting but I wouldn't want to pay full price for it. It's not really my thing. However, far be it from me to turn down something cheap or free!
Radiohead's strategy is similar to Prince's. Prince, who has a very savvy business mind, gave away his last album free of charge with a British Sunday newspaper. Everyone mocked him but he got the last laugh when his concerts sold out completely at huge prices. Now Radiohead must think that the strategy will work for them too. It's the classic case of a "loss leader" - give away the album for virtually nothing but use it to draw people in to buy paid premium products and expensive concert tickets. Getting the person's email address is a canny move too as they can now start relentless email promotional campaigns for the band. Of course it is entirely possible to give fake contact details as you don't have to verify anything in your email. Not that I am advocating anyone doing that but I'm just pointing out that anyone wanting to avoid being marketed to death can easily avoid it if they wanted to.
Could this be what finally shakes the music industry from its apathy? Do artists need to wrestle artistic control back from the music labels and do things their own way? It will be interesting to see if any other big names in music follow the lead of Prince and Radiohead. We could be on the start of something big here. It doesn't bode well for places like iTunes if the artists start demanding the right to set their own prices or give away their work for free.
Microsoft Releases Word 2007 Viewer for Reading docx Documents - if you're not willing to submit to the Scam of the Century by upgrading to Office 2007 to be able to read "docx" documents, Microsoft has issued a free "viewer" so you can open any docx documents that people send you.
Email Scrambler - this code allows you to place your email address on your website without email harvesters stealing it for spamming purposes.
Xerox Copier - a cool little freeware program that combines your scanner and printer into your very own Xerox copying machine. W3C Link Checker - check the links on a website to see if they still work. Useful for webmasters and bloggers to remove the dead links from their site.
Zinkmo - synchronise bookmarks across different browsers and publish shared bookmark folders.
ePassportPhoto - use this site to turn a digital photo into passport-compliant photos. Never get ripped off by a passport photo machine ever again!
Rememble - rememble is a 'washing line' for your digital bits and pieces. Thread together texts, photos, videos, sounds, scribbles, scans, notes, tweets... so they're not drifting in a digital wasteland.
Innocentive - join the InnoCentive community to apply your expert knowledge and creativity to InnoCentive Challenges™ that span a wide variety of domains. Challenges are posted by Seeker™ organizations eager to present their toughest problems to thousands of the world's most creative minds, and offer rewards of up to $100,000 for the best solution.
Livemocha - the social way to learning a foreign language.
TringMe - an alternative to Skype - a web-based telephone.
Netjaxer - now you can launch all your favorite Web 2.0 programs right from Windows! Create a desktop or quick launch icon. Load any web page when Windows starts and run it as a tray icon.
Google Search Operators - the following table lists the search operators that work with each Google search service. Click on an operator to jump to its description — or, to read about all of the operators, simply scroll down and read all of this page.
File Hippo Update Checker - the Update Checker will scan your computer for installed software, check the versions and then send this information to filehippo.com to see if there are any newer releases. These are then neatly displayed in your browser for you to download.
Radiohead's new album available from today - the band Radiohead is offering their new album for download on their their website - and you can choose how much you want to pay for it. Could this be the start of a whole new trend in music buying?
Every so often, to keep you going while I am writing a longer, more informative article, I will clean out my bookmark folders and show you some websites or software programs that I have found on my travels around the web. With dozens of websites being bookmarked daily and a backlog of 3000+ bookmarks, there'll be no shortage of sites to show you.
All the links to do with software or internet tools are free services or they have a free option. I have tried to test as many as possible but time constraints means that some have not been tested. I am not endorsing any of these sites in any way so I am not liable for any problems you have with them!
Disposable Webpage - you already have disposable email addresses. Now you can have disposable webpages that eventually self-destruct. Choose a time-frame from 3 days to 90 days. At the end of the time frame, watch the page disappear! Good for temporary promotional campaigns or practical jokes.
Keyword Selector Tool - if you use Google Adwords or an equivalent program, this free online tool can instantly generate lots of suggested keywords for you, based on the number of online searches for that term in the last month. Good if you don't know what keywords to insert into your Adwords campaign and also good if you want to know what people are currently searching for in your area of expertise.
OnlyWire - use one bookmarklet to post links to multiple online bookmarking sites. A great time-saver if you use a lot of bookmarking services.
360desktop - Grab all of your favorite web apps and content — web widgets, RSS feeds, AJAX start pages, or any part of any web page — and make them available any time, in an expanded photo-panoramic desktop.
MP3 Tag - Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit metadata (ID3, Vorbis Comments and APE) of common audio formats. It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words from tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more.
ObjectDock - ObjectDock is a program that enables users to organize their shortcuts, programs and running tasks into an attractive and fun animated Dock.
Office Online File Converters and Viewers - with the help of converters and viewers from Office Online, you can share your Microsoft Office files with people who have different versions of Office programs, or even with people who don't have Office installed. NOTE - you will need to access this page with Internet Explorer. It doesn't seem to like Mozilla Firefox.
Windows XP Hidden Applications - a list of "hidden" XP applications along with the Run command to start that particular program.
Avoid Windows XP Re-Activation - a tip to supposedly avoid having to re-activate your copy of Windows XP if you have to re-install the operating system. I would be interested to hear from anyone if this would work or not. At the moment I am rather sceptical.
WHOIS Search - enter a domain name and get the contact details for the owner, how long the domain is registered for and place a backorder so you can get the domain when it expires with its current owner. You can also search to see if a domain name is still available. If you are a website owner, this is good for seeing what personal information is out there on your domain. It's also good if you get ripped off by a website or if you are spammed by a website. WHOIS can give you the contact details of the webmaster and / or the web hosting company so you can report them to the authorities.
Process Library - ever opened up the Windows Task Manager and wondered what a particular running process was? Process Library has indexed every possible running process, both Windows and non-Windows so you can see what program it belongs to and if it is safe to close that process down.
Process Explorer - along the same lines as Process Library, this free Microsoft tool is supposed to complement the standard Windows Task Manager by giving you more information on what processes are running in your computer along with the option to enable or disable processes. It is also particularly good for identifying which programs are running the CPU-guzzling "svchost.exe" processes so you can zap them if need be. This is a standalone executable program which doesn't have to be installed first so it can be run from a USB stick for example.
Fmail - access, read, write and send your Gmail email in your Facebook account. This may be useful for diehard Facebook addicts but I for one would not want to reveal my Google account password to anyone. But I have to admit that the application does look well designed and aesthetically pleasing. Now if we could access our Facebook account inside Gmail....well that would be different!!
eText Reader - have you been looking for a good way to read those Project Gutenberg e-books? eTextReader is a nifty little book interface where you can read text files. You can also change the font size and type, and put a bookmark on a page when you need to stop reading. A really amazing piece of freeware software!
jZip - described as a "free alternative to WinZip". Although I personally prefer Winzip.
How to tap into online riches - a very interesting British newspaper article on the potential to make money on the internet.
I will be returning to writing more blog posts tomorrow. The past few days have just been really busy and everytime I sat down to write something, I had to give up after a few minutes because something else came along which demanded my full attention. But tomorrow being Sunday (theoretically a day of rest and peace - hah!), I should finally be able to devote some time and attention to my Labour of Love (a.k.a. Better Than Therapy).
In the meantime, why not take a look at the newly-remade MakeUseOf.com? I write for them on a regular basis and today Aibek (owner of the blog) rolled out some changes that he had been working on for a long time. Looks good!
Today is German Unity Day in Germany and so this is a good time to take advantage of some holiday surfing and post some recently discovered bookmarks :
It was a merry day indeed some time back when I discovered that this blog finally got a Google PageRank. To all the non-bloggers reading this, getting a PageRank is important because it kind of denotes how important you are to Google (and by comparison to other search engines). The higher the PageRank, the higher you go in the search results. Those with a PageRank of 10 are internet Gods. So if you have the Google toolbar, don't be so quick to disregard the PageRank function. It is actually quite useful in filtering the worthwhile sites from the not-so-worthwhile ones.
Advertisers also seem to take notice of PageRanks - the higher the PageRank, the more chance there is that an advertiser will want to do business with you.
So how do you make your PageRank higher? Well, writing lots of good relevant content on your site is always a good start. Keep updating your content and tweak your meta-tags. But I was speaking to someone online the other day who advocated getting a list of the sites with a PageRank of either 10 or 9 and link to them by leaving comments on these sites' blogs, forums and so on. That then creates a trackback so you will end up having a link to a PageRank 10/9 site. That apparently pushes up your PageRank finally.
I'm not sure of the ethics of doing this (in fact my gut tells me it is not allowed). Can anyone clarify the rules on this? Is it ethical / allowed to try to link to a high PageRank site in order to boost your own site's PageRank?
But just out of pure interest, I Googled to see if anyone had posted a list of websites with a PageRank of 9 or 10. Lo and behold! We have results!
I found this on a Google blog some time back. It's supposed to be what the forthcoming Google phone will look like. I am already salivating! I WANT ONE!!
It'll keep me going until I can afford an iPhone....
As a pro Flickr account holder, I upload a lot of photos to the site on a daily basis, including back-ups of GIF photos. But when I try to use Flickr Uploadr to send the photos to Flickr, it crashes immediately.
Has anyone else noticed this?
The weird thing is that if you then go to the Flickr site and upload the GIF image manually, it works instantly!
Memo to Flickr : Get your Uploadr application fixed!
Page Reboot - add a link to the page and that page will re-load at the interval you specify. Good for breaking news stories, sports results......basically anything that gets updated fast.
Secure Password Generator - my new favourite Firefox extension. At the click of a button, generate long password strings and copy them to the clipboard.
CoScripter - another Firefox extension for recording, automating, and sharing processes performed in a web browser such as printing photos online, requesting a vacation hold for postal mail, or checking bank account information.
HideLinks - Shorten links and password-protect your browser favourites.
Web2PDF - provide "save as PDF" capability for your blog or website.
AddThisPost - now you can allow visitors to your blog or article directory the ability to quickly add posts and articles they like to the bookmark sites they use. No extensive coding. No having to hunt down icons. Just include one simple line of code.
My writing gig at Google Tutor is starting slowly. Check out my first two posts (and of course subscribe to the RSS feed!). Maybe you'd even like to leave a comment on each post?
Every so often, to keep you going while I am writing a longer, more informative article, I will clean out my bookmark folders and show you some websites or software programs that I have found on my travels around the web. With dozens of websites being bookmarked daily and a backlog of 3000+ bookmarks, there'll be no shortage of sites to show you.
