After introducing Teachertube just a few days earlier I received an email pointing me to Vidipedia which is a video encyclopedia, basically Wikipedia with Videos. The principle is of course the same. You search for a phrase or browse a category on Vidipedia and one or more results are shown on the next page. If a single result exists it will be shown in video player mode which loads and plays the video automatically.

The Stardoll is definitely a great playground for children between the age of 7 and 16 but also suitable for everyone else who likes to dress and play around with paper dolls. The site offers two main areas. The first can be accessed without registering to Stardollls. You can pick a celebrity, e.g. Johnny Depp, Kylie Minogue or Heidi Klum and use a wardrobe to to outfit them. If you take Johnny you could dress him with the same clothes that he was wearing in The Pirates of the Caribbean or with a multitude of other clothes.

A lot of images get uploaded on Flickr every minute and someone thought it would be a great idea to create a automatic slideshow using all the new images that get uploaded to the service. Instead of just providing a page with all new images he mashed up the images from Flickr with Google Maps to create an interesting result. All images are loaded and shown automatically one after another in thumbnail size with a reference to the country of origin of the uploader.

Microsoft is jumping on the “online storage” train and it was unofficially announced that their so called Windows Live Folders service is going into public beta. This online storage services provides its users 500 megabytes of space that they can use to store or share data online. Files can be uploaded with Internet Explorer and Firefox which surprises me a little bit. Well, the service was first mentioned to go public at the Liveside blog creating a big run for an account which had the result that the Live Folders website was not available anymore.

If you are looking for a online music player that is finding a lot of artists you might want to take a look at Spool.fm. You may search for and listen to songs even without registration which is a really nice feature. Registration adds more functionality like playlists for instance that can be saved. The Web 2.0 interface is doing everything it can to make searching and using Spool.fm as comfortable as possible. A search is conducted as soon as you enter the first letter of a song title or artist name and you can drag and drop those to and from your playlist.

I have heard about Musicmesh before but did not find the time to take a closer look at their service until now. The website is one of those web 2.0 sites who all look and feel the same. Musicmesh offers a related music search engine which connects music albums that are somehow related. One album is always centered and other music albums that float around it. If you move the mouse above one of them you can read the title and artist. A click centers this album and displays new related albums. This means that you can explore new albums by simply clicking on them to find more albums that you might like.

I think it has become incredible hard to find bargains these days on eBay and I reduced the time I spend on eBay a lot over the last two years. Actually, I’m only visiting eBay when I know what I’m looking for and can’t find it at a local retailer or online shop. The Lastminute Auction service might make me spend more time again on eBay though. It lists auctions that are running out in an hour or less and have a maximum price of $1. Various categories like computer, business and books make it easy to navigate the website and find what you are looking for. It is also nice to just look around and see if you can find something interesting.

Like Meebo Imo.im offers any users the possibility to connect to various instant messengers using a simple web interface. Imo.im lets you connect to the following four popular instant messengers: AIM, Yahoo, MSN and Google Talk. The free service that Imo.im offers is free and easy to use. Just enter your username and password and select the service that you want to log in to. It is possible to sign on into more than one account at a time. By using the Link Accounts feature you can link those accounts which would have the results that once you log into one account all other accounts will be available as well without logging into them separately.

When you first start a blog and you’re slowly building your audience and your traffic, your site’s uptime/availability is not something that you often think about. When your audience is still small and your blog is down for one or two or even ten hours it really doesn’t matter that much, as the potential number of people who might have tried to visit and failed is small, and most of them at that point are friends or are somehow connected to you and will likely come back again.

Once you have grown your traffic to a fairly decent amount, however, downtimes that affect your site are a complete different story, a nuisance that can mean that hundreds of people are unable to get to your site, most of whom are likely to never come back again. In my experience, even when my hosting company promised 99.8% uptime, this began to increasingly seem like meaningless marketing hype when I started getting emails from friends and strangers alike informing me that my site was down at such and such an hour (many of which downtimes occurred in the early am hours when I wouldn’t have been online anyway).

Frequently Asked Questions are a good way of reducing support inquiries at business sites or for reducing the tenth post about a similar topic in a popular forum. FAQ’s are a great way of answering questions from users before they have been asked.The developers of Querycat decided to create a database of FAQ entries from all over the Internet and make it searchable at their homepage. They claim to have more than four million FAQ entries in their ever growing database.

Digg.com is one of the most important social news sites on the Internet. It is not completely user driven but comes close to that. Every registered user may submit as many links to interesting articles and websites as he likes. Those links – with a title and short description – stay in the upcoming stories section for no more than 24 hours. Every user may also vote on as many links to stories as he likes which is seen as a indicator for a stories popularity. The more votes the more users voted in favor of the story.

Music recommendation services like Audiobaba exist for a while now. Some like Pandora search and stream music using Internet radio, others like Musicovery use a interactive website to play music of a certain period in time. Both are great services and I’m still using them from time to time to find new songs and artists that I never heard of before. I used to get my recommendations from terrestrial radio before but since they began to only play the same top 100 songs over and over again I had to shift my attention to a new medium that was better suited to discover new music.

Most video editing programs are rather complex and it takes a while until one is able to work with the video editing software without the fear of doing something wrong or missing a crucial step in the editing process. This is a huge problem for amateurs who would like to cut a video that they created without having to learn a complex software. There is however a possibility for them. Jumpcut is a online video editing website that lets you upload videos from your computer and edit them online on their website.

Audiobooks become increasingly popular and there are many pay sites that offer downloads of Audiobooks after you paid for them. It is however possible to download free Audiobooks from various sites from the Internet. The main problem with finding those free sites is that many pay sites offer free samples of the Audiobooks as well but you have to pay when you want to listen to the complete book.

Tunecore online service offers an incredible opportunity for everyone who is creating music. You can use Tunecore to upload your music to their site and publish it at well known online music stores such as Apple iTunes, eMusic, Sony Connect or Rhapsody. It is possible to upload single songs, albums, cover art and everything else that is related to the music. Tunecore gets non exclusive rights to submit the songs and albums to the stores that you selected and to collect the money from the music sales earnings. They have no other rights on the songs such as merchandise rights or master recording copyrights.

A reader of my blog recommended a great music download site with the name ElectroBel, a free underground electronic music community site. The mp3 music that can be found on Electrobel can be listened to online or downloaded as mp3 files to your own computer. Every single song has been created by a member of the music community and released under Creative Commons.

Did you ever fell into the trap that you signed up for an supposedly unlimited service only to find out at a later time that the unlimited service did not really mean unlimited at all ? I fell into that trap with my first website which i hosted using an unlimited webhosting plan. No extra money for transfers over a certain amount of gigabytes, no worries about cpu and sql usage, everything was advertised as being unlimited. I started hosting some file mirros and ran some pretty resource demanding scripts and it did not took long until I was told to either upgrade my hosting account to a dedicated server or leave the company and look for hosting elsewhere.

All of my friends hate the flv format that Youtube and other social video sites such as dailymotion and break use to show video content on their websites. Most download managers, like the Firefox extension Video Downloader, offer the flv files as downloads which most multimedia players do not support at all. You could add a flv plugin to add flash video support to your media player but there is an easier solution to this.

It seems that the big three, that is Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, always have to compete against each other. When someone introduces a new feature the others are surely going to announce a similar feature that is just a tad better than the feature of the other company. We are witnessing the race for Email storage at the moment. Microsoft has a storage limit of 2 Gigabytes for their users while Google has currently a limit of 2,8 Gigabytes. Yahoo decided to accept the challenge and give the others something to choke on, they announced today that they will offer unlimited Email storage to all of its users in the near future.

The free social music networking site Jamendo announced today that they have distributed more than one million downloads of albums that are freely available using bittorrent technology. Only albums that have been fully distributed have been counted or as they put it: “this figure is the minimum indicative number of the total of complete albums we have distributed so far”. This is a huge success for sites that believe that drm free music sites can and will succeed in the long run. Jamendo has an incredible download rate of more than 200000 albums every month and the figure is increasing with each passing month.

Pando is a free online service that utilizes p2p technology to share large encrypted files by email and instant messenger. The sender selects files and folders that he wants to share. Those files are immediately uploaded to the Pando server where they are stored in encrypted form. The recipient receives an email that contains a small attachment which starts the download process when executed. Data will be send from the Pando server and other users who are currently online.

I’m normally not writing that many articles with webmasters in mind but I sometimes come upon a remarkable service or site that I like to much that I have to write about it. We all know that webmasters use Social Bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us to bookmark and tag their own articles to drive traffic to their website. This is working well in conjunction with buttons that let visitors of the site add the same article to those bookmarking sites increasing the popularity of the article.

I never had the time and passion to submit my articles to many bookmarking sites and only submitted it occasionally to the most popular services. That is, until I found the site onlywire which handles most of the submitting process for me. I had to signup for the service – it is free of course – and provide login details for all the social bookmarking services that I wanted to combine. I then had to drop a bookmarklet into my browser bar and click on it whenever I was on a page that I wanted to submit to all of the services that I supplied login details for.

Media Convert is a new online service which makes it possible to convert a lot of file formats before downloading the file to your computer. All you have to do is add an url and select the input format. Select the format that you want to convert the file to and click on convert. The only restriction is that the file has a maximum size of 150 megabytes, everything above that amount will not be processed.

There are so many supported file formats that it is impossible to name them all. I try to list the most important ones. It supports the most important text formats, such as doc, txt, pdf, rtf and Open Office, many zip formats such as zip, rar and cab. It supports 17 movie formats such as avi, mpg, mov and mp4 and more than 40 audio formats.

Krunch is a nice little service that offers you the option to upload and compress files in three different formats (zip, rar and gzip). After compressing the file you have the option to download it for yourself and mail it to other recipients either with a download link to the file or directly as an attachment. The service offers the option to upload and decompress a compressed file in the formats zip, rar and tar.gz. It seems to have problems with my rar files though.

Have you every asked yourself what you have to do if you want to share your photographs with others online ? Or how to share an online calendar with family, friends and co-workers ? The I want to site has a large list of things you´d probably want to do and a link to a site that leads to the solution.