Registered users can ask questions from several popular Instant Messaging clients such as Google Talk, Windows Live, AIM or Twitter, practically all email clients (no matter if they are online or desktop clients) and the Aardvark website. One major component is the friend network that user’s can utilize to have their questions answered. When posting a question Aardvark will analyze that question and try to find the best possible friends who can answer that question. Questions will also be directed to friends of friends, co-workers, people living in the same location and people who are topical experts.

Answers will be either send to an Instant Messenger of choice if the user who asked the question is online at that time or to the email account if the user is offline in the client. The time it takes to get a response depends largely on the question, the time the question is asked and the friends of the user. All questions that have been asked during tests (with only 1 offline friend present at that time) were answered by dedicated users of the service in less than five minutes.

The concept itself is pretty amazing and users can contribute by answering questions. The main benefits of Aardvark over similar services like Yahoo Answers are that the answers (seem to be) more professional, that questions can be asked from Instant Messengers, Email or the website, that the answers arrive in less than five minutes on average and that the community does not seem to be spammed by webmasters promoting their own services.

Aardvark offers a great alternative to Yahoo Answers, similar services and doing research on the Internet.

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All that needs to be done to find a specific user manual is to enter the manufacturer or model in the search form. It is possible to download the manuals that have been found right from the search result pages or to take a look at the user manual’s profile that not only includes the download as well but also member discussions and additional information about the manual.

Another interesting part of the site is the community which helps users solve problems with their devices. It is furthermore possible to create a user account and store manuals in that account for faster access and to participate in the discussion and community. The User Manual Site should be one of your first stops if you are looking for a user manual.

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The free OCR scanning service supports PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF or BMP files with a maximum file size of two Megabytes. The OCR currently supports the six languages English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch.

Best results are achieved if the images have a dpi setting of at least 150. That’s problematic when taking screenshots as these usually are taken at a lower value.

Results range from impressive to workable and it is a good idea to check the recognized text and correct any errors made during the OCR scan. Free OCR has a few additional limitations that are mentioned in the faq on the website. Probably the two biggest restrictions are a one page limitation when scanning pdf documents and that it will not recognize document layouts which means that a two column layout will be processed as a single column layout.

The developers of Free OCR promised to update their service in the near future to remove these restrictions and limitations. Thanks go to JoJo for sending in the tip.

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The online service will compute a list of words that have been found in the text and categorize them in multiple ways. The words are for example sorted by relevancy and subject. A click on any word will also display the relationship to other words in the text, a definition of the word and example usage from the text.

A word cloud is displayed that is showing all words that have been discovered in the text. It is possible to filter words by relevancy or subject which can reduce the amount of words quite a bit. The subject filter is interesting as it displays word that fall into subjects such as math, science or art.

VocabGrabber has been designed to create a vocabulary list which can be a great help to understand and learn the text that has been pasted into the web form. It is currently only working with text that has been written in English.

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For most of us (at least for me), that research involves the fun little dance of switching between Microsoft Word and the Internet, constantly reading, writing, losing my place, cursing the world, crying uncontrollably, and then getting back to work. But I digress.

One of the best tools out there, of the many I’ve tried to avoid that vicious cycle, is WebNotes. I use it constantly as a student and a professional, and it offers the most features and best usability of any application out there.

WebNotes, at its most basic, is an annotation tool. The first step is to install the toolbar (which works in Firefox and Internet Explorer), or the bookmarklet (which works in pretty much every browser, but with a couple fewer features). When you visit a website, the WebNotes software lets you can either highlight the text on the page, or make sticky notes with comments on the page. Everything you annotate is automatically added to your WebNotes organizer, for easy access later.

Once you’ve annotated a few pages, check out the WebNotes organizer. From there, you can either see the Web pages in their original form, view your highlights and comments on top of the page, or see only your markups. You can also search through your highlighted text and annotations, which makes finding that killer quote you came across an impressively easy proposition.

You can share notebooks, or individual notes (the organization and filing features of WebNotes make sharing them easy), which makes WebNotes great for collaborating on research within a group. There’s no emailing files necessary, no trying to figure out which version is most up-to-date; instead, all your research lives in one constantly-updated place.

For the more professional users, there’s the ability to create a “Report,” which is a well-designed aggregation of all your notes and highlights on a given subject. I’ve used it for giving presentations, or just summarizing research to someone else – it’s much more useful than I initially thought it would be.

The bottom-line of WebNotes is that it streamlines all your research. One, everything goes into one place, meaning there’s no hunting through twelve different Word documents to find what you want. Two, there’s no copy and paste – just highlight or comment, and everything gets saved automatically. The best thing about WebNotes, though, is that it lets you avoid the inevitable hunt through a page you know is useful, but that you can’t for the life of you figure out why.

A few weeks ago, WebNotes launched a “Pro” version, which adds some serious functionality to WebNotes. The biggest update, at least in my own use, is that WebNotes Pro lets you highlight and comment on PDF files. Particularly in school, I do a ton of reading PDF’s, and hate changing between the PDF and Word constantly so I can take notes. With WebNotes, that’s all avoided, and PDF markups go right into my organizer. (If you love the idea of PDF markup, but don’t want to use all that WebNotes has to offer, give Foxit Reader a look – it’s got all the markup love you could want.)

The Pro version also offers better support, and Multi-Color highlighting. It’s aimed squarely at professionals and students who do a lot of research from a lot of different sources, and WebNotes wants to be the source for all your research and informational bookmarking. For me, personally, it’s become indispensable in both cases.

The Pro version costs $9.99/month, but there’s a 50% discount for students who use the promo code “student101″. For gHacks readers, however, there’s an even better deal:

3 FREE months of the full, WebNotes Pro interface. The first 50 people to click this link will get three months free of the Pro features, to test to your heart’s content.

If you don’t want the added features (and the price tag), you’ll be reverted to the free version of WebNotes – which is pretty great itself – after three months is up.

What do you think of WebNotes? Is there a better application out there?

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The typing course is divided into different courses from beginner to advanced and specialty courses and even problem key courses at the end of all typing courses. The online service keeps track of the progress of registered users which is important as the typing courses can take quite some time to finish.

Each typing course consists of several separate lessons. The typing tutor will display various statistics after each separate lesson and each typing course. The first courses show the computer keyboard and fingers that should be used to type the requested key. This is helpful for users who need some visual guidance in their first lessons.

The beginning courses for example target the different computer keyboard rows. They start with a single line of different computer keys that need to be typed in by the user. The typing courses become more difficulty with time. Advanced courses for example ask the user to type in multiple key rows without the visual aid provided in the beginner’s courses.

TypingWeb’s Online Typing Tutor is a helpful typing course for beginners but also advanced users who want to work on their typing speed and decrease their typing error ratio.

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Port forwarding can be configured in the router or traffic controlling device. It basically consists of telling the router route to send incoming traffic to a specific computer by specifying a port and IP address.

One of easiest ways to check if a port is properly forwarded is to use an online port checker like the one provided by uTorrent. To verify the port forwarding open the following url in your web browser http://www.utorrent.com/testport.php?port=1337 and change the number at the end to the port that you want to forward.

The script will check if the port is forwarded properly:

The above screen is displaying that the port forwarding has been properly configured. It will display that an error has occured. The port forwarding test can be repeated after adjusting the configuration settings.

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But this is naturally not the only way how work gets reproduced on the Internet. Other websites may cite passages of an article in their own articles which is a totally legit thing to do.

Keeping track of all the websites and discovering new websites that use your articles can be a time consuming task. A manual way to track them would be to enter key sentences into Google to find the websites that are indexed in Google that are using at least that sentence of your article.

An easier way is to use a service like Fairshare. Fairshare monitors RSS feeds that the user enters into their form on the homepage. It creates another RSS feed that will add all the websites as feed items that copy at least 20% of the words of an article of the initial RSS feed.

FairShare lists the percentage of the article that appeared on the other website, if a link back to the original site is present, if ads are displayed on the website and the url plus title of the article. Those information are excellent to discover the sites that are copying your articles.

It usually takes a few hours after adding a new RSS feed before the first feed items appear in the RSS feed of the copied articles. Fairshare will create another feed that posts a weekly summary of all the discovered items.

While FairShare is surely not discovering all websites that make use of other author’s articles it does a pretty good job at discovering the majority. The information provided are great to help webmasters depending on their use policy. Some webmasters probably only want to contact webmasters copying articles without linking back to the original content, others might want to ask websites that use ads to remove the content while some might want to ask all sites that copy 100% of their articles to remove them immediately.

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The signup process requires no email verification, there is actually no option to enter an email during signup which raises the question about data safety when the password or username is forgotten. Cloudo should work in most modern web browsers. A test in Firefox revealed an initial display problem which was solved by right-clicking and selecting a different skin from the list of available ones. The web operating system did not recognize Internet Explorer 8 yet.

Cloudo can be accessed from desktop computers or mobile devices but is far from feature complete. The public beta release is actually the same release that developers were able to access for about a year.

Some features that are already implemented are the file uploader, viewer, text editor and calendar plus a free goodies such as games, widgets and mashups. Loading times are acceptable most of the time although it usually involves waiting a few seconds before an application shows up.

Cloudo has been designed to be a open plattform meaning that it is possible for web developers to develop and share applications they create in the system. The development environment seems to be already accessible.

The public beta signup is time limited. If you are interested in Cloudo you should make sure to signup immediately even if you do not plan on using the service in the near future.

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One prime example where keyword filtering can be useful is a website that several authors write for. If you are only interested in one author you could use the author’s name as the keyword so that only the author’s stories land in your RSS reader.

Notify.me has been mentioned on nearly every tech blog out there in the past weeks. It is basically a keyword filtering service that monitors RSS news feeds and informs the user of posts that match the selected keywords.

It is a bit different from services like Yahoo Pipes because it can send those notifications only to an email client, cell phone or instant messenger. The process can be divided into the following steps:

• Configuring a destination (cell phone, email, instant messenger)
• Adding a source
• Configuring keyword filters

It is not really complicated but the user needs to know about RSS feeds. The keyword filter can be set to either include or exclude posts that match keywords. Setting up no keyword filters sends all new items to the selected destination. An include keyword filter will only send the items containing the keyword while an exclude keyword will send all except those that are excluded.

The keyword filtering is still a bit rudimentary. There is no option to filter parameters like title, tags or authors which is definitely a much needed option.

Another thing that is missing is the ability to configure multiple destinations of the same type. Only one account of each type can be configured. This basically means that it is not possible to setup multiple email addresses in one account.

I cannot really see the need for such a service right now. What’s your take on this?

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But first things first. To shorten an url one would simply head over to the Shrinkomatic website and paste the url in the form on the main page. The service creates a unique short url in the form shrinkomatic.com/xyz which will redirect to the original url. This is definitively not the shortest url for an url shortening service but any name that is easy to remember should be fine for most users because that’s what url shortening is all about.

If you sign up for an account you can manage all the urls that have been created with the service. The list does contain a very nice and maintainable overview of the created urls. It also provides access to statistics detailing how many times the link was accessed (url trackin).

The unique feature are special urls for websites. Special urls are located at their own subdirectory of the website. While this does not necessarily different to creating a single link to a website it does provide the site owner with additional statistics.

The site owner will see all links that point to his website by all users of the service. That’s an excellent way of keeping track of the links if the service is used a lot.

Daniel has some great plans for the service. Users will be able to export their links to txt or csv and also share their links with others. He has more in the pipeline but some features are to unique to be spilled yet.

You can read about new announcements at the Shrinkomatic blog or visit Shrinkomatic directly to shrink some urls.

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The use of Java ensures that the screen recording service works on most operating systems that Java can be installed on including Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh and Linux. The recording works surprisingly well and is completely keyboard driven. Pressing [ALT S] will start the desktop recorder which will capture the entire screen. Pressing the hotkey combination again will stop the recording and display a preview of the video on the ScreenToaster website.

The alternate hotkey to record only part of the computer screen is [ALT Shift S] which lets the user draw a rectangular shape which contents will be recorded. It is possible to quit at this point which would delete the video or assign a title and description to it to store it on the ScreenToaster servers.

Links will be automatically created that can be used to open the recorded video directly in a web browser or embed it on a website. The service is currently in beta and has a few limitations. Sound for instance will not be recorded at all. There is also no way of saving the video on the computer or deleting a video that has been created before.

The developers will surely offer those features in a later build of the software. There was also no information available about maximum recording time, space per user and other limits that might be in place.

ScreenToaster is a desktop recording service which is currently in private beta. Beta keys are usually handed out quite frequently. It took no longer than two days to receive one.

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