Here is a visual representation of the process:

And here how it looks like on the homepage:

The service is currently in private beta with a few invites still available on the site for a price. Apparently only users who buy the Web Trend Poster for $49 can apply for a private beta invitation on the website. It is likely that this is going to change in the future. Users with an account can create their own maps. Everyone else is currently left with the information that are posted on the homepage of the service.

A click on any icon on the homepage will display trends posted by that specific user or website. Each link includes a small preview and the option to open the website to retrieve additional information about the topic. Interested users can visit the Web Trend Map website by following this link. (thanks Jojo for sending in that tip)

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The first section will display information about the blog’s responses. This includes checking the web server’s IP, RSS feed, robots.txt file, web caching and search engine indexation in Google and Bing. The second section will display technical details about the blog which are mostly interesting to the webmaster of the website.

The technical details will display page generation and fetch times, transfer speeds, information about compression as well as the version of the blog software and the theme used.

The site links to three additional services that can be used to check out a website or blog. This includes HTML verification at W3c, feed validation at Feedvalidator and HTTP header checks at redbot.com.Is My Blog Working is a great way to quickly check various technical details of a blog. A bookmarklet is provided that can might also come in handy.

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Readability is a bookmarklet that aids the Internet user in improving the online reading experience. We have discussed other options before like the Tidyread add-on for the Firefox web browser or Washer which turns colors into grayscale for better readability.

Readability is a little bit different as it offers some choices during the creation of the bookmarklet. The reader can select an individual style (newspaper, ebook, novel and terminal), size (small, medium, large and extra-large) and margin (narrow, medium, wide and extra-wide) to improve online reading. The bookmarklet will use the parameters that the user selects during configuration.

But Readability will not only change the text that is displayed on the website; It will also remove all the clutter – and by all we mean everything from advertisement, sidebars and comments – from the page so that only the title, images and text remains. Below is a screenshot of the original article HP Photosmart Premium All in one of Otakugadgets.com and the same article after having used the Readability bookmarklet with the ebook, medium, medium settings.

You can configure and bookmark the Readability bookmarklet (via Shellcity) to improve online reading at the developer’s website.

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Evernote

Everyone, it seems, has covered Evernote in the past, talking about how great it is, how to use it, and all of its wonderful features. You’d think it would have been done to death by now, right?

Nope. Here are six features of Evernote that are equally awesome and useful, that don’t get the press or coverage they deserve.

Saved Searches

One of the great features of Evernote is the ability to use Notebooks and tags to sort all of your notes – its organization features are among the reasons it’s so useful. Saved Searches add even more functionality to tags and notebooks, because it lets you weed out only exactly what you want. You can search for, say, everything in your “School” Notebook that doesn’t have a “History” tag, or only things that are tagged with “To Do” and are in either your “Home” or “Office” notebook. The more notes you have, the harder it can be to weed out exactly what you want – Saved Searches are a lifesaver.

To create a saved search, right-click on the left side of the Evernote client, and select “New Saved Search.” Then, enter your parameters, and you’re set!

Sub-Tags

Within a given tag, you can create sub-tags that will make it even easier to sort what you’re looking for. To do so, right-click on a given tag and click “Create tag in ___”. You can create as many tags as you want within a given tag.

I have a ton of tags within my Evernote, but sub-tags lets me put them all underneath the general topic of what I want. This isn’t so much a feature as it is a way to further organize your notes under umbrellas, to be able to access all the appropriate ones at the same time, in the same place.

Global Shortcuts

This is the single most-used thing in my Evernote workflow. From any window or application on your desktop, a particular keystroke (that you create) can create a new note in Evernote, clip a screenshot into Evernote, or paste selected text right into Evernote. This means getting information into Evernote is super fast and simple, and makes Evernote the easiest place on your desktop to put information.

HTML Export

One worry I hear from people, when I tell them to use Evernote, is “what if it goes away?” It’s a fair point, as Web apps are prone to up and disappear without any warning. With Evernote, though, there’s no worry. First, because the desktop app works offline, and will still function even if something happens to Evernote.

And second, there’s no worry because Evernote lets you export notes to HTML. Most other applications will read an HTML file, so exporting it that way makes it easy to import into another application, or even keep accessible on your hard drive. Thanks to this export, there’s no fear of ever losing your Evernote data – you just might, possibly, one day, have to move it around a bit.

To-Do Lists

Since Evernote is aiming to be your “second brain,” your place to keep everything in your head and in your life, it’s a natural place to keep a to-do list. All the information is there; why not have your action items there too? Evernote does a great job with this – you can easily, with a mouse-click or keyboard shortcut, create a checkbox next to any line of text.

You can also search for to-do items, and keep track of any number of lists within Evernote. It’s flexible, easy to add to and edit, and a perfect solution for to-do lists simple and complex.

Formatting Goodness

What a lot of people don’t realize is that Evernote actually works fantastically as a word processor. It’s not especially feature-rich, but it has all of the basics you’d need when you’re writing – font, color, size, bold, italics, underline, justifications, bulleted lists, and even tables can all be featured in your documents. They’re all saved automatically into Evernote; it’s great for writing everything from a journal to a novel.

What about Evernote works (or doesn’t work) for you?

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According to a newsletter sent by eBay to its members, eBay will allow sellers to list their first five items each month without having to pay a listing fee. In the past, eBay has offered large discounts to bulk sellers on eBay leaving the burden of cost on the shoulders of those who list only a few items at a time. Former users have said, “because of this, what used to feel like an online garage sale where some treasures can be found has turned into just another online store.”

With the new fee structure, eBay hopes to turn around sales on the site. The change allows sellers to list items without paying a listing fee for the first five items listed a month. This is aimed at bringing in new sellers and bringing back many of the sellers who have left eBay because of rate increases. In lieu of the listing fees for the first five items, eBay charges a flat 8.75% commission known on eBay as the final value fee. Those familiar with selling on eBay are probably aware of the final value fee as it is charged on all sales. Because of the flat rate final value fee offered with the first five items sold each month, sellers could end up paying more in fees by using the “first five items listed are free deal” than the traditional fee structure. When a seller surpasses the first five items listed per month, they will be subject to the insertion fees, but will benefit from the tiered final value fee system.

The reaction of the eBay community is mixed with many sellers stating that the final value fee system that goes along with the free insertion fees is “a hidden way to get more money” and “more punishment for the little guy.” Following the announcement on June 16th, eBay’s stock fell 1% closing at $17.23 per share. eBay stock hit its lowest point since 2001 earlier this year, closing at $10.43 per share on March 6th. The fee change has left many to wonder, will the free listings bring eBay out of its slump or will the change in the final value fee structure drive the auction giant further into the ground?

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Even those who read the terms and conditions during sign-up should be aware that website terms-of-service can change at any time. Even website policies often change. The problem is, most people don’t have time to visit 10 or 15 sites regularly and read through terms-of service agreements and website policies.

Thankfully, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group is keeping track of some of these changes. You can see these changes by visiting TOSBack, a site dedicated to terms-of-service tracking. The aim of the site is to show how these agreements change over time.

TOSBack is currently monitoring agreements for 58 popular websites. These include social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, user-content run sites like Flickr and YouTube, as well as online shopping giants Amazon and Ebay among other sites.

Updates are posted on the home page, as and when a policy changes. Clicking on a specific link opens up a page with the agreement text. Changes to the agreement are highlighted so that you don’t have to spend time searching for additions and deletions.

A site like TOSBack provides an important service. User agreements are the basis of a trustworthy relationship with a service provider. However, they are often forgotten until a problem with the site arises and then people scramble to read website policies. With TOSBack, a user can stay in touch with policy changes and quickly recognize anything he is not comfortable with.

Do you read user agreements and other policies when you sign-up with a service? Have you heard of TOSBack before? What do you think of this tracking mechanism? Let me know in the comments.

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Deletionpedia provides a mirror of these deleted pages so that they can still be accessed by interested users. The website offers for example pages like “2008 United States presidential election controversies and attacks”, “Elvis Sightings” or a “list of female basketball players”. Searching for some of the phrases on Wikipedia will lead the visitor to a more general page that covers the topic. A search for “Blood Angels” will for example open the Space Marines (Warhammer 40,000) on Wikipedia while Deletionpedia still offers the original Blood Angels Wikipedia entry.

Most Deletionpedia pages contain links to the deletion discussion on Wikipedia which can shed some light on the deletion motives. Some pages contain additional information that the page is going to be transferred to another Wiki in the future.

Deletionpedia is an interesting project that currently hosts more than 60.000 Wikipedia pages that have been deleted. Interested users can browse Deletionpedia by various parameters including date of deletion, by number of revisions or editors.

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Categories range from computer hardware to digital cameras and camcorders, office equipment and even baby and kid stuff. Users looking for a specific product can use the search form on top of the service which will display suggestions during the process. The approach is best suited to find a specific product quickly as it makes more sense to type in the product name directly than to browse the specific category on the website.

Browsing one of the categories is the better approach if you know that you need a new product but have no specific company and model in mind. Products can be sorted by various means including price, popularity, name or FreakScore. FreakScore is a weighted index of all aggregated professional and user reviews. The main advantage of this approach is that scores from different review sites and user reviews are combined to compute a better score for each product.

Expert and user reviews can be read to get a better understanding of the score. Testfreaks mashes up reviews from sites like Amazon with reviews on professional review sites like Benchmark reviews.

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However, I really, really don’t care what people are doing right now. The people who I do care about are very limited, I would follow about 3 Twitter users, even then I wouldn’t read all the tweets. Twitter can be cool if you find something funny or interesting on the net, you can send the link to your firends without needing to create an email. However, I really don’t care when someone gets up, when they brush their teeth.

Call me anti-social, but I just can’t see the “addicivity” behind all this. In fact, following a lot of people would clog up my twitter clients, so I would miss a lot of valuable stuff. I am not criticizing you guys who follow hundreds of people, I completely understand that we are different. Regardless, Twitter is an awesome idea and a well-implemented service. So do you like Twitter? What do you use it for?

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Performing that task manually can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days depending on the type of website or project. Hundreds of factors can play a role in determining the real value of a website.

There is another solution albeit less accurate and not suitable for serious business. Website value calculators will analyze and calculate a value of a website in seconds. Stimator is one of those websites and it provides one of the slickest professional interfaces in the niche.

The value of a website is analyzed and calculated as soon as the user enters the domain name in the form on the page. Several different values like backlinks, traffic levels, social and inlinking scores, web recognition and linking data are computed and part of the calculation of the final value.

The site seems to be more accurate than most comparable sites as it lists $1,349,935 as the value of ghacks.net, hehe.

A report can be opened that is displaying several of the scores of the analyzed website. These scores are explained in the about page. The page does not say how they are computed but it lists factors that influence the score.

No value calculator will ever be dead on but there are some that can provide a first impression of a websites value. Serious website buyers on the other hand will never rely on these tools alone but perform a manual analysis before they consider bidding or buying a website.

Are you a webmaster? What is the value of your website according to the tool? Do you think it is dead on or way off?

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A letter that has been send out by the Google Docs team seems to have made the worst case scenario true for some users of the online service. According to Techcrunch who received a copy of a letter that has been send out the following happened: The Google Docs team identified a bug in their online service that may have caused the sharing of documents without the knowledge or permission of the user.

“This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.”

While it is unclear as to how many users have actually been affected by the bug it does outline the problems of storing documents, files and information on the Internet. There is always a chance that the documents will fall into hands that they are not intended for.

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The author’s at Ghacks are Duty Fullfillers according to the analysis of Typealizer. Duty Fullfillers are the responsible and hardworking type that are careful about getting facts right and reluctant to take risks. Rarst on the other hand is a guardian, one of the organizing and efficient type who are attuned to setting goals and managing available resources to get the job done.

Most technology blogs seem to fall into those two categories, think Lifehacker (Duty Fullfillers) or Download Squad (Guardians). Typealizer works best with blogs but it can actually be used on many websites that are not blogs as well. Some websites cannot be processed at the moment including CNN but most English or Swedisch websites and blogs should return a result. (Perez Hilton turned out to be detected as a Thai blog..)

What type is your favorite blog? Let us known in the comments.

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Clicking on the central “star” will close in on that star and fill it with exactly 235 picture thumbnails. The planet can be rotated with the left mouse button and zoomed with the mouse wheel. A click on a preview image will load that image in front, another click will load information about the picture like the name of the artist, a description and a link to the Flickr page.

The Flickr page of the selected photo are loaded in a new tab. The user can use the navigation on top of the screen to load another batch of thumbnail pictures from Flickr which replace the old photos shown on the planet.

Tag Galaxy provides an intuitive way to browse for photos on Flickr. It does require a good chunk of system resources though to function properly. Computer memory usage went up between 250K and 400K when using the service.

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Sure you could use a ruler to get an understanding of how the objects compare to each other; Or you could visit Sized Up, a website that visualizes objects in 3D. Working with the service is a breeze. All that is needed are the height, width and depth of at least one object in millimeters or inches which will then be generated by the service and displayed as a 3D object.

It is possible to enter multiple items to compare them against each other or pick one of the default items from the service like a box of matches, a CD case or different paper sizes.

Every comparison that has been saved by users of the website can be looked at. Most items are electronic items like mobile phones and laptops but you find the occasional odd comparison like a Boeing 747 and Antonov 225.

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Download at Work (link, via Technostop) steps in by routing downloads through their own server changing the file extension of the download to one that will slip through the company’s security systems. The principle is simple but effective. The user needs to paste the file url of the file that he wants to download into the Download At Work form. The Download At Work server downloads the file when the user clicks on the Do It button and provides a link to the file on the same page of the website.

Users can customize the file name and extension before clicking the Do It button. Downloading uTorrent.zip might be less suspicious than downloading uTorrent.exe which might get blocked but if an administrator spots the download it might still be problematic to explain what the file did and why it was downloaded.

Available file extensions are zip, doc, pdf, xls and aaa. Download At Work will use the original file name of the download which can be edited by the user as well.

Downloading the file does not mean that it can be executed on the computer and it also might cause some alarm bells to ring if the user downloads several files from a service called Download At Work but it can be a lifesaver for an important file that could not be opened otherwise.

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The only requirement for using Yahoo Pipes is a Yahoo account which can be obtained freely if needed. I’m going to walk you through the customization of the Softpedia Windows RSS News Feed which lists freeware, demos, adware, trial and shareware software programs in its feed. Since I’m only interested in the free software I decided to use Yahoo Pipes to filter out all the other items.

You can use the same technique for your favorite website. Say you own a Windows PC and are subscribed to the Lifehacker RSS News Feed. You might want to filter out any item that describes software for an Apple Macintosh computer.

The Yahoo Pipes interface is divided into three panes. The left side contains the different elements that can be dragged and dropped into the main canvas area. You can use them to load RSS News Feeds and filter data among many other things. The last is the debugger which displays the data of the selected element.

We want to fetch an RSS News Feed and drag the Fetch Feed element into the canvas area. This element requires at least one RSS News Feed url so copy and paste on into the box. If you click on that box you will notice that the debugger has loaded the titles of the RSS News Feed at the bottom. You can click on the titles to see variables like descriptions or titles of the items.

You can click on the + icon next to URL to display another form to paste another RSS News Feed URL.

Click on the Operators entry in the left menu and drag the Filter element to the main window. Connect the Fetch Feed and Filter elements by pressing the mouse button over one of the nodes and (while holding the mouse button) moving it to the other node.

The elements are now connected. The process begins by fetching the RSS News Feed, sending it to the filters where they are customized and then to the output which is already available at the end. All that remains to be done is to create the filters.

You can block or permit items that match the filters. To do that you need to find differences or similarities. Softpedia uses classifications in their item titles. To find out about them you can head to the debugger area and click on a RSS News Feed item. You will notice that there is an entry called y:title which contains the title of the news item. You find the classification at the end of each title, for instance freeware, adware or shareware.

I decided to block all unwanted classifications from the news feed by selecting item.y:title > Contains > Classification, for example item.y:title > contains > Shareware. This will block all items with the Shareware classification in the title. I create three additional rules for Trial, Demo and Adware.

It would have been possible to do it the other way round. To allow only RSS News Feeds with titles like freeware or gpl. A click on the Filter element should update the debugger. It should only display freeware and gpl news items. Now connect the Filter element with the Pipe Output element.

The Pipe Output Element should display the same content in the debugger as the Filter element because nothing is changed in between.

A click on Save saves the pipe and enables a Run Pipe option in the header area. A click on that opens the Pipe profile with a preview area and options to use it as an RSS Feed or embed it on websites.

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The first thing I began to realize was that although Plurk has a great way of managing threaded conversations it’s also very easy to be overrun by noise. I’m guessing the idea was for ‘the ‘fans’ feature to be used more, but as it is everyone simply adds people as ‘friends’.

A couple of weeks ago however Plurk rolled out one new feature to cut back on the noise… the mute function which you can use on any Plurk conversation. It’s handy, but there is another way to cut down the noise, but going into your “Show all Friends” options you can turn off individual people’s timelines.

Karma, a good idea at first, has been a large cause of this issue as Plurking a lot rewards people with higher Karma levels. Unfortunately this also resulted in a lot of spammy responses. Plurk rolled out a new algorithm a week ago which supposedly addressed this issue but we will have to wait and see.

In the best blogging tradition a few people jumped on the opportunity and have created Plurk websites. Eric Oddom has a blog called Plurkable which is “dedicated to all things Plurk”. Updates on just about every minute Plurk event, including such riveting posts as this one from yesterday. Plurktionary is the unofficial Plurk dictionary and help guide. Plurkiverse is yet another blog on the subject, but if you are going to follow any Plurk dedicated blog I think this one covers the topic best.

Depending on adoption of course, I think we’ll start seeing a whole swag of Twitter-like services beginning to spring up around Plurk. Plurkerati is one of the first and tracks the top Plurkers based on their Karma and other stats.

What’s holding Plurk back at this point is the lack of an API, something which has been both the cause of Twitter’s success and also resulted in it’s greatest problems.

An unofficial Plurk API has been released very recently and is hosted on Google Code. It apparently has the approval of the Plurk team but not the support, it should be interesting to see what developers do with this. 

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See the problem is that I never really “got” Twitter… I tried, I really did. I signed up and followed people and Twittered regularly, but it never really did it for me. Eventually I just forgot about it.

Enter Plurk.

Considering micro-blogging isn’t something I’ve really got into you may be surprised I wanted to introduce you to this service. Some say it’s just a better featured Twitter clone, but I think it has a great deal more potential then that.

It’s got a wicked name for a start.

No seriously, the name is actually brilliant. It manages to sound suitably web 2.0 without taking a killing the consonants and even works perfectly as a verb. Check out how they explain it:

• Plurk as stalkerati central: People + Lurk = Plurk
• Plurk as an amalgam of Play + Work: Play-Work. Plurk is what scientists do. It is the enthusiastic, energetic application of oneself to the task at hand as a child excitedly plays; it is the intense arduous, meticulous work of an artist on their life-long masterpiece; it is joyful work. (credit)
• Plurk as acronym: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma
• Verb potential: “Oh I googled this –> Oh I plurked it” Easy enough to wrap around in any form. Plurked, plurking, plurkers, plurks. Little p, big P, it’s catchy, snippy and sweet.

I agree.

It also demonstrates the sites tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, something which actually works in this case… *ahem* Sphinn (“Stop right there! We’re going to have to see some ID”). In fact the Plurk blog is quite entertaining and worth a read.

You’ll find a nice attractive UI which features a colour scheme very similar to the WordPress dashboard. Here is an image of what to expect:

As you can see I have no contacts so it’s not very fun at the moment, I would like to test drive the service properly so so why don’t you join up and try it out too!

One particular element I’m liking is the horizontal orientated timeline, rather then the vertical focus of most services. I’ll be interested to see how it’ll handle a lot of contacts because having to scroll across and down to view “plurks” will be a pain.

Anyway, this isn’t just a Twitter-plus-more-features start-up, it’s a whole new take on micro-blogging and social networking in general.

Expect it to be big soon!

(If not, just expect it to be in TechCrunch’s Deadpool by early next week)

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Until now, when you uploaded a video on YouTube, the only information you received was how many people watched your video, rated it, voted it as a favorite, and any comments people posted. Now, you can actually learn more about viewing statistics for your video.

YouTube has launched a tool known as YouTube Insight. This free tool is embedded in YouTube and can be accessed by anyone who has ever used their YouTube account to upload a video to the site. The tool can be accessed by going to your account, then clicking on the ‘Videos, Favorites, and Playlists’ option under ‘My Account’. This opens up a list of your videos. To access the Insight tool, click the ‘About this video’ button on any video.

YouTube Insight gives you detailed statistics about the video chosen. For instance, you can see how popular your video is all over the world. You can also check up on the popularity of your videos and find out how long it takes for a video to become popular.

How does this help? Well, for starters, you know more about your videos and who they appeal to. Some videos can throw up astonishing results. If you really want to target a particular audience, you can focus on making videos that will appeal to those people. This can be a huge benefit, especially if you are using YouTube videos for revenue purposes.

Have you used the YouTube Insight tool yet? What do you think of it? Are you happy with this tool? What else do you think YouTube can come up with to help its users?

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ThisOneNext or TON if you please is an extension of the already popular What Should I Read Next site. Both sites are the brainchild of a group of people called Thoughtplay Ltd. The working of the site is simple. You type in the name of a book, music artist, or movie. The site asks you to confirm your selection and then proceeds to give you a small list of recommendations you can try out next.

How does this work? Well, the site produces its lists purely on the basis of something called collective taste. This means that when people input the book or movie you are searching for into their own favorites list, you get to see their choices. This means the more your movie is in someone’s list, the more recommendations you are provided with.

I typed in names of a few movies and books and was fairly impressed with the recommendations of the site. Another nice part of the site is that the recommended titles have links to Amazon, where you can purchase the movie you want to see. A small percentage of your purchase goes back to the site to help its running.

You can contribute to the site as well. Simply register with them and you can enter in your own favorites and help out other visitors to the site. Registration is free and only needs an email address.

Overall, the site is interesting and quite helpful when you are stuck with making a choice. I’d love to see how the site grows in future as I think the concept has great potential. Do you know of any similar sites? Do you agree with the recommendations? Let me know.

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