Random Bits

Google has recently released Blogsearch. This search is specifically reserved to search through blogs which provide feeds through RSS or atom. There were many search engines reserved for indexing and searching through the blog feeds, but Google Blogsearch beats them all with its cool and familiar Google search interface. Though the regular Google search also indexes blogs, Blogsearch is very handy being specific to Blogs. This also has some Advanced Search features specific to Blog search like Searching based on blog author, etc. One more cool feature of Google Blogsearch is that it lets you subscribe for the search results. A feed for feeds

Links:
1. Google Blogsearch - Google Interface
2. Google Blogsearch - Blogger Interface

http://www.apple.com/ipodnano/
One of the cool versions of Apple ipod. It gets its name “ipod nano” by its sleek looks and amazing features. Its tagged “Impossibly small”! It can store upto 1000 songs and is available at a starting price of 199$. It has all the features of a regular ipod and more…

Kannada Kasthuri the First Online 24/7 Radio. It plays some great songs - a good mix of old and new film songs. It also has a very active forum. I was surprised to find so many interested kannadigas on internet. The site also provides an option for requesting songs to be played on the radio. We can also find kannada music reviews like “Akash - not a typical Appu’s album”, “Valmiki - Nothin Special Guru!”,… Lots of Kanglish used by the visitors of the site.

Masth aagidhe guru.

Platypus and GreaseMonkey are some of the coolest extensions for firefox that i have used. Any web page can be edited using Platypus. If you want to take a print out of a web page and if it has lots of useless information like Ads etc. then the unwanted portions can be cut using the smart cut feature present in Platypus. If you visit a web page and it is too gaudy then you can selectively make it black and white and view it peacefully. There are host of other tools in platypus to tweak the web pages. After modifying the web page it can be saved as a greasemonkey script, so that your subsequent visits to the page will be customised.

There are numerous other extensions for firefox. Need be, i will try out all those plugins.

ShouldExist stands by its tag line - “Good ideas, free for all”. Its a place where people pitch in their ideas on variety of things. These ideas are released into the public domain and are intended to make the world a better place to live in. In this present world of patents and ugly plagarism beating its trumphet all over the globe, I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon the site “ShouldExist”, in which people freely publish their ideas for the betterment of the world. If you are a person looking to implement an idea but dont have one, or if you are one with lots of ideas but dont have time or other resources to make them work, then “ShouldExist” is the right place for you.

If you are thinking not many people will be ready to share their ideas openly with others then you are wrong. “ShouldExist” has reinforced my belief that “The future of human beings will be driven by their community.”

I was looking for ways to store my firefox bookmarks online so that I could access it from any browser anywhere. My first choice was to use Yahoo bookmarks. This was easy to use and i could export all my firefox bookmarks into a file and then could import this into Yahoo bookmarks. Cool… Then i found something better and interesting - “Social Bookmarks”. I was kind of surprised about the terminology used - “what can be social about bookmarks?”

Social bookmarking is storing your links online and letting others access this list. There are many sites which provide facility for social bookmarking. del.icio.us is a good Social bookmarks manager and works well with Firefox. In this site apart from storing our bookmarks online, we can also associate them with one-word tags. This way we get to categorize our links. The site provides a means to search and browse the bookmarks of various users based on the tags given by them. Thus the setup actually acts as a manual indexer - and hence is more acurate when it comes to search results when compared to a mechanical spiderbot. The success of such a system solely depends on the number of users and their willingness to share the interesting links they are aware of by categorising them into relevant groups.

I got very good results when i tried the search feature. I really feel this concept of social bookmarking will go a long way. This is a very good example of a “simple thing having a big impact when done in cooperation of a large comunity”. Kudos to the people who have concieved this concept.

Related links

1. My bookmarks
2. Subscribe to my bookmarks
3. Search all the bookmarks in del.icio.us
4. Wikipedia description of Social bookmarking and list of related resources

Finally i found the way to know the amount of dowload and upload done through my dataone broadband. http://10.240.43.216/
When i clicked on this link i got the shock of my life. I got this error message

” Sorry, IE is needed.” .
It had “Imcompatible Explore” as its title.

I dont understand what in the world makes even the latest version of Firefox incompatible. Pitttts. I had to open that lousy IE. To get the usage details i had to click on the Service Records link. Here i got a bigger shock. It gave usage details session-wise in KBs, without giving the total per month usage figure. So to get what i needed i had to sum up around 60 entries spread accross 3 pages. Hats off to the genius who has designed it. He has thrown away even the basic concepts of usability out of his window.There were some more links available in this site but I didnot dare to click them.

Google Fight - What a site? I just stumbled on this today. We can have George Bush fight against Bin Laden, Google with Yahoo, Ben Afflech against Jennifer Garner, America against Iraq, India with Pakistan,… And there will be no casualties!! Because the fight here is the number of search results Google gives for each term. Kuch Bhi..

Google Fight provides a simple interface to conduct such fights. It has a good little animation as a splash screen during fights. The site has categorised the fights as The Classics, Funny fights (they think others are serious :-)), Fight of the month and The Last 20 fights. I pitched Linux against Microsoft Windows. Guess what? Yes, Linux was the winner. Way to go.

Hats off to the people of Google Fight for coming up with such a concept. I was surprised to see the number of people using Google Fight. There are really lots of jobless people like me around.

Google Whack is another site similar to Google Fight.

Yet again i am writing on Google and its technology. Recently i read an interview in which a Yahoo executive quoted that “Google is replacing Yahoo as the coolest thing on web“. Today during my usual timepass sessions on the broadband, i stumbled upon the site Google labs - this adds to the cooool image of Google.

Google Labs is Google’s technology playground. It has hosted lot of applications, still under development and not yet ready for full deployment. These applications are for the keen users to play and experiment with them & lets them give their feedback to improve them.

Google sets is one such app. One can enter few items of a set and Google sets prompts the other elements of this set. For example if you enter nike & reebok then Google fills the set with adidas, fila etc. One can enter upto 5 elements of the set to clearly define the relation of the set. Google Sets is still under development and hence you may end up getting some weird results. However it works well for most of the sets. For example i entered Karnataka & Tamilnadu, Google Sets completed the set with all the names of Indian states. Google sets is not built for any particular use, it is upto the user to decide is utility. If not just play around with it, you sure to have fun.

Google labs, as of now, hosts other cool utilities like

• Google Web Accelerator - Loads webpages faster
• Google Suggest - As you type in the search box, it suggests search items
• Personalize Your Homepage - Lets you personalize your Google homepage

Some of the applications which have passed through the Google Labs and seen the light of the day are:-

• Google Desktop Search
• Google Groups
• Web Alerts
• Google News Alerts

Visit Google labs and get a peek into the future services of Google. Afterall it is the coolest thing on web as told by its competitor Yahoo!