Tag: Internet

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News

YouTube crosses 2 billion views per day

YouTube had a short video of some 30 seconds which was the first one uploaded to its server. This was the first video on YouTube ever and from there started a revolution. The technology was not new and videos were being streamed before but YouTube took this technology and transformed it into a community. Communities make brands and YouTube is no small brand.

Almost everyone reading this post will have a YouTube account and if not, surely watches a lot of them. Today YouTube announced that it has crossed the mark of 2 billion views per day. That means 2 billion videos are view everyday on YouTube. These numbers are massive and shows that YouTube is a player everywhere in the world. The graph below shows the rise of YouTube over the last five years in terms of views per day.

YouTube has clearly shown where it wants to go in the next five years. They claim that on an average each person spend 15 minutes a day on YouTube compared to 5 hours a day in front of the Television. With that it is apparent that YouTube wants to have its presence as wide and popular as the television itself.

What do you think? Will YouTube get there?

Link: YouTube Blog

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News

Google to offer encrypted search next week

Few months ago Google offered secure Gmail in the wake of its reports of Gmail account being hacked by Chinese authorities. Google has not recently announced in its blog that its street view cars for Google Maps did pick up fragments of data from non-password protected wireless network. This happened in Germany.

What will Google search encryption mean?

  • Gmail offered encryption which meant the entire session is secure and encrypted. This means it is very difficult for someone in the middle to read that email even if using a unprotected wireless network.
    So Google will not offer a encrypted version for its search page. This means the usual http will be changed to https automatically.
  • Such a change usually does not mean much at the end user’s side. But it does put extra load on the servers of a company and can sometimes slow down the service.
  • Gmail has not really slowed at all after going secure and I am sure Google search will not allow its search page feature to slow down because of encryption.

Google has often been criticized for some pockets of insecurity it develops obviously because of its massive undertaking and various services it offers.

I think Hotmail, Yahoo should follow suit and also introduce complete encrypted email sessions rather than just secure sign-in sessions. What are your thoughts on it? Do let me know through your comments.

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Reviews

Edit Images Online Using Fixpicture

Fixpicture is a utility tool that edits your images without installing any software in your system. This is one of the most user friendly tool that is really easy to edit your pictures.

It is the free online image tool that is used to resize, convert the pictures or images even the digital photos into various formats like jpg, png, gif, nef, tiff, etc. It supports more than 400 formats. You can apply rotation, and some effects like greyscale, sepia, blur etc.

I think this is going to be the best alternative for many photo editing tools like Snagit, Photoshop etc. I feel this is the best alternative for these kinds of photo editing software and also there is no need to install this into your system.

As you can see from the above picture, here are the few things that you need to do while editing the images with Fixpicture.

  1. Open fixpicture.org, then you can select one of the 2 options displayed over there which are Flash version or Html version (if you use high speed Internet go for Flash version)
  2. You can resize the image to certain size of 760px, 600px, 350px, 100px and image size of 75% smaller, 50% smaller, 25% smaller and also a custom field is given to enter your prescribed value.
  3. Rotation is your next option, you can rotate your picture or image to 90 degrees Clockwise, 90 degrees Anti-Clockwise, Flip is vertical, Flip is horizontal and finally none which keeps your image as it is.
  4. You can also give effects to your image with features like automatic contrast, Grey-scale, sharpen, sepia.
  5. Select your prescribed format and then select the quality of image as good, better, best which gives you the required quality of images.

This way you can have a versatile editing options for images from a website interface like Picnik from Google instead of a a image editing software.

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News

YouTube allows videos to be unlisted

Almost everyone reading this might have their own favorite YouTube channels and videos. As a blogger I sometimes create videos of certain features I am covering so readers can get a better perspective. Obviously all these videos are listed publicly and available for anyone to view even without the need to sign-in to their YouTube account.

Personal videos taken of friends and family function can also be shared by having these videos saved as Private and allowing only certain YouTube accounts to view it. What happens if there is friend who wants to see a private video but does not have a YouTube account?

Google now has a third option which is videos can now be saved as unlisted.

  • The new feature will now not list the video in any search or channel.
  • It will not show up as video under your account either unless you own that account.
  • All someone needs to view the video is get the URL of the video. With only the link someone view the video. So it restricts viewing to only people who know the url of the video. 😉

YouTube has really ratcheted up its design and features to allow for better sharing and viewing of videos. This one feature will make people use it more often for personal videos. So what do you think about unlisted videos? Will you be using them? Do drop in your comments.

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Reviews

Publicly share your email address without being spammed

In the days of Twitter and Facebook taking over our lives one thing that we still use as much if not more than say 5 years ago is Email. A lot of people are using their email a lot more even though email was supposed to die in the past few years thanks to the rise of social networks.

This makes sharing your email address a little risky as it can often mean you will receive untold amounts of spam from various internet marketeers selling you all kinds of unwanted products. Scr.im allows creating our email address into short URLs so it can be shared without the spam bots picking it up.

About Scr.im

  • Type in your email and create a short url automatically. I could also create customized short URLs for protecting my email id.
  • You can share this URL on Twitter, Facebook or even in a HTML document.
  • Once someone clicks on the short URL, he/she will be taken to the website where your email address can be revealed.

This is a pretty decent way to keep your email address safe. I have earlier used and written about self destructing emails but that is good only if you want to not let even the recipient your email id. With scr.im I can share my email address without worrying about some bot picking it up and spamming my Inbox to glory.

If you know any more tips or similar services do share by dropping in your comments.

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Reviews

Just-Ping.com – Free Worldwide “Ping” Online Service

Here comes, one of our tools of trade! 😉

In many of our services, specially – Blogger To WordPress Migration Service, we move domains from a server to another server at times. In this migration process, most crucial phase in change in DNS records.

Time taken to reflect changes in DNS records varies from few hours to few days. It depends on many things like domain registrar, physical location of nameservers, your ISP caching, local system caches and many other things.

All above factors. makes it hard to check to trust local ping command which will only reflect a domains information at your end.

To overcome these problems, we use a free web-based service – just-ping.com


About Just-ping.com

On just-ping.com, you simply enter domain-name and click ping button.

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It displays domain status, IP address of domain if reachable, from different locations of the world.

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Also link to the result page can be bookmarked, in case you want to share it with your client. Their URL structure is like below:

http://just-ping.com/index.php?vh=devilsworkshop.rsites.dev6.rt.gw

Just replace devilsworkshop.rsites.dev6.rt.gw with domain name you want.

You can also ping IP addresses if you need.

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What if domain doesn’t resolve as expected at your end?

It may happen that, even if just-ping shows desired results world-wide, site may not be working as expected on your end.

Possible reasons for this can be:

  1. Local DNS cache – Flushing DNS cache on machine may help
  2. Network cache – if your machine is in corporate network, behind firewall or proxy, then network elements may have their own local caches
  3. ISP cache – some ISP maintains their own cache. In this case using something like OpenDNS or Google DNS may help.

Hope you may find just-ping.com helpful! 🙂

Link: just-ping.com

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Reviews

4 Free websites to scan files for virus

Many times we do not have a Anti-Virus installed on our computer. Some times such Anti-Virus applications give false alarms about a certain file or script. Sometimes we suspect that there is nothing wrong with a particular file and that the Anti-Virus software is raising a false alarm.

Most times in such cases it is better to scan your computer for viruses, trojans and malware scripts. Online websites which scan for viruses are great mainly because there is no need to keep updating the anti-virus database as its done by the website offering this service. 😉

Below are 4 websites which will allow you to scan files your computer for trouble and that too for free.

#1. NoVirusThanks


  • This website allowed me to scan a particular file for a virus by scanning it with 24 Anti-virus programs which includes AVG, TrendMicro, Panda, Kaspersky, Vipre scanned form the website directly.
  • The only limitation is that the file size of NoVirusThanks is 20 MB.

#2. VirusChief

  • Pretty much like NoVirusThanks I could simply upload any file from my computer and scan it online with VirusChief portal.
  • It uses multiple anti-virus scanners for scanning a file like AVG, AntiVir, Avast, Bit Defender and others.
  • VirusChief also requires no registering to scan a file and it a free service.

#3. Dr.Web File Scanner

  • No registration required for using Dr.Web file scanner for viruses.
  • It is very useful for scanning a file for Mac or Linux users who are sending certain types of files to Windows users which might be defined as malware or suspicious.

#4. ActiveScan from Panda

  • ActiveScan 2.0 is powered by Panda Cloud Anti Virus. It allows you to scan your computer for viruses, trojans and malwares.
  • It can also carry out a quick scan of essential files on your computer.
  • It scans for more than 2.7 million viruses and trojans.
  • Active Scan can also be integrated on a website with a API being available for developers.

These 4 websites should be able to look up and diagnose a corrupt file on your computer. But it is not really a replacement or alternative for anti-virus applications installed locally on the system. Read up 3 free anti virus programs for Windows for getting options of having a Antivirus software locally.

These websites can more or less be used for diagnostic purposes but not for defending yourself from having infected files.

If you know any more alternatives do share with us through your comments.

Categories
News

Lookup and compare backlinks data of two websites

For any blog or for that matter for any website, back-links are very important as it basically leads to a decent Google Page Rank and then leads to greater organic traffic through search engines. A page rank is determined by the number of websites linking to a website and their authority thanks to their page ranks.

In other words backlinks from a website with higher Page Rank is worth its weight in gold a any blog or website. With Open Site Explorer you can look up backlink analysis of website and compare that data with another website’s data.

About Open Site Explorer

  • Open Site Explorer has options to look up backlinks and carry out analysis of what the page authority is of the page which is giving the backlink.
  • It shows up the domain authority and the individual page authority of page which is giving the backlink.
  • If you sign up and register you can view 20 such weighted backlinks analysis and 1000 backlinks. I could also compare stats from two different domains.

I think keeping a watch on the backlinks of your website is a must for any blogger or webmaster. With Open Site Explorer, I get a bit of analytical data which can be helpful to chalk out strategies improve backlinks from higher ranked websites.

Do write in your comments with your views and share any similar web services.

Categories
Reviews

5 Great services to create your own wikis

Wikipedia has changed the way information is dispersed on the internet. The idea of having everyone in the world adding to a online encyclopedia which covered everything caught up fast and today Wikipedia has an article on almost everything and anyone.

But Wikis are very important even when it comes to small projects or companies. Many projects now a days have Wikis onlines so if a new member joins up, they can pick up things very quickly.

Here are 5 websites which will help you create your own wikis for free.

#1. Wiki Spaces


  • Wikispaces Basic version allows you to create Wikis with unlimited pages with unlimited users.
  • Allows standard features like a WYSIWYG editor and also media embedding.
  • Allows you to create RSS feeds and also have discussion areas.

#2. dooWikis

  • Doo Wikis is a website which allows you to create free online wikis which are public. This is great for public communities.
  • Doo Wikis also allows protection of the public wiki by creating a password for people to update the Wikis.

#3. Zoho Wiki

  • Zoho Wikis allows creating 2 wikis for free with unlimited users and unlimited updates.
  • It allows creating RSS and Atom feeds along with storage space of 50 MB.

#4. Intodit

  • Intodit is a great way to create wikis and invite friends and collaborators through their Email ids.
  • It also allows you to create new pages with a WYSIWYG editor which supports embedding.
  • You can read a complete review of intodit on Devils’ Workshop.

#5. Alex Knowledge Base

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  • Alex Knowledge Base is not exactly a wiki but can be created on your own computer to notate and create articles which you want to refer to.
  • This is very handy for developers and people joining new project as it is not as widely editable like wikis but quite comprehensive.
  • Read more about Alex Knowledge Base.

That completes the list of 5 websites or services with which you can create your own Wikis. These are all free to create and most are perfect to use for personal projects or small teams.

Do drop in your comments to let me know what you think about creating your own wikis and share with us any other services you know about.

Categories
Video

YouTube is 5 years old: Watch the first video uploaded on YouTube

You Tube has turned five years old. It all started on 23rd April 2005 when the first You Tube video was loaded. It was a innocuous video upload called ‘Me at the Zoo’. The website URL was registered in January 2005 but development started over the months and first video uploaded was on 23rd April of the same year. The official launch of You Tube was in October 2005.

Some interesting statistics of You Tube over the last 5 years

  • You Tube after its official launch had over 65,000 videos being uploaded and over 100 millions video views every day by June 2006.
  • You Tube consumed more bandwidth alone in 2007 than the entire Internet did for the year 2000.
  • When Google bought You Tube in 20o6 October it was valued at 1.65 $ Billion.
  • Today You Tube widely gets 1 billion views per day!

Below is the first video uploaded to You Tube. The video where it all started.

Here is wishing You Tube a happy birthday. Do share your favorite You Tube moment with us through your comments.