Most new videos I come across on YouTube, are through referrals. Either through my friends on Twitter or Facebook or even a blog post. Sometimes I come across a nice video thanks to related videos showing up. 🙂
This is how most people discover new content on YouTube, but in this way I might miss out on some trending videos not discovered by my social circle.
YouTube Charts is the URL, which shows up some awesome stats of new videos.
YouTube Charts allows looking up the most viewed videos across all categories.
I could select the time frame from most viewed from today, past week, month or even all time.
The best part is it also shows videos based on most number of liked, most commented, most viewed in HD, and even most subscribed.
I have used YouTube charts in the past couple of days to look up new trends. This way I doubt I will miss out on what is the latest rage when it comes to viral videos. It is also a great way to discover new content on YouTube.
Do look up YouTube Charts and drop in your comments.
Recently, I have come across a few advertisements for Speak Asia. A lot of friends have even asked me about this service. Some are even calling it a scam or a ponzi scheme. Other friends are swearing by the fact that Speak Asia is making payouts to people they know and hence is genuine.
A friend of mine, first brought to my notice the surveys as vague, as the questions were too easy to be considered useful for companies to actually pay for such surveys.
I decided to read up a little on this new website and check why so many people are suspicious about Speak Asia. I must admit, after a little digging around on Speak Asia’s website (speakasiaonline.com) even I am suspicious of their credentials, hence I decided to share my views with you.
#1. Registration with SpeakAsia
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There are 3 options to register as a panelist. The first option requires sending proof by email of income statement of over $1000 from one of the top 20 survey companies.
The second option allows registering by taking a two-hour written test on English language, comprehension and general knowledge. They will be called to an exam centre in Mumbai or Singapore and charged $60 for the test. They will also have to pass a personal interview. Registration again is by sending them an email!
Such stringent rules when it comes to selecting panelists for surveys might not be suspicious at all, except when compared to the 3rd option. The third option allows you to register as a Standard panelist for $120 or Premium panelist for $220. This money goes towards a e-zine subscription.
I wonder how subscribing to an e-zine for money is the same as going through a rigorous scanning process of interviews and tests.
#2. Payment for Subscription is not available online!
I could not find any option to subscribe online or register online, unless I had a sponsor ID.
That means I need to find someone who can refer me to the Speak Asia program. This means people are forced to register only through a referral. I do not think that is very convenient.
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Note: People get extra payment if they bring in more people who register with Speak Asia.
#3. Payment structure from Speak Asia is vague
Speak Asia allows payment of points based on reward points collected based on the surveys completed.
The equivalent amount is transferred to the bank account of the panelists after 30 days from the date of taking the survey.
Unfortunately, as Speak Asia has no office in India, the best you can do is chase the person who recruited you as a panelist if you are having issues.
#4. No Physical presence in India
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I also searched for a physical address in India with Speak Asia website. There is no physical address available in India. The company is registered in Singapore and has no proof on its website of being registered in India.
There is also no list of companies vouching for Speak Asia and also no company suggesting they use Speak Asia surveys for their market research needs.
This is strange and the best way to recognized as the real deal, would be to provide links and credentials of companies which are their clients when it comes to market research.
#5. Speak Asia agents arrested in Bangladesh
Two officials for Speak Asia were sent to jail in Chittagong, Bangladesh for fraud. The news way covered by Daily Sun, a Bangladeshi newspaper. Even if we assume Speak Asia has nothing to do with it, it still does not inspire confidence.
Why are there so many doubts on Speak Asia?
Most reputed survey companies will pay money for the work done towards the survey, which means payment will be made for the number of survey’s completed. The main legitimacy to Speak Asia as valid service, comes only in the form of prime time TV ads. Even Speak Asia shows up a schedule of their advertisements during IPL.
In my opinion if a company makes it difficult for you to register free and expects you to invest your own money to make money online, I will avoid it completely. Speak Asia seems to be raising more doubts that settling them.
What are your views on Speak Asia Online? Do drop in your comments.
LastPass stores all these online passwords in encrypted form. Even its tagline suggests that LastPass master passwords is the last password you will ever need. Ironically LastPass security seems to have been compromised and users might have problems accessing their passwords.
LastPass has requested all its users to go ahead and change their passwords to secure their accounts.
LastPass on its blog mentioned
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We noticed an issue yesterday and wanted to alert you to it. As a precaution, we’re also forcing you to change your master password.
In recent times, when almost everyone has 2-3 different online accounts for email, social, twitter and bookmarking – it is a good idea to store all the passwords in single place. LastPass is a popular service used by people who have many online accounts and use it on many different platforms.
But when the storage service itself might have issues, it can start a panic. At the moment it does not seem to be something major, but it has only been few hours. Real damage if any will be known in the days to come.
I woke up today to the news that the world’s most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden was killed. This news I came across on television but after that, I have been following the news story online. This is very different from almost 10 years ago when 9/11 attacks happened. I primarily looked up the news on television. Internet was still used primarily for email. Search engines gave useful links but hardly anyone of them updated their results in real-time and this made searching for news online during the 9/11 attacks quite useless.
I came across a post on Search Engine Land about how Google has evolved. Back in 2001, when the tragedy happened, a lot of American’s probably looked up Google for more news.
Google actually had a banner on their search landing page suggesting people should look the most current news on television and radio.
This was probably because the news agencies did not put out reports immediately on the internet and Google search probably did not do a good job of searching real time results. Also much of the news agencies did not put up their content free but it was premium.
Today, if we searched for Osama Bin Laden’s death, we get search results which are almost in real-time and the top links are all to credited and trusted websites which cover the news.
But, Google was probably not the first place, people came across this news. Many of my friends came across this news on Twitter. Twitter does seem to be crowd-sourcing news in real-time and has become a very important tool in today’s online world.
Twitter is becoming a primary source for News!
Here is how the term “Osama” was used on Twitter according to Trendistic.
The news spread like wildfire on Twitter and it was done in real time. The reports were scattered by within hours about 17% of the Tweets contained the word “osama” in it. That is a huge volume of people getting and sharing news on Twitter.
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube which are distributing and spreading news through the world within seconds did not even exist on 11th September 2001.
Back in March, there were rumors out that Yahoo will be selling Delicious to StumbleUpon. Today the uncertainty over the fate of Delicious bookmarking service is over. It has been bought by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen who were founders of YouTube.
Earlier Yahoo has planned to shut-down Delicious but with outrage by many internet groups, it decided that it will end up selling Delicious instead of closing it down. This shows how much, Yahoo was aware of the popularity of their own service.
Challenges for new owners of Delicious!
Delicious bookmarks was exclusive and simple. It was not ever meant to be a Stumbleupon or a Digg like service. This does mean less volumes of sharing bookmarks will happen but quality ends up high.
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The new owners of Delicious, will have to make delicious more social at the same time manage to make sure users still find it useful and there is no information overload which seems to happen with other bookmarking services.
At the moment, when users sign into their Delicious account, users are prompted to give permission to Delicious to move the bookmarks from Yahoo to the new owner.
I think YouTube, which is Google on real product which is social and yet successful. So YouTube founders might be able to meet these challenges quite well.
Whatever the British royal family does, usually ends up making news. So a wedding of a prince will surely a big deal. The media all over are really gearing up for covering each and every aspect of the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
The online world has not been left behind and there is a dedicated YouTube channel for the coverage of the wedding.
Just visit the Royal Channel on YouTube and we get to an interactive page. This page has a countdown timer for the broadcast along with options to view the map for the procession via Google map.
The broadcast will be a YouTube Live event with starts at 29th April, 2011 at 10.00 AM GMT.
The wedding falls on a Friday, and that means a long weekend on the UK. This will probably mean a lot of people might choose to actually follow the wedding and YouTube might get a lot of them.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on 10 best Chrome extensions for YouTube junkies. I am sure that we all love watching videos on YouTube in full screen. This is fine but very often we need to resize the video to check the comments.
An ideal solution would be to be able to check and write comments on videos while watching it. If you think that is a great idea then Smart Video Enlarger is for you.
YouTube video resized as you scroll
Once we have installed the Chrome extension, try looking up a video. The video will play in full-screen mode as seen in image below.
Notice we can see the scroll bar in the side. Move the scroll-bar down to check out the comments on left on the video.
Once the scroll is moved down we can view the comments along and the video resizes automatically to a smaller size which makes it possible to view comments (See image below).
Additional Tip:
This extension is also very useful to look up and scroll all the way down to the end of the page without losing track of the video. This happens because even if you scroll down completely the video is still displayed continuously.
Do try out Smart Video Enlarger extension on Chrome and drop in your views through your comments.
It seems to be the season for shutdowns. A lot of online services which were not making many inroads are closing down recently. Google Videos, MyBlogLog are closing down and yesterday Yahoo announced that it is closing down Yahoo Buzz.
Yahoo Buzz updated that
Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date, you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site…
This was probably an expected closure and Yahoo seems to be on a roll when it comes to closing down its services. Yahoo has recently shutdown MyBlogLog and also looking to sell off Delicious.
Yahoo Buzz was a content aggregator and was similar to services like Digg and Stumble Upon. Considering how rarely Buzz is covered compared to other services gives a good sign of how little Yahoo Buzz was used by people.
Yahoo shutting down services not being used is a good idea and might give it more a chance to regain relevancy in some of its core strengths. But I keep wondering if it really has some core services and products?
What do you think? Will Yahoo regain its past glory and survive or will it be history in the next few years? Do let me know your views through your comments.
If you’re a designer or even a site owner, then you will be having lots of fonts installed on your system and obviously you will feel irritating about which font to choose when designing a logo or choosing fonts for your site. Luckily, there are many tools which can help us in comparing fonts installed on a PC. Through this, you can visualize all those fonts installed on your PC, so it eventually saves you a lot of time!
This is the best among the three sites I have found for previewing fonts! It also provides PRO accounts through which you can save selections for later reference, toggle between upper case and lower case previews etc. Luckily Wordmark.it is providing PRO accounts for free (free for first month of use), you just need to signup to get the PRO account.
Font Picker is available in web as well as desktop versions. To run the desktop app, you need to have Adobe AIR installed on your PC which you can get here. The desktop app is almost similar to the web version. Click the “cross” button beside a font so that you will be left with a small list of desired fonts. It would be better if there was a feature to save font selections for later reference (like, in Wordmark).
This is one of the best font managers for Windows, besides general tasks like previewing, installing and uninstalling fonts; it can also extract fonts from PDF files and images! It gives complete information of each font including its type, family and even its designer! Another innovative feature is, if you like a font, then you can find other fonts which are similar to that. It supports Windows, Linux and Mac (OS X).
It has a very sleek interface resembling Mac OS X. You can create sets so you can preview all similar fonts under one set, for example I have created a set “Hand Writing” and grouped all the Hand writing fonts under it, so the next time you’re looking for a good Hand writing font, you don’t need to search.
There are many more tools for Windows but I reviewed the best ones that I found useful. Do drop in your comments.
Additional Tip:
If you’re running Mac (OS X) then you might want to checkout FontCase. 🙂
Google’s new addition to its image search is “similar image search” through which you can find similar or duplicate images. This feature is particularly useful when you want to view the source image, for example you have found an edited/photoshopped image of Sachin Tendulkar then you might want to know the source of that image.
For example, take a look at the below two images, you can keep the first image as wallpaper (by tiling) but not the second one (looks ugly). So, this can help wallpaper junkies a lot!
Here are some of the best sites which can help you in identifying similar images:
#1. Google Similar Images
“Google Similar Images” was a Google lab experiment but now it’s integrated into Google images. You can see the text “similar” at the bottom of any image when you hover over it. When I checked similar images for the below picture, there were 8 images which were matching it.
Related: Google Image swirl, it organizes similar image search results into groups and sub-groups.
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#2. TinEye Reverse Image Search
This is a bit advanced and it’s the best when compared to rest of them. What amazed me is that, when I searched similar images for the same image (which I used in Google image search), it came up with 32 relevant results!
So, the relevancy of TinEye is very high compared to Google Image search. It also provides cool extensions for IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers. You can make use of their bookmarklet too!
GazoPa is a similar image search engine with more than 90,000,000 images, that’s a huge database isn’t it? It’s better than Google image search; it found 10 similar images when I searched using “sachin.jpg” image. It gives similarity percentage also, which can be used as another metric in finding relevant similar images.
GazoPa is also available for iPhone, you can download their free app here. Similar to TinEye it also provides Bookmarklets and plugins which you can get from here
If you’re a Flickr fan then you should try Retrievr. Draw some raw sketch and it will show similar images almost in real-time. Currently, their server is down, but I hope they will be back in a few days.
