Social Network.

Wisdom of Crowds.

These are few buzzwords that have become obsolete because of their overuse. Welcome to isolation.

Isolator , a social  personal network anti-network for pure fun. The creator of Isolator will answer no more questions other than those found on their faq page.

There are more than 1000+ social network sites and applications available on the web and you can not easily differentiate between them. Here’s is a megalist of social networks and social web applications available on the web. Yep, you can download it as a spreadsheet.

But, on a serious note, do you know how many people on the internet actively uses at least one social network?

You will be in a shock to know this – just under 7% of all the internet traffic goes to social networks.

Looks like we are living in a bubble, huh? Come on people, join us – dont get left behind.

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If you are living in Australia, you know that there are few things that are not written in the same way as others do. One good source to get used to the Australian spellings is to refer the Macquarie English dictionary. For instance, Australians prefer to use ‘-ise’ for ‘prioritise’ instead of ‘prioritize’. But, when I typed the ‘ise’ firefox will show as an error.

Quick fix (for only firefox): Tools –> Options –> Advanced–> General –> Languages — Add ‘English [Au]‘ to your list and hit ‘Move up’ till it reaches the top of the list.

Another way to overcome this problem is to edit the “Custom.dic” file that comes with the most of the applications such as Word, Outlook or Firefox.

Where to find the custom dictionary file to edit:

Firefox
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\ \persdict.dat

Word / Outlook /Powerpoint
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Microsoft\Proof\Custom.Dic

Now, all set except the typing of every word in the dictionary file, you can do this manually by typing one word per line.

There are pre-built custom dictionaries available for free around the web. For Australian English (rejoice), such dictionaries are available at justlocal.com.au (courtesy of Kelvin) for FREE.

You can download the dictionary for openoffice.org and use it for firefox, outlook or word. For instance, download the kelvin_en_AU_V2.2.0.zip file from the site and unzip it. You will find a text file that can be opened with notepad. Copy and paste the list into your application’s custom dictionary.

There’s also an Aussie slang dictionary available at their blog.

That’s it, a perfect spell check from next time onwards.

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How do you get hold of such free schwags. If you happen to visit the web conferences, tech fests and seminars, you will get a loads of such stuff.

If not, you can email them using their contact page and ask them. Not all the web companies encourage the users openly as the following few.

Flickr Schwags: FREE
For example, Flickr says in its blog page that if you need stickers, buttons, balloons – you could send an email to them. I did and got a pack of goodies which are really cool.

“When you are organising a flickr meer, if you let us know in addition to adding your event to the Upcoming Flickr group — we can send you some Flickr schwag: stickers, buttons and name tags. Please include your postal address and let us know as soon as you can, ideally, at least a month before the event.” – Flickr blog

Visit http://www.flickr.com/help/contact to let them know you want some flickr goodies. Within few weeks, the parcel should arrive you.

Feedburner Stickers: FREE

Taking a cue from Flickr, now Feedburner provides stickers, but you need to send them some pre-paid, self-addressed envelopes to their address.

Read this announcement on the Feedburner official blog.

Startup Schwag:
There is much an easy way, if you can shell some out some money ($25-$30), startupschwag will collect all such cool schwags (with one T-shirt guaranteed) every month to your address.

There was a startup named ValleySchwag which got shut down earlier because, they could not cope with the users demand. Now, the home page link leads to a 404 page.

Other FREE Stickers:

You can get a free 2007 Ferrari Stickers given away by Shell.

Have you requested such goodies from companies? Whats your experience?

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At 43 things, you say, “What you want to do?”

At WAYN, they ask, “Where are you now?”

Now, I propose a new idea for another web service. Answer a simple question, “Who are you?”

Huh, you don’t say a thing. Let your friends say all about you. Let your friends add tags (sort of one-word testimonials) on you saying, ‘sexy’, ‘brave’, ‘good guy’, ‘SOB’, ‘BS’ or whatever. Part this idea is inspired by the movie “Citizen Kane”. What if we sit back and ask our friends to describe us. We can borrow a dictionary of adjectives; let the users tag their friends. We need not develop this as a web service (enough of existing social networks), this service can be developed as a facebook application.

Ok, you heard this idea from me. But, I no nothing about programming or APIs (I know there are geeks out there, come on!). I can give more details on this idea, we can develop a cool widget.

Wants to get famous, Precious?

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Google reader allows you to make certain things public (the feeds that you can share with others), and google offers those rss items on a public page as this one, Thiru’s shared items (sorry, you are not supposed to monetize those feeds, ok?

Google can build a social network around such shared RSS feeds by us and they can put together a Digg like site. They have not done it yet. Here’s where Feedrer is coming in.

Feedrer is a social network where you can add friends, and see what others are reading currently. Now, you can get a list of mini-feeds that your friends have subscribed. If you like a friend’s feed then, you can subscribe to them with a click.

Feedrer is a start-up and they are working on the site to add more features. What they can do is to add a front page showing, “most liked feeds”, “most read feeds” to use the wisdom of the crowd to bring the best feeds on top.

What are the benefits of joining Feedrer?
If you are looking to publicize your blog’s RSS feed, or find new readers for your blog then, these tips are for you.

1) If you have a blog, then you can get a RSS feed at the free Feedburner service (Google’s) and register it with feedrer. Make friends at feedrer, generously subscribe to their feeds. Since the people in the community are already loving RSS feeds, they would subscribe to your RSS feeds. The feeds are mini-feeds, so, readers need to visit your blog (more page visits) to read them. So, you win all the way.

2) One of my SEO friend at gridpro tipped me that every links from feedrer is considered by search engines as Google /Yahoo as one way, inbound web links. So, if you have 10 friends subscribing to your blog’s feed, you are going to get 10 links. When you pubish 10 posts , the links are going to be 10 by 10 = 100. Can’t get my head around this, I have to confirm this myself.

Update: To gain access to Feedrer (currenty in beta), you need to enter an invitation code “INVITEME” at the registration form (Thanks Anand, for pointing me). Enjoy!

There you go, another start up, social network, web 2.0.

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Be nice. Leave a comment

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This short 3-minute video made by Professor Edward Lee of Queensland University of Technology Utube blog (link via Peter Black) is very crisp and told in a comical fashion.

A well-made, enjoyable video.

There are many online courses one can select from. If you are confuse that which course is best for you then you can read online reviews or even you can see videos on YouTube. While viewing these videos one will know that mcp (Microsoft certified professional) certification will provide you the expertise to successfully install Microsoft products in your business. The itil training is the international standard of IT service management. The ITIL microsoft training most excellent practice framework makes sure that IT services are closely aligned with all areas of the business and it helps in giving high quality performance. With the help of these videos one can know that the ccnp program is a certification which confirms a network expert’s capability to implement and maintain converged LAN and WAN. The mcse boot camp certification, at times comes with a free laptop, and the boot camp training might consist of ccna exam. If you want to certify your ability to manage, support, maintain, and troubleshoot a Windows Server 2003 network then go for mcsa certification. You can select the best course according to your skills and interest by seeing these videos and reviews.

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(Early days, May2004)

Flickr has just celebrated its fourth birthday (Feb 2007), but it is widely known to the users as (arguably) the coolest web 2.0 application on the web.

(July 2004)

Flickr was founded by Stewart Butterfield (his flickr page) and Caterina Fake (her flickr page). Incidentally, they met through blogs (http://www.caterina.net/) and became life-partners.

(November 2004)

Flickr was born in Canada. It grew out of an online multi-player game named, ‘Game Never ending’ (shelved), that was being developed by LudiCorp. Fake and Butterfield’s company, Ludicorp, never did launch a game.

(March 2005)
Yahoo purchased Flickr in March 2005. Even at that time, it is was a small company managed by only 11 employees.

(January 2006)

Looking to buy a Digital Camera? Check Out The Camera Finder page on flickr that shows graphs that reflect the number of Flickr members who have uploaded at least one photo with a particular camera over the last year. See sample images, tech specs and how many others have purchased.

(throughout 2006 – same layout with different images)

As on 7th of July, Flickr hosts close to 75 million photos. How do you figure that number? Easy. Visit the Flickr Expore page and click on most recent uploads and click on the bottom-right photo (the last uploaded one), you will find a number something like 743708779 just divide that by 10 million (1 followed by 7 zeroes) you will get 74.4 million photos. Wow!

On an average (July 2007) about 1500 photos are being uploaded every minute.

(2007 – major change in layout)

In June 2007, the logo changed from ‘Flickr Gamma’ to “Flickr Loves You”.

According to Wikipedia, Yahoo is completely blocked in the United Arab Emirates and Chinese ISP’s have started blocking flickr since June 2007.

Yahoo is closing Yahoo photos in favour of flickr and provides options to easily move your photos to flickr.

Want to read more?

Birth of Flickr – USA Today – a good article covering the flickr history.

Caterina talks about the Early Days of Flickr – audio podcast on IT conversations.

Guess what has not changed all these years. Our love for Flickr!

Related Posts for flickr users:

How to get into Flickr Explore? (Revised)

25 Useful scripts for Flickr users that make your more productive

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How do you post to these social sites all-at-once?

Social Poster will help you to do just that. You can enter the title, url and description and tags once for your blog post and then hit the “Generate” button, it’s ready for submission to 40 sites.

The 40 social sites include Digg,Netscape,Reddit,Del.icio.us,Stumbleupon,Google,Bookmarks,Myweb2.search.yahoo,Technorati,Indianpad,Socialogs,Furl.net,Diigo,Wirefan,Bibsonomy.org,Looklater,Blinklist,Blogmemes.net,Bluedot.us,Myjeeves.ask,Simpy,Backflip,Spurl.net,Newsvine,Netvouz,Folkd,Grupl,Blinkbits,Bmaccess.net,Shadows,Ma.gnolia,Scuttle.org,Smarking,Blogmarks.net,Plugim,Linkagogo,Dotnetkicks,Mister-wong.de,Favorites.live,Wdclub and Yigg.de.

For instance, this following link will help to you post my article to those 40 social news sites.

10 Common Mistakes Made by web 2.0 start-ups:How to avoid them

Submit to Social Websites

How cool is that?

Link via TechBharat

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You may be famous among your friends circle for your advice on real estate investments. Your friends always pour out with you about their relationship troubles and ask for your advice. They know and are sure that your advice will help them. They think that you are an expert.

What if you can help the whole online community with your expertise. There are millions of people ‘out there on the web’ who constantly seek help- friendly advice – or a nice casual chat with you. Now, the best part is you can get money for listening to people and advising them – at least the initial earnings would cover some of your bills. As the time passes, you will grow into a better expert and you can a successful online business based on it.

We are going to review a web service that runs expert counsellings on the web. Werlive.com is one such web service that helps you to open such an online business program for you. You can sign up with this form to become a VideoChat Expert with werlive. People will pay to learn what you know – teach them online at weRlive.com – yea, thats an underlined fact. You will get paid for the job that you love most.

What do you need?
1) A personal computer with a webcam (web camera)
2) Internet connection (Broadband preferred)
3) Filling up this expert signup form at weRlive

Once completed, you’ll need to read the Terms of Use and create a resume / CV telling about your and your speciality areas before you can begin VideoChatting with users.

But, your resume is the billboard that would draw people towards you. Hence, look at some of the expert profiles in your area. Visit weRlive.com homepage to explore the successful experts similar to the subject area of yours.

Look at the following profile of an expert – serenityforyou – who is specialized relationship issues such as abuse,Divorce, Dating, Fear of Commitment and Marital Problems


When do you work?
You can set your working hours. I would advise you to start allocating 2 hours a week (on one day).

You need not make any promises to your users regarding the overall amount of time you will spend online or the length of a VideoChat session; but it is good marketing practice to let them know when they can expect to see you in your chat room.

You must be online at least three hours per month,

How it works?
When a weRlive user contacts you and begins a paid Chat or VideoChat session, your working hours will start. You will get paid on a fee-per-minute basis and you can set the fee.

When you are offline, members can contact you by email (has a set price), and when a member accesses your written tutorials, you will get paid.

You will receive 50% of what your users pay. Your charges may vary from $0.98 to $9.80 per minute, and weRlive.com will fix an upper limit for your fee. As you provide more expertise you will raise your fees.

How will I get my money?
A cheque via FedEx Shipping.
Electronic transfer to your Bank Account.

Verdict: Whatever expertise you have got, you can start selling them right now. There are at least few people who are seeking on basic things such as how to build a blog, how to set up a website or how to fix a computer. It doesn’t hurt to try new things. Start small by allotting 2 hours on the week ends. I strongly believe that this has a good earning potential. When you become an established expert, you can start your online business based on it.

People will pay to learn what you know – teach them online at weRlive.com

Don’t be surprised if, I soon become a “Blogging Expert” at weRlive.com. I have already applied

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