Buzzsonic.com

Late last week Google quietly acquired data visualization software tool, Trendalyzer from its parent company, Gapminder. They are already making the tool available for free here and the software developers have moved into Google’s Mountain View HQ.

Trendalyzer generates moving graphics and other novel effects in the display of facts, figures, and statistics in presentations.

The Official Google Blog reports, “We hope to provide the resources necessary to bring such work to its deserved wider audience by improving and expanding Trendalyzer and making it freely available to any and all users capable of thinking outside the X and Y axes.”

via Paid Content

Related Reading
A Word In Motion (Official Google Blog)

I was designing an invoice last week for a friends business using Word. I hate the way Word formats everything and although I was pleased with the end result it took me longer than I would have liked. Still, before I sent it off to my colleague I cleaned up the final article and made it more printer friendly by converting it to a PDF which gave it a final polish.

There’s a number of PDF converters online though the one I’m using right now is the excellent PDF Online. One of the beauties of the (free) service is the simplicity and speed of it. Upload your document, enter your email address and bingo, you’re done. Your document is emailed to you minutes later. Brilliant.

I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out what was causing the Windows Live Writer to crash everytime I tried to insert an image into a post. I back tracked a couple of days to see which recent Firefox plug-ins I’d added and it turns out it was the MySpace toolbar I mentioned here causing the problem.

So, out goes the toolbar and there ends the head scratching. Though at least one good thing came out of my search for solutions, discovering Flickr4Writer.

I have three MySpace profiles, one for my latest music project, one to network my travel site and one which acts as an archive for my old bands music. My latest music profile (the 99th Floor Elevators) is the most active and has proved great for networking and making new contacts in that field.

I actually hate manually visiting MySpace daily so a neat ’shortcut’ is to install the unofficial MySpace Firefox toolbar which is unobtrusive enough and enables you to quickly toggle between profile pages, messages and the like. The toolbar auto hides when the MySpace page is closed. One thing the toolbar is lacking is the ability to log-in to multiple accounts, that would make it even handier.

Related Links
Download Unofficial MySpace Toolbar (Mozilla.org)
MySpace Toolbar Home (Freewebs.com)

This one is really down to individual needs and every user is different but here’s what Add-Ons I’m running right now as part of my ‘ultimate’ browser set-up. Naturally my browser of choice is Firefox and has been for about three years.

First I dumped the default Firefox theme and installed Noia 2.0 Extreme which is a little more streamlined and sharper looking.

I read way too many RSS news feeds daily and if I’m not using my desktop reader of choice, FeedDemon (which has recently replaced RSS Bandit) Sage is a brilliant RSS feed reader and manager that tends to be less resources heavy than the desktop equivalents and sits in the sidebar of Firefox. Read the rest of this entry »

Stan Beer at Australian IT blog IT Wire today talks about a Windows version of Evolution the Linux desktop alternative to Microsoft Outlook.

“Evolution for Windows exists, it’s easy to install and it works! No sooner had the ink dried on an article I had penned bemoaning the fact that OpenOffice.org on the Windows platform does not include an equivalent to Microsoft’s Outlook, when a poster pointed me to a very exciting non-project.” Reports Beer.

Good tip. I’ve been happy with Thunderbird for around three years now but have started to miss having a built in calendaring client. So, this morning I added Lightning, the Thunderbird calendar extension (actually based on the stand-alone Firebird client) and downloaded Evolution for Windows to try both out. Both options seem less daunting than exporting my Thunderbird settings and mail back into Outlook.

Early impressions favor Lightning for me as Evolution for Windows is still very buggy right now with hung screens and such but its worth a look for early adopters and beta testers.

Related Reading

Evolution On Win 32 (Sourceforge)
Novell Drives Nail into Microsoft Office Coffin (IT Wire)
Export Thunderbird To Outlook (Broobles.com)
Importing Thunderbird Mails in Outlook and Outlook Express (Robert Peloschek)

Here’s a neat piece of software that I discovered care of Gina Trapani’s excellent weekly tipsheet ‘Geek To Live’ at Lifehacker.

If you’re like me you probably have a stack of passwords and log-ins hidden away in secure .doc files, scraps of paper and the like. Alternatively you can keep a secure and searchable database to retrieve those hard to remember passwords without compromising security using the free, open source software application KeePass.

There’s a great ‘how-to’ at Lifehacker here, so I wont repeat it.

Related Reading

Strong Passwords: How To Create and Use Them (Microsoft.com)
Choosing Your Password (Yahoo Security Center)

Back in May we wrote about some useful GMail hacks, including the GMail Drive shell extension, which basically enabled you to use the allocated 2GB+ of storage space at Google as a mini hard drive, even going as far as sitting a little hard drive icon in Start>My Computer on your PC for you to drag files too.

Latest GMail hack is the G2G Exchange which basically enables GMail users to swop files that are stored on their GMail accounts. Google has a 20mb email limit so bigger files have to compressed or split as multiple files. G2G apparently will recognize these files and display them as one complete file.

More GMail Hacks

Roam Drive (Roamdrive.com)
Ten Cool Gmail Hacks (Makezine.com)
GMail Tools and Plugins (Igniq.com)
gDisk (Sourceforge.net)

There is such an avalanche of information on RSS, RSS software and RSS feeds nowadays it is simply bewildering, even to someone as relatively ‘informed’ as me. What I do know is, apart from a hiatus this summer I was trying to wade through literally 100s of different feeds a day, each with multiple headlines.

Imagine trying to visit each individual website daily and pulling out all the new headlines manually. RSS delivery shaves hours off any news hounds day. I’ve been using the free aggregator RSS Bandit for a few months now but noticed as my feed list grew to a more sizeable proportion, when RSS Bandit updated the headlines the thing rendered my two year old laptop almost useless, grabbing almost 100% of system resources as it updated.

The solution was a lovely little Firefox plug-in called Sage. The tiny little app sits on your browser toolbar and kind of acts similar to recalling your history function or your favourites, opening up a column to the left in Firefox. Another big headache for me was that all the feed URLs I’d built up in RSS Bandit would have taken hours for me to manually type back into Sage. No worries.. I simply exported my collected feeds (as an OPML file) in RSS Bandit and then imported them back into Sage. Excellent!

I’m finding that Sage is extremely nimble, especially in terms of resource useage and feed updates. Still, if I’m away from my own PC I’m still stuck. Well not really, there’s been a number of web based RSS readers for a while now but the one I’m using right now is the Google Reader. Like most things from Google its functional and simple to use. Again, I simply imported all my feeds via the OPML file and bingo, access to all of my essential feeds from any computer anywhere.

Related Links

RSS Background
All About RSS (FaganFinder.com)
About Feed Syndication (Feedburner.com)
OPML (Wikipedia.org)
RSS (Wikipedia.org)
Choosing an RSS Reader (SearchEngineWatch.com)
What is RSS and Why Should You Care? (SearchEngineWatch.com)

Finding RSS Feeds
BlogPulse
Daypop
Technorati
Pubsub
Yahoo RSS

Free RSS Readers
RSS Bandit
Feedreader
RSS Reader
Pluck
Rocket RSS Reader
List of News Aggregators (Wikipedia.org)

Web Based RSS Readers
Bloglines
Findory
Google Reader
Newsgator
NewsIsFree

The expected new update of Apple’s all-in-one music jukebox software, iTunes 4.8 was released today and adds new video playback features, including the ability to drag and drop movie clips from your computer into the iTunes Library for easy cataloging and organization. The video clips appear with a new movie camera icon in your library.

There’s three options for video playback under the preferences tab which gives you the choice of full screen, separate window, or main window playback. You can drag the borders of the video to change the size of the screen. There’s also a new iTunes store preference with a choice of 1-click buying (though not sure Amazon will be too pleased with Apple’s use of that term) and ‘buy now’ shopping cart puchasing . Its all pretty seemless and using my Paypal account plugged into iTunes its made buying music the easiest its ever been for me in over thirty years of musical fanatasism, going back to the days of the 8 track cartridge.

Download iTunes 4.8

Related Reading
Apple Releases iTunes 4.8 [iPodLounge.com]

We mentioned Podscope, the search engine for Podcasts last week. Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider behind the venture had promised a launch this month and sure enough they kept their promise.

Pretty neat it is too, a very basic front end with just a logo and search box. We did a search for ‘new wave’ looking for a possible MP3 blog that was micro-broadcasting old punk chestnuts from the 70s. Nine results came back. Next to each search result you get a + sign, click on that and a drop down reveals a couple of buttons to play a clip, a link to the podcast site and another link which opens the originating site in a framed page with the choice of playing back the show via Windows Media or Quick Time players. Theres also a link to the RSS feed URL so you can plug the feed straight into your podcast software of choice and a link to download the whole show. We thought it was pretty cool.

Related Links

Podcasting [Wikipedia.org]
iPodder [Sourceforge]
Podshow [Podshow.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
How to Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own [Engadget.com]

I know there has been a lot of hype about Firefox, its faster, its this, its that. Its actually not massively faster than Internet Explorer (IE) but its a damn site more secure. Here we’re still using both browsers , simply because its going to be a long time before web design becomes compatible with both browsers by default. Some web sites look absolutely cack in Firefox believe it or not whilst I bet 99% work just fine in IE. A lot of sites load slowly in Firefox too, simply because they were optimised with IE in mind.

Anyway, its not all hype. There’s a little additional search box on my Firefox that enables me to search Google, Yahoo, Amazon, IMDB, the fabulous Wikipedia and tons more without having to use a load of toolbars. Although I have it there on IE by default, the Google toolbar slows things down a tad.

One thing we have noticed on this site (taking in its previous incarnation as MusicbizNews24.com too) and one of our search directories, Floorelevators.net, a short while ago the browser % of our visitors was 80/10 (with 10% using other alternatives) in Internet Explorers favour. From this weeks figures on the server stats there has been a big swing with figures now 52/31% in favour of IE, with the remaining 17% of browsers split between Safari, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror and Camino. If people have any doubts that IE could ever be over taken, look at what happened to the original Netscape browser.

Related Reading

Comparison Of Web Browsers [Wikipedia.org]
Are The Browser Wars Back? [Slate.MSN]
Browser Wars [Wikipedia.org]

Quite a few things that we’ve missed whilst we’ve been ‘away’, even since the end of January and the last proper posts here under the old URL, the buzz surrounding ‘Podcasting ‘ has gone from a speculative whisper to a very loud shout, to the point where the grassroots internet broadcasting+P2P+RSS craze has even spawned its own Expo , ‘The Portable Media Expo’, which will debut in California this November.

Weblog pioneer Dave Winer probably explains it best here:

“Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new files from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately. Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on any capable mp3 player on the computer or hardware player such as the iPod. Think of your player with podcasting as having a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates.”

The latest variation on the Podcasting ‘theme’ is ‘Skypecasting’ which has been picking up mentions over the last few weeks on various websites with many people pulling their quotes from a spartan mention on the News Target website. Though the word seems to have been originally penned by Stuart Henshall on his Skype Journal back in December of last year where he revealed a straight forward how-to.

“The SkypeCasters’ recipe is simple and we have written it up in detail. Add together Skype, Virtual Audio Cables, Windows Sound Recorder, a simple Wav to mp3 converter MT_Enclosures and iPodder and you can be Podcasting later today! The solution will cost you $40.”

The Skype software was founded by Niklas Zennstr�m and Janus Friis, the creators of Kazaa and boasts 29 million users. Skype is the largest of the new breed of companies offering voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, which lets Internet connections double as telephone lines by treating calls no differently than e-mail.

The new development is being done without Skype’s active input. But Skype has made some of its source code public so developers can tinker with new applications, such as Skypecasting, Skype spokeswoman Kelly Larrabee told CNet, “We’re aware of this and encourage developers to help facilitate it,” she said.

Related Links

VoiP Gets the Podcast Treatment [CNet News]
Hot Recorder [HotRecorder.com]
Skype + Podcast Recorder = SkypeCasters [SkypeJournal.com]
iPodder [Sourceforge.net]
Skype + Podcast Recorder = SkypeCasters ( 8 page PDF instructions download) [Henshall.com]
Adam Currys Weblog [Curry.com]
Pod Show [PodShow.com]
iPodder Podcast Directory [iPodder.org]

Not one but two new search options for video content on the web were unveiled today only hours apart of each other. First out of the blocks was a “test phase” version of the previously hinted at Yahoo video search. The site went up on Wednesday and competes against pioneers like the AOL owned Singing Fish which was recently upgraded.

The Yahoo video search service lets users narrow their query results by file formats, such as AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Windows Media and Real, by size and by duration (less or more than a minute). Users can also choose to filter results based on Internet top-level domains, so only results from .com Web sites would be listed, for example. Users can also choose to filter content unsuitable for minors from the search results.

Yahoo search executive Jeremy Zawodny had more to say on the company weblog. Why video? “The costs of producing video content have been steadily decreasing in recent years. Between the adoption of broadband Internet connections, and easier to use video editing software, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a lot more video content make its way on to the Internet. And what’s out there today is just the tip of the iceberg.”

He continues to explain: “It’s often not easy for a web crawler to find downloadable and streaming video content. Unlike web images and most audio files, videos aren’t always easy to discover. When we started thinking about how to make it easier for anyone to expose video and other rich media content, one of the first things we thought of was podcasting and RSS. Podcasting uses RSS Enclosures to provide an audio file along with a news item or blog posting in an RSS feed. At the most basic level, this (new search option) is just a matter of pointing to a video instead of an MP3 file.”

Search results show a thumbnail of the video, the name of the file, screen size, length in seconds, and size in MB with 20 results per page by default (though this is customizable from 10-100).

Video search is nothing new, the Yahoo owned Alta Vista and All The Web search engines have offered a video search option for years though the technology has improved. Yahoo are now deploying a method called “Media RSS”.

Media RSS is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilities of RSS 2.0. Enclosures in RSS are already being used to syndicate audio files (Podcasting) and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, in addition to providing additional metadata with the media.

Only hours later Blinkx released the Beta version of Blinkx TV, which allows you to search the web for video and audio clips. Blinkx had previously been known for its downloadable desktop search app which actually beat Google’s similar offering to market in the summer. According to media sources search giant Google is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows. Microsoft is also developing a search engine for video.

Blog search engine Blogdigger recently revealed a media search option on their site, enabling users to specify media files in five different classes: audio:, video:, image:, torrent: and text ( a catch all including things like PDF, ZIP or Microsoft Word documents) that Blogdigger indexes from the RSS feeds used on blogs like us here at MBN24. Both Compaq and IBM have been working low key on multimedia search options for a while now too.

Related Reading

Yahoo Launches Video Search, New RSS Format [ResearchBuzz.com]
Blinkx Unveils Video Search Engine [CNet News]
Striking up Digital Video Search [CNet News]
At Yahoo, Signs Point to a Bigger Media Move [CNet News]
Search Meets TV [SearchEngineWatch.com]
TV and Search Merge [BattelleMedia.com]
AOL Revamps SingingFish Audio Video Search [MusicbizNews24.com]
Google Audio Search [Oristus.com]