The ads at Stumble Here range from housing to automobiles to personal to services. Any type of ad that you would find in your local newspaper can be found here, making it a number one choice online for your shopping needs. The ads are neatly presented under each category. The process of publishing your ad is very simple. You have to just register with the site and then go to your respective locality and publish your ad under the category that suits you best.

To avoid spam and keep the quality of content high, members are allowed to report ads which are inappropriate and this is a good method to keep the site clean and usable. The service is offered to the world at large and with ads based on localities, it provides you with ads of your locality and thereby saves time and energy in locating ads specific to you.

Apart from general ads on daily things, they also provide services to publish free job ads. This is a boon to a) the unemployed youth who are on a look out for a job and b) to companies which are on a look out for raw talent or looking out the options for sale.

Since it is a free service I am sure a lot of advertisers and users will like this site. To keep the site clean, current and healthy, the duration of an ad is fixed to 120 days from the day of publishing. Right now Stumble Here is also organizing a contest, where one can win up to $500 for just publishing ads in their site and being active in their forum.

In more cases they find themselves in a bad deal and crib. Web Hosting Choice comes to the rescue. They cater to all needs, from personal websites to large e-commerce websites. They provide this service for free and don’t even spam you with advertisements.

For those who are new to web hosting, they also provide you with a quick learner’s guide, which walks you through web hosting in great detail. From what is a domain to what is the best hosting, everything is been covered in the faqs.

If you aren’t a novice and want specific features and a good deal, they also have advanced search which has a comprehensive checklist of features that you may pick from. If you aren’t sure about the specifics, then you should stick with the quick search, which has four fields: Monthly cost, Setup fee, Disk space, Bandwidth. You can edit the values of these four fields to see which host will suit your purpose. Also as you load the page, a default value has been assigned to these fields to provide you with a rough idea on what a normal website would require.

What I liked best about their website, is the scam section in the learning center, where they enlighten you into the scams and traps that you may fall into while signing up for a web host. Do read it, even if you aren’t planning to buy a domain in the near future.

They also have a directory of web hosting companies, which is comprehensive. If they have left out any that you know of, then you can submit the url at their submit page.

bothack.in expired a few months back and I just used Web Hosting Choices to find a good deal for a new domain

This review is paid for.

As every coin has two sides the massiveness of Youtube serves as its own disadvantage. The site is visited by millions of people and it is very hard to get the best out of the innumerable videos in youtube.com. It may take an average user very long to get what he is searching for. Youtubevideos.biz is an amazing solution where you can catch up with the best of youtube. The site contains funny videos that are handpicked based on the entertainment factor. As the tag line goes it is definitely the best place to have fun after work. So next time instead of keying in www.youtube.com all you have to do is key in youtubevideos.biz and enjoy!

How many of us have wished, that we get rid of the stupid old headphones and mics and wished that we speak to our friends abroad/local in the good old telephone, yet with minimal call charges? Well, the solution is here, Jaxtr.

Jaxtr was developed primarily for bringing your phone into your social networks. How does it work? Simple, create a Jaxtr account and you get a personalized widget, that you can post anywhere. Next if some one wishes to call you then all they have to do is enter their telephone number. Jaxtr will then call the first person first and then connect him to your phone (which you have configured in your Jaxtr account), thus your phone number remains private, yet at the same time both you and your friend can speak normally over telephone sans headphones, mics and for that matter the internet.

Chuck minimal charges, it is absolutely FREE. It can be thought of like a simple three way call initiated by Jaxtr so you don’t have to pay.

A few things I personally feel will make Jaxtr even better:

• SMS capabilities, the widget says send text, where as the message comes to you as an email, if SMS is made possible then nothing like it.
• Jax points, there is only one way to gain more Jax points, and that is by helping them spread the word, this might be a beautiful business strategy which might increase their popularity, but then it would be ideal if they introduce more means of earning Jax points. They however offer 100 Jax points at the start of every month.

Jaxtr – Get Calling

At ReviewMe once you register you can order reviews from other registered blogs and you can submit your blog where you earn a lot of money by getting some review orders.

Once you submit your blog it goes through a screening process before it gets accepted. During the screening process your blog’s value is decided. In simple words how much is your blog worth for one order. You may end up receiving $30 to $250 per review. In the ReviewMe system, advertisers choose which blogs review them. So basically, sit back, and let the review offers come to you.

If you want to pitch your product to a niche group of users, the best way is to search for blogs in that category and order a review out of a popular blog. Imagine for a hundred dollars you end up with a product advertisement and also a review of your product. The quickest and cheapest way to get feedback on a product or service from influencers. Also instead of your advertisements wasted on some sidebar of some very unrelated post, here you are getting a whole post for your product and to a select group of audience – > Imagine the undivided attention of a group of audience to your product.. it is fabulous.

So go register your blog today and mint money

ReviewMe
Technorati Tags: ReviewMe, text link ads, advertisements, blog ads, product reviews, money, adsense, monitizing blog, Advertisers, Get Buzz. Bloggers, Get Cash.

Why does VOX score? Simply for its simplicity and features. Imagine blogger + livejournal + wordpress + flickr + orkut/myspace + youtube + amazon + listables + odeo + a lot more services bundled in an uncluttered manner for a layman to use and have fun with. The idea is definitely incredible.

Vox is for the average internet surfer who wants to enjoy the world of blogging without having to meddle with the CSS/HTML/JAVA or worrying about service integrations and those two line javascripts that one has to include in their sidebar to get those effects. Vox has a beautiful collection of templates and the template customization is ajaxed with a  minimal hand full of options such as on the fly selection of the number of columns, the arrangement of the same and the tagline for your blog.

The best feature I liked was a page in the dashboard which would let you organize your content. Photos/videos/books/music/other collectibles. You can upload your music/videos /photos or you can just access your flickr/photobucket/ifilm/youtube account and just pump those images/videos here.

It has got various levels of post status: friends only, private, protected, personal, everyone etc. and it also offers the same level of status for the comments section too. It also sports an amazing tagging system. When you tag a post on your side bar you can find a list of users who have tagged their posts with the same keywords and what more? You can send them a private message.

I quite don’t understand the motive of Six Apart on releasing Vox. I do agree it has a lot of features. But its tad bit late to enter the market. With millions of bloggers already setting foot on blogspot, wordpress and other such blogging platforms, I don’t see a bright future for Vox. What they could have done was at least copy the import feature of wordpress, so that if I wanted to shift, I could do so without the loss of my posts and comments in my previous blog. Also instead of releasing a new blogging platform, Six Apart could have integrated all these new features into their existing blog platforms namely Typepad, movable type and LJ.
Also there were a few things that irked me. All the pages had ads on it. This irked me the most. I know you guys are running a free service but hey, you can’t ruin my blog with those ads. There was no option to edit the html of the template, making VOX a good option only for the less ambitious bloggers. I would want more control of my blogs feel and looks. I couldn’t add my own services. For instance if I liked a google search box on my sidebar… nope I couldn’t do that. As of now there is no blogroll.

Vox is good enough for a newbie blogger. But not good enough for a long time blogger. If you take my advice I would suggest you to stick with wordpress. Cauze someday you gonna learn that blogging has more to do with flickr and youtube and you might not find a easier transition from your vox blog to some other powerful platform. (Hat tip – Kausik)
Final verdict: Though feature rich, Vox has a bleak future…

VOX – A new Blogging platform

Technorati Tags: vox. six apart, live journal, type pad, blogging platform, blog, services, review

Writely is now redirecting to docs.google.com. Google Docs and Spreadsheet requires you to run IE6 or Firefox. It is not supported by Opera or Safari

Two things which I liked about the new service are:

1) One click import of all your writely files.
2) You can email documents to your google ID and they will automatically appear in your D&S account.

You can save your documents as PDF. Also the spreadsheets link in your google account toolbar is replaced with the new docs and spreadsheet link.

Google Docs and Spreadsheet [Help Center]

Radio Link – There are two ways of obtaining links. First is to subscribe to the Club’s package for the international fans where they provide weekly highlights, live Radio coverage during the game and few other incentives like player interviews, etc. The cost of subscription varies and on an average is about four pounds per season. This has nothing to do with the message board and is obtained from the OFFICIAL WEBSITE of the club.

An alternative is through the previously mentioned, message boards. In certain clubs, there is a free radio link available during the game even though the option of subscribing to the Club’s Radio station is also present. Many such links can be picked from the message boards, THIS is an example of one such link and once in the page, you only have to choose the banner of your club and the Radio broadcast is immediately made available.

However, most of the more popular clubs have found a way around this loophole and the live match broadcast of these clubs is made unavailable to you, under such circumstances, the final option is sports stations like 5live, which belongs to BBC and broadcasts all the big games, every weekend.

That is as far as Radio links are concerned. Videos are obviously the closest to the real thing and the best method to get videos is through MFF. The setup at Maxxed Football Forums, well known as MFF, is a big boon to football fans living anywhere in this world. MFF, is a site that accommodates selective discussion forums (one for the EPL, for La Liga, international football, etc.) and the main attribute of this site being , the generous cappers(recorders) who continue uploading different videos, ranging from live games to programs about football and self-knit football compilations/videos. To expand further, MFF offers to cap(record) every game shown in the television depending upon where the Capper lives, the popular requests and some personal requests as well, example if a number of people request for the forthcoming Manchester United versus Charlton match , then some capper will stand up to accept the request and will upload the game via torrent. MMF itself is a very interesting concept as it works by principle to satisfy public demand.

Usually, the activity in MFF is top notch as the cappers upload all the good programs shown in top sports channels like SKY sports, FOX, BBC, etc. One can also find interesting and rare programs about Football history, Club Specials, highlights package of the weekend’s action, Classic encounters of the past, Special tribute programs and so on.

If your team is in action soon and the game has been selected by some television network, all that is required by you is to start a thread in the REQUEST VIDEO room and request someone to cap the game, often you get a positive reply.

The downloads tend to be jus a bit heavy on the memory as a full game can even come up to 700 or 800 MB. However there is so much variety available to choose from and not only can onend videos, it is also possible to have a great time getting to know new people and talking football.

1. Club’s official Website- This would the first choice that comes to mind. All such sites provide up to date official news from a very formal perspective without in depth content as the club would be liable for information published here. Hence it would appear more like a press release than a fan’s eye view of events. The good points about the official sites are that they offer good packages for connecting with the club using Audio Visual format through subscription. eg. LeedsUnited.com

2. For those whose thirst is hardly quenched by the official website, we recommend, www.newsnow.co.uk, a site that provides links to the latest news of the day related to your club from all the various football websites in the available on the web. Its extensive search results returns a wide variety, ranging from major sites to informal blogs that talk about your club and it updates on a daily basis, it is a brilliant interface for any kind of football fan.

3. Another exciting option are websites run by sports enthusiasts. There are many football/sports sites started by english companies most probably , which act like colony with seperate space for every club in the Premiership and Championship. They offer fans of the respective clubs an opportunity to run the small house for their club, taking care of the newsfeeds , banners , Chatroom activites and most importantly, discussion forums and message boards. Such sites are bound to have a good Administrator who actively circulates news feed as and when any action takes place in the club. Some such suggested sites are:

http://www.vitalfootball.co.uk/

http://football.sportnetwork.net/

Once inside, navigate to your favourite club’s page. Since the suggested sites are just picking up you might be able to take up the option of running your club’s site or being a moderator there by helping the one already running it.

4. A final most interesting option is the Pure Message Board, these though many in number online, are hard to find. When the club you choose to support does not have a well run/attractive/famous/active webspace in any Big Football Interaction cum Information related Website then such message boards are your only solace. For instance, Mancheser United’s top msg board is RED CAFÉ.NET, Leeds’ top msg board WACCOE. The unique names make them just a tad bit harder to spot online, these sites will have only a discussion forum in them but will be dizzy with activity most of the time. These are not just run of the mill sports websites with a message board and the basic difference between these and the previously mentioned sports websites is that, while those are run for profit from adsense these are pages compiled by hardcore fanatics whose only source of revenue to run the site are the paypal accounts of fellow fanatics hence one is bound to find die hard fans in such spaces.

With increasing activity in online sites and forums, management has started taking keen interest in promoting their clubs through such sites. Keep on the lookout for version two of EPL Hacks for information of live audio and video feeds online.

Hacks into EPL – Part 2

• Access from anywhere.
  Create a document at an office computer, drive home, continue right from where you left off.
• Built-in sharing.
  Instantly share music, documents and more with your buddies.
• An application community.
  Everyone from professional software engineers to high school age programmers can participate at no cost. Choose from a growing list of over 301 released applications developed by our users.

Some of the features include:

• Using the RichTextEditor, create a document, and save it.
• Using YouFiles, open previously created documents, share them with others, and open other people’s shared files.
• Using Chat, make chat channels and have discussions in them.
• Using YouBuddy, instant message other people in YouOS.
• Using YouSticky, make and save sticky notes.

And most importantly,

• Using JavaScript and our IDE, make new applications.

Right now, YouOS is the beginnings of a web OS. It runs applications, has data storage for your apps, and is extensible– you can write apps for it right now. Our web OS right now has a Javascript-driven front end and an ever-growing backend of cool services. It’s a little raw (we’re working on it), a little ugly (also working on that), and wayyyy alpha.

But it works. Right now, wou can write YouOS apps that use our servers to save data. You can write an application that has its own chat. You can write an app that receives text messages from your mobile phone. And of course, you can use our existing apps to chat, create documents you can access from anywhere, and more. And we’ve got lots of new things on the drawing board (as well as a good number of bugs to fix.)

If Google is gonna work on their OS, then keeping in m ind the Google spreadsheets, calender, writely, paint, notebook, even their OS is bound to be web interactive. In some ways similar to YouOS.

You can get a free account at YouOS.com. A demo is also available.

Tags: youos, operating system, OS, open source

Some screen shots:

Emulator Zone has got a whole lot of links and downloads for probably every Videogame console that you’ve heard of. There are different emulators available for each console and they’ve all been reviewed and rated.

I tried out the Gameboy Advance emulator, Visual Boy Advance. It’s very simple to install and use, and with excellent results. You require ROMs, which are hacked versions of the actual games, that can run on the emulators. For Gameboy Advance, I went to this website which provides links to a large number of other websites where you can find freely available ROMs. Of course you are not assured that all of these ROMs may work, or if you’ll even find your favourite game. There are still many available out there and you might get what you want if you search hard enough.

The games work perfectly, no different from their real versions. Visual Boy Advance even has the capability to read zipped ROMs directly from their zip files and saves games without any hassles too. These are a must-have for all gaming freaks who can’t quite get their hands on the real thing.

For ROMs, you can just search on Google for “console name” + roms and you should be able to find the required sites.

The Emulator Zone

Gameboy Advance Roms

Nintendo DS Roms

The things that you can expect from it are:

# Protection against phishing scams, using technology that  comes from Google.

# Improved RSS support.

# A new history option, with ‘open recently closed tabs’ feature.

# An inbuilt spell check that will work on all text fields.

Though the RSS integration is not great, yet it is far better than that available in firefox 1.5 ( the current stable version). The history menu, previously unavailable in ver1.5 seems to be a very welcome tool.  But the best of the package is the built in antiphishing tool that is being developed with the help of Google.

you can download it from mozilla’s FTP server, over here (please download the .exe file).

P.S here is a useful hack to enable your ver1.5 plugins to work with the ver2.0 beta. Type “about:config” in the address bar, right-click and create a New String. Call the new preference value “app.extensions.version” and give it the number (e.g., 1.5.0.4) of the version you want extensions to think you’re using.When you install an extension, it will look to this preference value (if it exists) rather than your actual version number when it’s checking compatibility.

 Firefox Ver2.0 beta

Flock is the new kid on the browser block. It’s still in the Beta stage but there has been a steady development ever since the first beta version was released. Flock is a social networking oriented browser that is being developed based on Mozilla technologies. Quoting from the Wikipedia article on Flock:

The first technology preview released on June 22, 2006 had the following features:

• Bookmarks, in addition to being saved offline, can be replaced with del.icio.us. When a bookmark (known as a favorite) is added, it is added to one’s del.icio.us account
• Favorites can be tagged
• A favorites and history are integrated into the favorites manager
• Built-in full-text search using Clucene. Search as you type for pages in the cache
• Flickr integration
• Technorati tagging
• Blogging tools
• News aggregation
• “Drag-and-drop” capability and a clipboard like feature known as “The Shelf.”
• Built-in spellcheck capability

Additional features in recent preview releases:

• Private bookmarking is supported with the introduction of the ability to store bookmarks at Shadows.
• A Yahoo! Maps
  topbar has been introduced. Addresses can be dragged into the topbar,
  whereupon they will be mapped by Yahoo! Maps. This feature has since
  been removed, to be re-introduced at a later date.
• Uploading images to Photobucket is now supported.

This blog post has been published using the built-in blog editor in Flock. It allows you to write and publish blogs to different websites and even gives you the option of tagging your post and submits your posts to Technorati.

Most of the features of flock are available to Firefox users as extensions, so in that way it does not have a very great advantage over Firefox (for e.g. Performancing is a blog editor extension for Firefox). New extensions are being released which are Flock-specific and many Firefox extensions are avaiable for Flock too.

There are still some very obvious flaws with the browser that need to be ironed out. The next beta release is scheduled for September, 2006. Till then you can check out the features of the current version.

Flock

technorati tags:bothack, flock, browser

Blogged with Flock

Google has brought out the latest installment of one of it's more popular softwares – Google Earth.

The new version boasts of new features, including a new interface, textured 3D buildings, integration with Google Sketchup and a new way to share and implement user-generated terrain and locations. It has a larger viewing area with the navigation panel taking up less space hovering over the viewing area, and visible only when in use.
Google now encourages users to submit models and textures, as well as terrain and details using the available APIs for Google Earth and Google Sketchup.

More areas of the world are now displayed with higher resolution and Chennai/Tamil Nadu users will be delighted to know that they can finally zoom in better than before (I could spot my house! )

The latest version works on Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.
Google Earth has been much talked about ever since it's release and it only seems to be getting better, with more detail and features with each newer version.

Google Earth 4

Google Earth Home

Google Sketchup

Tezaa, a new venture of Tenmiles corporation is a non profit online community driven by polls. Coined as the 'wisdom of many' the site features only polls. Still under development, the site deals with accumalating opinions and views of its members on a variety of topics ranging from the best operating system to use to the most suited colour for a MacBook, from the best political party to vote for to the the team most likely to win the world cup, from most entertaining movie genre to the most acute source for music and more.

Its basis of funtion is very simple, Users signup onto the community and are given the option to vote on polls and create polls of their own. It is easy to utilize and user friendly, the site itself is ordinary yet effective in its packaging. The site's foundation lies on an average man's love to counsel. The most advantageous feature about the site is that the polls are created by Users themselves and not  by the Admin but this is also the main drawback as the site tends to feature certain polls which are insipid and baseless perhaps they should employ moderation to polls that are being accomodated.

The site might not have the highest utility value and with only 185 members so far it isn't the most eminent but to a regular net nomad the site is useful to spend a small interval of time on. And to those who have decisions to make and choices to pick from, if you are the sort to resort to advice and base decisions on public opinion then this is a site to refer. TEZAA - is a polling booth for the interested and can dish out a hiatus for recreation to all.

Internet Scrabble Club is by far the biggest online scrabble community, bringing together players of all ages, nationality and skill.

To play, you need to register yourself on the site, download their program and you're ready to play. The program is available for Windows, Linux and Mac users. It runs on Java Virtual Machine which needs to be installed first.

There are innumerable features incorporated into the program which allow you to play, chat and compare statistics with other users. You can also observe others' games currently underway, examine previous games or send out match requests to all others who are online. There are a numberof options that you can set to customise the type of game you want to play (duration of game, dictionary, etc.) It keeps track of your statistics and there is a rating system where each player is rated among others depeding on performance.

The interface is mainly command line and takes some getting used to, but once you get familiar with it, you will realise the advantages. There are many in built features that provide you essential information and let you execute common tasks smoothly.

There is a good amount of support for the program. There is extensive documentation on their website and help topics can be accessed from within the game program. There are also a number of helpers who answer questions live and are very helpful.

For aficionados of one of the most popular board games in the world, it is a great way to meet fellow enthusiasts worldwide and enjoy s game, it's as close as you can get to the real thing.

Internet Scrabble Club

Right now it is available only for Windows OS and supports Win98 and higher versions. And it also requires Ghostscript to be installed, which can be got here. 

What is probably its best feature is the Pro-Reviews available in it. It is written by experts in the most normal language sans the technical jargon.

Developed in the lines of Zdnet Reviews, but with better interface and features, Yahoo!tech is probably the best place to decide whether you have to go in for a Sony digital camera or a Kodak.

Yahoo! Tech

SUPER © (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) a GUI to ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora and the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn. Player and Encoder of various types of multimedia files. – is how it is described on the website.

And it's what it is called – Super! It does things which I could not do with any other software. For starters, it can convert any video format to any other. It supports almost all video formats that I've heard of, including flv – so all those YouTube videos can be less of a hassle. And it can even download streaming video that use rtsp protocol – something i badly needed and couldn't do for a long time. All its features are listed here.

The software has been praised in a lot of internet forums and it's great that a freeware with this much capabilities has been brought out.

Webaroo is a new software that stores whole websites on your computer. It's like the make available offline feature of IE. But it implements an algorithm that scans all sites that you select and then saves them in the hard drive. It then has the option of searching within the sites  stored on your computer. It's like having the internet stored on your computer! It even syncs the site while online to keep them updated.

Of course Internet Explorer has the make available offline feature which does pretty much the same thing but in that you can only select a particular website and the number of layers whereas this is more customizable and has an inbuilt search feature.

Firefox also has an extension called Scrapbook which has some nice features like making webpages and even parts of web pages available offline and also has word search facility. It even has a feature to annotate saved web pages. It's yet another excellent extension for firefox users.