For non webmasters : try coRank and its recently released make your own digg site. You just sign up and can create an exact clone of digg, suited to your categories or your interests. You could probably start a digg for music review, movie review, latest news articles or even software hacks. Whatever the  category , you can have your digg up and running in no time.

For webmasters : Try pligg, its a deploy ready framework that can be deployed on your apache and mysql. Its essentially the same, but you take care of the hosting and the space. Its a cinch.

So you diggin yet ?

Link: PlayMyGame

I just got word about Toondoo and I was more than eager to check it out. I just loved what the site had to offer in terms of its functionality. A really easy to use interface to make your own cartoon strips and yes, I created one.

The idea is really cool, there will be a lot of people spending a lot of time on these sites and its a great way to build a community and share your exploits. The site has a youtube like system to share, embed, comment etc plus there are the good ones picked up by the editors. What I would really love to see, would be professional cartoonists using Toondoo and bringing out quality toons. Im sure, you will agree that average everyday man cannot come up with funny strips, but they can definitely translate a real world scenario into a funny strip. All in all great concept, great site and great usability.

See the cartoon strip I created.

There is the wonderful open source stellarium which is used by many planetariums nowadays, but wikisky was just amazing.  check it out

Good for the budding SEO’s  of the new era.

Alright, enough gibberish. I came across these bunch of applications that were demoed at the Adobe Engage. To take a look at what these things are capable of please take a look at these sites.

A calendar, writer , lists and more organizational stuff with the ability to work offline.

  An online Office application built entirely in flash. I hear its got excellent typography and pagination. Could be a competitor in the race to the online office automation prize.

Also dont forget to check out start page yourminis and my favorite photo editing tools fauxto and picnik.

[digg=http://digg.com/linux_unix/Yahoo_Pipes_4]Yahoo is really going after the mashup craze, releasing some amazing products one after the other. The latest in their offering is Yahoo Pipes. Let me be honest, I was totally astounded at the brilliance of this wonderful product. Forget sites making mashups of content, in pipes any user with little bit of an IQ can create his/her own mashup feed and publish it.

Get from any RSS /ATOM source , combine, tailor, sort add, rename and mix match all the feeds to create your own mashup of content, be it yours or someone else’s.

Pipes was inspired by Unix Pipes, which provides a mechanism of communicating between two process, share information and basically, do wonderful things. I , myself remember the time when I studied and implemented a small unix pipe as a part of my curriculum. Well , Yahoo now lets you pipe your content from many sites and lets you make a mashup of them and publish them. One look at the site and you will see people creating content like price alerts, news feed from top news sites, top blogs , property searches in and around teh bay area etc. As I always say, possibilities are endless and I appreciate yahoo for supporting such an amazing idea and giving it out to their customers.

Mashups are big and pretty soon, it will take over as home page in many browsers. Makes sense, doesn’t it? A feed of all the things that I wish to keep in touch with, this could include videos, phots, news, blogs and many more. Take a look at this pipe based mashup I created , this basically is my entire online syndicated presence. Feeds from three of my blogs and also photos from flickr.

Me Online : http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/GokWYhC_2xG_AmTHZYQMOQ

A screenshot of how I created the pipe ( marvel at the complexity !!!)

Obviously you can donate to the Changes by credit card but for those who aren’t really the donating types, you can donate time by participating in certain events that happen in your locality. Finally I see a positive angle to social networking   , do you want to change the world ?

This I had to write about. Found this through Techcrunch and was ROTFL after reading and seeing it. Its not new that there are 2.0 startups by the dozen every week and people are trying to do something new. Well if you would like to create your own 2.0 firm here is what you do ( I mean sarcastically ofcourse )

  “Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator”

Using the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generatorâ„¢ as part of your Business Plan.

1. Devise bullshit-compliant products and services with the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generatorâ„¢
2. Go to Brownpau’s Buzzphrase Generator for some excellent catchphrases with which to litter your site and marketing materials.
3. Name your new Web 2.0 site with Andrew Woolridge’s Web 2.0 Company Name Generator. Update: Or use this one, which is even better!
4. Go get yourself a snazzy logo with the Web 2.0 Logo Generator.
5. Sell your company to Yahoo!
6. Repeat over and over

Here are some of the things I got as solutions which is actually hilarious:

enable citizen-media tagclouds   and   tag undefined mashups , hilarious i must say. This was my company name Zimeeno.  My company does this : rss-based photos via email invite *only*.  Give it a try, if nothing you will feel like an entrepreneur 2.0

 

I just finished seeing Yahoo Ourcity, a local mashup site that localizes to your current city and shows a mashup of information collected from the various Yahoo brands. Quite recently I have begun to notice a trend in sites that localize content based on the access point . For example if I were to log into Orkut from Bangalore, I would see a lot of Bangalore friends, but if I were to log in from say the US of A , i would see more friends from the US than from India, its more relevance to the data.

Yahoo OurCity also does the same, by showing you a localized version of the site. The portal features current news,weather information, photos tagged geographically to Bangalore in Flickr , upcoming events in Bangalore and other info like movie listings, events, blogs etc. This is where Yahoo stands out from the other web giants. Yahoo has a tradition of building great audiences around a product, they did with their mail, answers and My Yahoo which are forerunners in their own right. Our city is definetely a great concept, add to this the usablility of Yahoo products, great backend services like Flickr, News, maps , videos , del.icio.us and other systems, and you have a great portal which will pull in people like bugs to pest-o-flash. Social networking features is not given that much of an importance, considering thats the most requested/required feature. nevertheless this concept of the Local Daily portal will work. Below are some screenshots.

First it was Organisational Charts and now its relatives. I just love what Geni has to offer. Its a method of cataloguing and making family trees and the concept just rocks. Just add your name , your fathers name and mother’s name and your email id.  After this you just add your relatives and their email ids. They inturn get invited to geni to build their own tree. As the process continues the tree grows and keeps adding branches , you can navigate your entire family to see their profiles and information.

This service offers a unique service that everybody will love to use. I see great potential in this service and as the network picks ups  users and the trees get bigger , you can have a really big netowrk of related people. Will take time though. The networks are private and you can only view your own network, which is a great initiative to maintain privacy.

Microsoft seems to be developing some pretty cool new stuff that nobody anticipates and this time around they have a perfect solution for those nucleated, tech savvy families. Imagine you have a family of four all using diferent machines, wouldnt you like to organise a server of sorts for sharing common data, music, photos schedules etc. MS has just the product for you, Windows Home Server.

Check out their cool website that depicts why you would require such a gadget. Also its unlikely that for such a need you would go all out to set up your own client server mechanism and buy another PC to act as the server. The windows home server is extremely small and compact and packs in it some really revolutionary features. You have expandable memory, auto organising(indexing) and searching of content. You can share printers, data, have automatic backups of dataand full system restore to name a few features. It looks really promising considering that lot of families, hostels and other small establishments need such solutions. I forsee a similar product coming in the SME space also, sort of a Google Mini but from Microsoft. what do you think? dont forget to check out the site.

Fooplot is a plotting engine built using SVG and VML. You have to plot values based on the value of Y =

so basically you have to equate everything to Y in an equation, you can even use trigonometric functions like sin(), cos() etc. Its great fun to use and really helpful to some people I know. Especially the people who like using CRO’s and other graphy solutions will like what this site has to offer .

The author Dheera Venkatraman writes : This website is in a very early stage. Expect many more features to come soon (we plan on developing a fully-featured graphing calculator with analytic tools, charting with Google spreadsheets, and more)! Expect there also to be bugs in this version – please let us know if you find anything. You need an SVG- or VML-capable browser to view this website.

There are a lot of apps churning up daily but nothing to benefit the people who use it. I just signed up for Traineo, a service that acts like your personal weight loss manager and fitness manager all in one. I love what this service has to offer in terms of the features and usage. The UI has been doen up really well, with a lot of ajax and effects.

You have to enter your workout data, like the number of minutes you ran, or the number of crunches you did. The system then tells you how many calories you burned and also shows some fancy graphs of your workout pattern. You have to initially set your current weight and also set a goal for yourself. You will be definetely asking whats new about this, well, you can add motivators to your profile.

Motivators are friends that you add to help you reach your desired goal. You can help each other out infact. You can direct your profile to be accesible by the entire traineo community to help you reach your goal. People who really want to lose weight, i suggest you take this option. Your own friends will be delivered yoru weekly workout reports and also the weight you enter, so if you are slacking then your friends can motivate( in my case, scold) you back to your workout. The public humiliation factor has been well used and I am all go for this site.

You can check out my profile on traineo here. Work it

There is another player in the aggregator town, Profilelinker aggregates content from many social networks onto a single interface. You can continue to explore content from all teh networks and also discover friends, communities etc and get friend requests, messages etc in one place. The downside however is that it uses site credentials to do so.

The main source of revenue for these social networks is page views and ads and definetely people in myspace, facebook and bebo will not be pleased at profilelinker eating into their share of hits. There is a big probabilty that the site wont last long. The solution here is not to make and break such site, but to work on a framework that helps in the convergence of social networks. I read an article in Wikipedia that explores such possibilities using concepts of microformats and webservices. It will be a long shot trying to please all the network owners and also whether such an approach will be adopted by the sites, is still a matter yet to be seen.

Update : Kurt comments that ProfileLinker doesn’t need your credentials for the basic operations, but for actions like checking for new mesasges etc. There is whole lot of features put in which doesnt require credentials and the site intends to release more features in the coming days. 

Found this great dictionary service through ajaxian. Ninjawords erves the words and also autocorrects typos, shows only the relevant results and that too at a fastpace. Speed and accuracy is a Ninja’s trait and the service definetely lives up to its name. Links to other words in the meaning will open up the related term in the window above. Try searching and then polling, you will know.

I have listed down three services that let you add yoru own maps with lots of features.

1. Platial: is a service that lets you create your own maps with a lot of information. You can link this to your Flickr account and document the places you have traveled for example. You can also search maps that have been tagged close by to your tags. It looks like a wierd mix of yahoo local with the ease of making your own. Almost all maps provide the three views namely map as in 2d plot , satellite( image seen froma sattelite ) and hybrid( a combination of both. All in all a great service.

2.Flagr:

The same tagging service, it lets you upload photos, videos etc and tag them geographically. You can also embed this map in your website or blog and share cool geo tagged info or media. Searching of people, activities etc around you is also included. Great service.

3. Frappr:

The same kind of service, but you dont even have to sign up. It provides a great embedding widget for myspace, blogger, Hi5 , xanga and other sites. It lets people visiting your profile or site, tag themselves and write comments , upload photos etc. I like its ease of use the best.

All the three are great offerings and Im sure such geo based sites will pick up more mass in the coming years. Geo revolution is goin big and you know it ..

Hey Watch,a france based site, lets you convert videos into different formats.  It is considered impractical to have such services online due to the CPU intensive processing involved, but these guys are doing just that. There are a host of formats to choose from and they also create a RSS feed for all the videos that are converted by a user. Great innvoation, saves you the trouble of going to the site over and over.

You can rip videos into DVD, Mpeg4 , Ipod formats and guess what, you can rip any video on RSS, basically meaning you can rip out You tube videos. So, how easy is it? Rip a couple of you tube videos and convert them to mpeg 4 and put them on your Ipod. Piece of cake !!

Picture this, there are numerous news sites which churn out breakign news every second. A bot is constantly monitoring a set of news sources and also the stats on it. When a news article gets more and more hits, the bot picks it up, converts it to speech, adds in an animated character to present the news + add some video footage if any in the source and voila you have your news at seven- Completely automated.  This mechanism does open up things to a whole new world of possibilites and I can’t be but surprised, at what people will think of next. With a lot of services feeding out of each other, especially in the blogosphere, I am sure we will soon have a universal feed of all the top blogs across the globe. I really really like the concept. I have attached a news cast from news at seven, enjoy!!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT1myWbmZTQ]

I just checked out a service called Fauxto. Its an online photoshop clone, built using a flash and someother things. It really amazes me what more will be possible on the web. All the basic image editing features, the layer approach, effects , all the works. If you have ever used photoshop and are impressed at the way things are handled in it, then youwill be dumb stricken by this beauty. Is a little slow though, Photoshop itself is considered to take an eternity to load, so you can expect teh online version to measure up.

Give it a try and Im sure you wont be dissapointed.