Browse media on internet on 3D wall | Amazing user experience!

Have a look at this video!

Wow! excellent! Amazing!
That’s what came out of my mind when I used it for first time. It’s really a great experience while browsing media in Piclens. Yes, that’s Piclens which did the magic!

Piclens is a browser plugin which enables you to browse media like pictures, videos on a 3D wall, giving greate browsing experience. Piclens works great for popular sites like Youtube & Flickr. After installing Piclens, a one click launch button will be added to your browser. Upon clicking that button, Piclens launches a full screen 3D wall to browse the media on site. Click, hold, drag using mouse to navigate on the wall, click on a particular picture to zoom, or on a video to play!

To get Piclens go to www.piclens.com. It is available for Firfox on Windows/Mac/No Linux , Internet Explorer & Safari.

Enabling Piclens on your Blog/Website:

If you are a website owner or a blogger, you can enable Piclens on your site. This enables your visitors to experience & browse media on your site on a 3D wall. This will be especially useful for bloggers who post photographs (Photo Blog) & videos. If you use wordpress, it’s more easier, because they have WP plugin too!

You can get more details on enabling Piclens on your site at http://piclens.com/lite/

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Above is the radio created for Tech Bangalore. You can listen to all posts made on Tech Bangalore. Text to speech conversion looks pretty good. You can listen to all blogs which are having RSS feeds. You can listen to any blogs in simple two steps:

1. Goto http://blogbard.com
2. In the search box enter blog URL

That’s it! it automatically detects feed of that blog & creates a flash radio out of it. Embed HTML will be provided in a text box, copy & paste it in your blog. Now your visitors will be able to listen to your Radio, oh! I mean blog.

BlogBard also has features to read your subscriptions in Google Reader & Bloglines. Just login to thes services in BlogBard & it does the rest!

In my experience Plusmo is the easiest way to mobilize your blog. It makes your blog easily readable on mobile phones. Your blog can be mobilized using plusmo in three easy steps:

1. Go to www.plusmo.com & select a widget to put on your blog.
2. Give your blog URL in next step & click “Fetch”
3. It generates a HTML, copy that code & put it on your blog.

That’s it! Now your visitors can subscribe to your blog through their mobile phone. For first user has to download the Plusmo mobile application, which is small & simple. Later they can add more blogs which they want to read in that application. Browsing blogs in Plusmo application is really fast & simple. You can use your phone’s navigation keys as “Next” & “Previous” to browse next & previous posts of a blog.

Plusmo also has a usage tracking system where you can see how many users are subscribed to your mobile content, number of pageviews..etc. Plusmo has a monetizing option, where they can put ads on your content with your permission & generate revenue out of it.

Go on, mobilize your blog!

It made a very positive impact on my mind at the first look itself. What an interface, looks really great & simple. Coming to service, it apparently looks to me as combination of smsgupshup & twitter! Tagg.in claims itself as SMS group messaging system as well as micro blogging platform. But they are not simply telling like that.

Firstly registration is very easy, you have to fill only three feilds, email, password & verification code (are you human?). You can activate your mobile phone later, but updates via SMS is what looks great. Registration process can also be completed via SMSs. So you need not to have internet to use this service, just remember SMS short codes & their number. Tagg.in uses local number 99801 99801 so you will be less charged by service provider to update via SMS.

After simple registration process, you can create your own group termed as TAGGtivity. Updates to group can be sent using web interface or SMSs. Your followers can follow your updates in either medium. You can subscribe to other popular groups like CricScores, BrkgNews, SportsNews, JokesGuru…etc to get free updates.

Cons:

• You cannot add your friends mobile numbers to your group, they have to sign up or have to send a message from their mobile to follow your updates. SMSGupShup has a feature where you can add mobile numbers of your friends to your group & start sending messages straight away.
• Updates can be made via only two mediums, SMS & web. I still love twitter because it provides lot of ways to update. May be they are going to add these features in final release, this is still in alpha.
• Lack of badges to display your updates on your blogs or web pages.

I feel it still lacks in features when compared with it’s competitor. Let’s wait and see what features they are going to bring in final release.

It was a great evening, people which we knew through their blogs were in front of each other. Their were talks by Pavanaja, Hariprasad Nadig, Abdul Rashid & Shyamsunder. It was my luck that i took my portable music player with me. I have recorded all talks & publishing here. If you missed the event or want to recall what they said, listen to these podcasts:

1) Pavanaja:

Pavanaja talking about how he brought up first kannada website vishvakannada.com & what we have to do to improve usage of kannada in web, softwares, computers.
Download this podcast as MP3(22.2MB)
2) Hariprasad Nadig:

Hariprasad Nadig of Sampada talking about how to build kannada web portal, how much investment it requires & revenue model.
Download this podcast as MP3(14.8MB)
3)Abdul Rashid:

Abdul Rashid about importance of having kannada portal & about his kendasampige.
Download this podcast as MP3(9.44MB)
4)Shyam Sunder:

Shyam Sunder talking about, kannada blogs are currently limited to poetry & story writing, which should come out of this & start providing useful information require3d for common people. He made his talk in humorous way. I missed out few bits at the start
Download this podcast as MP3(15.4MB)
More detailed posts:

http://www.raveeshkumar.com/2008/03/blog-post_17.html

http://thatskannada.oneindia.in

http://www.kendasampige.com

Microsoft is providing 5GB of space to store your files online. As the above picture illustrates, you can save files for yourself, share files with friends & also share on world wide web. It provides three level of access control for your files.

Private: Store files which are only accessible to you. This could be used to store files which are private & should not be accessible to anyone else.

Shared: Share files only with your friends, but they need to have an MSN or Hotmail account. Other than your friends can’t access these files.

Public: Upload files to public folder to make it available to everyone. After uploading files you can share link with anyone & they can download the file. If you have a web page or blog & want to provide a download to your visitors, it also provides attractive badges to insert in your web pages. Clicking on it, user can download that file.

Users who already have MSN or Hotmail account can straightaway start using it by logging in. If you don’t have one, you can sign up for a free account. Sign up or login to Skydrive at http://skydrive.live.com/

As my Twitter network is growing, I’m discovering interesting new people. Aalaap Ghag is one of them, who is also the founder of a new online service called LinkBunch.

You might have heard or used TinyURL which shortens lengthy URLs into smaller ones, which can be used in places where space is a constraint. LinkBunch is a step ahead - it lets you create a single, small URL out of multiple links. The LinkBunch link is easy to remember and share, due to its short length.

Some Web 2.0 services have limited amount of characters that you can input. In Twitter the limit is 140 characters per tweet. If you wanted to share multiple links services like Twitter, you will run out of space. LinkBunch can be very useful in this case.

LinkBunch is still in Beta and the full set of features is not yet implemented. As I discussed with Aalaap, user accounts will be integrated into this service. With an account, a user can manage bunches created by him. Managing includes adding links, removing links, editing links in a current bunch, deleting old bunches if not required. User need not to go through sign up process, as this service will be OpenID enabled.

I have created a bunch with URLs of my blogs and social networking profiles, this is an example LinkBunch: http://linkbun.ch/4ma

To create your own Link Bunch go to linkbun.ch

Twitter is a service which ask you “what are you doing?”. But it’s deviated a lot from this theme & evolved as a big microblogging platform. You can just update whatever you want through web, IM or Phone. Others can follow your updates & can receive updates via all three mentioned mediums.

Twitter has millions of users & finding people from your location to interact is difficult as there is no such option provided right now. Abhinav Sarkar, a forth year student in IIT Kharagpur, created a script just for fun. But the script is really useful, it is written in python & uses Twitter API. Primarily script crawls Abhinav’s Indian friends on twitter by looking at location entry as “India”, “Bangalore”, “Mumbai”…etc into his database. Later script crawls his friend’s Indian friends & so on, the list keeps building. Finally, the result is a directory of all Indian Twitterers!

This list can be accessed at
http://abhinav.sarkar.googlepages.com/indiantwitterers.html

Great work Abhinav

Update:

Abhinav has created a twitter bot which follows, collects tweets from all Indian Twitterers & re-tweets them. So, you can follow this bot to follow all Indian twitterers tweets. Follow this bot at http://twitter.com/IndiaTwit

Google adsense units on few pages of Tech Bangalore started displaying a scroll bar. I noticed this just few minutes back. I guess this enables adwords users to put more description  about their ads. But may affect negativelyon publisher, as it looks entirely different & not blends with content. But, may also attract visitors with that scroll bar. Let’s wait & see how it affects CTR (Click Through Rate).