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/

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Good News for Tech Bangalore readers, TB enters into Alltop list of Indian websites at http://india.alltop.com. This is a single page with recent five post title’s from top Indian Sites & Blogs. Content form around 40 - 50 popular websites & blogs are aggregated in a single page. Upon mouse over on a title, it show snippests from that post. So, user will be able to have a look before he clicks & goes to that particular website.

Alltop has top websites all around the world from different categories & sub-categories. It’s a  “dashboard,” “table of contents,” or even a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. It has a minimalistic interface with no ads & graphics providing great user experience. Overall it’s a good site to hang on & find top stories in favorite category.

Blogathon word is derived from most known Marathon. Where in Marathon we run for a cause & in Blogathon we blog for a cause. Blogathon is a six day event where all bloggers across country will discussing about a particular topic. The outcome of Blogathon is a galore of ideas. We might have found an idea to address an issue, but never had a chance to express it. The main stream media don’t care much about collecting citizens opinion, and you might not find like minded people around to express your ideas. Now this is the time, say golden opportunity to give a dimension to your ideas, thoughts about particular issue.

Blogathon is a virtual event which happens on cyberspace, I mean Internet. All you have to do is just create a blog if you already don’t have one, you can get free blog at www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com. There are many other free blog services, but these two are the most popular. Pick any topic which interests you & write your article/blogpost  on your blog. Remember that you have to use tags as blogathonindia or blogathonindia1. This helps Blogathon team to find your post & aggregate on Blogathon site. You can also use a form to submit your post URL to Blogathon admin team. If you can’t straight away think & write about a topic, Blogathon team is going to publish three blogpost with different view point on each topic. This might give you some idea on how to write, how to jot down your ideas into a blogpost. You can also participate by commenting on other’s posts.

After six days of mass blogging, all the blogposts will be reviewed by jury experts in each category. There are many awards to give away in each category & also few special awards like best commentator, student blogger…etc. Since Blogathon is a zero cost event, web badges are given as awards which you can put on your blog.

Topics:

Infrastructure: Sunday, 20th April 2008
How can we improve the traffic condition in our city?

Politics: Monday, 21st April 2008
How do we change the focus of politics from caste/religion to grassroot issues?

Entertainment: Tuesday, 22nd April 2008
Does Bollywood overshadow regional cinema in India?

Media: Wednesday, 23rd April 2008
Why are Indian news broadcast channels not as mature as their International counterparts?

Gender: Thursday, 24th April 2008
What are the challenges that society faces in accepting the concept of alternate sexuality?

Sport: Friday, 25th April 2008
Are ‘media’ and ‘commercial interests’ in cricket the only reason that are killing other sports in India?

Seed from Blogathon team on each topic will be released as per dates above. But you can stat blogging from now!

More details at www.blogathon.in

Bangalore Bloggers meet is planned on April 12th, coming Saturday. Blogaloreans is brand of Bangalore Bloggers, active blogging community in Bangalore. Main agenda of meet on 12th is Blogathon, which is initiated by Blogaloreans & then supported by blogging groups of other city. I will be writing a detailed post on Blogathon, you can get more info on that at www.blogathon.in

Apart from Blogathon, we are going to discuss about sessions about blogging at BCB6. Though venue is not finalized, it’s almost going to be Traffic Police Park near St.Marks road. Time is also not yet decided, will update once it get finalized. I will be glad if all Bangalore Bloggers can make it, if it is really impossible to attend you can follow updates on http://twitter.com/blogaloreans.
Join Blogaloreans group at http://groups.google.com/group/blogaloreans

Map to venue:

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For any help or details about event, you can reach me at +91 99860 35099 & gtalk hnprashanth.

Update:

Venue is finalized to be Traffic Police Park & time 4 PM onwards.

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

Thatskannada.com (OneIndia) Pranati is organizing Kannada bloggers meet in Bangalore. All kannada bloggers in Bangalore are expected to attend it. There will be talks by Pavanaja, person behind firsts kannada internet portal Vishwa Kannada, SK Shyamsunder editor of thatskannada, Hariprasad Nadig of Sampada & Abdul Rashid of KendaSampige.

If you are interested in blogging & want to know more about blogging or already a blogger, this is the right place to come & discuss. Meet is on March 16th, Sunday 4 PM at Indian Institute of World Culture, Basavanagudi, Bangalore. I am participating, will you?

More event details at Thats Kannada

Map to venue:

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