10x10 -- Thats 100

TenByTen has been around now for more than two years. When it was released two years back there were not many professionals to give it a good competition, Digg was still in inception and Slashdot was not much known. In what followed in the next two years, zillions of news services surfaced, and TenByTen got lost somewhere in the ocean. Had it not accidently been rediscovered today it would have converted to fossils after remaining years inside the ocean.

Even after two years with so many news services around the interface still looked sleek and browsing through the flash based interface looked painless. The greatest drawback is that it draws news from only three sources (Reuters, BBC and NYT) nevertheless it is still worth giving a try. You can browse through the news of every month,day and hour starting 2004. The site more looks like kinda demo how a news service works.

Link : TenByTen

TailRank Tale

Tailrank is a news aggregator which has been around for a little now. The service marks the quality of a news story by the number of times the story has been blogged or linked. The stories are aggregated from various sources much like Digg. But unlike Digg which sometimes suffer from worthless Diggs, the Tailrank system looks more robust as someone will take the pain of blogging or linking something only when its worthwhile. And with the rise of bloggers at exponential rate in every field its obvious that a good story will receive a lot of links.

Features that can make a difference

1. Recently added video category populated with videos from various video sharing services (mostly youtubes) which are selected on the basis of number of links or embeds. (TailRank Video)

2. Providing deep tracking for a story with the "track this thread", to get depth and breadth of a story.

3. Easy access to news by date. For 21st dec news -- "http://tailrank.com/2006-12-21".

4. Import service from other aggregators (bloglines, newsgator). Manual uploading of OPML files. (Tailrank import)

5. Allowing for embedding Tailrank on your blog with fully customizable CSS.

Mazes to amaze you

Almost all of us at some point of time have tried solving mazes in our childhood days. I was very good at mazes and wanted to solve more and more, so i end up buying lots of magazines, books on maze problems. But recently I found out this site which has exactly One Billion Mazes to be solved without a single repetition. All the mazes are in printer friendly pdf formats to let you print and make your day. Some mazes are cool, confident booster but some are real gory. It can be fun if you got some time to spare.

Link : One Billion Mazes

SuperHeros are Just a Click away

ComicVine is a wiki of superheros where you can edit the description, origin, power etc of a superhero or can create your own. You can vote for your favourite superheros through a hot or not system where two heros are put side by side and users are to vote who wins the battle between the two. Find out more at the video tour below:

Random Google Image Search

I stumble upon this service that lets throws you the images from Google image search with random phrases. The service adds a random name with a random verb each time you refresh the page which means it will search form "people doing stuffs". Good for time pass.

asdf : Its not crap always

"asdf", a middle row first four letter of a qwerty keyboard, a common word that people tend to enter to test something that they think isnt important. The word is so much common that it has found an Wikipedia entry and there is a total crap website called asdf.com. But where I think "asdf" has been most productive is on Youtube, just do a search for it and you will find more than 6000 videos. Here is also a compilation of videos named "asdf". Google Image Search got me 4800 results and Flickr got me 817 results.

LiveVideo : Another Video sharing site

In the recent months it has become quite clear that YouTube is there to stay and rule with a good number of video sharing sites launching each week and lost under the hype of YouTube. Unless these services bring some innovativeness in them, they are bound to remain under the YouTube's hood. LiveVideo could have been just another video sharing site and by now lost the newly created ocean of video sharing. But this service craved out some space for itself by introducing some new features. While the interface looks too much similar to Youtube's , its the addition of following features thats making the difference: [via Mashable]

» A Digg like voting feature "Hit or Miss".

» An interactive map to browse videos by country. Just mouse over the flags on the world map and the videos for that region will be shown up. For US you can even browse by states.

» Customizable Profiles. This is probably the most powerful feature to get it an edge in the race. Users can create there profile pages which makes viewing the video a different experience as they run against a different background for each user.

» Different skins to choose from.

See the what's new section to get hold of new features as it surfaces over time.

You - The Designer

In the recent months there is a surge in the online design services that let you design your custom goodies like tshirts, casino chips, cards etc. What more, you can order online the design you just made and get it home delivered with moneyback guarantee. Here is a brief description of the three pioneers in this field.

favorite products that match their interest.

» ChipLab : The service is dedicated for the creation of Casino Chips. You can choose whether you want complete poker set, customized chip set or individual chips. You can add layers, pictures, arts, pictures all customized to suit your requirements. After the design is done you can just checkout and the chips will be shipped to you.

» CafePress : CafePress is based on theme "Gift". You can almost find anything that you planned for gift to find it fully customizable. You can either choose from already created designs or created your own. The products are classified across categories like School or education, food or drink, military, sports , religion,technology or geek etc, to let you choose the nearest match to your interest or profession. If you are creative enough you can even sell the products designed by you to others. Or if you own a site you can direct your traffic to the

» Zazzle : This service has a lot to offer when it comes to range of popular products. The most important I felt was the design of tshirts. Besides you can design and sell your creations. You will earn a 10% royalty when a product designed by you sells. You can also refer visitors of your site to the products for which you will earn 7% commission for each sale.

Daytipper -- Tips for making life easier.

Daytipper is another social networking Web 2.0 service that runs on the content submitted by the user. The site seems first of its kind and therefore poised for a success. The service allows users to submit tips which in someway you feel will help others. The tips are classified across various categories. The service pays you $3 for each tip published. The importance or usefulness of your tip is judged by the users who can vote for it which will be shown as a percentage. No doubt, there were lots of negative votes. You can subscribe for the tips through email or through rss. At the time of writing there were 2,468 tips submitted but only 476 published, which shows there is really a lot of liking for this service and people are having great tips and the $3 factor is also doing its part.

100 Most Useful Sites in 2006

The Guardian published a list of 100 most useful sites across various categories. The list is comprehensive and if you are a not a net-addict it will serve as a good ready reference. The list goes here.

Top 50 CSS designs of 2006

SmashingMagazine listed 50 beautiful CSS-based websites of 2006 with snaps, thus earmarking the end of an year full of creativity.

Emotionslive.co.uk

Dinis91.com

Expiring Domain Names

It is often first come first serve. The early you do the domain name registration the better the chance of getting name of your choice. The domain names are filling so quickly that it has already started becoming difficult to get one word or modular domain names.

If you are looking for some good domain names, chances are that they are already booked, or they were booked and now are on the verge of expiring. There are a lots of domain names that expire everyday and you can choose from them as soon as they expire. This site lists domain names that are expiring with the time left to expire. You can navigate through the list to find some really cool names or make a search for domain names containing words your choice. You can also see the Google trends (to see how often they were searched on Google) for those domain names so that you get domain name that is most sought after. [via Digital Inspiration]

Expiring Domain Names

Disposable Phone Numbers

Sometimes it just gets very important to get a disposable phone number for a lot of business or private reasons or simply to alleviate the problem of receiveing spam calls. Craigsnumber provides a free service whereby it generates a disposable number with validity period from ranging from one hour to one week. You can distribute this number to all those with whom you do not want to keep permanent contact. The calls to this number will be forwarded to your real number which cannot be seen by the caller. Presently, this service is for US only numbers. [via Lifehacker]

Link: Craigsnumber
Related: Disposable Emails.

Digg added Videos and Podcasts section

Digg, a one stop shop for buying news and interesting stories chalked out democratically, launched video and podcasts section yesterday. Although users used to post videos and podcast news earlier also, but that had to be included in the only section available - the news section. Now that videos and podcasts sections are specifically outlined, users will get a cleaner and organized experience while looking for video and podcasts. The podcasts section which requires you to sign on to access it, at the time of writing already had podcasts spread over 28 pages with "Diggnation" and "this week in tech" dugged down 5576 and 4628 times respectively.

Linux equivalent of Windows Softies

If you are one of those who abandoned the plan to switch over to Linux because of sheer lack of full feature softwares, then this post could be of some help to you to overcome your fear and go opensource. LinuxEq like the name suggests maintains a good list of softwares for Linux family of OSs with its windows counterparts. The apps range from equivalent of photoshops, office, itunes, netmeeting to notepad.

ZCubes : The browser, your home.

ZCubes is a new webservice that is creating quite a buzz. But for me it was only after I tried it personally did I felt the buzz. The slick interface combined with almost all the contents you could think of makes it a unique experience. And boy this ajaxian interface is fast enough unlike online OSs that I discussed earlier (YouOS, EyeOS).

As the site claims:

ZCubes is the world's first website that seamlessly integrates browsing, searching, editing, painting, freehand drawing, cursive hand-writing, audio-video media
management, publishing, and much more into a pure BROWSER-BASED PLATFORM.

I think it really is what it claims to be. You can browse, search, paint blah blah. But the feature that interested me most was the drag drop of images, youtube videos etc from the sites open inside ZBrowser. Yes, you can drag and drop any html element from the ZBrowser to what they call ZSpace, what if its an image or a link or just a paragraph. It claims to support upto 30 file formats, so you can integrate PDF, Shockwave, Powerpoint, Word, and more. You can save your work on hardisk or publish directly on web.

The service as I see has some future in this Web 2.0ish world where every now and then innovative solutions appear.

ZCubes

Cogmap - Wiki of Organisational Chart

It happens at times that you need to know about an organisation, its corporate structures and governance. And if you are a reporter or an interviewer it just becomes more than necessary to keep an updated version of who's who of an organisation into your head. If you think it is a problem, then solution has arrived.

Cogmap, a wiki of organisational charts, ajax powered, maintains the structure of an organisation in a graphical format as shown in the snap. Anyone can add an organisational chart and anyone can edit to rectify the errors or put some new nodes. Now the next time you need to know who to call upon in your organisation for a problem or see organisational chart of any corporation you can just make a search on Cogmap and get to know about personalities holding crucial positions.

Tiny apps : Free and efficient Apps

There is a good collection of apps at TinyApps which are free and run on your system without much overhead on your CPU. Almost all of the apps are freeware(?), less than 1.44MB in size, does not require VB/MFC/.NET runtimes and they claim they are not adwares(?). A good number of their apps come with source code, requires no changes in registry, 100% self contained withing their own directory, do not require installation. Free apps for Palm and OS X are also available.

ChaCha Guide Search

Well, lets say you want to buy a computer to satisfy your ever increasing appetite for games, songs, videos and programmings. Simply put you want a powerful PC. You have two options either ask your nerd friend or do a web search, and now since you yourself know a lot about searching techniques you do a Google search and get one million results. Now you have two options either you go through all of them or go back to more reliable method, that is asking your friend. But, oh no this time your friend is stuck with some very serious work and do not want to be disturbed (obviously he is dating someone). You are nowhere, doomed.

And suddenly there's a thunder, all gets illuminated and ChaCha comes to rescue. ChaCha is a web search engine gives you the most optimized search which it brings out while chatting to you. You can in much the same way as talking to your friend, chat with ChaCha and quote your requirements. ChaCha will guide to the search result that is most suited to your need. Enter your search query and click search with guide. ChaCha will suggest you with sites while you chat and if you are not satisfied with the results you can tell you are not satisfied and want more specific results.

Here is an exerpt of a typical chat session:

Status: Looking for a guide ...
Status: Connected to guide: Lakhena L
Lakhena L: Welcome to ChaCha!
Lakhena L: HI
Lakhena L: How are you doing?
You: hi
You: i am fine
Lakhena L: How may I help you with computer today?
You: i am looking forward to buy a computer
Lakhena L: Ok,
Lakhena L: any specific type?
Lakhena L: Do you want to look for destop or laptop?
You: i want a powerful PC to play games, videos and running some common compilers
You: desktop
Transfer: You are being transfered to another guide who can help you search even better!
Looking for guide ...
Status: Connected to guide: SamanthaT
SamanthaT: Welcome to ChaCha!
SamanthaT: Hello, I will be happy to help you today with your search.
SamanthaT: Please be more specific as to what you're looking for on this topic.
SamanthaT: Hello?
SamanthaT: Hello?
You: i want a powerful pc that will run games like warcraft,nfs
SamanthaT: Sure one moment while I look.
SamanthaT: Thanks for being patient! Rest assured I'm finding the most relevant results for your search.
SamanthaT: Are these results sufficient?
You: yes thank you
SamanthaT: Is there anything else on this topic I can find for you today?
You: no thank you
SamanthaT: Thank you for using ChaCha, have a great day!
SamanthaT: Please RATE ME. Thanks for using ChaCha.

Cricket Networking

Cricket in India is a game with popularity matching nothing. Some call it religion. So, I guess this is the right time to start professing your religion. Sixer which was launched about two months ago and CrickeM which is just launched provide cricketer lovers a platform they always wanted. They wanted to network with like minded cricketesters, discuss with them the crucialities of a match, comment on batting style of Sachin , share and view their favourite clips of shots. And so thee get all you desired.