Digg’s UX was now Improved (a LOT!)

Digg.com has got a major revamp in UI and UX (User eXperience).The first thing you would observe is the “Cleaner” interface of the website. The stories area was now moved to left hand side and makes the web site more readable and cleaner.

Some of the changes that made digg.com made looks cleaner..(more at Kevin’s Blog).

Navigation : This is a major change in the websites navigation. The left side navigation now turned in to a top, horiantal multi level panel navigation which makes more sense to the reader. Digg.com has also added two new sections for Videos and Podcasts. The videos section seems to be tough compitition for StumbleVideo (In looks and Stuff too).

Popular Content : Digg.com content is now shown along with time since when it was made popular and made it on to digg.com home page. This gives the sense of freshness and helps the user to choose the required content.

A new panel called “Top 10 in all Topics” has been added to the home page now. This is probably to drive traffic even on to all the topics and increase the traffic on digg.com (I feel most of the Digg.com users visit the home page and close the window…). Right beneath this panel, Kevin has got some space to add a new Google Ad panel.

Cloud View :This  is still in beta (upcoming) stage. So right now I can see an empty page when I clicked on this option. But this seems to be an interesting feature and possibly could gives a meme graph of what’s happening on Digg.com at that second.

Digg Video:This will be the most envious section for Google. Because, they could’nt come up with this kind of cool interface to create a social favourite video site even after the huge buy of YouTube. This is basically a simple video rating system based on Digg.com dugg system. This can be the next big asset of Digg.com for sure.

Digg Podcasts: A big directory of podcast publishers. Digg.com has provided an inbuild audio/video player, so that you dont have to leave the site at all.

Now, Digg is going make a big difference compared to Slashdot. This leap can take digg miles apart in the race for sure.

Now it’s time for Scobliezer to re-consider digg.com back in his feedroll. 🙂

Technorati tags: digg.com, digg, podcasts, videos

BarCamp 3, Hyderabad, INDIA

BarCamp3 is all set to rock for tommorow @ Infosys campus, Hyderabad. The theme will be Consumer/Enterprise Software Oppertunities Around Web 2.0 Communities. The last BarCamp was hosted by Microsoft India at thier campus. If you want to know more on BarCamp, you should read this Wiki Page

Kickoff, Ramesh, Pramati, http://jroller.com/page/rameshl

Collaborative document generation in private user groups, Tentative

Dimdim (Open source web meeting) Demo (and anything else we all might want to talk about), Bharat, Sundar.

Framework for understanding Web 2.0 Business Models, Dr. Jai Ganesh, Infosys Technologies

Introducing SlideShare: the YouTube of Powerpoint – http://slideshare.net/ , Kapil Mohan

IM Bots – Interactive Agents on Web 2.0 – Janakiram MSV,Microsoft Corporation

The Web 2.0 Acid Test, Vignesh Swaminathan, Cordys.

(tentative) Applications in the new web- Jay Pullur, Pramati Technologies.

Rubyists Dream of Eclectic Java (Leveraging Enterprise Java for Ruby fu). Vishnu Gopal. Uzanto.

Web 2.0: Customers, Consumers, Users … People , Ashish A. Tiwari, Cordys

Web 2.0: What’s in there for Enterprises ? Brijesh Deb, Infosys Technologies.

This the first event that I ever heard of Infosys hosting till now. This will be the first event for me which I am gonna attend in Infy too.

• Technorati tags: barcamphyderabad3, barcamp

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is now available for Download

The much awaited VS 2005 service pack 1 was now pushed to Microsoft public downloads site. If you dont know what the heck is VS 2005, just skip this post :-), Otherwise VS 2005 is a flagship enterprise application development platform from Microsoft. VS 2005 SP1 has got around 70 enhancements including…

 

New processor support (e.g., Core Duo) for code generation and profiling

Performance and scale improvements in Team Foundation Server

Team Foundation Server integration with Excel 2007 and Project 2007

Tool support for occasionally connected devices and SQL Server Compact Edition

Additional support for project file based Web applications

Windows Embedded 6.0 platform and tools support

You can download the bits from VS 2005 SP1 Downloads Landing page

Technorati tags: vs2005, vs sp1, microsoft, visualstudio

Stumble at Videos now

User favourites sharing service StumbleUpon has launched the new venture mashup called “StumpleVideo“. This is a smart service which does’nt host even a single video, but certainly decides which video suits your taste.

If you have’nt heard of Stumble Upon till now, you better go and install thier famous Stumble Toolbar and enjoy the most favourite web sites of the Internet world.

Stumble Video does a collective information gathering and polling on various Videos (Google and Youtube etc) to provide top ranked videos all the time to the customer.

All the videos are sorted in to categories called “Channels”. This makes StumbleVideo as a mini TV online to watch cool videos in one go with out searching for them. Very neat except the color they have chosen for website….I hardly can see anything on my screen. 😦

More coverage @ Techmeme, TailRank

Technorati tags: stumblevideo, stumble, videos, googlevideo, tyoutube

Google’s Web Toolkit is Open Soured now !

Google has made thier Web Toolkit open source software. That means, you can now customize that cool web tool kit as per your requirements. This source code is available under Apache 2.0 license. (via GWT Blog).

Read more @ Google Operating System Blog, TailRank Story and Techmeme Tracker

What you can do with Google Web Tool Kit :

Automatic serialization on communication for all Serialized objects in you application using Really Simple RPC

Better browser history management.

Hassle free multi-browser support (You dont have to worry on new releases of any browser)

Javascript Interop with in Java (use javascript with in Java)

My most favourite part of GWTK is Reusable UI Components. Now you can build your own Gmail interface 🙂

Technorati tags: google, GWTK, webtoolkit

Internet Explorer 7 Optimized for Google

After yahoo, its now Google’s turn to optimize Internet Explorer 7. Don’t get confused on the word “Optimized”. They meant “Customized” 🙂

Internet Explorer Administrators Toolkit (IEAK) makes it easy for you to customize IE 7 as per your customer needs.

Google has customized Internet Explorer 7 for Google services and released as “Internet Exploer 7 Optimized for Google”.

Create PDF Documents for Free

There is no doubt that PDF is a de-facto standard for eBooks and cross platform documents. We love PDFs for the quality and compatibility. The biggest challenge for any PDF lovers is to “Create” them.

There are several ways, one can create PDF content for free. I did a quick search for the same and found the following ways…Thanks to LifeHacker.

01. Office : If you have Office 2007 installed on your machine, creating PDF will be a breeze of work for you. All of the applications in Office 2007 suite supports creating PDF content right with-in.

02. PDF Creator : This is an open source PDF printer available. Once you install this, you will be able to print any document as a PDF document. You can download it here.

03. PDF995 : PDF995 is a famous printer driver. Comes for Free of cost. You can download it here.

04. PDF Online : This is an online version of PDF printer. Supports many file formats including .DOC, .RTF, .PUB, .PPT, .MHT, .TXT, .PPS and many standard image formats as well. Visit PDF Online and convert your documents in to PDF Online.

[Update]
05. OpenOffice.org : My apologies for ignorance here. I was not aware of Open Office feature, as I am a full time Office user. Open Office is also an alternative office suite which supports PDF creation right with in.

Free Internet Video Player for Life

Democracy Player, the new member of amazing web 2.0 application family, plays almost all the video content available on internet via standard protocols available.

This player is 100% Free, Opensource software licensed under GPL.

 

Some of the cool features…

Play Anything :Play virtually any video– Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more. Browse your collection, make playlists, stay organized. One homebase for all your videos.

Internet TV Shows : Subscribe to any video RSS feed, podcast, or video blog. Explore hundreds of free channels with the built-in Channel Guide.

Search : Search YouTube, Yahoo videos, and Google videos and play what you want..

Torrent Client : Easily download any BitTorrent file. Fast. Then watch it in the same app. Simple.

This cute player looks exceptionally cool in user interface (looks more like iTunes…hmm better than that indeed)

 

Technorati tags: democracy, music, opensource

Add ICC Cricket World Cup to Your Outlook

Indian Cricket is going with low lights, but there no doubt that doesn’t lowers Indian cricket fan’s love on the game. They are eagerly looking forward to watch and enjoy the ICC World Cup at Caribbean Islands.

If you are one of those who love cricket crazy, well there is a calendar ready to help you track all 47 days of exciting moments right from your Outlook calendar.

This calendar is primarily hosted on Google calendar service and can be subscribed by any standard calendar program. Go Get the Calendar Here…If you are denied to see the page (This site enforces that you need to have Office 2007 to the webpage…weird hehe…), just click this link to add this calendar directly in to your Outlook.

Create your own Online Radio

Creating own online radio is a dream for many of us. It involves a very big problem “bandwidth cost”. Hosting streaming media results in to a huge budget. Live365 used to be a good stage to host our own online radio, but now seems to be useless.

Diino, a new Web 2.0 venture seems to be a good alternative to host your own radio online. Diino is an online storage solution which allows you to store your documents, music, mails etc on a 2 GB online drive. The best feature is, it allows you to listen to your music via streaming…wwwwoow

Let is see how to create an Online Radio using Diino…

01. Create an account with Diino.com and download the diino client.

02. Login to your Dilino Client and create a folder “music”.

03. Upload your mp3 files to diino account and enable web access as follows..

04. Unable web access on the mp3 files you wanted to stream…(Right Click on the mp3 file and click “Enable Web Access”)

05. Once diino publishes your mp3 files, you can access your playlist at http://youraccount.diinoweb.com/files.

06. Now you can play your songs 🙂 and share it with your friends too..

Is’nt cool ? 🙂

SQL Server beats Oracle atlast

Atleast in security…

According to a recent security research done by David Litchfield, SQL Server 2000 with SP4 turned out as the most secured database in the market. You can read the full report in the following PDF Article. David also pointed that SQL Server 2005 is more secure.

Via Vunet and Vineet Gupta

OmniDrive is here for you !

I am awaiting this moment since long. I have enrolled myself for a beta, but never happend to get an invitation till now. Today OmniDrive opened the doors for public and I am now happy 🙂

OmniDrive is nothing but an Online drive to store your files of any type. Initially every account holder would get a 1 GB free space allocated. The best advantage of Omnidrive is the windows explorer extension. You can use OmniDrive right with in your Windows explorer just like any other drive. Xdrive also supports this kind of feature.

TechCrunch praises OmniDrive as “Online Storage Perfection“.

What are you waiting for? Dont waste time reading this stupid blog…go grab an account with OmniDrive :-).

Photosynth just went Live !

Atlast Microsoft has opened up the curtains of the much awaited imaging technology preview “Photosynth” Go grab a session of technical preview here. (All the stuff you enjoy is actually will be done in a web page..)

Q. What does Photosynth do?

• A. Photosynth combines hundreds or thousands of regular digital photos of a scene to present a detailed 3D model, giving viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle. The scene can be constructed regardless of whether the photos are from a single or multiple sources. It’s like a hybrid of a slide show and a gaming experience that lets the viewer zoom in to see greater detail or zoom out for a more expansive view. By viewing the photos in a 3D context you are able to get a better sense for the place where they were captured.

I cant wait to jump in to this page and roam around the virtual place stitched by Photosynth using some snaps.

Microsoft BlogStars Contest : The Fun Side…

Recently Microsoft India has launched a contest “Microsoft BlogStars“. The contest was designed to hunt the best developer blogs in India.

Today they have announced the contest winners. Most of them are MVPs. Thats a great news. Obviously they maintain the best possible developer connection with community as well as Microsoft. You can see the winners list here.

I found some funny things on this contest page…

01. Out of three judges only one judge manages his personal blog (A very good one), the other two judges does’nt have any blogs (or they are not listed).

02. The contest page listed some blogs by employees under “Cool Blogs”. I can see there is only one/two active blogs in those 7 blogs. 3 blogs have got under 6 total posts. One blog was stopped in March, 2006 and one in Dec, 2006.

I am surprised to see this page and was not able to understand what message they want to give the contestants? To be frank….the developer blogs in india are not living up to mark. Thats for sure. Am also surprised to see Digital Inspiration slipped off from Top 5. That was one of the top visited tech blogs in India. I could not find top .net blogs like www.dotnetindia.com too

Anyway, I am happy to see Indian dev bloggers getting enough recognition. Kudos guys !

Wired : Zune could become a serious threat to the iPod

Wired magazine’s blog has got hands on Zune atlast. Well, it was not very extensive review of the music player, but clears some of the stories webbed around Zune.

Read more about the story at

Hands-On with the Microsoft Zune (New Details Emerge)

Technorati tags: zune, wired

Pick the color for your webpage

You loved a color in a cool snap somewhere online…You wanted to use the same color for your web page too. But web can understand standard web color codes only. What do you do? You should then use a cool color picker like this…

Download of the Weekend : Color Pic

 

Get a Free Download Manager and Save Your Time

 Get this cool free download manager fully loaded with all the cool features anyone expect from it.

 Read more about feature here and go download it ! and save your time with 5X times faster downloads.

 

RSS Lists, Simple Lists Extensions and the future

Yes, we all know much about RSS. We subscribe, We Create, We search..and We xxxxx. RSS has now become everyone’s end point to outer world. Your kid may get his home work questions delivered from his teacher’s RSS feed very soon.

Having found too many advantages, industry experts tried to put thier brains on work just to see how they can push this revolution in to hands of customer? In to a micro device affixed in to a toy? or a dustbin…Is it possible?

I heard long time backm that Microsoft has made a smart home where you can find smart gadgets everywhere..you can play with these objects as if you are dealing with real software objects. I am not sure if it is hypothetical 🙂 Similiar concept was made by sun and named it as Jini in which you can talk to any device in it’s language protocol. But somehow all these efforts never made it to the hands of customer yet.

RSS Lists and Simple List Extensions are one more step in this concept. You will publish self desribed lists using RSS protocol and make devices presnt those lists..

Read more about RSS Lists here

and check out some RSS lists (Use some RSS reader like IE7 or Windows Live Mail Desktop).

Yahoo! Music Top Songs

Yahoo! Music Top Videos

Yahoo! Music Top Albums

A Wish List @ Amazon

In future, you can think of a Windows Side Show Gadget showing up RSS lists from the local departmental store on all discounted items available that particular day…Sounds exciting ! Isnt it? 🙂

 

 

Technorati tags: vista, sideshow, rss, sle

Orkut no longer requires an Invitation

The above picture says it all. Orkut (A google company) has removed the “By Invitation Only” concept and now allows any user to join Orkut. This could be a major hit on the concept behind SPAMless social communities…

Technorati tags: orkut, google

Windows Vista Team finds a new place to blog…

No..its no longer “blogs.msdn.com/windowsvista” and that sleepy community server templated blog 🙂

Windows Vista team has skinned thier blog with a shiny Windows Vista skin..

Visit : www.windowsvistablog.com

You can also read Jim Alchin’s post about the new Team blog here

Via: Scobleizer

Technorati tags: windows vista, jim alchin