Google recently invited people to make short movies about their Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome Shorts features a collection of short films about the browser. Below are some of the best of Google Chrome short videos we enjoyed.

Google and Motion Theory craft the first video for Chrome’s arrival.

The video game shows simplicity of Chrome’s clean user interface

Internet is full of nooks and crannies hiding technological mischief.

On the internet you can do things, but you need the tools.

What makes a good browser?

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Need free business cards featuring your Google Profile? Google has partnered with iPrint.com and they are giving away 10000 sets of 25 Google profile business cards totally free to show off your profile.

Matt McGee says that people logged into their Google accounts can visit their profile and see the offer. However, I logged into my Google profile, but saw no offer. Moreover, the url which he posted turned 404. Firstly I thought that was because the offer is available in US only. But I realized my profile was not public as yet. So first create and update your  Google Profile, and see how to represent yourself on Google products to other Google users.

So I set up my public profile here

and then created a short display url.

And behold! On top of my profile was the offer

That link points to http://www.google.com/profiles/me/bizcards

And that page displays a sample business card like this

Each person can get 25 free business cards like this, with the Google home page, with your name in the search box and your Google Profile URL below in green. But remember this offer is available to U.S. continental street addresses only, so though my profile displayed the offer, I cannot use it.

Anyway for US people - after that you need to create a free iPrint.com account and confirm the information on the sample business card, fill in your shipping and email information and your personal Google profile business cards should come in 10-12 days!

Update: I checked what some people noticed -  if you add the trailing slash at the end of the url, it leads to 404 Profile Not Found (only after logging into your Google Account)

Use http://www.google.com/profiles/me/bizcards

and NOT http://www.google.com/profiles/me/bizcards/

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BuddyPress 1.0 is released and you can download this suite of WordPress plugins and themes, which promises to extend WordPress MU (multiuser) with a whole range of social networking features.

BuddyPress is a package built on top of WordPress which transforms it into a social network with profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and activity streams. The  BuddyPress plugins can be themed to match your own style.  All of the plugins can help you create a complete social network or you can use specific plugins to add special features to your blog network. It’s 100% GPL and Open Source.

You can test drive the BuddyPress demo site, which is powered by the latest version of the BuddyPress software. You can sign up and see how BuddyPress works. I signed up too and the demo application is amazing.

Download BuddyPress. BuddyPress 1.0 requires you have a functional running WordPress MU version 2.7.1 or greater. Read this setup guide to get started.

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.tv is the official domain name from Tuvalu, and if you try to register .tv domain name at Godaddy, the alert box warns you that Tuvalu is sinking!

As a suggestion to why choose .TV, they remind potential domain name registrants about a sinking Tuvalu -  I am confused if they want people to register to support .tv, or they are warning us about what happens to .tv if Tuvalu happens to sink one day…

Tuvalu is a Polynesian island nation located in the Pacific Ocean. With a population of 11,992, it is the the third-least-populated independent country in the world. At just 26 square kilometres (10 sq mi) Tuvalu is the fourth smallest country in the world.  At its highest, Tuvalu is only 4.5 m above sea level, and global warming threatens to sink this small island nation following  sea level rise caused by climate change. There are many reports suggesting this sinking threat.

So will .tv domain names continue to exist if Tuvalu sinks away?

Update: Apparently an old USA Today article says

VeriSign spokesman Tom Galvin tells me that a defunct country’s Internet domain lives on. For instance, you can still find addresses on .su — the domain for the Soviet Union.

Anyway, as Galvin points out, Tuvalu would not necessarily cease to exist. Apparently, the laws of the sea say that a country is a country, even if underwater. Sopoaga has said in speeches, “Our sovereignty would not be threatened. Our claim would be maintained on this spot.”

Noticed via Wreck & Salvage

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Microsoft has released the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC), which is now available for download to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Now Windows 7 is in final phase of development and getting ready for partners to develop new applications, device drivers and services.

Some of the cool new features to look out for are
1. Remote Media Streaming. Remote Internet access to home-based digital media libraries from another Windows 7-based PC outside the home.
2. Windows XP Mode. Utilizing Windows Virtual PC, allows Windows 7 users to run many Windows XP productivity applications, launched right from the Windows 7 desktop.
3. Windows Touch. Controlling the computer by touching a touch-enabled screen or monitor is a core Windows 7 user experience.

Download Windows 7 RC

So what are the minimum system requirements for Windows 7?
- 1GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
- 1 GB of RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
- 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
- DirectX 9 graphics device with Windows Display Driver Model 1.0 or higher driver

In case you are not TechNet or MSDN subscribers, but still interested in previewing Windows 7, the Windows 7 RC will be publicly available May 5 on the Microsoft Windows 7 site.

Note: Windows 7 Beta was available earlier for a limited time earlier till January 24, 2009. The Windows 7 Beta software will expire on August 1, 2009.

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This post is a big, public “thank you” to the folks behind PortableApps, a suite of open-source software (including Firefox and Thunderbird) that have been modified for use on removable media.

As you know, my HP notebook recently became unusable due to a motherboard problem. The data on the drives was fine, though, so I purchased a couple of external 2.5 inch hard drive enclosures to hold the notebook’s hard drives. I installed the PortableApps suite on the main drive and moved my Thunderbird profile over to the PortableApps installation directory. Started up the PortableApps version of Thunderbird and was able to access all my mail and everything. Whew! I had backups, but this lets me use the latest and greatest stuff without changing anything.

Now I can take my drive to any computer, plug it into the host computer’s USB port, run the PortableApps console and access my email. A nice, simple solution while I figure it what to do to replace my laptop.

Free Keyword Tool For Subscribers Only: Download SuperSuggester 1.0.0 today. It runs on Windows, Macintosh (OS 10.4 or higher) or Linux computers!

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Guest post by Dalirin
If you want to start a blog and you have money, it is advisable to go with your own web hosting because you would be in total control of your blog. There are so many web hosting companies, so what differentiates them are the services they provide.

Before you choose a web host, it is advisable to review if the web hosting company meets your requirements. If it doesn’t, you remove the company from your list and look for one that meets your requirements.

What to look for in a web host?

The requirements that you should look for in a web host are

1. Cost of Hosting - Consider your budget before choosing a host. Some web hosts would give you discount if you pay for 1 year. Some might give you more discount if you can pay for 2 years or even more. I prefer  going for hosting that cost less than $5 a month, but I will compromise if I cannot get a host that meets the other requirements of a web hosting company.

2. Addon Domains - If you have multiple websites, get a webhost that allows addon domains. I prefer hosts that allows  unlimited addon domains i.e. I can add as many as 20 sites to my account without being charged.

3. Down time - Look for hosts that have low down time. It is annoying if you try to access your site, and you cannot. If you have a business, this means losses because there were no sales. (If you have a wordpress blog, you can cache you site. You can read more about how QOT got more than 20K pageviews traffic despite Internal Server Errors!).

4. Web Space - You need a lot of webspace if your site is growing especially if you have addon domains. Every post you post on your site uses some of your web space. So this means that the more you post, the more space is being used monthly. If you have a WordPress blog, you would like to install plugins to improve your blogging. These plugins also use some portion of your web space. All this is for just 1 blog. If you have about 4 blogs, you post daily on your site, and you have been blogging for more than 2 years, how much web space would you have left if your web space is small.

5. Customer Support - A good web host should have online customer support. This is because you would like to receive an answer immediately and not after 6 hours. The customer support should be able to handle all your technical needs. A tech support representative from my host helped me transfer my database. If I go to look for help in places like forums, I would have to pay money to get that done for me.

6. Cpanel - Having a Cpanel feature would save you a lot of trouble. If you want to install a blog platform such as WordPress, you can do it with a single click from the Cpanel. If you don’t have a Cpanel, installing wordpress can take you more than 30 minutes if you have no clue.

7. Money Back Guarantee - You might change your mind later and decide to cancel a hosting service. Most good web hosts have 30 days or more money back guarantee. So if you change you mind within 30 days, you are sure of receiving your full refund back.

8. Reviews - Look for reviews about the web hosting company. People would always write if a web host is good or not. Read the negative reviews and see if it is a recurring problem or if it is an isolated problem. You can get web host reviews on forums or you can do a search on any search engine.

What other features do you look for in a web host? I would like to read your comments.

Guest blogger Dalirin owns a make money online blog, where he likes writing about how to make money online . You can also write a guest article and share your tips with our readers.

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Google just announced a series of changes to the AdSense program policies. Some of the changes are cosmetic — they cleaned up the policy page to make it easier to find information about what’s acceptable or not acceptable. They also clarified some of the vagueness around encouraging clicks and such — read the Inside AdSense article for the details.

If you wonder why this is important, it’s because the AdSense program policies are officially part of the AdSense terms and conditions. They’re not “unofficial policies” or “recommendations”, they’re real rules that AdSense publishers have to follow. (If you don’t believe me, read the first section of the terms and conditions.) It’s important for AdSense publishers to keep up-to-date with changes to the program policies.

Meanwhile, I’m doing my taxes (grrr) and am trying to figure out how to go forward with my broken laptop. I’ve pulled the two hard drives from the laptop and purchased some hard drive enclosures so I can access them as external drives, but it’s an imperfect solution because that just gives me access to the data, not the apps. I think I’ll consolidate everything onto a single external drive and install PortableApps so I can run Firefox, FileZilla, Thunderbird, and a few other useful things directly from the external drive. This will save me from having to reinstall the world when forced to switch devices.

I’m so disappointed that my HP notebook died, though. I didn’t cheap out, I bought a developer-class 64-bit laptop running Vista Ultimate so I could use NetBeans, Eclipse, and all the other tools a good developer uses. Also on my laptop was the Finale software I use for music notation, along with the drivers and software needed to record my piano playing and singing, which means it’s been impossible to update my new site since then.

One of the commenters suggested I go for a cheap netbook, but I need a machine with good horsepower for programming. What a pain… losing a hard drive would have been simpler, because then I’d have a backup to work from. Losing the entire computer because of a faulty graphics chip is incredibly frustrating… And, of course, my model of notebook is not listed on the special HP limited warranty extension page. Somehow, I doubt I’ll be replacing my notebook with another HP, which is too bad for HP — I was happy with the notebook up until this incident.

Free Keyword Tool For Subscribers Only: Download SuperSuggester 1.0.0 today. It runs on Windows, Macintosh (OS 10.4 or higher) or Linux computers!

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Now you can download Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 (Service Pack 2) and get major performance enhancements for Office applications, most notably Microsoft Office Outlook, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Office 2007 SP2 features enhanced interoperability and supports additional built-in file formats such as PDF and ODF.

The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 (SP2) provides customers with the latest updates to the 2007 Office suite and contains several product fixes, including improvements in stability, performance, and security. Check out some  big areas of improvement that are included in SP2.

Supported Operating Systems include Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista Service Pack 1; Windows XP Service Pack 3. Here are some known issues for these service packs, and learn how to debug and how to fix the issues that you may experience.

Download Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 for Free! Alternatively you can install this update from Microsoft Update, which consolidates all updates into one location and offers you only those that affect your particular system.

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Guest post by Harsh
One of the biggest advantages of WordPress over blogspot is the power to add functions and modify the settings for better search engine optimization. Search engine optimization in simple words means making your blog/website search engine friendly. This will help your posts to rank high in search engine.

Wordpress is already SEO optimized but there are few settings needed to be done before launching your first post. If your useful post cannot be discovered by search engines, you are actually losing lots of potential readers.

Permalinks Migration

Wordpress Permalinks are permanent links of your posts. By default wordpress permalinks are in the following format
http://www.yourdomainname.com/?p=123

This is not a search engine friendly permalink. First thing after installing wordpress, you should consider changing your permalink structure. If you use permalinks which has keywords in it and are relevant to your post, chances of ranking in search engines are high.

The ideal permalinks are
/%category%/%postname%/
/%postname%.html

You can use either of them, but if you use more than one categories for a single post, I would suggest you to go for later one. You can change your permalink structure, under your wordpress admin dashboard > Settings > Permalinks

But what if you are changing your permalinks after publishing many posts? Use the Permalinks migration-plugin, and it will help your old permalinks to redirect to new ones instantly.  The redirection will be 301  permanent  redirects, so you do not loose any Google link juice.

SEO Friendly Images

Optimize your images for Search Engines. Many bloggers avoid the importance of traffic from image search engines, like Google image search and Yahoo image search. By adding an alt tag to your images you can make it search engine friendly.

The basic rule is if you upload any image by the name 12387.jpeg with the same alt tag, it doesn’t make any sense to search engines. But if you upload an image with the title iphone-screenshot.jpg and using the same alt tag, you can rank high in the image search engine results as well.

Though manually adding alt tag is not easy for every image you upload, this can be easily accomplished by using wordpress SEO-friendly image plugin.

It automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Download SEO Friendly Images Plugin .

ALL in one SEO plugin

Recently I attended Wordcamp and got the opportunity to meet Matt Mullenweg.  In the discussion round, one of the topics was  integration of “ALL in one SEO plugin” with wordpress. Matt answered they would like it to be users choice rather then implementing it by default. The point here is “All in one SEO plugin” is one of the basic essential SEO plugin for any wordpress blogger.

All in one SEO plugin helps you to stuff appropriate keywords and optimizes your blog for the keywords you are targeting.  You can read more about the plugin or download All-in-one SEO plugin

Broken Link Checker

Broken links become dead ends for search engine bots. Suppose you have written a post which is pointing to a website www.domain.com, and after some time website goes down; you will never realize it and such posts become dead ends  for your blog.

Broken link checker wordpress plugin comes very handy in such situations. It will show the broken link on your dashboard which you can unlink from there. Download Broken link checker for WordPress

NoFollow Plugin

Nofollow plugin helps you to add a nofollow attribute to your external links. You can simply select to which external links you want to share your link juice. It’s always a good advice to add a nofollow attribute to bad neighborhoods, like warez websites or adult/p0rn websites. Download Nofollow WordPress Plugin

These search engine optimization tips will help you to get more visitors from search engines, but in the end it’s “Quality of the post” which matters the most. Don’t forget to share your search engine optimization technique.

Guest author Harsh Agarwal is a blogger from New Delhi, India who writes on ShoutMeLoud about social media, internet, computer tips and tricks, torrents and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter at @denharsh. You can also share your tips by guest blogging on QOT.

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Yahoo! Geocities is closing down and webmasters hosting sites on Geocities need to find an alternate free hosting solution soon to move their websites. Dreamhost is offering Geocities users 2 years of free web hosting!

What is the deal? Free 2 years unlimited hosting. Free domain name!

What is required? They need to verify you are an existing GeoCities customer. So you need to login to Geocities and create a new web page or edit an existing page and post the text “I’m off to DreamHost!” on it. Since new users cannot sign up to Geocities, only existing users can do that.

What is the promo code ? When signing up for Dreamhost, put the full url to that web page you created with the notice as the promo code and you’ll get a 2 year plan (which would otherwise cost $214.80) totally free!

Sign up now. More step by step instructions at Technotip.

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If you feel I’ve been neglecting you, it’s because my HP laptop is officially on the fritz due to a motherboard problem that many others have encountered. My life as an Internet marketer is on that laptop, so it makes it hard to do some things. The data’s fine, but it’s hard to use it without a computer. Still trying to decide what to do to move forward. I hope HP will repair it for free, but that will take a few weeks and what do I do in the meantime? What a pain.

Anyhow, earlier this week Google released an interesting whitepaper called CPA Performance on the Google Content Network, which I suggest you read when you have the time.

The term “CPA” refers to cost-per-acquisition, which is advertising speak for the price you pay to acquire a customer lead or sale. (It depends on what you’re targeting.) It’s a broader term than “CPC”, which is cost-per-click. CPA measures the cost of obtaining traffic and converting that traffic into customers and/or sales.

Because AdWords advertisers can optionally allow Google to track how well ad clicks convert into sales or leads (by inserting special tracking code that Google generates onto their landing pages), Google was able to crunch the numbers to see how well ads clicked on the content network (AdSense publishers like you and I) fared versus ads clicked on the search network (ads shown on Google-generated search result pages).

The main conclusion is that, on the whole, advertisers pay less per-conversion for ads shown on the content network versus the search network, but it’s not really much less, only 2.6% less. Does this mean that advertisers are paying almost the same per click on the content network? No. The really interesting part of the whitepaper from our perspective as AdSense publishers is this fragment:

… for the median advertiser, Content Network clicks are on average over 28% cheaper than search network clicks. This lowered cost is partially a result of smart pricing, which automatically reduces maximum CPC bids for certain pages in the Content Network based on their likelihood of driving actionable business results.

I would love to see the cost differentials between content and search described in more detail on a broad niche level, I’m sure that there are some niches where the difference is much more than 28%. Proper niche selection can make such a huge difference in this game. What we need is a formula that takes into account the CPC published in the AdWords Keyword Tool, which is for the search network and returns the likely equivalent CPC for the content network.

Free Keyword Tool For Subscribers Only: Download SuperSuggester 1.0.0 today. It runs on Windows, Macintosh (OS 10.4 or higher) or Linux computers!

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Alex King has launched WordPress Help Center, a real-time WordPress support and help center. Call them, and if their experienced wordpress web developers can answer your queries under 3 minutes, the call is free!

We can answer simple questions about how to create categories and tags, how to use your links list, or we can help you install and/or troubleshoot themes, plugins, etc. and answer questions about your WordPress.com blog. We can also make little modifications and tweaks to plugins and/or themes (change your colors, fonts, header images, etc.) as desired. Best of all, we have real developers answering the phone when you call - you can get answers, right now!

All bloggers need some WordPress blog support off and on. Most of us with self hosted WP visit the Wordpress forums and wait for the helpful Wordpress community to share their knowledge and provide free wordpress support. Those on wordpress.com can try the Wordpress.com forums and also contact them for support. But what if you need support right now and can afford to pay for the phone call support?

Call WordPress Help Center and phone calls upto 3 minutes are free, limited to one free call per person, per week. But if you cross the free 3 minutes limit, you pay $19.99 upto 25 minutes. They also provide other forms of support on a charged basis. For $14.99 they can help you out with WordPress Upgrade or Plugin / Theme Installation.  For $19.99 they can help with WordPress Installation, Theme Tweaks and WordPress Backup

You can call them on 512-788-9236 from Monday-Friday 9AM-7PM PST. Note that WordPress HelpCenter is not affiliated with or sponsored by Automattic, Inc. or WordPress in any way.

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Our Dreamhost server crashed and our site has been offline for a large part for the last 2 days! This again gives us an opportunity to share what happened and some tips we learnt from this experience.

Internal server errors were on for last few weeks on our server, and we learnt more about memory intensive plugins and the need to upgrade from PHP4 to PHP5. Though mostly the server errors were fixed, it was short lived as our shared Dreamhost server crashed.

The web server, bulger, is having issues with its raid and attempts to move the drives over to a new server have also failed. We’re currently bringing up a new server and restoring it from backups… More information to come!

Update: Further hardware disaster with this machine has extended downtime, unfortunately. We are still working on it and we hope to have it back up soon. We are very sorry for the inconvenience.

Update 06:35 PDT: The machine is back up now but is still restoring from backups and some configurations are still running on the server. Websites should be up for the most part but if they’re not, don’t fret as we’re still working on it! We’ll post more updates as they come in!

Update 8:11 PM PDT: The server is still restoring from backups but sites should be online. You will notice a bit of instability meanwhile all the backups are restored but this is only temporary and subside once everything is restored. We’ll post the all clear once everything is good to go!

There has been no update for over 24 hours and it seems its not all clear as yet. This time we could not maintain traffic like before and no cached pages were functional and the entire site was down. There was no FTP access and even the homepage notice could not be posted.

Thankfully maintaining a status blog helped as an alternative Blogger blog could send out updates. Using Feedburner as the primary feed url helps to redirect the status blog feed if required. Those who follow us on Twitter, could stay connected about recent status updates from our blog. It was great that we use Google Apps to run our email, so email communication was not affected. All these tools helped to maintain contact and keep some services running.

I had a few email discussions with Dreamhost support over the last 2 days, and here is an email from yesterday highlighting what the problem was.

Thanks for writing in! I am *VERY* sorry for the inconvenience! The server that you are on, bulger, has been having a few problems as of yesterday. I’ll go ahead and explain what happened. Basically, bulger was having issues with its RAID setup and the server was going up and down intermittently. Our network admins went ahead and decided that we needed to fail the existing hardware over to new hardware in order to restore functionally to the server! The new hardware has been installed and the server is running BUT the I/O from the rsync of backup data is causing problems for people on the server. I don’t have an ETA for when the rsync will be done but we’ll get this squared away as soon as possible! I really do apologize for the inconvenience and I totally understand how frustrating a server being up and down is. That is why our network admin team is working hard to bring it up now.

And another support email today morning…

We’re very sorry for the problems that you are having with your site. The server that it was hosted on was having some hardware issues, and we tried to do a quick move to get it setup on new hardware with little downtime. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as quickly as planned and it is still having issues. We do have the hardware issue all straightened out, but we are still in the process of copying data over from our backup servers. This is causing the network of the server to become extremely saturated and is causing the server load to wildly fluctuate. At this point, we don’t see anything wrong with the server that is making your sites unavailable other than extreme load that these backups are causing on the server. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot we can do with this server until after the data transfer is complete. All we can ask at this time is that you keep an eye on this status post to see when the issue is resolved.

Thankfully the site traffic is creeping back for the last few hours and the FTP and wordpress admin has started working.

Though Yang let me know about the Internet Supervision tool, which shows the site is still loading very slowly across the world at over 40 seconds.

As I considered the Dreamhost PS private servers upgrade, many helpful Twitter users (like @nirmaltv, @manikarthik, @sumesh, @rishi, @keithdsouza, @shivaranjan, @denharsh)  pitched in to suggest alternative VPS hosting solutions like Slicehost, Doreo, Linode, Mediatemple and it was great to see some hosting companies offering their services to us on Twitter  like @linode and @spiralhosting.

I hope Dreamhost fixes the server issues soon and posts an update to affected customers … as someone mentions in comments  “Information aids patience; silent downtime breeds discontent.”

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Guest post by Nalla
If you love Firefox and Twitter, then these cool firefox extensions will make your twitter experience even better.

Twitter Search - is a FireFox extension that enables you to search content on Twitter web site. This extension even looks  into the tweets left by other Twitter users. You can find people on Twitter using this FireFox extension. A Twitter  search engine loads into the search engine list on the FireFox web browser.

Power Twitter - adds many features to your Twitter Web interface like you can narrow your search to a specific user on Twitter, Facebook updates, it allows URL expansion, you can do custom settings to Twitter, you can even upload photos, you can include other media sites like YouTube, Flickr, Google Maps and many more.

StockTwits - allows you to search and follow the stocks you like. It displays tweets related to that stocks you have selected from the Twitter Web site. This is really useful if you are doing online trading and want to know up to date information on the stocks you follow.

Twitter Fox - is the most loved FireFox extension for Twitter. This FireFox extension keeps you updated about your friends on Twitter. If your friends update their tweets, it immediately notifies you about that. Also, you can update your own tweets with the help of text input field present in Twitter Fox. This FireFox extension is known as TwitterNotifier earlier.

TwitterBar - allows you to post tweets from your browser address bar. You can enter up-to 140 characters. After installing this addon to FireFox, a small Twitter icon will appear to the right hand side of the address bar. You can type your tweet in the address bar and click on the Twitter icon to post your tweet. You can see how many characters are left by pointing the icon. Click on the Twitter icon to tweet  the URL of the website you are currently viewing.

Twitzer - allows you to post tweets more than 140 characters on to Twitter website. You can directly post your tweet to Twitter using this FireFox add-on. It also has an additional feature, which converts and resolves  TinyURL links so that you are sure that you click on the safe links and view the target website.

TwitBin - this is like a Twitter messenger. Using this FireFox extension, you can easily send and receive messages from your friends and Twitter via Twitter right from your browser. This is a very cool FireFox extension and every Twitter user must have this extension.

TwitKit - is Twitter sidebar for FireFox. It has 6- section interface. You can use tabs to separate content on the Twitter page. It enables you to view your timeline and Twitter public timeline. You can also view the latest tweets left by your friends and followers. You can view your friends list replies send to you and also view your account stats using TwitKit.

Song.ly - allows you to share music links with your friends. When you come across a music file link and want to share it with your friends, just right click on the link and select ‘Song.ly: Share this song’  from the context menu. Now your friends will get the link of the music file, which you have shared with them they can listen to the music right from the browser.

TwittyTunes - allows you to post the list of songs that you are currently playing to the Twitter website. You can also post the URL of the websites that you are viewing, videos that you are watching and many more. You can post URL or play-lists just in one click.

Guest blogger Nalla writes on Tech Inspiration blog about tips, gadgets, and technology. You can also write a guest article and share your experience with QOT readers.

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Catching up on some AdSense news, been pretty busy lately. The big news that will make some publishers very happy is that Google has increased the number of URLs you can add to the competitive ad filter from 200 to 500.

The AdSense competitive ad filter lets AdSense publishers exclude specific ads from appearing on their content sites. This exclusion is done by URL only, which some publishers think is too limiting. The URLs you enter into your filter are matched against the display and destination URLs of the AdWords ads that are to be displayed on your sites. Any ads whose URLs match one of the entries in your filter are not displayed on those sites.

The primary purpose of the competitive ad filter is to prevent direct competitors from bidding for advertising space on your sites. If your primary business is selling widgets and you have a blog about widgets, you typically don’t want someone else advertising widgets on that blog. The filter is the only tool you have to reject those ads.

A secondary purpose is to block inexpensive ads for “MFA” (made-for-AdSense) sites from appearing on your sites. This was a big deal a couple of years ago, but I don’t see many people talking about that now. Google did crack down on using AdSense arbitrage as a way of generating traffic to AdSense sites. (You can still do it, but only using carefully-targeted ads that directly relate to the content of your landing page.)

The ad filter is a manually-intensive process — you have to figure out which URLs you don’t want yourself, often only be looking at the ads you see on the site — and it’s not something that most AdSense publishers should worry about, but it’s there if you’re having some problems.

Unrelated note: My new blog, I’m Not In Marketing, premiered yesterday. If you’re a techie, check it out!

Free Keyword Tool For Subscribers Only: Download SuperSuggester 1.0.0 today. It runs on Windows, Macintosh (OS 10.4 or higher) or Linux computers!

Free Special Report For Subscribers Only: Learn How To Make $5000/Month With Simple Membership Sites.

Guest post by Sumesh P.
Firefox addons enhance functionality, and many users do not fully utilize the power of the ‘fox by using the right addons. These addons can save a variety of purposes - from saving time and keystrokes to automating tasks. Here are (some of) my favorite addons for Firefox. These aren’t the usual top 10 extensions…

1. Advanced Dork: Advanced Google queries - If you had to refer to a webpage every time you needed to use advanced search queries on Google, Advanced Dork will help you. You can highlight text, right click and choose from the available advanced operators. If you want to run an intitle or allintext operator on the title tag and alt tags respectively of the current page, right click within a page and choose the query. There are several other options available beyond the scope of this article. Download
2. Autocopy - As the name suggests, Autocopy copies text to your clipboard whenever you select text. If you are a writer or designer, Autocopy would be particularly helpful in copy-pasting text and code fragments. Download
3. Smart Bookmarks Bar - If you use Firefox’s own bookmarks bar for frequently used pages (as I do), it is likely cluttered beyond recognition. Smart Bookmarks Bar reduces clutter by hiding names of bookmarks bar items. Names are revealed when you hover over them. Download
4. Autopager - AutoPager automatically loads the next page inline. Think of it as Google’s autopagination. AutoPager works with popular sites like Google, Digg etc. You can also add support for websites that are not supported by default. Download
5. History Submenus - History Submenus places your browsing history for each day in submenus under History menu. If you are a frequent surfer and go back to websites that were visited earlier, History Submenus will help.  Download

Everyone who uses Firefox addons will have their own favorites. I am always curious to know, so recommend your favorite addons in comments.

Guest author Sumesh writes tips, tutorials and resources for software and web on TechZilo (subscribe to RSS) and design and WordPress tips on Blog Designed (subscribe to RSS). You can also write a guest article on QOT and share your favorite tools.

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Digg bar continues to frames websites and blogs, but do you know how to remove the Diggbar? The popular DiggBar lets you Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web quickly and easily.   (See this article on Diggbar)

Disable Digg bar for Users

1. Digg Settings - If you are a Digg user, its easy to disable the Diggbar from your Settings > Viewing Preferences

2. Disable Diggbar using Greasemonkey - Firefox users can install Greasemonkey to modify the web and  then use the Remove Digg bar userscript to stop the Diggbar from appearing.

Remove Diggbar for Bloggers, Site Owners

1. Disable Diggbar using Javascript -  BloggingTips explains how adding a small framebreaker javascript code within your page <HEAD> tags  can work. When you add this to your blog the visitor will still see the Digg Toolbar for a second or so and then it will be removed (So for the visitor to go back to Digg they would have to click the back button twice). But on javascript disabled browsers, this will not work.

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</script>

Farukat.es has a better code that prevents the Back button being broken

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self && document.referrer.match(/digg.com/w{1,8}/)) {
top.location.replace(self.location.href);
}
</script>

Wikipedia has another framekiller code to let user know why they are being redirected with the use of a pop-up alert

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) {
alert('The URL '+self.location.href+' cannot be viewed inside a frame. You will be redirected.');
top.location.href = self.location.href;
}
</script>

2. Block Diggbar with PHP - DaringFireball explains how this is done by adding a small php code within the <HEAD> tags of your pages. He explains that the code first line uses a regular expression to check if the HTTP referrer looks like a DiggBar URL, and if the pattern matches, it prints a special message for Digg users and calls PHP’s standard exit function, which stops the rest of the page from being transmitted. It doesn’t attempt to block all referring URLs from Digg, just those that look like DiggBar pages.

<?php
if (preg_match('#http://digg.com/w{1,8}/*(?.*)?$#',
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) ) {
echo “<p>Special message for Digg users here.</p>”;
exit;
}
?>

3. Remove Digg bar using Wordpress plugins - No frames wordpress plugin removes the browser frames imposed on your site. It will detect these frames and break your site free presenting the user with your full page.

BUT WHY? Just incase you are still wondering why many people are blocking the Digg bar - Techcrunch had concerns that Digg was keeping all traffic on their site (instead of dugg links). Though Digg clarified that they had fixed SEO issues and webmaster concerns associated with the toolbar, some concerns still persist.

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Will Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, adopt the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license? The Wikimedia community is voting to determine the course of licensing of this free content.

The Wikimedia Foundation has invited the Wikimedia community to vote on the proposal to license Wikimedia material so it is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), while retaining dual licensing with the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This is a step to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge!

Creative Commons says

This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.

So who can vote?
All users who have made at least 25 edits to any Wikimedia project prior to March 15, 2009 can vote. Start voting here. If it gets less than 50% votes, further Board-level and community consultation will follow. If 50% or more voters express preference for change, it will be referred to the Board of Trustees for approval.

The vote began on April 12, 2009 and ends on May 3, 2009. Here is a nice banner for seeking voting support on your site.

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Guest Post By Shankar Ganesh
Google Talk is the messenger of choice for Gmail users. Although the desktop client hasn’t been improved for a long time, many people use it as their primary instant messenger just because they are loyal Gmail users and many of their friends are. Unlike most other IM clients, Google Talk is also very minimalist and doesn’t intimidate you with ads and the like, so people are just sticking to it.

Here are five tips and tricks that every Google Talk user should know. Make sure you bookmark this page because you never know when they’ll come handy.

1. Desktop Shortcuts to Contacts

This is probably the quickest way to initiate a chat with a Google Talk buddy. Using this method, you can create a desktop icon. When clicked, this icon will directly open a chat window where you can chat with your friend.

To create a desktop shortcut to quickly chat with your GTalk friend, just right click on your desktop and go to New > Shortcut and type gtalk:chat?jid=username@gmail.com. To initiate a quick call, use the shortcut gtalk:call?jid=username@gmail.com where username should be replaced by your buddy’s GTalk ID. This method doesn’t work on Windows Vista, but only on XP.

2. Running Multiple Instances Simultaneously

Google Talk, by default, doesn’t provide a way to log in to multiple accounts at once. However, you can achieve that by a workaround.

Just edit your existing desktop shortcut to Google Talk by right clicking on the desktop icon, going to properties and then appending the parameter /nomutex to the target, like this: C:Program FilesGoogleGoogle Talk.exe /nomutex. You can use this shortcut to launch multiple instances of Google Talk, thereby allowing you to login to multiple Google Talk accounts simultaneously.

3. Making the Status Always Idle

There’s no way to control you can control your Idle Status on Google Talk. But, if you can install gAlwaysIdle, you can choose to remain either ‘Always Idle’ or ‘Never Idle’. Just by right clicking on the Google Talk system tray icon, you can make use of these idle options.

4. Formatting Text in the Chat Window

Did you know that you can format text on Google Talk even though there are no visible buttons present for that purpose. You can do basic formatting in Google Talk like making the text bold, italic and underline. To make the text bold, just enclose it within *asterisks* and to make it italic, just enclose it within _underscores_

5. Learn the Keyboard Shortcuts

Google Talk provides plenty of keyboard shortcuts that you can use to perform a variety of actions. Their documentation doesn’t seem to be listing the shortcuts though, so here’s a list of many user discovered shortcuts. Learn them once, and you’ll find them indispensable forever.

Here’s the list, as listed on Sizzled Core:

1. CTRL + Mousewheel up/down: It will change the font size in a conversation window.
2. CTRL + E: Center text
3. CTRL + R: Right justify text
4. CTRL + L: Left justify text
5. F11: Start a call
6. F12: Stop the call
7. ESC: Close the current window

That’s pretty much it. If you know of any other tricks or tips that you think will be useful for Google Talk users, please share them in the comments.

Guest blogger Shankar Ganesh writes on Killer Tech Tips on general tech tips ranging from most useful Firefox addons to how to make Windows run faster. You can also write a guest article on QOT and share your tricks.

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