Web Authoring

Ever did something that you wish you could take back? Maybe you snuck out of the convenience store without paying for that pack of gum or never returned that past due library book. Whatever the case maybe, why not voice it to the world and get it off your chest with i4Giveu.

i4Giveu is not just a sounding board, its members judge your confessions, rate them and ultimately decide if your confession is worthy of forgiveness. Of course, you too can dish out a bowl of moral soup if you’re feeling a bit high and mighty.

Oh, Internet… is there anything you can’t do?

Everything has gone electronic these days, from banking to health records everything is online and the only thing keeping this information away from unauthorized users is the cryptic password that you came up with. But what if you were pass away one day? Will your family members know your password to get into your accounts to sort out your affairs? Sure they could enlist the help of Oda Mae Brown and a ouija board but sending them an email from Death Switch may be easier.

After creating an account with Death Switch, you simply fill out your message of what you would like sent to others after your demise. And when you pass, this email will be sent to those you have specified. Grim but straight forward.

In order for Death Switch to send out the email after your passing, it will send you messages from time to time to which you will need to respond back verifying that you are still with the living. If you fail to respond back to this message after several attempts, the service will assume that you have expired and your message will be sent.

While we can see the logic behind this, one has to wonder if a will with instructions on how to handle your estate would be a bit more tactful than freaking everyone out with an email out from the dead.

After spending a few months in private beta, Odeo has launched a new version of its podcast aggregation service. OK, actually it looks like the new version of the site launched a few weeks ago, but we just noticed it, thanks to a short writeup over at TechCrunch. The updated site features a sleek new design and video. Lots and lots of video.

Odeo now has videos from about half a million different partners, including major content partners like Blip.tv and Revision3. There’s also an improved Flash player for watching videos or listening to audio on the site. At its heart, Odeo is still a podcast aggregation site, which means that there are download links for most audio and videos. Because while you can spend all day watching videos online, sometimes you want to download them and take them with you on your portable media player.

Users can also create profile pages, create playlists, rate podcasts, and share content using email links or embed code. The developers are also working on an improved version of Odeo Studio, a utility that lets users record or upload podcasts using a web browser.

Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

In this edition:

• Live blog with Google Docs
• Google Mobile App for iPhone
• App Engine Hack-a-thon in Chicago
• Google Sites domain mapping
• Google Notebook bookmarklet
• Google News new design

Live blog with Google Docs

The Google Docs Blog has a great post about how to use Google Docs to easily live-blog an event or conference. There are too methods: embedding your Google Doc as an iFrame inside your blog, or by publishing your document as a blog entry and then updating and republishing that entry.

We had some problems getting the test to work with our WordPress blog (we’re sure a little bit of playing around would fix the issue), but the idea is brilliant.

[via Official Google Docs Blog]

Google Mobile App for iPhone

With the official release of the 2.0 software and the App Store, the mobile development world is consumed with iPhone-mania. Google is no exception, and its first entry for the iPhone, Google Mobile App, is designed to make search as simple and effective as possible. You can search your contacts and the web, and Google pops up suggestions as you enter in your words. Google Mobile App also uses My Location to detect where you are so that you can quickly find locations nearby.

Google Mobile App is free and available in the US App Store (though it is coming soon to other stores).

[via Official Google Mac Blog]

App Engine Hack-a-thon in Chicago

If you live in the Chicagoland area and are interested in learning more about Google App Engine, Google is holding an all-day Hack-a-thon at its Chicago Office on Thursday July 31, 2008. From 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. you can get training on the major features of the App Engine API, Django, data modeling and how to incorporate App Engine with other web services.

You can build an app along with the Google team or create your own. Facilities, power and food will be provided — so just bring your laptop and get ready to code. If you are interested, sign-up here.

[via Google App Engine Blog]

Google Sites domain mapping

Over the next week, Google Apps users will see a great new feature added to Google Sites: domain mapping. This is a really, really great addition because in the past, creating a Site in your Google Apps account left you with a URL like this: http://sites.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/site-name — which, let’s be honest, is far from easy to remember, especially if you create more than one site or manage more than one Google Apps account. Wouldn’t something like http://wiki.yourdomain.com or http://yourdomain.com/site-name be easier to access and remember? Thankfully, this is exactly what is happening.

A new option in the Sites settings panel in the Google Apps dashboard allows you to map a site or group of sites to your domain or subdomain. The feature isn’t available to all Google Apps users (we weren’t able to test it on any of our Google Apps accounts), but will be rolling out in the coming week.

[via Google Sites Blog]

Google Notebook bookmarklet

The Google Notebook extension for Firefox is pretty awesome — it lets you easily add any clip to your Google Notebook, but what about those of us that prefer to us a different browser for most of our day to day web work? Well, Google has just released a new Google Notebook bookmarklet so that even the Firefox-less can enjoy Google Notebook accessibility. We’ll be honest, the bookmarklet isn’t as nice or as useful as the Firefox extension, but it does let us “note” things in Safari, and that works for us!

[via Official Google Notebook Blog]

Google News new design

Google News has started testing a new redesign. The new design personalizes all pages, not just the front page, has “developing stories” areas and a “featured photos” section and a new auto-generated footer. Overall, the new design is much more “newspaper” like and we think easier to navigate.

Google is rolling out updates and tests to its News page, so you may see the updates, you may not. This testing period will help the team decide on the final new layout.

[via Google Operating System]

Once upon a time there was a company called Streamload that let users upload huge media files to a web site fo sharing with their friends. Eventually Streamload changed its name to MediaMax and offered pretty much the same service. This year the company changed its name again, this time to The Linkup and launched a new business model: a social network based around online file storage and sharing.

Apparently the whole social network thing didn’t really pan out, as The Linkup has announced plans to kill the service on August 8th. The company has posted a message on its homepage stating that it will no longer accept new uploads or new accounts. It will also no longer charge current customers. If you’ve got any media stored at The Linkup, you’ll probably want to make sure you’ve got a backup before August 8th, because at that point the company will delete your files.

According to the note, The Linkup had problems transfering user files from MediaMax. That’s kind of an understatement. What actually happened was that the company deleted nearly half of its user files. Many were recoverable, but some were not.

Did you use The Linkup, MediaMax or Streamload? What was your experience like? Will you miss this service or just move on to other online storage sites?

[via GigaOm]

PlanetEye is a new travel site that uses Microsoft technology and partnerships with third party services like OpenTable and Travelocity to provide a ton of information about in one place. Just enter a destination and PlanetEye will bring up a map with a bunch of dots representing points of interest. Click on a dot to see shared pictures from that location.

You can also click on the hotels, restaurants, or attractions buttons in the sidebar to switch from the picture view to something a bit more useful. Or you can turn off the map and click on the City Guide to bring up a list of places to eat, sleep, and visit.

If you’ve registered for a free account, you can save information you find on the site to a “travel pack” which you can share with other users or just use as a tool for planning your own vacation.

[via AppScout]

It may seem illogical to tie Meebo to a desktop app, but that’s exactly what’s going on here. Meebone uses Adobe AIR to bring Meebo’s services to your desktop through a dedicated app, but it’s still in beta. So if you’re down to try it, keep in mind that you’ll probably encounter some problems… just like we did.

When attempting to login to AIM, Meebone was confused by a space in one of our user names. Other IM clients and services — even Meebo itself — aren’t usually bothered by spaces. But that was our only major issue with the AIR-based app. And we’re hoping it will be fixed before Meebone graduates from beta.

We tested the app with Google Talk and AIM accounts. Each logged-in successfully, brought up buddy lists, etc, etc. In other words, it introduced a basic Meebo set-up to our desktop, and we liked it. Just barely, but we did like it even though it sort of defeats the purpose of Meebo itself.

[via Adobe Air Marketplace]

Want to know what people are talking about on Twitter without actually bothering to go to Twitter? Check out a Twitter-focused search engine. Summize and Twitscoop can both help you answer questions like “does the new Will Smith movie stink?” or “is Nancy Pelosi really trying to ban Twitter from Congress?” But this week Twitscoop rolled out a nifty new feature that makes it even easier to see what people are talking about without typing anything at all in the search box: a tag cloud that’s updated in real-time.

The video above should give you an idea of what the tag cloud looks like, but the video capture software slowed our computer down a bit, so imagine the whole thing sped up a bit. As more and more Twitter users enter keywords in their messages, the tag cloud is updated.

Twitscoop’s tag cloud should make for interesting reading during a major news event like a presidential debate. But even on slower news days, Twitscoop provides an overview of the conversations taking place among Twitter users. Sure, they’re probably not representative of the public at large, but they’re certainly representative of something… early adopters maybe?

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Create tree menu for your websites.

Usually, your websites may have many web pages, and you build many text or image links for your visitors to find these pages, but most of visitors are not patient enough to find these pages. So we need to build a tree menu to navigate your websites.

AllyNova Tree Menu is specifically designed to help with that problem. It adds a tree menu to your website to make it more easy for your visitors to find things from and make your website looks more professional. It is easy to use and powerful enough for experts. To build a professional web tree menu with this tool, what you need to do is just clicking on several buttons.

Create tree menu for your websites.

Usually, your websites may have many web pages, and you build many text or image links for your visitors to find these pages, but most of visitors are not patient enough to find these pages. So we need to build a tree menu to navigate your websites.

AllyNova Tree Menu is specifically designed to help with that problem. It adds a tree menu to your website to make it more easy for your visitors to find things from and make your website looks more professional. It is easy to use and powerful enough for experts. To build a professional web tree menu with this tool, what you need to do is just clicking on several buttons.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Many visitors to your website are usually looking for specific information. If they have to take too much time to find what they want, you will lose some of them.

Search Engine Builder is specifically designed to help with that problem. It indexes your entire website quickly and generates an efficient search engine. It makes it easier for your visitors to find things on your website and gives it a more professional appearance.

Creating a search engine with this tool is easy. Just click a few buttons and let the spider code do all the tedious work for you.

This professional version can deal with large sites that have thousands and millions pages. It supports ASP, PHP MySQL and JavaScript on IIS, Apache and many other web servers.

Many visitors to your website are usually looking for specific information. If they have to take too much time to find what they want, you will lose some of them.

Search Engine Builder is specifically designed to help with that problem. It indexes your entire website quickly and generates an efficient search engine. It makes it easier for your visitors to find things on your website and gives it a more professional appearance.

Creating a search engine with this tool is easy. Just click a few buttons and let the spider code do all the tedious work for you.

This professional version can deal with large sites that have thousands and millions pages. It supports ASP, PHP MySQL and JavaScript on IIS, Apache and many other web servers.

[Read the rest of this entry...]