Get your work done without being the software pirate

We all have specific needs from time to time for which we don't have the software on our systems and we start looking out for options. Sometimes we find what we want and pay the price for that, other times we compromise using a trial version of some paid software, we go and download pirated software from the Internet and for the wise of us, they try to get their work done with the free software available in the market. Of course, they might not be the best of the software, but still they are OK for the occassional use. Some of my friends who got recently into photography were going to spend few hundred dollars for Adobe Photoshop. When I asked them why they needed it, they said they needed to digitally touch five of their really cherished pictures and they were advised to buy Adobe Photoshop. I suggested that they give out a try to few of the free software and see if that will do the trick, and to their surprise they got whatever they want and more from the free software they installed. When people are Internet savvy enough, they know that they would be able to find software on the P2P networks which in other words is software piracy. But if we look around, we don't necessarily have to use paid software to meet our requirements, free software and services can meet our demands. Critter has posted a extended list of all free software that can be used for different purposes from 3D Graphics to PDF Utilities and more. Check out the extended list. Ofcourse I have bookmarked the links on Diigo and Del.icio.us and forwarded it to my friends so they can check out the list before looking on P2P networks next time.

At last, get a sneak peek at the pictures of Google Calendar/CL2

Michael Arrington is the man!! You are the man!. He got what most bloggers might just dream about. He got us the pictures of how Google Calendar known as CL2 will look like. Some great screen shots which pretty much give us a good idea on the features of the Calendar. Those tiny miny pictures do give me a good idea of what it to come. I am excited about it. As Mike says in his post, that other web based calendar service providers will have a hard time competing in the market once CL2 is out in the market. Reading about the features, some of the features do sound like Spongecell (drag and drop, etc.). Now I am really really looking forward to it. I truely hope they have a sync. software which will sync. the calendar with Outlook and similar tools. Looking forward to CL2 now.

Microsoft Buys Onfolio

Microsoft buys Onfolio. Robert Scoble points me to this. I have used Onfolio a lot before, i.e. in late 2004 and early 2005. I have written about in in my previous blog. It is a great product and I am sure Microsoft and it's users will get a lot of value out of it when they integrate it within the toolbars of Microsoft Live. Will it interesting to see in what software will they integrate this tool if they do. To check out what Onfolio has to offer, check out this tour of it's features. With Onfolio, you can collect, organise and share the information. You can bookmark, put tags to it, search them, categorise them, has a news aggregator and a lot. You can also capture local copies of documents and webpages. The best part I like is the sharing feature in it. It is really handy feature. You can even download a trial version if you like (if you can wait for few days, you will get the same tool in Microsoft Windows Live Toolbar). Maggie Tsai, do you think you can get such a reporting feature in Diigo? It can be a great feature for a site like Diigo. People should have the ability to customise what they want on a web page and then create a report. It can be report based on tags or some keyword search.

Microsoft Buys Onfolio

Microsoft buys Onfolio. Robert Scoble points me to this. I have used Onfolio a lot before, i.e. in late 2004 and early 2005. I have written about in in my previous blog. It is a great product and I am sure Microsoft and it's users will get a lot of value out of it when they integrate it within the toolbars of Microsoft Live. Will it interesting to see in what software will they integrate this tool if they do. To check out what Onfolio has to offer, check out this tour of it's features. With Onfolio, you can collect, organise and share the information. You can bookmark, put tags to it, search them, categorise them, has a news aggregator and a lot. You can also capture local copies of documents and webpages. The best part I like is the sharing feature in it. It is really handy feature. You can even download a trial version if you like (if you can wait for few days, you will get the same tool in Microsoft Windows Live Toolbar). Maggie Tsai, do you think you can get such a reporting feature in Diigo? It can be a great feature for a site like Diigo. People should have the ability to customise what they want on a web page and then create a report. It can be report based on tags or some keyword search.

Diigo Review Part II-- Bookmarking is more then bookmarking now.

I reviewed and wrote about Diigo when I got my hands on an invite earlier. Since I wrote that review, been using Diigo on the side along with using Del.icio.us. Things are definitely been on the rapid improving end since that time.

I have been in constant touch with Maggie Tsai from Diigo and kept on hammering her with my view, ideas and complaint about what more can be done about Diigo. They seem to have a vision and have some great plans with Diigo as I see it.

When I talk about social bookmarking tools and talk about services such as Del.icio.us, Wink and Diigo, people ask me what exactly is this service for and one word answer is it is a “bookmarking service” which is up on the Internet. But thinking about it, I don’t think that it’s only about bookmarking now. I see online/social bookmarking completely different now. Social bookmarking not only lets you bookmark your internet readings and findings, but also lets you track your journey on the Internet. By looking at personal bookmarking page on such services, one can not only track what all sites have interested him over the time, but much more. One can do some analysis of all the sites a person visits over time and bookmarks it and see how a person’s focus and interest has changed over time. By constantly monitoring the personalised bookmarking page of a person, one will be able to find as to where the person is focusing these days. Scary ehh.., it sure is for me.

Of course using sites such as Del.icio.us has also proved to be a great social bookmarking sites. Using and searching by tags people can now find more interesting and useful links then ever. This definitely keeps the geeks more informed! You now don’t have to work as hard as finding things, as someone else would have already found it and tagged and bookmarked it.

So how is Diigo helping me achieve all the above mentioned points? I think it’s doing it in a great way and offers much more flexibility compared to the other tools available (if they are available, I might not have used them).Going on the same lines as my previous review of Diigo, lets recap some of it’s capabilities again: -

1. Social Bookmarking: – Same with most other bookmarking sites. It lets you bookmark links and make it available for other people to use it along with searchable tags. More then this when using Diigo browser extensions, you can configure the extension to bookmark it to other favourite social bookmarking sites along with Diigo. So this is a win win situation, you use Diigo, while still maintaining a copy of your bookmarks at other sites.

2. Private Bookmarks: – Del.icio.us came to a huge success because of it’s social and open nature, but there are times when I want to bookmark links and keep it private. So for such times, we should have the feature of private bookmarking which Diigo offers and we can switch between making a bookmark private and public anytime. This is one feature where Del.icio.us is lagging behind for a long time now and ya I do remember it complaining it all the time about this too.

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3. Annotations, Comments & Stickies: – You can make private and public annotations on your bookmarks. You can also add comments to the links that you bookmark or you when seeing bookmarks from other people. This is a great feature I think. This feature helps a lot in community sharing. With highlights and annotations on the web page, you can do it privately and publicy as well. Sticky is a great feature when you want to bookmark a site and want to remember what exactly you bookmarked that site and then you can highlight multiple

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4. Toolbar: – Diigo Toolbar itself includes many good features namely meta search and customisable search engines (try out the Diigo Firefox Extension to see what I mean). It includes other features like Subscription links (depending on the filter, links from your subscribed tags/user names will show up here),Inbox and QuickD (where you can just hit the button and the link will be bookmarked without any pop-ups on your screen) and few other option. Also, if you have bookmarked or highlighted any section of a web site, the next time you visit the same page, you will be able to see the highlight and the toolbar will show up that the page is already bookmarked (you can change the behaviour of this). Toolbar also offers the facility where you can directly email links from within along with annotations if preferred.

 

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5. Web site: – Diigo web site also offers some easy to use functionality and I am hoping that they will add more functionality in the future. One of the recently added functionality I like is that of advanced search and adding of tags (you can right click tags and start editing the tags). Also a recently added feature is importing bookmarks from Del.icio.us. They have also added the feature of linkroll.

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Overall, I am impressed with Diigo and with more focused features and more adaptation it can go a long way. If for not anything else, I can just use Diigo for it’s three key features namely, multiple highlights (Del.icio.us fails on this one), sticky ntoes and private bookmarking. This features can not only increase my productivity but also don’t have to use multiple bookmarking and note taking software/services.

Discussing about GDrive on Techcrunch

Michael Arrington posts about rumours on the upcoming Google product called Gdrive where it will host user's data and will have the option of making online copy (copy of the file on Google's Server) as the main one and that on the box as the cache copy. I think it is a interesting idea and very usefull indeed to the general public who really does not care so much about privacy (and let's face it, Google is not going to open up each and every file and read into it personally. Google is also not interested into seeing the assignments you make for your university or your tax return files). Now let's see what the personal files can comprise of. It can be Word,Excel,Powerpoint,Access and other office format documents. It can be pictures, music files, small video files etc. etc. I think the files which should be uploaded should be those which can be easily downloaded on the other end and I can start using it. Now I don't think anybody would like to upload their 1.2 GB PST (Outlook Email File) onto Gmail drive just do download the same at the other end. So I think there will be limitations on what kind of files one will be able to upload and may be about the file size as well. I think this would be also be the best time to either integrate Office Applications feature within Google or develop their own. I am sure there is a majority of people who primarily use Word documents or Excel Spreadsheets on a daily basis. I speculate that there will be some limitations on the space they allocate to each user as well. And if users get unlimited space on Gdrive, then there is a issue as well. Think of GB's of data copied on to the hard disk on a daily basis and GB's of data copied back to Google Servers! Bandwidth is cheap in US or European countries, but it is still not very much affordable in even countries like Australia. But overall, where is all this leading? This is leading towards a system where we will be more reliant on our web based systems rather then Desktop based systems. How much difference will it make to a non geeky normal and casual computer user who is going to use web based system for all his needs if he uses Windows XP or the latest version of Windows Vista? The world is running after web based applications and systems these days. I have hardly seen too many interesting desktop based applications these days compared to the flock of web based applications I see. Looking forward to Gdrive though. I can definately use it to store my backup copies of important data which can be accessible from anywhere,anytime and no matter what the platform is. Will you use it?. But before that I am still waiting for Google Calendar!!

10 User conferencing in Skype 2.0 patch

Skype by default comes with a 5 user conferencing feature. If you are like most of the users, you still are not running Intel Pentium Dual core processors on your desktops. And this would mean that with Skype you are limited to 5 user conferencing limitation instead of 10 user conferencing feature if it was a Intel Pentium Dual Core processor. To over come this limitation, a nice man (sorry could not easily figure out what the author's name is) has found how Skype find's processor specific information and found a solution to it. The patch is downloadable on the same website as well.

10 User conferencing in Skype 2.0 patch

Skype by default comes with a 5 user conferencing feature. If you are like most of the users, you still are not running Intel Pentium Dual core processors on your desktops. And this would mean that with Skype you are limited to 5 user conferencing limitation instead of 10 user conferencing feature if it was a Intel Pentium Dual Core processor. To over come this limitation, a nice man (sorry could not easily figure out what the author's name is) has found how Skype find's processor specific information and found a solution to it. The patch is downloadable on the same website as well.

How good are memetracker working for you?

When I started out onto Blogosphere and reading the RSS feeds of different people, I was much more well informed then I am today. Lately, I have left my habbit of looking at my RSS aggregator and just rely on the information provided to me by the memetrackers like Memeorandum and the then when I follow the links on the Memeorandum and land on author's blog, I read other posts that he/she might have made along with clicking on any other interesting links. The other source of information for me today is my email, where someone trickers an email with a link and I follow it through. Now that's no good I think. The idea behind memetrackers was to get a gist of what's happening on the blogosphere. Yes, it is good when we don't have time to read the RSS reader and go through all the feeds (especially when you are subscribed to 100's of them) and still want to be informed about major happenings. But memetrackers in my opinion are reducing the social effect of blogosphere. As not everything that is interesting shows up in Memeorandum and not every interesting author's blog shows up which I would have linked to if I was reading the feeds in RSS aggregator rather then just going to one site. Also, something that interests me might not interest the blogosphere and thus will never show up on memetrackers. I have to admit that because of memetrackers such as Memeorandum, I have gotten lazy and hardly touched my RSS aggregator in last two months. I am not subscribing to as many more blogs I was before (not that number of subsriptions necessarily means everything). Before I was forced to read the feeds to find out the interesting news, now I know where to turn to get the most interesting news. So as a result of this, I am reading less as well! Now, don't get me wrong here. Memetrackers is a great idea. It can save us a lot of time but then if people who are interested in reading and learning more, exploring more won't get a chance to read and explore more if they just stick to memetrackers and not get back into habit of reading their subscribed feeds (if they have left that already). I like to see memetrackers as a main page of the newspaper, but there is still lot more interesting in the rest of the newspaper. Most of the times what matters most is all the small and big news that don't show up on the front page of the newspaper. All the magazines and articles what make the part of the newspaper. Honestly, just as I was typing this post up in OneNote, I thought I will check what's on the front page of the newspaper today (Memeorandum). I went to http://tech.memeorandum.com/ and found one of Scoble's post. And this is what Robert is coming to as well. He said he is unsubscribing from Memeorandum atleast for a week. Well I would not go ahead and unsubscribe ( I will have to fireup my RSS aggregator to unsubscribe ;) ), but I will force myself that I get back onto reading more RSS feeds from now on. That's the best way I found myself to keep me well informed and also made me more wiser each day. So I am going back to my Google News Reader ( I love this reader). So what all parts of the newspaper are you reading and how good the memetrackers have been for you? For me, I will make a habit of scanning the first page of newspaper but still want to read the rest of the relevant portion of the newspaper.