Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

If you go and search for a video at Google Video today, you’ll notice a new addition in the mix of results.  Up until recently, Google Video and YouTube videos were the only ones to appear in the results. Not so anymore as MetaCafe has now been added in.

They’re not stopping there either – MetaCafe will not be the only video sharing website that will be included in the results.  At the Searchology event, Google’s Marissa Mayer said that “we have them all.” And eventually, they will include the results from many of the video sharing sites.

Not only will the text results be included, but they’ll also have thumbnails for the videos from five or six of the major video sharing services.Mayer was asked about the availability of video search and her response was, “if we can crawl it, you will be able to search it.”

What’s interesting is that when you do a search and a MetaCafe result is displayed, it’s linked back to MetaCafe, the thumbnail is from MetaCafe, but you can watch an inline preview of the movie and it’s played using the Google Video Player. Apparently Google downloads the video themselves because they’re hosting the file that is played in the video player.

This really changes the way people will search for videos. Instead of going to one site to search, they can do a comprehensive search (eventually) of all of the major video sites to get a larger set of results.

I’m wondering how MetaCafe feels about this right now, because as it stands there’s really no need for anybody to click through to their site when they can stay and watch the video inline right from Google Video. It would be different if just a preview was offered and in order to watch the full video, users would have to go to MetaCafe to watch it.

Keep your eye out because other video sharing sites will be added soon…

Source: ZDNet

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

Right now I feel pretty bad for the YouTube team because of all the vulgar comments they’re receiving over the recent addition of video overlay ads. Most of the comments are irrelevant to helping YouTube improve the ad experience for the users, and if you decide to go look through the comments I’m sure you would see how immature some people can really be.

I’ve had a chance to interact with one of the video ads (pictured above) and I don’t understand why people despise them so much. The first time I saw one of the ads it was for The Simpsons Movie, and it really caught my attention. I was drawn into the ad, and even found myself compelled to watch it. It only takes up the lower 20% of the video, is heavily transparent, and it will disappear after a few seconds if you don’t click on it. Or there is always the "X" in the corner to manually close the ad.

Crazily enough the anti-ad outcry has been heard and there is a Firefox extension, called TubeStop, that will block YouTube ads. It does so by replacing the standard YouTube player with an "embedded" one…the same one you’ll find on other non-YouTube sites. This works because YouTube is currently not showing the ads on videos that are embedded on other sites.

So my real question is why would you want to block YouTube ads? I can only imagine how much money it costs to run YouTube because of the extreme bandwidth usage, but as of 1-year ago the associated costs were reported to be $1 million per month! Since that time their traffic has almost trippled, and I can’t imagine that the cost to run it has gotten any cheaper. Not only that but I’ve heard that a portion of the ad revenue is given to the authors of the video, and by leaving the ads you’re thereby supporting them.

Maybe I feel this way because we run our own site and rely on advertising for our income, but all I know is that you’ve got to support the sites you use the most. They’re not asking you to fork out money from your own pocket…all they’re trying to do is give the advertisers and viewers the best experience possible. I’d much prefer to see this type of video ads rather than the ones that are shown for the first 15-seconds of the video.

Source: Mashable

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

RSS feeds are a wonderful thing that have revolutionized the way many people read news. If you use feeds to keep up with your news, think about how difficult it would be to follow all of the sites your subscribed to if there was no feed available.

I use FeedDemon (our review) to keep up on all of my news, and it was definitely worth the $30 I had to pay to get it. Keeping up with 400+ sites would be a huge chore if I didn’t have a great desktop application to use, which is why I’m grateful to have a program like FeedDemon. If I didn’t use FeedDemon I think the next best thing would be Google Reader.

Now you just have to find the feeds that will be the most beneficial to you, and that’s why we’re here. We’ve compiled a list of what we believe to be the top-10 most useful feeds. They’ll increase your knowledge, save you time, and they are just plain awesome. Check them out, and get your feed readers ready!

–This Day in History (Feed URL)–

We all like to get some interesting facts from time to time, but what about getting one each day? The Encyclopedia Britannica offers a cool RSS feed that tells you what interesting things have happened for each day. It reminds me of something you would see on one of those desktop calendars that you flip through.

–Amazon Price Monitor (Feed Generator)–

Seeing that Amazon guarantees the lowest price for up to 30-days after your purchase, it might be in your best interest to monitor for price changes. After you buy something, you probably never think to check the price again, but it can be greatly beneficial if you do.

If you’re skeptical of prices flucuating that much, just checkout the feed for the full version of Vista Ultimate. Since the beginning of March the price has dropped $60!

All you have to do is provide an Amazon URL or Wishlist to this feed generator service to monitor for price changes. Each time the price goes up or down you’ll receive a notification in your feed reader.

–Tracking Airfare (Feed Generator)–

With the rising cost of airfare we all want to make sure we’re getting the lowest price possible. Thanks to Farecast, it is possible to track the prices of airfare using your feed reader, and they will even tell you whether the price keeps going up or whether it has been going down.

–BitTorrent Search Feed (Homepage)–

BitTorrent is a wonderful tool that is used by millions of people everyday, but have you ever been guilty of sitting around waiting for a torrent to get posted? You sit there refreshing, refreshing, and it just never pops up. Eventually you forget about it and check back a week later at which time you notice that it has already been available for a few days.

Don’t go looking for the torrents, instead let them come to you with an RSS feed! If you go to the BTJunkie.org homepage and perform a search there will be an orange RSS icon located at the top of the results. There’s your RSS feed, just subscribe to that and you’ll automatically be notified via the feed as soon as a new result is posted.

–Word of the Day (Feed URL)–

This is kind of like the “this day in history” feed in the sense that it provides knowledge that can actually make you smarter. Not only that, but it is also fun to impress your friends with big words.

–eBay Auctions (Homepage)–

At the bottom of every eBay search is a small discrete RSS button. It’s almost as if they didn’t want you to know that you can use RSS to monitor search results, but it works wonderfully. You can monitor for newly added items that match your search results…this is another great tool to hunt down deals!

–DHL, FedEx, and UPS Package Tracking (Homepage)–

This is one of the most useful feeds that I have. The site offers package tracking for a variety of shipping services, including UPS and FedEx, and also provides an RSS feed for keeping up-to-date with the status of your package. In fact, I somehow get the status updates from the site before they are even available on the shipper’s website.

–Weather (Homepage)–

We all want to know what the weather is like right now, as well as what to expect in the future. After all, that is probably the most used gadgets on computer desktops and personalized homepages. Now you can bring it to your feed reader! Just go to the Yahoo! Weather homepage, enter in your area, and click the RSS button.

–Using Google Calendar for Cool Feeds (Homepage)–

You probably already realize that you can retrieve a feed for your Google Calendar, or for any calendar that you’re currently subscribed to. The usefulness of subscribing to your own calendar might not be apparent because after all, you can send yourself email reminders along with several other notification options. I, however, use it for other purposes.

For example, I subscribe to the Mozilla Developer Calendar so that I can see when they add anything new to it. After subscribing to an iCal calendar, all you have to do is go into the Google Calendar Settings -> Calendars and then click on whatever one you want to subscribe to. You’ll then be presented with an XML address which you can use with your RSS feed reader.

Apple has a nice list of iCal’s that you can subscribe to in Google Calendar. They include things like DVD and movie release dates as well as the top iTunes songs. By subscribing to these you’ll be one of the first to notice the new content.

–CyberNet News (Feed URL)–

If you’re not already subscribed to our feed, there has never been a better time! We are constantly providing cool tips on using Vista, Ubuntu, and a ton of freeware applications that are sure to save you some money. What, did you really think that we wouldn’t include our own feed?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

It was just a few days ago that we got an idea of where Microsoft’s Photosynth technology could potentially go in the future thanks to a project called “Finding Paths through the World’s Photos.” In the article, Ryan mentioned that the project involved some pretty awe-inspiring technology, which reminded him of Photosynth, another project by Microsoft. He pointed out that it has almost been a year since we have heard from the Photosynth team, and what do you know, a couple of days after he says that and the Photosynth team has spoken. The big news from them is that Photosynth has gone public!

We first wrote about Photosynth for the first time way back in August of 2006. Over two years ago. Since then Microsoft has been working on the project one step at a time. As a refresher on exactly what Photosynth is, it allows users transform their digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience. Microsoft calls each experience you make a “Synth” and they are now free to create.

Over the last two years while they were working on the project, the Photosynth team made examples available (check them out here) for people to explore to get an idea of what it was all about, but now today, people can use their own photos to create their own synths to share with family and friends and the public..

An obvious area of improvement is shown in the screenshot below:

Yep, no Mac version quite yet, but hopefully soon. Another thing we’d like to see them do is integrate a way for collaboration to take place. If you were trying to create a synth for say, a landmark like the Eiffel Tower, wouldn’t it be great if you could collaborate with complete strangers who have also been there and took some great photos?

We have yet to try Photosynth for ourselves, but Josh Lowensohn over at Webware has and points out how fast it is. He also mentioned the fact that users get 20GB of free online storage for the Synth’s that they create. Now when visitors go to the Photosynth site, they will be able to download a plug-in that allows them to both view synths, but also create them. The plug-in comes with a desktop uploader and works in both IE 7 and Firefox 3, nice.

If you are using IE7 or Firefox 3 on your Windows PC, checkout Photosynth and let us know what you think of the process of stitching your photos together to create a 3D environment. Your computer does most of the hard work, by processing all of the images. It will take very little effort on your part to create something amazing, assuming you are able to correctly take the photos so that Photosynth has an easier time stitching them together.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 21, 2006 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

The biggest hassle with Web development is that different browsers have a tendency to display sites a little differently. Our site is typically verified in the latest two versions of Firefox, Flock, Opera, and Internet Explorer. I have machines that run two versions of each of those browsers, but if you didn’t, notice Safari isn’t on that list. First I’m going to walk you through where I find old versions of all the different browsers (standalone and installable versions) and then I’ll cover a couple websites that do the dirty work for you.

–Firefox–

Firefox is the Web browser that is beginning to capture a large percentage of the market share from Internet Explorer. Developers typically rejoice at this because there are normally far less problems designing websites that work with Firefox than with Internet Explorer. The best part is that it is a piece of cake to get your hands on any version of Firefox, even all the way back to Firefox (Phoenix) 0.1!

• Homepage for current version
• Install: Firefox 0.1 to the current release
• Standalone/Portable: Firefox 2, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 1.0

–Flock–

 Flock is a branch off of Firefox and is currently based on Firefox 1.5. Technically speaking if your site works in Firefox 1.5 then it shouldn’t have any problems in Flock, but it is always better to be safe by testing it in Flock as well.

• Homepage for current version
• Install: Flock 0.4.9 to the current release
• Standalone/Portable: Flock 0.7

–Internet Explorer–

The most popular browser used on the Internet is indisputably Internet Explorer, but other alternatives are starting to creep up and take over its’ market share. To make things a little more difficult, Microsoft does not allow more than one instance of IE to be installed at the same time. Therefore you will find the standalone versions below to be extremely useful. Note: Internet Explorer is much more standards compliant than previous versions and coding a website to work with it is much easier, but it isn’t quite as nice as other browsers yet.

• Homepage for current version
• Standalone: Internet Explorer 3 to Internet Explorer 6
• Standalone: Internet Explorer 7

–Opera–

Opera is often referred to as the most standards compliant browser that is available and when they started to offer their desktop browser at no cost, it attracted a lot of new users. At that time, standalone and portable versions started to emerge which makes it even easier for Web developers to test their sites against Opera.

• Homepage for current version
• Install: Opera 8 and 9
• Install: Opera 3.21 to Opera 8
• Standalone/Portable: Opera 8 and 9

–Safari–

Safari is Apple’s claim-to-fame browser that is based off of Konquerer for Linux. To the surprise of many people this is probably the most standards compliant browser, but Windows users are left out in the dark when it comes to testing a site using it. The Swift browser is supposed to render sites similarly to Safari except you can use it in Windows, but my experience with Swift is that it does not render things the same way as Safari.

• Homepage for current version
• Standalone/Portable: Safari (costs $0.99)

–Websites–

Alright, so we went through where you can find the most popular browsers so that you can install them, but what if you want to keep your computer clutter free and just want to do a quick check? The most popular website that will do many of the browsers you want is called BrowserShots. They recently trimmed down their selection of browsers eliminating Safari and Internet Explorer editions, but they still offer multiple versions of Dillo, Epiphany, Firebird, Firefox, Flock, Galeon, Konqueror, Mozilla, Navigator, Opera, Phoenix, and SeaMonkey. One thing that always eliminated the usefulness of the site, however, was that the screenshots can take up to 4 hours to be generated based upon how many people are waiting for their own websites to get processed.

Okay… drum roll please! Total Validator is my favorite website because it snaps screenshots of your site within minutes, and if you don’t feel like waiting around you can have it email you the results. Besides for checking screenshots it can also validate your HTML, look for broken links, and a bunch of other stuff, too. Oh yeah, and I almost forgot to mention that the browsers they do have available are also available on multiple operating systems, for example, Firefox 2 can be tested on Windows, Linux, and OS/X! Where else are you going to find a service that is able to do all of these:

• Windows XP
  • Internet Explorer 7
  • Internet Explorer 6
  • Internet Explorer 5.5
  • Internet Explorer 5
  • Internet Explorer 4
  • Netscape 6.2
• Windows 2000
  • Lynx 2.8
  • Firefox 2.0
  • Firefox 1.5
  • Firefox 1.0
  • Mozilla 1.7
  • Netscape 4.8
  • Netscape 3.0
  • Opera 9
  • Opera 8
  • Opera 7
• Linux
  • Lynx 2.8
  • Firefox 2.0
  • Firefox 1.5
  • Firefox 1.0
  • Mozilla 1.7
  • Konqueror 3
  • Epiphany/Gnome 2
• Apple Mac (OS/X)
  • Safari 2.0
  • Firefox 2.0
  • Mozilla 1.7
  • Opera 9

 I would recommend that you install at least one version of each primary browser mentioned above, and then you can use an online solution to test the rest. From the images you should be able to see if the HTML code is being displayed properly, and whether there were any serious errors by a malfunctioning script that you might be using. If you have a better solution for testing a website in another browser feel free to let us know in the comments below!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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