Hasta La Gadget!

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

A couple of weeks ago, Photobucket and MySpace were feuding again (round 2) after MySpace blocked Photobucket videos and video remixes from displaying on MySpace profiles. Photobucket turned to their users to protest this move by MySpace and pressure them to change.

Finally they worked out their issues, and now embedded videos are permitted again. No details were given, other than on the Photobucket blog they say that “after discussions with MySpace, we’re pleased to announce that all Photobucket videos and remixes are enabled one more on MySpace.

It always amazes me when feuds like this come about with MySpace. Their users should always come first, and with so many people relying on Photobucket, there were a lot of angry MySpacers who felt that they weren’t first on the priority list in the grand scheme of things.

I’m sure all of the negative press that MySpace has gotten over this helped them get over their issues with Photobucket pretty quickly. It made them look like the Big Bad Wolf, and understandably so. But seeing as MySpace has already done this twice with Photobucket, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they did it again with any of the services that MySpacers use to personalize their profiles.

Source: Mashable

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

There are several well known web-based music services available, and probably one of the most popular is Pandora which allows you to create “stations” based upon your old and new favorites.  Another great music service that hasn’t really managed to get plastered all over the radar yet is Soundpedia, and I think that it deserves some attention.

Soundpedia allows you to listen to streamed music or watch videos right from your browser.  While you can listen to entire albums, you’re not allowed to download any of the content. They have a large sampling of everything from independent artists, to commercial artists, and it’s all free. You just stream the content using their built-in player.

Registration

If you want to simply listen to music, it’s free and no registration is required.  If you decide that you want to create playlists however, you’ll need to create a login. It’s still free though. And if you’re wanting to listen to albums, if you don’t have an account, you’ll only have access to the first five songs. After registration, you’ll have access to them all.

Features

While the songs are playing in a separate window, it shows you the lyrics (pictured to the left) to the song if they have them available.  While you’re listening to songs, you can:

• Add them to a playlist (registration required)
• Add a comment (registration required)
• Select to “repeat all” songs

The play and pause controls are found under the lyrics, and the sound quality is decent.  Definitely not perfect, but it’s decent.

Advertising

One of my only complaints is the way they’ve decided to monetize the site.  It needs to be monetized, there’s no doubt about that.  However, I think they need to come up with a new method.  Currently, at inconvenient moments ads will appear where you’ll be required “click to skip” (or wait a few seconds for it to disappear) in order to go on.  The types of ads that take up the whole page that must be clicked to be removed is a bit much.

You’ll also find ads at the bottom of the player which are discreet and don’t take away from the experience.

Independent artists

Independent artists have a great opportunity to share their music at Soundpedia.  Using Soundpedia, you can upload your songs and then view live statistics of your music so that you know how many people have listened to it.  You’ll also get a profile, a journal, and a photo gallery to share important information with others.

Extras

If you’re a Mac User, Apple has a Dashboard widget available for download that will make it easy for you to perform a Soundpedia Music Search right from your computer.

Searching

Soundpedia makes it easy to search for your favorite songs, artists, or movies. They break both the music and the videos down into genres and artists .  You can also use their search box, or browse for artists by clicking on the first letter of their first name.

Version 2 Coming soon

They’ve been around for just about 7 months, and now they’re getting ready to release version 2. The new version will be mostly changes to the graphical user interface, however there will be new players, and they’ll be adding video channels. They’ll also be adding a rating system where you’ll be able to promote artists or albums to the front page (I’m thinking Digg, kinda).

For only being around 7 months, Soundpedia is a great service and worth checking out. While it isn’t the best sound quality, it will give you a chance to listen to some of your favorite songs that you don’t want to purchase, or that you don’t have access to anywhere else. It also gives independent artists an additional place where they can get their music heard.

Source: Thanks for the tip Jack of all Trades!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Did you know that simply 50 words make up 60% of everything that we say? That’s not a whole lot of words considering there are thousands upon thousands of words that are available to use. Even Shakespeare used about 22,000 different words in his published works! According to the PowerTyping site, most of us have a working vocabulary of about 2,000 words which means there are probably about that many words that you could regularly be typing if you use your computer for communicating with others. Being able to accurately type, and the ability to type fast is one of those invaluable skills these days. Today we’re taking a look at four different sites that will test your typing ability and give you the opportunity to improve your skills.

TypeRacer (link)

Typing skills turns competitive with a fairly new site called TypeRacer. TypeRacer is a “game” in which you’re competing against others to see who the fastest typer is. Each person participating will have a car that moves across the screen as they type. The first person/car to the end of the road wins. What you end up typing are lines from different books and movies that are sold on Amazon.com. As you’re typing, they tell you which book the excerpt came from, and then an affiliate ad is shown which helps explain how this site is making money.

If you were wanting to improve your typing skills or just see how fast it is that you can type, TypeRacer adds a little fun to the process. The only downside is that you’ll probably have a hard time making the high-scores list unless you cheat. From the looks of it they’re trying to keep cheaters off the list, but for a while there, it was always someone who probably used some JavaScript to cheat and make the list with a speed of 250 words per minute (definitely not realistic).

For those of you who thrive off of competition, go checkout TypeRacer.

TypingTest.com (link)

TypingTest.com isn’t quite as fun as TypeRacer, but it does exactly what it says it does, and tests how fast you can type. The only requirement is that you must have Java. When you click to start the test, you get to choose if you want a 1 minute, 2 minute, or 3 minute test. You can also choose between a handful of different text options, and then you can choose whether you want the speed unit to be WPM (words per minute) or CPM (characters per minute).

After the time is up, no matter how much of the passage you have completed, they’ll display your test results. They take into consideration your accuracy to determine a Net Speed. So if you made a few mistakes, your Gross Speed would be higher than what it displayed for your Net Speed, make sense? Below is an example of the results that you’d see after taking a test:

Notice that TypingTest even has a Facebook Ap? You can add the typing test to your Facebook profile and then once you complete a test, it will show you who are the best typists in your network. They also keep an average speed of all Facebook users which happens to be 50 WPM. Results from your typing test will show up in your mini-feed.

PowerTyping (link)

At the PowerTyping site, they give you a paragraph to type so that you can test your speed. There are several different tests that you can choose from. Some of the tests are designed so that you only leave one space after a period (if you put two, it’ll be counted as a mistake), while others are designed so that you should put a double space after a period. I am used to putting two spaces after a period so I made sure to choose a test under the “double space” category.

Once you complete the test, a box will pop-up in your browser with your results. They tell you what your typing rate is, how many words you typed, and how many mistakes you made.

iPhone Typing Test (link)

Own an iPhone and want to know how fast you type? Here’s how you can do that. On your iPhone go to www.iphonetypingtest.com. There you’ll find a typing test designed just for those using an iPhone. After clicking start you’ll be taken to a new page and the test starts when you click inside the blue field. Once you’re done with the test, press “Done” on the screen and then you’ll see your results.

Unlike typing on a keyboard where I’m able to type about 100 WPM, typing on an iPhone is much more difficult for me and I found that I could type about 32 words per minute using my fingers.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 31, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

Every time I drive by the gas station these days, the price seems to continue to go up, and up, and up. The other day when I went past the gas station, the price at the pump was $4.07. Five years ago if someone had told me we’d be paying over $4 for a gallon of gasoline, I probably would have laughed. It’s no laughing matter now, and everybody is talking about the prices and how they are impacting our lives.

We’ve seen all kinds of sites pop-up around the web for helping you find the cheapest gas prices in your area which can help you save money. In the past we’ve written about those sites, so today we’re looking at a site called FuelFrog for helping you track your gas mileage. Sure car manufacturers put out gas mileage information, but mileage varies for every driver. Using FuelFrog will give you a good idea of what kind of mileage you actually get, and then you’ll be able to keep a history of it as well.

What is FuelFrog?

According to their “About” page FuelFrog’s goal is to help you track your gas milage but more than that, they want to be able to provide you with a history of your milage so that you can watch trends. They try to make the process of adding your information quick so that you’ll be more likely to use the service, and part of making it easy involves allowing users to enter their info via Twitter, which we’ll explain in a minute. Ultimately, they want users to be able to do the following:

• Quickly add info to your account after filling up
• View trends for the amount you spend on gas
• See how gas prices change in your city over time
• Gain insight into how your car’s gas efficiency changes

Dashboard/Records

As you’ll see from the screenshot below, the Dashboard is the place where you’ll be able to view your fuel efficiency history in the form of a graph. You’ll also be able to view your latest fill-up information and add a new record. The only information you’ll need for a fill-up record is:

• Miles you drove since you last filled up
• What you paid at the pump per gallon (or liter, depending on your settings)
• How many gallons you put in your car
• The date you filled up

You can also click on the “Records” tab at the top of the page and then you’ll be able to see your entries in a list. This is where you’ll also be able to delete entries as well. At the top of the page you’ll see what your average mileage over the last 30 days has been.

Settings

There aren’t that many things that you can tweak in the settings of FuelFrog because it’s really a simple service. What you can do though is enter your Twitter ID so that you can take advantage of using the service to enter in your fuel and mileage information. You can also select your region so that the currency and measurement of fuel and distances will be correct (miles/km or gallons/liters). If you want you can enter in your vehicle make, model, and year. They have a big long drop-down menu that has them all listed. It would probably be easier if they had three drop down lists- one for the make, model, and year, so that people didn’t have to scroll through such a long list to find their vehicle.

Using Twitter

They’ve made it really easy to enter in your information to FuelFrog by using Twitter. All you need is a Twitter account, and then you’ll need to enter your Twitter ID in on the FuelFrog settings page which we mentioned earlier. Look at the example below to see how you’ll enter your data.

1. enter @fuelfrog
2. then enter the miles
3. enter the price
4. enter gallons

So in the example I drove 251 miles on the tank of gas. I paid $4.09 for each of the 13.589 gallons of gas I put in.

Wrapping it up

Of course this is not for everybody. If you don’t use Twitter, it’ll take effort to remember to go to FuelFrog to enter in your data every time you put gas in your vehicle. For those who do decide to use it though, it’ll be a great way to watch trends and keep track of the kind of mileage your vehicle gets over time and how gas prices change.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 05, 2007 by CyberNet.

Google just posted about a new feature that they are offering to webmasters who utilize their Webmaster Central Control Panel that is offered. This new feature shows the other sites that are linking to yours. Actually this tool is pretty awesome because on the main page will list the articles from your site along with how many links are pointing to them.

We have nearly 54,000 links to our homepage and then the list starts in on some of our articles with a whopping 129,000+ links in total. I’m not quite sure how it is organized, but it showed pages with our old URL format that we used very early on with CyberNet.

Each of the link numbers are hyperlinked, and when you click on them it shows all of the URL’s for the sites who link to that specific article. We’ve got 1,934 different articles/pages with links so finding links for a specific article could be a pain, but Google also thought about that. Towards the top you’ll also notice a “Find a page” link that will actually let you enter in a URL from your site and it will retrieve the sites who link to it.

So why did Google implement this feature? Webmasters, including myself, always enjoy knowing where their links are coming from, but Google’s search engine never seems to show all of the links to a specific site. For example, using Google’s “link” operator our site shows 2,830 incoming links…that’s only 126,000 links off . The Google blog post about the new feature says that the link operator returns a “sub-sampled list of backlinks.” I’m not sure why it doesn’t return all of the links, but it probably has something to do with spammers.

Anyone can sign-up for one of the Webmaster accounts to view this information and it doesn’t cost a thing. In fact, their Webmaster Tools offer a lot of useful information including how often Google crawls your site and how many pages it views each day. If you have the urge to know more about the site make sure you head on over to Webmaster Central!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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