Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’ve been a huge fan of the online Google Reader ever since they launched the much needed redesign almost a year ago. Since then I think they’ve taken feed reading to a whole new level, and have drawn many users away from Bloglines.

Today Ask, who acquired Bloglines back in 2005, announced that Bloglines Beta is now available to the public. The great news is that the Beta was setup so that you can seamlessly switch between Bloglines Beta and the classic Bloglines, and any changes you’ve made in one account will show up in the other. As far as new features go there are quite a few that are notable:

• New look and layout that brings a bunch of AJAX goodness to your fingertips!
• Bloglines now has what I consider to be a built-in Netvibes. You can customize the new Bloglines Start Page with all of your favorite feeds, and it scales beautifully to fit the width of your browser.
  
• Reorganizing your feeds is as simple as dragging-and-dropping them.

And then there are three new views to read your feeds in:

• Quick-View: Browse your feeds only by their titles. This is one of the fastest tools I’ve seen for reading through large amounts of news.
  
• Full-View: This is essentially classic Bloglines, but there are a few enhancements.
  
• 3-Pane View: Think of 3-pane as a feed reader with an email application interface.
  

Right now I use FeedDemon (a non-free desktop app) to track all of my feeds, but picking between Google Reader and the new Bloglines Beta isn’t easy. The one thing that really sells me on the Bloglines now is the Start Page, which is super nice since you can put your favorite feeds there. Then anytime you go to read some news the first thing you’ll see is what’s most important.

You should also note that this is an early Beta, and more features are still expected a little bit later:

• Mobile – Bloglines on the cell phone (it’s already on the iPhone).
• Actions and activities involving a post – Save, Send, Share.
• Personalization Preferences – Edit a Feed or Settings.
• Creation of Disposable Email Addresses.
• Upgraded Developer APIs.
• Creation of a Link-Blog.

Putting Google Reader vs. Bloglines Beta is definitely tough right now, but if I had to crown a winner at this time I would still give the crown to Google. Although I’ve fallen in love with the drag-and-drop in Bloglines, as well as the customizable Start Page and resizable panes…none of which Google offers. So I’m kind of pulled in both directions right now. Who do you think is better?

Bloglines Beta Homepage
Source: ProBlogger

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This article was written on February 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

And the saga continues… yesterday we reported that Yahoo officially turned down Microsoft’s offer to acquire them for $44.6 billion dollars. Yahoo said that the offer undervalued them, and so they weren’t interested (typical corporate response for a first offer).  Microsoft has now responded to Yahoo and the story gets more and more interesting. The first few lines of Microsoft’s press release reads:

It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies. Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.

We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company. The combination also offers an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.

 

Around the web, I’ve seen a few people mention that this was going to be a “hostile takeover” and now I can see why. Microsoft has set their sights on Yahoo and they are not going to be looking away any time soon.  If there was any question on whether or not Microsoft was going to turn to the shareholders, there shouldn’t be any longer.  The last line of the press release states:

The Yahoo! response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal. As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

Watch out Yahoo shareholders! Microsoft is coming after you and will probably do whatever they can until you realize the “inherent value” in their proposal. Is Yahoo fighting a battle that they can’t win? Perhaps anti-trust issues will pop-up and “save” them from Microsoft, but then what will happen to their stock? Before Microsoft announced that they were interested in Yahoo, their stock was trading at nearly 52-week lows. Post-announcement, their stock shot-up. It’s clear that Yahoo needs and probably wants to do something drastic and there are options out there. I just don’t think at this point they’re confident on which direction to take. If you were Yahoo, what would you do?

Image source

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This article was written on December 22, 2006 by CyberNet.

The holidays are a special time of year and it is a time to spread the holiday spirit with others. I’m not sure if there is a better way to spread the cheer than with some festive Firefox wallpapers! If you like any of the following wallpapers just click on them, but the only size available is 1024 x 768:

Check out here and here if you’re looking for some nifty Firefox/Thunderbird wallpapers that don’t have a holiday theme. Unfortunately widescreen Firefox wallpapers are a little harder to come by but Interfacelift has a lot of awesome non-Firefox wallpapers (available in resolutions up to 2560 x 1600).

Posting will be scarce over the holiday weekend for us but our CyberNotes articles will continue as normal. In fact, we have a really special post planned for tomorrow morning that I’m sure everyone will love. *We’re in the spirit of giving for the holidays, hint hint*

News Source: Firefox Extension Guru’s Blog

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This article was written on August 15, 2006 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

I’m a pretty slow reader which can get very frustrating when I see long articles that I have to read. I have seen programs before that say they can make you a speed reader in no time. Whether they work or not is a good question; I normally believe them as much as I believe those diet pills that can shed 50 pounds in a week!

ZAP Reader is different though. It isn’t some crazy program that starts you off with “eye exercises” that make your eyes want to bug out. It works on a concept that I have never seen before. You can customize how many words you want it to display on the screen at a given time and how many words per minute (wpm) it should display. ZAP Reader defaults to 300 wpm and one word on the screen.

According to this reading test I currently read 200-250 words per minute. Just like in the demonstration below I changed the ZAP Reader Settings to 600 wpm and had it display 2 words at a time. At that speed I can comprehend everything as well as I did before, but I am doing it more than twice as fast.

You’re probably wondering what you need to install to use this. Well, nothing. ZAP Reader is completely Web based and works in browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox without any problem. Here is how you use it:

1. ZAP Read – Right-click on the “ZAP Read” link and choose “Add to Favorites” (for Internet Explorer) or “Bookmark this link” (Mozilla Firefox).
2. Select text on a page and then click your new “ZAP Read” Favorite or Bookmark to ZAP Read the selected text.

Plug-ins for applications like Microsoft Outlook and Word are going to be available soon as well. There is also a WordPress plug-in that will be made so that a ZAP Reader button can be added to all of your posts. You can see the button being used at the ZAP Reader blog.

If you want to see ZAP Reader in action without testing it out yourself then watch this quick video that demonstrates all of the features:

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This article was written on November 28, 2006 by CyberNet.

Statistics are always fun to look at and they help to monitor growth. LinkedWords provides a look at statistics in a more unique fashion. Their goal is to accumulate hyperlinks from a variety of sites and monitor what words they are using to link to those sites. Then they compile those results to find the “most linked-to words” for the day, week, and month.

I haven’t seen another site that does this but there is definitely some room for improvement on LinkedWords. Right now it only looks like it searches a handful of sites to get their statistics so it doesn’t give an accurate representation of the most linked-to words on the Internet. If they expand the site to crawl the Internet then this could be a viable source to find news.

This has sparked a lot of thought in my mind though. Think about having access to the statistics that Google has. That would be loads of fun to play around with and I’m sure that they keep track of the most linked-to words. At the top of that list would probably be “here” or “click here” but I wonder what would come after that. I would venture to guess that “Google” and “Microsoft” would be pretty high on the list.

I just did a search for “click here” on Google and it returned almost 1.5 billion results. At the top of that list are the sites for Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple. Looks like everyone likes to use those words when referring to a link.

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