Top 40 GIMP plugins

GIMP is the undisputed king of image editing in Linux platforms, and is next only to Photoshop in popularity in Windows and Mac platforms. Most of these plug in are aimed at web-designers and photographers, the main users of GIMP. There are also some to fix common problems of GIMP. Read more

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Microsoft buys UK mapping service

Microsoft has bought online mapping company Multimap to expand its web business, the US firm said.

Multimap, which was established in 1996, is among the UK's top 10 visited websites, receiving more than 10 million users each month. Microsoft hopes that the acquisition "will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business". Web search giant Google, Microsoft's arch-rival, provides its own online mapping service, Google Maps. more

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Setup and configuration for New Blogger Tag / Label Cloud

Here is the code and setup information to use the Label Cloud in New Blogger. First you obviously have to have a blog on New Blogger, and you MUST be using the layouts templates, (this isn't available for classic templates, or FTP published blogs ) and you must have some posts labeled already. (There needs to be at least ONE label with more than ONE entry or the scripts hit a bug - so have at least one label with more than one entry before starting).

Make sure you backup your template before making any changes!

Log into Blogger and go to your layouts section. On the 'Page Elements' setup page make sure you have a label widget already installed where you want it (it can be moved around later). Then go to the Edit HTML settings and leave the widgets NOT exapanded. It will make things easier to deal with.

Now the code comes in 3 parts. A section for the stylesheet, a configurations section, and then the actual widget itself.

The first part to put in is the stylesheet section. The following code needs to be copied and inserted into your stylesheet, which in the layouts is marked out by the <b:skin> tags. Easiest thing to do is find the closing skin tag

]]></b:skin>

and place the code right BEFORE that. Here it is, copy and paste without modification right now. I'll explain what can be tweaked later.

/* Label Cloud Styles
----------------------------------------------- */
#labelCloud {text-align:center;font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
#labelCloud .label-cloud li{display:inline;background-image:none !important;padding:0 5px;margin:0;vertical-align:baseline !important;border:0 !important;}
#labelCloud ul{list-style-type:none;margin:0 auto;padding:0;}
#labelCloud a img{border:0;display:inline;margin:0 0 0 3px;padding:0}
#labelCloud a{text-decoration:none}
#labelCloud a:hover{text-decoration:underline}
#labelCloud li a{}
#labelCloud .label-cloud {}
#labelCloud .label-count {padding-left:0.2em;font-size:9px;color:#000}
#labelCloud .label-cloud li:before{content:"" !important}

This next section is the configuration section for the Cloud. It also goes in the head of the template, but outside of the stylesheet part. Easiest thing to do again is to find the closing stylesheet tag

]]></b:skin>

But this time place the code right AFTER that line, but BEFORE the </head> tag. Here it is.

<script type='text/javascript'>
// Label Cloud User Variables
var cloudMin = 1;
var maxFontSize = 20;
var maxColor = [0,0,255];
var minFontSize = 10;
var minColor = [0,0,0];
var lcShowCount = false;
</script>

All of these settings can be changed but I'll explain them in a moment. The defaults will work for now. Now the widget itself. Scroll down and find the label widget in your sidebar. It should look something like this.

<b:widget id='Label1' locked='false' title='Labels' type='Label'/>

Copy the following code (from beginning widget tag to ending widget tag) and replace the line above with it.

<b:widget id='Label1' locked='false' title='Label Cloud' type='Label'>
<b:includable id='main'>
<b:if cond='data:title'>
<h2><data:title/></h2>
</b:if>

<div class='widget-content'>
<div id='labelCloud'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>

// Don't change anything past this point -----------------
// Cloud function s() ripped from del.icio.us
function s(a,b,i,x){
if(a&gt;b){
var m=(a-b)/Math.log(x),v=a-Math.floor(Math.log(i)*m)
}
else{
var m=(b-a)/Math.log(x),v=Math.floor(Math.log(i)*m+a)
}
return v
}

var c=[];
var labelCount = new Array();
var ts = new Object;
<b:loop values='data:labels' var='label'>
var theName = &quot;<data:label.name/>&quot;;
ts[theName] = <data:label.count/>;
</b:loop>

for (t in ts){
if (!labelCount[ts[t]]){
labelCount[ts[t]] = new Array(ts[t])
}
}
var ta=cloudMin-1;
tz = labelCount.length - cloudMin;
lc2 = document.getElementById('labelCloud');
ul = document.createElement('ul');
ul.className = 'label-cloud';
for(var t in ts){
if(ts[t] &lt; cloudMin){
continue;
}
for (var i=0;3 &gt; i;i++) {
c[i]=s(minColor[i],maxColor[i],ts[t]-ta,tz)
}
var fs = s(minFontSize,maxFontSize,ts[t]-ta,tz);
li = document.createElement('li');
li.style.fontSize = fs+'px';
li.style.lineHeight = '1';
a = document.createElement('a');
a.title = ts[t]+' Posts in '+t;
a.style.color = 'rgb('+c[0]+','+c[1]+','+c[2]+')';
a.href = '/search/label/'+encodeURIComponent(t);
if (lcShowCount){
span = document.createElement('span');
span.innerHTML = '('+ts[t]+') ';
span.className = 'label-count';
a.appendChild(document.createTextNode(t));
li.appendChild(a);
li.appendChild(span);
}
else {
a.appendChild(document.createTextNode(t));
li.appendChild(a);
}
ul.appendChild(li);
abnk = document.createTextNode(' ');
ul.appendChild(abnk);
}
lc2.appendChild(ul);
</script>

<noscript>
<ul>
<b:loop values='data:labels' var='label'>
<li>
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:label.url'>
<data:label.name/>
<b:else/>
<a expr:href='data:label.url'><data:label.name/></a>
</b:if>
(<data:label.count/>)
</li>
</b:loop>
</ul>
</noscript>
<b:include name='quickedit'/>
</div>

</b:includable>
</b:widget>

Now if all has gone well, and you have posts already labeled, then if you preview the blog you should see some form of the Cloud appearing. If it doesn't appear, then something went wrong. You should probably back out and try it again from the start.

Update : I've found 2 things to check for first if the label cloud isn't showing. First make sure that at least one of your labels has more than one entry. A bug in the script causes it to fail when all the labels have only one entry.(As soon as any label has more than one entry, then it should be ok from then on) Also, make sure that none of your labels contain quote marks " . Apostrophes or single ticks ' are ok. ------

Most likely the cloud with it's default settings won't be what you ultimately want. But all the colors and sizes are configurable to match your tastes. If the cloud is appearing in preview then you can go about changing some of the variables so they suit.

The settings in the Variables section will be where you make most of your adjustments. Here I'll explain what each setting does.

var cloudMin= 1;

This setting you can use to limit the number of labels shown (for example if you have a lot of labels). Leave the setting at 1 to show ALL labels. If you enter in a higher number, then only labels that have at least that number of entries will appear in the cloud.

var maxFontSize = 20;
var maxColor = [0,0,255];
var minFontSize = 10;
var minColor = [0,0,0];
var lcShowCount = false;

The lines for

maxFontSize maxColor

do what you may think they do. The first one sets the size (in pixels) of the label with the most amount entries. The maxColor sets the color of that entry (in RGB format). Similiar with the next two

minFontSize minColor

Just these are for the label with the least amount of entries. Again the size is in pixels, the color is in RGB format. Any labels between the two will get their color/sizes based on how many labels they are, and where their entry count falls, giving the much desired cloud effect.

From my experimenting, there are many factors that make up a pleasant looking cloud. From color/size choice, to the number of actual labels, to how well dispersed the entries are among the labels. 3 Labels don't make a good cloud as there isn't much to work with. You just have to experiment around to see what looks good with your setup.

IMPORTANT, when change the color settings, Keep them in the format supplied. In between the [] and the numbers separated by commas. The default colors are BLUE for the max and BLACK for the min. You can select any valid RGB color combination. If you don't know what RGB colors are, don't worry. It's just a way of defining a color. You can use many charts on the Internet to get the correct RGB value for the color you want to try. Here's one that is fairly good.

RGB Color Code Chart

Remember, if you get the 3 sets of numbers to enter them in correctly. Inside the [ ] separated by commas.

Also experiment with different font sizes. Again it depends on how many entries, how dispersed they are, and how much room for the cloud is available as to what looks good.

The last variable there is

lcShowCount

This can either be false (default) or true. All this does is turn off/on the post count displayed next to the label. Usually in a 'traditional' cloud the count isn't used. But if you go to a 'flat' listing then it's sometimes useful to turn it on.

Now to the CSS section. Most people won't need to tweak these much, and it's not necessary to understand what all those entries are for. Most are just to make sure that other styling elements from the rest of your page don't inherit in and ruin the cloud. But there are a few that you may want to change to suit. The first line

#labelCloud {text-align:center;font-family:arial,sans-serif;}

You could change the fonts used in the cloud here if you wanted. Also, the text-align statement can also be changed. I have it set to center by default but you could use

text-align:justify; text-align:right; text-align:left;

If those suit better. The next line

#labelCloud .label-cloud li{display:inline;background-image:none !important;padding:0 5px;margin:0;vertical-align:baseline !important;border:0 !important;}

Well don't worry about most of it unless you are a hardcore CSS'er. The only one of real importance is the first entry

display:inline;

You can change that to

display:block;

To get the 'Flat' (each entry on it's own separate line) listing of the weighted entries. Usually if that is set to block you would probably want to change the sort frequency from alphabetical to frequency. You do that by editing the widget from the Page Elements tab in Blogger.

And the last bit I'll mention is the line

#labelCloud .label-count

If you set the lcShowCount variable to true to show the post counts, you could change the
color/size of those numbered entries with that line.

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GMAIL TOOLBOX: 60+ Tools For Gmail

By Sean P. Aune

Google announcing the ability to increase your Gmail storage capacity this week, we decided to delve into other ways to extend and enhance Google’s popular webmail service. Presenting: 60+ tools and resources for Gmail.

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Yahoo Top Searches 2007

It’s that time of year again for the major search engines to release their top search queries of the year. Yahoo traditionally goes first, and today’s the day. And once again, people can’t seem to help but type “Britney Spears” into every search box they come across.

The top queries of the year on Yahoo are:

1. Britney Spears
   
2. WWE
   
3. Paris Hilton
   
4. Naruto
   
5. Beyonce
   
6. Lindsay Lohan
   
7. Rune Scape
   
8. Fantasy Football
   
9. Fergie
   
10. Jessica Alba
    

And this year Yahoo is expanding the list to include top ten searches by category. They’ve included Delicious searches (not tags) as well in the list. Delicious users are clearly a more tech savvy and interesting group of people than the population at large, based on their searches. This expanded data is good to have, I think, because it is a very accurate reflection of mass culture, particularly U.S. culture, during the year.

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Six Apart Sells LiveJournal To Russia’s SUP

Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced “soup”), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SUP previously acquired licensing rights in October 2006 permitting them to manage LiveJournal in Russia, where the platform dominates blogging culture.

“This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told me this evening. LiveJournal, created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, was the lone service not built in house. “We have very ambitious plans for our remaining brands going forward” he added.

Since the 2005 acquisition, Live Journal has grown from 5 million to over 14 million accounts. But overall unique visitor and page view growth has been static for the last year. In October 2007 Comscore says LiveJournal had 13.8 million worldwide unique visitors generating 475 million page views. That’s up only slightly from the 11.1 million visitors and and 408 million page view per month a year ago.

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Google’s fuzzy logic for image search gets clearer

Google continues to make forays into the world of images, on several different fronts.

Image recognition in Google searches is taking shape. Although not highly publicized yet, there is a way to search images for certain elements such as faces. For example, if you do an image search for “USA”, you get a slew of maps. If you do the search “usa imgtype=face”, the search does indeed turn up pictures of people.

According to Google’s Sergey Brin, it will be possible for the computer to soon automatically search images for patterns, such as that of an elephant, in a picture.

While identification of physical objects in pictures will go a long way towards helping categorize the trillions of images on the web, there are aspects of classification which are abstract, and subjective. For example, the picture on the left can be categorized as 1. sky, 2. bird or 3. soaring.

A new Google project called Google Image Labeler has popped up for improving the relevance of image search. At any particular time, two random users who have signed up for the experiment, are paired up. Over a period of 2 minutes, both are shown a set of images for which each provides as many labels as they can think of. When the pair has a match, each of them get a certain number of points depending upon how specific the description is.

I tried out the application in guest mode (see the pictures below). Interestingly, each picture starts out with a list of “off-limit” terms which are actually the first ones that would come to mind. The purpose of these might be to look beyond the most obvious categorization. For example, in the map example below, the descriptions “map” or “Australia” were off limits.

While the Image labeler seems like a pretty entertaining project at this point, Google’s objective is to probably use the real human fuzzy network data to refine its automatic image filtering, rather than a simple grand scheme to use free cpus to classify all of the web’s pictures.

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Finding your location without GPS

Google introduced a new "My Location" feature in version 2.0 of Google Maps for mobile that will help alleviate my map reading and orientation problems. It offers GPS-like positioning by using cell tower ID information and algorithms to approximate location. It's not as accurate as GPS (within about 1000 meters on average, according to Google), which is supported on less than 15 percent of phones sold this year. But, it's free, faster and consumes less power compared to GPS-enabled devices, Google said. Google makes a point that the location data is anonymous--the data is not personally identifiable but it does go into the great Google bit bucket to be mined. My Location is supported on most smartphone devices--unfortunately not on... more

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Google confirms JotSpot will replace Google Pages

Last week people start talking about some interesting clues that suggested Google Pages would be replaced by something Google purchased a while ago called JotSpot. JotSpot is a tool that people have been using for quite a while to help them create collaborative websites like intranets, project management tracking, and customer extranets. It turns out that during an event hosted by Google in partnership with the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce, Scott Johnston spilled the beans on some of Google's plans for 2008. Among them was confirmation that "Google Sites" will replace Google Pages. Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration...

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Fotolog’s $90 Million Acquisition Completed

French Internet company Hi-Media, operator of one of Europe’s largest ad networks and micro-payment services, completed its acquisition today of Fotolog. The $90 million deal was first announced last August. Since then, Fotolog has added two million more members for a total of 13 million, and claims 3.9 billion page views a month. Fotolog trails behind MySpace’s PhotoBucket and Yahoo’s Flickr.

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Social Site Rankings (October, 2007)

LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Imeem, and AIM Pages are all growing more than 100 percent year-over-year.

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Circular Money: Facebook And Yahoo Advertise Their Advertising Platforms On Google

If you need any further proof that Google flat out owns the online advertising space, just look to the right. Both Yahoo and Facebook are using Google Adwords to advertise their competing advertising platforms.

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Yahoo Offers Contextual Advertising In PDFs; Yes, PDFs

Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to give publishers the ability to offer contextual advertising as part of their PDF document downloads.

Users upload their PDFs to Yahoo’s ad network and then Yahoo hosts the document for download and serves up contextual advertising in a panel to the right of the given document’s content.

According to CNet, sites participating in the current closed beta include IDG’s InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation and Reed Elsevier. No word as yet as to when it might be broadly available, although if it is eventually rolled out as part of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) it will be a US residents only service.

On one hand contextual advertising in PDFs probably falls into the “why didn’t they think of that before” category, but on the other hand there’s probably a reason this is a new concept, because I can’t see there being a stampede of people wanting to use the service. It will be interesting to see however whether the ads convert, and it may provide an additional revenue stream for ebook sellers and similar online users and creators who regularly provide PDF downloads to visitors.

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Straight Out Of Left Field: Google Experimenting With Digg Style Voting On Search Results

If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

The program, part of Google Labs, works like this:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

At the moment the results of the program will only be stored per user and not applied to the general search index, so that sites buried (”I don’t like”) will not appear in future results for the user, where as sites voted up will stay up. Google Labs notes that “this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks,” still, who would have thought that Google would even experiment with Digg style social voting.

Screen shot below directly from the programs site here.

via Googlified/ Paris Lemon

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3G iPhone On Track For Next Year

In remarks at the Churchill Club, AT&T’s CEO confirmed what most Apple-watchers have been suspecting: a 3G iPhone will come out next year. Sounds like they fixed that battery-drain problem. Hopefully, these things won’t start exploding like those laptops a year ago.

Mike makes fun of me for toting around a Blackberry, but I’d rather wait for the 3G version of the iPhone to come out before thinking about switching. AT&T’s slow-as-molasses EDGE data network cripples the current iPhone (IMHO). The WiFi option for surfing the Web on the iPhone today is a nice backup, but you can’t really count on it for constant mobile connectivity. A 3G iPhone would certainly become yet another Apple lust object/upgrade, but will it be enough to accelerate sales to hit the 10-million mark Steve Jobs set as a goal for next year. It all depends on the price, and you can be sure that isn’t going to be cheap. A guess is $599.

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Microsoft Acquires Mobile Focused Social Networking Site WebFives

Microsoft has acquired Seattle based social networking site WebFives.

WebFives was initially founded in 2004 by former Microsoft engineer Mike Toutonghi as Vizrea and offers social networking with a focus of mobile media, including video, music and photos. Users are provided with standard social networking profile pages complete with blogging, and have the option of accessing their sites via computer or via a WAP specific page.

According to The Seattle Times, Toutonghi told WebFives users that the service will stop at the end of the year because of the Microsoft acquisition, making the acquisition a technology buy as opposed to a community buy. Toutonghi went on to encourage users to sign up to MSN Spaces and/or Windows Live for their social networking experience.

Price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

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Google Reveals 2008 Plans For Google Apps

Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for Google Apps at an event in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Blogger Andrew Miller took some great notes from a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston, the VP of Product Development at wiki startup Jotspot prior to their acquisition by Google a little over a year ago.

First, Google Sites, an evolution of Google Page Creator, will launch in 2008. Google Sites will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to create intranets, project management tracking, extranets and other custom sites.

We should also expect Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar to soon work offline via Google Gears. This has been widely predicted, but it’s good to see it coming more formally from Google (note that Zoho, a Google Docs competitor, already has offline functionality via Google Gears).

Some of the other stuff is more speculative, but worth the read (pivot tables on Google Spreadsheets? I doubt it).

* Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.

* Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.

* What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.

* Will Google docs have OCR capabilities for importing .pdfs or other graphical files? Not yet, but perhaps someday. Scott couldn’t comment on the “roadmap” for future enhancements. However, the collaborative Google Sites (based on JotSpot) will allow for upload and storage of any file type.

* Will GrandCentral be integrated into Google Apps? If so, when? Again, Scott didn’t comment on the timing but said they are working on it and it is a “huge priority” for them.

* Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.

* Will Google Apps support video conferencing in addition to Google Talk and Chat? Scott’s answer, “Not yet”. I got the impression from his body language that it’ll come someday, but nothing more was said.

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Google Reader Gets Recommendations, Drag-and-Drop

Google has released two new features for its RSS reading product, Recommendations and Drag-and-Drop.

The Discovery recommendation feature suggests new sites a user may wish to read based on current subscriptions and (interestingly) browsing history. Google has previously offered feed bundles based on subjects, but this is the first time it has offered customized recommendations in this way.

The drag-and-drop functionality allows users to re-order or move subscribed feeds within a folder or to another folder. This style of functionality isn’t unique, and as Google itself points out, RSS readers such as Bloglines and NewsGator already provide drag-and-drop functionality.

Google thanks a number of interns and ex-interns for the new features, a nice thing to do.

As a Google Reader user I know I’m certainly going to use the drag-and-drop functionality, and I’m even looking at some of the suggested feeds as well, but I’ve got to ask: how is it that we can get drag-and-drop in Reader and not Gmail? Surely Gmail could do with this functionality. Maybe the Gmail team needs some interns as well

Google Testing OpenID With Blogger, May Offer OpenIDs To Users

Google’s “Blogger in Draft” program that tests functionality for Google’s popular Blogger blogging platform has rolled out OpenID support for comments.

Read complete article here

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Solid State Drives replacing HDD laptops in 2009

Very interesting article discussing the benefits of the new 64GB solid state drives, and just how soon HDD's will be a thing of the past in laptops (just like MP3 players).

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