Win $10 Million from Publishers Clearing House when you search blingo.com

Here is a great opportunity for those who use search engine very frequently everyday. A lucky searcher can get prizes worth upto $10 million from Publishers Clearing House by using blingo.com for searching internet. They put minimum eligibility criteria for getting into the sweepstakes is 25 searches per day.

But for blingo last date is 28 September 2007. You can try your luck by searching in blingo.com. The offer is applicable to only United States. Checkout the rules of the sweepstakes also the facts.

This is in fact a nice idea of making money online, like blingo.com.
The steps involved are

• You need a website and Google AdSense account.
• Integrate Google custom search with your AdSense account.
• Put the Google Custom Search box in your home page.
• Promote your site, ask people to search web through your site. Done!!!

Don't you feel this interesting, tryout it yourself. You can win along with Google.

Suggested readings:
Search and Win Contest from Guruji.com
Sell your story to The Sun to get thousands of pounds
Great Indian Blogger Hunt by ibibo.com

Happy BirthDay Wishes for Google

Google has completed its 9 years in the Web World, dominating in Search and related technologies. Beginning with search engine they have reached level to challenge the Operating System major, Microsoft Technologies, in web technologies and tools.

You can see the complete history road map of Google success stories from Google's corporate details section. We take this opportunity to wish Google a Very Happy BirthDay and very successful year ahead. Hope, Google will reach more heights in the coming year in the internet and related technology services.

Suggested reading
Google Home Page in 1998
Google is the Powerful Brand
Let Google Index Your Brain !!!
Microsoft's Google Envy is reflected in Windows Live Hotmail ID creation
Do remote presentations and chat conferencing with Google Presentation and Talk Gadget
Get SMS Event Alerts from Google Calendar.
Create Your Own Stock Charts with Google Spreadsheet

Download free DivX software bundle with DivX converter

DivX is a video compression format that will give same visual and audio experience compared to .avi and .wmv video formats by utilizing less disk space. DivX is video compression format is based on the MPEG-4 technology.

Latest DivX Software bundle for Windows comprises of:

• DivX Player: To play every DivX file ever created
• DivX Codec : To play and create DivX video files with 3rd party applications
• DivX Web Player: To play DivX video in the web browser
• DivX Converter : To covert the other video formats to DivX video format (this is a trial version).

The system requirements for DivX Software bundle are:

• Windows XP/2000/Vista (32-bit),
• Pentium 4 with 256 MB RAM, Graphics card with 32MB of RAM is also recommended
• DirectX 9 or higher.

DivX bundle is available for Mac, with all the above components. But for Linux only DivX codec is available from them.

Download DivX

• DivX Software bundle for Windows
• DivX Software bundle for Mac
• DivX Codec for Linux

ibnlive with tooltip on mouse over ads screening

In order get more earnings from earning income from online advertising, ads placement strategy plays a prominent role. The number of clicks for your ads greatly depends on the way you layout your ads. But in the case of ads which will pay if the banner or logos are screened, the position of putting this ads for better customer attraction will play the role.

Recently ibnlive.com has started putting advertisements as a tooltip on mouse over, for important links. You can see the screenshot of a similar ad in ibnlive.com below.


This type of ads screening will help, for those who has more visitors/ readers of their blog and for ads which doesn't belongs to the pay per click realm. Visit ibnlive.com to get the complete picture.

Suggested reading
Adsense layout strategy to get more clicks on your ads

Adsense layout strategy to get more clicks on your ads

The number of clicks you get on your ads greatly depends on the way you layout your ads. Especially AdSense like content related advertisement programs will help you bring more revenues if you place your ads applying more thought.

Most of the people who hosts their blogs on blogspot platform, the prime traffic driver would be Google search and Yahoo Search. Most cases the link referred by a search engine would be pointing to a single blog post or article. And the link referred by most of the site referral or link exchange or blog roll would be to your blog home page. So we have to apply different ads layout strategy for your individual blog post or article page and for your blog home page.

Ads layout for individual blog article page: As the individual blog article page referred by search engines and RSS feed readers will drive users directly to your blog article, is only because of the referred content. In this case it is must that the ads should be adjacent or within the article content.

• You can put your AdSense code soon after the blog article heading and before the starting of the content.
• Also you can put one more AdSense code soon after the content got over.

Preferably, you can use the square ads in above two places. And in order to selectively place your ads in the above two locations, only for individual blog article you have to make use of the <ItemPage> and </ItemPage> tags around your AdSense code. This will make sure that the ads will be showed only for individual blog article page.

I feel text ads would bring more clicks compared to the image and video ads in this place. See the image below to have a clear picture on ads placement.


Ads layout for home page: You are aware that, link promotions, site referrals and your frequent blog readers would directly come to your home page.

• In order to serve ads for home page its always better to have long horizontal banner ad on top of the blog, this would attract the attention of user when he enters the blog and while closing the page.
• One more point you have to consider is that most of the internet users in this world are right-handed people, so they use to keep their mouse pointer on the right side of the while they are reading the articles. So it is always better to have a large vertical banner on the right side.

This can be selectively achieved by placing your ads between the <MainOrArchivePage> and </MainOrArchivePage> tags in the blogger old template. In this place also I feel text ads would bring more clicks compared to the image and video ads.This particular ad placement is evident from the ad layout in the Google search result.


Ads layout common to home page and individual page: Try to keep a large vertical banner on the right side and a long horizontal banner on top. Text ads would be preferred if you have more content oriented articles and image and video ads would be preferred where your blog niche is about offers, vehicles, gifts, real estates, FMCG and electronic goods.

If you find any better ad placement strategy, please feel free to share with us.

Convert images and photos to video with Microsoft Photo Story 3

Photo Story 3 for Windows is an excellent tool from Microsoft to convert or to say express your photos and images as video. Photo Story 3 gives you a very user friendly interface, that will let you narrate your story with photos and images.

Photo Story 3 offers lot of cool features

• This will let you import images as group.
• You can adjust color level and correct the red eye in images.
• It allows you to give lot of effects like black and white, sepia, washout, negative and diffuse glow and heading to each photos.
• You can even customize the time of motion in each photos.
• Even this will allow you to put background music to your video story, either by selecting a pre-existing one or by creating by itself.
• You can even create the video album for your Smart Phone or Pocket PC with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile or even for Portable Media Center.

Photo Story 3 is a great tool that will let you create a video album from your static photos of an event. This will be very much helpful if you wish to create your marriage video album from your marriage photos. Here is a tutorial from Microsoft that will explain you how to make wedding photos to a wedding memories video album.
[ Download Microsoft Photo Story 3 for Windows ]

Great car driving skills demonstration video

Its great and unbelievable demonstration of car driving skills by a group of factory drivers.
They are demonstrating how to make 360 degree turn in a smooth way and even synchronized car driving. Even one driver is changing his car tyre while running on two wheels and also showing parallel parking skills, it is really amazing.

I think this video was shot from Hyundai factory driving team. Its a marvelous effort. And the car they used for their demonstration in Hyundai Lantra. This video has been featured as all time top viewed in msn videos. Checkout this video at msn videos.

How blogger play will help your blog get famous

Blogger team has recently launched a new photo sliding portal for blogger. The portal named play.blogger.com will take care of showing the latest images uploaded by bloggers on blogspot platform dynamically. One pretty thing is that, they also link to the blog in which the image is displayed.


So If you have posted an article with a relevant image, it is sure that some people who are viewing play.blogger.com will see it and will visit your blog. Thus you will get more readers to your blog just being on blogspot platform.
But, you have to remember that they will show images only after applying family filters.

Samsung YP-P2 Touch Screen Smartphone, a Competitor to iPhone

Samsung came up with a new touch screen smartphone, which could be a biggest competitor for the well launched iPhone by Apple.

The size of Samsung YP-P2 is 100 x 52 x 9.9 mm and its weight is 85g. This has a 3 inch, 480 x 272 pixels with touch screen facility. The available colors are black, red and white. Expected battery life for video is 5 hours and for audio alone it is 35 hours. It can have internal memory of 8 GB, obviously it comes with a FM radio too.

Have a look at this video below, which demonstrates the features of the YP-P2 Touch Screen Smartphone from Samsung.

Suggested readings
Apple iPhone Specifications, features and screenshots
Enjoy iPod Touch and iPod Classic from Apple
GSM Mobile technology turns sweet 20

Do remote presentations and chat conferencing with Google Presentation and Talk Gadget

Its again a revolutionary product line up from Google, Google Presentation or Google Point (Power comes with Google itself !!!) what ever you name it. It worth beyond its name.
You can get unplugged of doing your presentations with Microsoft PowerPoint, its the time to go live with Google Presentation.

Google Presentation facilitates key features essential for online presentations

• Collaborative editing of the presentation slides.
• Importing existing .ppt and .pps files, you can upload presentations upto 10MB of size.
• Insert images from local computer.
• Changing the background theme of the presentation
• Saving the presentations as zip archives to your local computer.

Once you are done with creating presentation slides, Google will also help you to make remote presentations and conferencing with its Presentation viewer along with Google TalkGadget.
In order to do remote presentations and conferencing with Google presentation

• Share the created presentation with the targeted audiences.
• Start the presentation slide show simultaneously.
• Make discussions through the Google talk gadget. Its done.

This is the way of getting things done with the help of Google.
Also watch the video below, which explains the collaboration with Google Documents in the simplest way.

Goto docs.google.com and create your slides.

Suggested readings
Create Your Own Stock Charts with Google Spreadsheet
Microsoft's Google Envy is reflected in Windows Live Hotmail ID creation

Its all in business, Sun Microsystems to resell Microsoft Windows Server 2003

No one is an enemy in Business. The strategic alliance between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft is another example of that kind. Both big players announced their strategic alliance with an expanded relationship to win in the server technology market.


As an implication to this partner ship, users can experience the performance of Windows Server 2003 on Sun's mighty machines.

Checkout the complete information about this news at Sun's portal.
http://www.sun.com/software/windows/

Suggested articles
Microsoft's Google Envy is reflected in Windows Live Hotmail ID creation
Its a lot in a name, sun plans to change nasdaq symbol SUNW to JAVA

Microsoft's Google Envy is reflected in Windows Live Hotmail ID creation

If you try to create a Windows Live HotMail ID with a name contains "Google" like Google.com.hk, it will say that the id google.com.hk@hotmail.com is available. See the image below.

But if you try the same with Yahoo, instead of Google, you will see some error message. The message says "The Windows Live ID contains a word or phrase that is not allowed. Please try again". Refer the image below.

This reflects that Google envy has made Microsoft selfish, in creating Windows Live HotMail ID itself. This shows that Microsoft is doing all sorts of possibilities for winning the online game with Google. But as the game gets tougher, Google is getting mightier.

Similarly, if you try to create a Windows Live HotMail ID with a name contains a keyword like online, president, billgates, Microsoft etc and check for availability, then you will get the same error message that you got for yahoo keyword.
The error message goes like this "The Windows Live ID contains a word or phrase that is not allowed. Please try again".

Get coupon codes for amazon, ebay and many other online stores

Here is a great opportunity for online buyers through amazon , eBay and many other shopping sites. RetailMeNot is a web site through which they provide the coupon codes for amazon, eBay, papajohns, ae.com, gap.com, kohls.com and many more e-commerce sites.

With these coupon you may get even upto 50% discount on your order. If you don't use, you may pass on this information to your friends and relatives so that they will get benefited.

Visit RetailMeNot.com today and get more discounts on your online orders in eBay, amazon and many other online stores.

Hummer off-road terrain drive challenge photos

Hummer is a very famous class of SUV brand from General Motors. Hummer is very famous for their off-road terrain drive.
Even though it has a wild look, it also has all luxury features that a SUV is expected to have.
Here are some photos of hummer, exhibiting its terrain drive abilities.

Enjoy and share with your friends.

Download free and customizable newsletter manager software

PhpList is free and highly customizable newsletter manager software, which will be very useful for webmaters to send email newsletters to their valuable customers. This is great tool to create, capture and maintain big audience for blogs and websites.

The great features that comes with PhpList are:

• Phplist is a one-way email announcement delivery system. It is great for newsletters, publicity lists, notifications, and many other uses. (It is different from group mailing list systems like mailman.)
• The Web Interface lets you write and send messages, and manage phplist over the internet.
• phplist keeps sending messages from your web server, even after you shut down your computer.
• Phplist is designed to manage mailing lists with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. phplist is excellent with smaller lists too!
• No duplicate messages. No 'forgotten' messages. phplist manages message delivery with a message queue, ensuring that every subscriber gets the email message, and that no subscribers receive two copies, even if they're subscribed to more than one list!
• Open/View Tracking tells you how many users opened your email message. This provides a minimum statistic, as many email clients with privacy or security policies block images (gmail, thunderbird, and others).
• Click Tracking tracks links and URLs. Statistics can be viewed by message, URL or subscriber.
• Multiple Subscribe Pages allow you to choose many different combinations of templates, languages, user attributes and lists.
• Templates are completely customizable, and make site integration a breeze.
• Multiple Templates on different subscribe pages can integrate phplist with several different web sites.
• Subscriber Attributes like 'name', 'country', and other personal information, are completely customizable. You can specify what information you need to get from users when they subscribe.
• You can use Subscriber Attributes in message content to make each and every email message personalized with the subscribers name, country, or any other attribute.
• Subscribers can be given the choice between text or html email messages. You decide whether subscribers can choose, what the default choice is, and what format a message is sent in: text only, html only, or both!
• The HTML Editor allows you to edit html messages from phplist using FCKeditor. TinyMCE is also available.
• phplist is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, Vietname and Japanese and translation work is in progress for other languages.
• Easy Install via Fantastico, FTP upload, or SSH.
• The super-admin can assign lists to List Managers, who can manage their users and lists. The super-admin user can 'prepare' messages that can be sent by list managers to their lists.
• Every email message contains personalized URLs for subscribers to update their preferences or unsubscribe. Subscribers can update their own information and keep your database up to date. Unlike most other mailing list managers, in phplist subscribers can change their email address.
• The User Management tools are excellent to manage and maintain large databases of subscribers.
• Bounce Processing keeps your database clean of unused and non-existent email addresses.
• Advanced Bounce handling let's you teach phplist to distinguish between permanent and temporary message-delivery errors. You can define automated actions on receipt of bounce messages according to matches with your regular expressions.
• Import and Export. Use CSV and tab delimited files to import your existing list of users or to export the users on the phplist system for use in your in-house database. phplist's database has a 'foreign key' to help keep multiple copies of databases synchronized without duplicating users.
• Attachments can be uploaded and included in messages for download.
• Send a Web page. Tell phplist the URL of a web page you want to send to your users, and phplist will fetch it and send it. You can even put subscriber-specific parameters in the URL.
• RSS feeds can be automatically sent to a mailing list weekly, daily, or monthly.
• PDF messages can be automatically created and sent as attachments to ensure that your message is seen the way it was designed by all your subscribers, regardless of their email message reader.
• Batch Processing is useful in shared hosting environments. Set the maximum number of sent messages in a given time period.
• Throttling can limit the load on your server so it doesn't overload.
• Domain Throttling limits the number of emails to specific domains to keep on the friendly side of their system administrators.
• Scheduled Sending let's you tell phplist when the message is to be sent.
• A message can be repeated automatically to send updated dynamic content and attachments.
• Text from HTML. Text email messages are managed fluently in phplist. phplist will automatically create a text version of an html message. Optionally the message composer can create it manually.
• Several systems exist on the internet that integrate phplist with your favourite CMS or blogging tool.

Download PHPList | Take a demo

Cafe from ibibo, social networking with mobile alerts and enhanced privacy

After letting people to get paid for blogging on ibibo platform, now they are come up with social networking with two great most expected features

Controlling who should view your profile: With this feature, the profile owner can set restrictions whether his/her profile should be exposed to the public or only to best friends. But another proble with their privacy is that anyone can view the photo of the profile owner even without login in to the cafe.ibibo.com [ view my profile ]. And they are, of course, exposed to search engines. I feel this has to be fixed by ibibo web team, to complete their privacy control mission.

Mobile SMS alerts and email alerts: You can be a trusted member in cafe ibibo, if provide your mobile phone number. Apart from this, you can even receive SMS event alerts for the activities like, new friend requests, blurbs etc.

Orkut says they also provide SMS alerts, but still I couldn't find how to do that.

Suggested readings:
Great indian blogger hunt by ibibo
Set sms alerts in Google calendar

Photoshop tutorials and templates collection

Here is a good news for photoshop lovers. EyesOnDesign.net has a very good collection of free tutorials on photoshop graphics and image works. You need not be an expert in photoshop, they have explained the tutorials very well such that a even a graphics newbie can understand them.

Their collection includes:

• Creating effects on portraits
• 4 ways to convert color pictures to gray scale and b&w.
• Create awesome matrix text effects.
• On making interfaces.
• On chrome buttons
• On slicing images
• On making cartoon eyes.
• Making bubble gum text
• Creating your own professional button bar

Apart from tutorials they also provide .psd (psd files) for free download. Be a photoshop master with EyesOnDesign.net

Suggested readings:
Web 2.0 Design tips & Buttons
Convert Images to ASCII Text

Prevent hearing damage while listening music with headphones

Now a days hearing damages for young individuals are very common because of prolonged use of headphones and earphones for listening their favorite mp3 or FM station.
Checkout this article from BBC on MP3 users 'risking hearing loss'.

If you take little care, you can avoid hearing damage to a great extend. Here are some tips
which would help you prevent hearing damage:

• Avoid headphones while driving and in high noise area, here you happen to increase the headphone volume above required level.
• Keep headphone volume always at an enjoyable level.
• Avoid continuous use of headphone, give regular interval, also reduce to time of headphone usage.

Remember, its your life and your ear. Take care of your ear.

GSM Mobile technology turns sweet 20

By 7th September 2007 the GSM mobile technology is celebrating its 20 years of voyage.
The world has witnessed a dramatic change from "just a wireless phone" to "mobile computer phone". We cannot neglect the contributions of Nokia, which was Ply wood firm before entering into the mobile market. Now they leads the GSM pack.
You can see a lot and lots of mobile handsets entering the market with new features, ranging from camera resolutions mobile TV, and PDA utilities. Now you can have your complete desktop access on your mobile phone.

In spite of cruising through advanced features, there is a big challenge ahead for both consumers and producers of mobile handset, that is to safely re-use or dispose the old handsets.
I feel we should take initiatives to inspire Governments to enact norms for a better green future.

Suggested readings

• Free iPhone theme for Nokia
• Free mobile wallpapers & games
• Set SMS in Google Calendar
• Access any mail your mobile with Flurry Mail

Complete reference for Java Documentation and JAR and class files

Recently I happened to visit DocJar.com. I was stunned to see the comprehensive java documentation repository they have. Its almost the complete documentation and library repository for most of the available java softwares and libraries ( over 3000 jar files ).

DocJar has a very good search facility. Just give the java package name or the java class name you looking for, wait for a moment, you will be given with download option for the corresponding jar file and documentation.

Other facilities offered by DocJar are:

• It will show you the document and code if you give the java stack trace. (Sounds great!!!, Yes it is really great).
• They also provide DocJar plug-in for IE, firefox and Eclipse. [Get plug-ins]

Enjoy iPod Touch and iPod Classic from Apple

Apple is going to rock in the the multimedia player market with its new versions of iPod.
Apple has introduced iPod Touch, the iPod with a 3.5-inch wide touch screen and with the iPhone look and Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) support . iPode touch comes with a storage capacity of 8GB and 16GB with prices $299 and $399 respectively. But black is the only color available.

iPod classic is all set to solve the storage worries of those who are more concerned about it. iPod classic comes in two models one with 80GB (costs $249) and 160GB (costs $349). These are available in two colors black and gray.

Suggested reading
iPhone specifications and details