About About.com

About.com is a good place to start with if you are looking for information about something. It has information on just about anything you can think of. It is not a search engine though, nor is it an encyclopedia; at about.com you can find detailed information about a topic, written by experts in their respective fields. You can therefore be assured of the authenticity of the information that you find there.

About.com home page is neat and well laid out, though a first time visitor may be slightly overwhelmed by the sheer number of links. Since all information on this site is from an expert guide, there is a personal touch. Most pages are written in a matter of fact way and they are conversational in tone.

Using Google Base

What's Google Base in the first place?
Think of Google base as an online database with powerful search features hidden under a simple user-interface. Using this you can upload contents and describe them with attributes so that Google crawler understands what those items are and what contexts those items would fit in.
The idea is simple and nice. You don't need a website to share your content and publishing contents off Google Base is a click of a button. Publishing essentially is informing the crawler about your content, the published content immediately appears in the Google Base search results, the ranks of the published content may depend on varieties of other factors. Users of Google Base also benefit from its seamless integration with AdWords to popularize content.

What kind of content?
As per Google, the contents could be anything, definitely has to be digital - on a lighter note.
On each item you can attach up to 15 files in these formats: PDF (.pdf), Microsoft Excel (.xls), Text (.txt), HTML (.html), Rich Text Format (.rtf), Word Perfect (.wpd), ASCII, Unicode and XML.
As of now, the total size of all uploaded files may not exceed 20 megabytes. There is a customary "we reserve the right to review all items in order to ensure they comply with the Google Base Terms and Conditions" clause to keep out spam and other malicious content.

How do I submit content?
Google Base has a nice and easy-to-use form interface to submit content, for large contents there is a bulk upload option too. It may not be too long before you see a desktop tool from Google to upload contents directly off your desktop.

Geolocation - Real-world geographic location

The Internet is a haven to multitude of information. Offering the ability for Internet users to garner information based on geographic location can for example, greatly reduce search times and in general, provide the user with locally specific information. Similarly, user communities and chat-rooms can be enhanced through knowing the locations of their members, provide them with information on local times, weather conditions and news events.

The concept of "Geolocation" applies not only to computers but to any device connected to the Internet. Geolocation is essentially the technique of determining a device's geographic latitude, longitude and by inference, city, region and nation by comparing the device's public Internet IP address with known locations of other electronically neighboring servers and routers.

There are heated debates of weather Geolocation is good for the overall Internet user community. Increasing number of websites and web based applications are using Geolocation techniques to determine what you should see and what you are allowed to do. As the technology improves, websites might turn into blocking groups of visitors and carving the Web into smaller chunks - in some cases, down to a ZIP code. With a technology that can detect users' whereabouts becoming a trend with most websites, the most concerning factor is if websites might resort to misleading their visitors.
For instance, an online trading company might show different prices when competitors based out of specific locations, visit; a political candidate might present visitors with different manifestos based on their respective locations.

On the other hand the advantages of Geolocation techniques are limitless. By pulling up a Web browser, a businessman on travel can do a localized search to find nearby restaurants and theaters. Chat programs and Web pages can determine his location based on the Internet address and deliver locally specific contents and opportunities. On his return back home, these programs can correctly place him in his home city. There is no need to change computer configurations, remember addresses or even be aware.

For the most part, Geolocation techniques are almost exclusively used by commercial companies for advertisements and other propaganda activities. Google AdSense for example, works exclusively based on Geolocation techniques to deliver location specific ads. It remains to see how these techniques could influence our lives in the long run.

Via.: Wired News: Geolocation: Don't Fence Web In

Google Browser Sync

While at work, most of us often have multiple tabs open on Firefox and we are often used to carrying work home. It would be really difficult if we are to remember all those pages we were looking into. In addition, there might be pages retrieved after persistent searching. Wouldn't it be nice if there was something that could remember all that what we were doing and help us continue the next time we log in?

Google Browser Sync from Google Labs is here to the rescue. This cool little Firefox Extension sits in Firefox's toolbar and keeps a tab on all the open windows. The next time when you open Firefox, Google Browser Synch jumps in and restores all your browser windows from the previous session. What's more, Browser Sync also syncs bookmarks, you could even choose to sync cookies and saved passwords. Google Browser Sync benefits from a strong security setup of encrypting information that's stored on Google Browser Sync.

Google Browser Sync stores all information online so you can continue your work if you are on travel, or if you tend to use multiple computers, you would only need to install a Firefox extension to do this. Google Browser Sync extension is currently available only for Firefox and the synching is done via a Gmail account.

Download Google Browser Sync

Do Blogs Earn You Money?

Make a blog profitable
You should have at least 100 pages of high-quality content. Good reference material really draws traffic.

Lucrative areas for blogging
Hot technology areas are always good to blog about. People always want to know what's new and what's hot and those sites tend to have very monetizeable content. Blogs on legal issues would do well if they are focused on areas that have to do with litigation - Drugs and diseases that have resulted in huge liability suits. Another area that seems under-blogged is financial reporting.

Make a living from blogging
There are 10 million lonely bloggers and people probably only read a few thousand. If you're going to make serious money off this, it's a serious time commitment.

Amount of time and money
People who are really in the business of making a living off content pages, average about $10 a page per year. Usually, it's not enough to make a living on, but it's a good supplement.

Own server-side blog advantage
If you host your own blog and have an AdSense account, you get paid by Google when people click on those ads on your web pages. You can make more money from keyword advertising if you host your blog on an outside server.

Milliondollarhomepage

In what might be the most brilliant yet somehow undiscovered idea to get rich quick, Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England came up with a Web Page with a million pixels and sold each pixel at $1 per pixel for ads. www.milliondollarhomepage.com provides advertising space to companies from around the world, who purchase the minimum of 100 pixel blocks for $100. These blocks are hosted on the homepage with a link through to the company's site.

Since its launch in 26th August, 2005, the Million Dollar Homepage has been an instant success with companies and individuals all wanting to own a piece. The last thousand pixels were auctioned off on eBay for about $38,000 recently.

Winamp Whiz kid - Justin Frankel

With zillions of music players available these days, it's easy to forget the original MP3 Player that revolutionized the world of MP3 music - Winamp. Justin Frankel was only a teenager when he started work on Winamp. He was promising with computers even when he was a youngster, writing software while at school.

Justin launched the first version of Winamp in 1997 under his newly formed company's name "Nullsoft". Initially launched as a shareware at $10, Winamp was a huge success. Millions of people would download the program and the revenue it generated ran into the tens of thousands of dollars. Although Justin sold "Nullsoft" to AOL in 1999, he continued working on the subsequent versions of Winamp and completed Winamp version 5.0 in late 2003 - just before he resigned.

Justin's subsequently worked on the Gnutella P2P system which he created with Tom Peppers. The system was similar to Napster; Gnutella has two distinct advantages over Napster. First, it allowed users to share all kinds of files and not just MP3s. Second, Gnutella did not have centralized servers, once the network was created, it could not be shut off.

After resigning from AOL, Justin has been working on several projects, including a program called "NINJAM" that allows several musicians to make real music together via the Internet and "REAPER", a multi-track audio editor for Windows.