Create MP3 Files From Text in Emails and Web Pages

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Create MP3 Files From Text in Emails and Web Pages via Digital Inspiration by Amit on 1/24/08

Vozme is web based tool that turns any snippet of text into an MP3 audio file that you can either listen online or download to your local hard drive.

You just have to copy the text from a web page or an email and paste it inside the Vozme text box.

Vozme.com - Accepts Spanish, English and Italian languages. Thanks Jane.

End of MTV's UGC Channel Flux

MTV Abandons User Generated Content Channel in UK from Read/WriteWeb by Josh Catone

MTV announced that on February 1 it would end the user generated content television channel Flux, which it started in the UK in September 2006. On Flux viewers were able to sign up at the Flux web site and influence programming on air by uploading photos and videos, voting on playlists, etc.

Though MTV is abandoning the idea of a completely UGC-oriented television channel, it is not giving up on using user generated content in its programming and will actually continue to build out the Flux brand online. When MTV pulls the plug on the channel next week, it plans to keep the Flux web community alive, reports the Guardian. MTV has plans to "integrate the user-generated content concept into its MTV-branded music channels," writes the paper's Mark Sweney.

Some of MTV's other channels will host a show, tentatively titled "Flux Me I'm Famous" Further, Flux users will have the opportunity to vote on and influence playlists on MTV's flagship music channels.

Monetizing Community by contextual Banner Ads

How Last.fm Will Create "Communities Around Content" from Read/WriteWeb by Guest Author

Music fans simply go to Last.fm, which has an active community of 15 million active users in more than 200 countries. It's best known for the song recommendation engine that tracks the music-listening habits and links them to other fans with similar tastes. Search for an artist, listen to a song, and see a small "billboard" ad on the screen while the tune plays. People don't even need to register with the site, if they don't want to.

Fans can listen to any song three times before they are directed to one of Last.fm's partners, including iTunes, Amazon, and 7Digital, where they can purchase the track. And just so we're clear here, tracks on Last.fm are not downloadable, so people cannot put streamed music on a digital music player.

On Billable Hours Mania

For all the consultants around, from Signs In the Times from Andrew McAfee

As I wrote in an earlier post titled "The Pursuit of Busyness," many organizations emphasize (in ways both formal and informal, overt and subtle) that their people should engage in activities that are directly, obviously, and immediately 'productive.' Within law and consulting firms, working billable hours is the clearest example of such an activity. 

So downplaying or doing away with billable hours provides leaders at these firms with an interesting and perhaps unique opportunity to communicate to the workforce what kinds of activities should take the place of billing the client upward of 2,000 hours per year. If these leaders are serious about improving collaboration, knowledge capture and sharing, innovation, and information flow, they can take advantage of both the novel tools of E2.0 and the novel work environment they've just created as they de-emphasized billability.

.. they could do this by putting the use of their company's emergent social software platforms 'in the flow' of work for their people. A major change in corporate culture like the decline and fall of billable hours presents a major opportunity to reshape what the culture measures, values, and esteems. This will in turn, of course, affect what people do during a workweek. Would a law firm or consulting company be better off if it went from having a standard of 40 hours of billable work each week to a standard of spending half a day (or a day, or whatever) each week helping colleagues and the enterprise as a whole via the modern social digital toolkit of blogs, wikis, mashups, prediction markets, comments, ratings, votes, RSS feeds, etc.?

Debate and create a Wiki

outQuib Launches Private Beta, Invites for RWW Readers from Read/WriteWeb by Josh Catone

outQuib, is a social network focused on debate and discussion. The site encourages people to initiate and participate in debates on any subject, and gather the responses in a wiki that co-founder Fariz Chowdhury says will help the site "to become the world's source of opinionated information."

Socially, the site incorporates a Twitter-style "following" idea. You can follow people, and then get information about their activity in a Facebook-like activity stream. Users can also organize into "Causes," which are basically debate groups for people who share a like-minded view 

Delete

[On Writing] Biz dev emails and first impressions from Signal vs. Noise by Jason

I work for an enterprise level integration company that is looking to attack the long tail of the market for point to point integration solutions.

RulesOfThumb.org

Web Site Attempts to Collect Every Rule of Thumb from Read/WriteWeb by Josh Catone

... web site called Rules of Thumb that is attempting to catalogue all those nifty bits of knowledge that fall somewhere between adage and old wives tale.

Anyone can contribute a new rule, but other users will have the ability to vote up or down whether new rules make it into the main database. Once in the DB, users can rate and review rules, which Parker tells us allows the site to employ "a Darwinian weeding mechanism which will let the content improve in value over time."

 

Did you know this?

In GMail you can "Select multiple conversations at once – check the first, then press shift and check the last."

On AideRSS

AideRSS Raises Money To Attack Information Overload from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick

You can enter any RSS feed and it will score each item in the feed by number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in Del.icio.us, Diggs and inbound links it's received. You can then get a new feed of just the most popular items from your original feed.

Just because things are popular doesn't mean they are good, though, nor does it guarantee that they are the right items for you to read.

AideRSS has a freely available, public API that other apps can leverage internally as well. The showcase example so far is the super-search tool Lijit, which uses the AideRSS API in addition to various other cool tricks it can do.

 

Wikipedia vs. Knols

Well said !!
From: Google Knol: Self-Interest not Community from Transparent Office by Michael Idinopulos

Wikipedia's quality is high precisely because there is a core community that cares deeply about it and ensures that crap is detected and eliminated. Google Knol isn't likely to generate that kind of committed community. As a result, it will probably come to look more like the blogosphere: Tons of content, some good, a lot of crap.

Google's solution to the quality problem is, predictably, technology. Feedback ratings are a central feature of Knol's design, and Google is almost certainly working on search algorithms that incorporate user ratings, not just at the asset level (i.e., article quality) but also at the author level (i.e., personal reputation).

Will Google's self-interest-plus-technology model trump Wikipedia's community model?

Branding online music players

I spent some time on MySpace last night, exploring the profile pages of family and friends and was shocked to see that all the music players on the site are now sponsored by Zune. It was news to me but I'm told it's been that way for weeks. I haven't been able to find a single shred of coverage of that deal on any of the top tech blogs - but I would assume it's helping sell more Zunes than ever.

From: Perspective: Myspace Still Kicking Facebook's Ass in Traffic from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick

Writing passwords safer than having them all same

Sound advice from Microsoft through the Guardian:

it's not necessarily bad to write passwords down - a piece of paper is going to be much harder to hack for an internet baddie than something stored on your computer or online, as long as it is adequately protected. Hide it, disguise it, put spaces in it, blend it in with other things. And don't write "My banking passwords" at the top of the page.

Especially for some of you who have a huge text file on their "office desktop" containing a universe of passwords to your banking and trading accounts - at least convert it into a password protected MS word file. (I know its funny - another password!!)

G(od) enters schooling business

Google Goes to School: Hey Kids, Want Some Free AdWords? from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick
 
Google's giving $200 worth of AdWords to schools where students will marketing students learn how to use Google's online advertising products and test out trial campaigns with local businesses.

According to the project page, the students will "outline a strategy, run your campaign, assess your results and provide the business with recommendations to further develop their online marketing. Teams submit their reports and are judged by a panel of independent academics from all over the world."

A Google Map of the participating schools show that the program has extended to every continent on the planet.

Go to: Google Online Marketing Challenge!

... [But] there's something a bit funny about this kind of corporate influence over the souls of...marketing students. Ok, so maybe this isn't as ominous as many other corporate sponsorships in schools these days.

Database as a Service (DaaS)

LongJump: Database in the Cloud from Read/WriteWeb by Sarah Perez

LongJump, a company based out of Sunnyvale, California, has introduced a Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) product that offers you an easy way to build a database application backend for your website and business. With LongJump, database setup is simplified - you no longer need to worry about server provisioning, redundancy, backups, patching, or any of the other IT complexities involved with running your own servers. Instead, you just sign-up with LongJump, set up your data structure and permissions, and connect your web services.

 

After Social Networking - here's social cartooning

Toonlet: DIY Cartoon Strips Made Social from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick

Toonlet is a new site where you can create your own cartoon strips with customized characters and leave cartoons as comments in response to other peoples' strips. It's fun, fast and easy. Kids will like it and I do too.

There's lots of sites on the web where you can create your own comic strips but few of them let you build your own characters. On Toonlet there are seven collections of resizable body parts you can mix and match, including one contributed by comic rock-star Peter Bagge, author of the 90's best seller Hate.

Tag 'em!!

From: The Transparent Office ...  

So how do we avoid the informational lawlessness that comes from a bunch of unlinked pages? Answer: tag them. An orphan with tags doesn't scare me at all.

Wierdest Stuff on the internet - RSS feed

From: ReadWriteWeb

What I've done is build a "Best of the Weird Hunting Blogs" RSS feed. You can subscribe to that feed using this URL or by email at the end of this post if you're more into email than RSS.

You can use this same methodology to create a "Best of" feed concerning any topic you're interested in - maybe it's web 2.0 blogs, maybe it's environmental news, maybe it's the contemporary civil rights movement (please, that would be awesome).

On Corporate blogs and wikis

Hemant tells me that Satyam has a whole blogosphere inside the corporate intranet - which Satyam intends to use as a Knowledge management tool - I think it does the same things as what Prof. McAfee describes as "above the flow wikis" - knowledge management outside the day to day flow of work. Hemant also tells me hat some blogs are immensely popular and act as incentives for others also to blog about their work  - indeed Satyam has found some way to overcome " the challenge of getting people to use above-the-flow wikis".

Read on - the quote below is interesting ...

Source: Why Not Widen the Flow? by Andrew McAfee

One of Michael's first posts was about the distinction between using wikis and other social software 'in the flow' of work versus 'above the flow.' As he explains:

• In-the-Flow wikis enable people do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual team rooms, and project management systems.
  

• Above-the-Flow wikis invite users to step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do. These wikis are typically replacing knowledge management systems (or creating knowledge management systems for the first time).

Michael's experience has shown him that in-the-flow wikis get heavily used (especially, I'd add, if they actually do replace previous collaboration technologies) while above-the-flow ones attract more sporadic contributions. He makes the great point that:... the challenge of getting people to use above-the-flow wikis is an above-the-flow thing, not a wiki thing. Left to their own devices, people don't collaborate very much in above-the-flow ways. That was one of the great (if depressing) learnings of the Knowledge Management movement.

One conclusion I take away from Michael's insight is that business leaders, if they're serious about Enterprise 2.0, should think of ways to put contributions in the flow, as opposed to above it. There are a couple ways to do this. The first, and most obvious, is simply to say something like "This project will be managed via a wiki, not email, project management software, etc." This doesn't redefine anyone's job; it just changes one of the tools used to do the job.

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Designing Interactions: Book recommendation

Designing Interactions from Signal vs. Noise by Jason

The book looks at the evolution and breakthroughs of interface and industrial design over the last 40 odd years. The history traces a squiggly line through the invention of the mouse, the graphical user interface, the PC, the laptop, the handheld, gaming, online services, the internet, and beyond.

What we just discussed is here ...

Postalz & Scrapblog - Doing More With Digital Photos from Read/WriteWeb by Sarah Perez

When you go on vacation, you no longer pack canisters of film for taking vacation photos - you just pack a digital camera and a handful of batteries. If the hotel has wi-fi, you might even upload photos from the day's activities to flickr in the evening. However, when it comes time to send postcards back home, you still have to browse through the assorted offerings from the gift shop, emblazoned with hokey "wish you were here" sentiments overtop images that look nothing like the place you're visiting.

Now there's a new service called postalz that lets you create and send digital postcards using your own images instead.

Who holds most data about us?

Marshal Kirkpack Says ...

Google and Facebook, two companies that hold more user data and do more with it than almost any other consumer service on the market

Source: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick

Isn't he a bit too enthusiastic and ignoring the "old economy" completely?
I think companies who "hold more user data" and "do more with it" than others surely would be Banks and other financial institutions (I am counting out governments as they are not "consumer services") than Google or Facebook for 2 reasons:

1. How many people have accounts with these two companies as compared to how many have accounts with Banks?
2. How much important is data like say "my search history" or "my friend list" as compared to "my credit history" ??

Need I say more .... ?

Check out my blog for more on this

Good practices for Feed Readers

Why FeedDemon is Better Than Google Reader and Bloglines from Digital Inspiration by Amit

It lists some very good features for a RSS Feed Reader which help reduce content noise and information overload

Real Time Watches - CES 2008 is happening a tons of blogs are live-blogging the event. I am not much interested in gadgets so I have created a new watch for "CES" in FeedDemon.

If there's a news story in my subscription that contain keywords like CES, it automatically appears in the Watch bin and I easily skip it. At the same time, I like to read every story that mentions "Matt Cutts" so there's a watch for Mr Cutts and so on.

Reduce RSS Stress - RSS is not like email - so you don't have to read everything. If there are too many unread stories in your reader, this new Panic Button will allow you to mark all those items as read which were published say more than 48 hours ago.

iGoogle & MyYahoo to morph into Social Networks

A comment on Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network

I am glad that Google is turning IGoogle into a social network sites for Americans and Europeans. The strategy of leaving Orkut to the Brazilians and Indians was a wise choice.

Anyone offended :-) ?

Music Aggregator

Idiomag: Sweet Online Music Magazine Now With Attention Data Import from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick

Idiomag is a fascinating project that combines syndicated media content, user feedback, recommendation technology and now Attention Data to produce a very attractive personalized "web magazine" about music.

Idiomag site has just added the ability to pull in your listening history from a variety of other services (Pandora, Last.fm, iLike, Mog and MyStrands) in order to personalize your content. Unannounced but also newly available is APML import, a very exciting means to allow users to personalize web content based on their activity on any other site that supports APML export.

The degree of personalization is really impressive. The automated integration of text and media is particularly striking. Just like Pandora or Last.fm, your recommendations get increasingly fine tuned by voting for each "article" you like or dislike. My APML file doesn't have much music in it but I plugged my Pandora profile into Idiomag and am already discovering some cool new music. It's an awesome product that is best experienced by trying it out.

Yahoo's Mobile Platform

This can become a table turner and help many small webcos to launch their existing service on Mobiles ...

Yahoo! announced tonight that it will be turning its mobile service, Yahoo! Go, into an open platform for 3rd party developers. Unlike Google's Android OS, the Yahoo! Go platform will work on more than 250 mobile devices that Go already works on.

PaidContent's MocoNews points out that though Go "comes preloaded on some phones made by Motorola, LG, Samsung and Nokia, carriers in the United States strip the software from the phones."

53 CSS-Techniques You Could Use

From: 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn't Live Without

CSS is important. And it is being used more and more often. Cascading Style Sheets offer many advantages you don't have in table-layouts - and first of all a strict separation between layout, or design of the page, and the information, presented on the page. Thus the design of pages can be easily changed, just replacing a css-file with another one. Isn't it great? Well, actualy, it is.

Here are 53 CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites.

1. CSS Based Navigation

2. Navigation Matrix Reloaded

3. CSS Tabs

4. CSS Bar Graphs (CSS For Bar Graphs)

5. Collapsing Tables: An Example

6. Adam's Radio & Checkbox Customisation Method

7. CSS Image Replacement

8. CSS Shadows (CSS Shadows Roundup)

9. CSS Rounded Corners Roundup (Nifty Corners)

10. Drop Cap - Capital Letters with CSS

11. Define Image Opacity with CSS

12. How to Create a Block Hover Effect for a List of Links

13. Pullquotes with CSS (Automatic Pullquotes with JavaScript and CSS

14. CSS Diagrams

15. CSS Curves

16. Footer Stick allows for the footer of a Web page to appear either at the bottom of the browser window or the bottom of the Web page content – whichever is visually lowest.

17. CSS Image Map

18. CSS Image Pop-Up

19. CSS Image Preloader

20. CSS Image Replacement for Buttons

21. Link Thumbnail

22. CSS Map Pop

23. PHP-based CSS Style Switcher

24. CSS Unordered List Calender (CSS Styled Calender )

25. CSS-Based Forms: Techniques

26. CSS-Based Tables: Techniques

27. Printing Web-Documents and CSS

28. Improved Links-Display for Print-Layouts with CSS

29. CSS-Submit Buttons

30. CSS Teaser Box

31. CSS Tricks for Custom Bullets

32. Ticked Off Links Reloaded

33. CSS Zooming

34. Creating a Star Rater using CSS

35. The ways to style visited Links

36. PDF, ZIP, DOC Links Labeling

37. Displaying Percentages with CSS

38. Image Floats without the Text Wrap

39. Let visitors decide, whether or not will they open link in a new window

40. Simple accessible external links

41. Zebra Table with JavaScript and CSS

42. Vertical Centering with CSS (Horizontal and Vertical Centering with CSS

43. Unobtrusive Sidenotes

44. Image Caption with CSS (Styled Images with Caption )

45. Dynamic Piechart with CSS

46. Format Footnotes with CSS

47. Hierarchical Sitemap with CSS

48. Snook's Resizable Underlines

49. Switchy McLayout: An Adaptive Layout Technique

50. StyleMap: CSS+HTML Visual Sitemap

51. Custom Reading Width

52. CSS Alert Message

53. CSS Production Notes

StartUp Lifecycle Waterfall

Where there's muck, there's brass from Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky (Thanks for the link Kalpesh)

.. the great thing is that as you solve each additional gnarly problem, your business and market grows substantially.

You start out with good design, then you add some good features and triple your customer base by solving lots of problems, and then you do some marketing and triple your customer base again because now lots of people learn about your solution to their pain, and then you hire sales people and triple your customer base yet again because now the people who know about your solution are reminded to actually buy it, and then you add more features to solve more problems for even more people, and eventually you actually have a chance to reach enough people with your software to make the world a better place.

 

Making Presentation Interesting!

Edit Clip Art Images inside PowerPoint Presentations from Digital Inspiration by Amit

If you want to know more ... read the original post :-)

The journey of RSS

Worth a read ... what trends can people spot from this ???

2007: The Year in RSS from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick

For whatever reason, it's the consumer space where RSS remains the strongest. ... Enterprise adoption seems in reality to be lagging far behind where it ought to, though.

The Big Events in RSS for 2007

• Facebook Introduced Millions of People to Syndication
• Google Bought Feedburner
• Google Reader Takes the Lead
• Feed Services Began to Tackle Prioritization
• Cross Platform
• Yahoo! Releases Pipes
• Feed Publishing Continued to Expand

Do read the full post to read the details of each of the above bullets ...

Customer Service!

Lessons from T-Mobile's support from Signal vs. Noise by Ryan

A few years ago I switched from Cingular to T-Mobile because Cingular's customer service stunk. My experience today was another proof that I made the right choice.

I called T-Mobile and expected to wait on hold. Much to my surprise, T-Mobile doesn't make you wait. They take your number instead and call you back. Three minutes later, my phone rang. 

Today my comatose phone gave a familiar chirp. T-Mobile had texted me this message:

An Engineer has reviewed your trouble ticket and a resolution has been found. Thank you for choosing T-Mobile.

After making a few calls and dancing around the room, I had to reflect on this ..

Web Scrapping

From: The Glory, Bliss and How-to of Screen Scraping for RSS from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick

Not every page on the web publishes an RSS feed, though. Thus the need for these wonderful screen scraping tools. I've written about a variety of tools you can use to create a feed for a site or page that doesn't have one. Sometimes, though, you've got to pull out the big guns. In those cases, it's time for Dapper.

Dapper will let you pull data from almost any web page and get it in a wide variety of outputs, including RSS, email, iCal, a Google Gadget, CSV and Google Maps. Is that incredible or what?

On India's Entrepreneurship Scene

The State of Innovation in India from Read/WriteWeb by Bernard Lunn

However, despite all these advantages and despite thousands of developers in India creating value for Western companies, where is India's killer app? Where is the Microsoft or Google from India? Or being slightly less ambitious where is the Salesforce.com or YouTube from India?

The fundamental issue in India is the risk/reward equation. It is simply too easy for a young developer in India to get paid a lot by an outsourcing firm; then enjoy being headhunted every year for more money. Those of us old enough to see a cycle or two, can see the parallels between Silicon Valley 1999 and Bangalore 2007, when just being able to spell the words of a popular programming language on a Resume meant fame and fortune.

This has been the story for some time but it is changing fast right now and we maybe reaching a tipping point related to innovation in India. Three factors are rapidly narrowing the labor cost arbitrage – weaker dollar, rampant salary inflation in India and new technology that significantly reduces the amount of code that needs to be written.

At the same time, VCs are looking entrepreneurs in the eye and telling them that capital is not a constraint but that you had better find a way to get sustainable advantage and scalability that is not tied to linear growth in headcount.

Innovation is happening today in India. You won't see a lot of it as yet as the interesting ventures are still fairly small and below the radar. But it is happening.

Amazing Write up !!! Very well analysed ... MUST READ ...

Tagging - different uses

Five Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again from Read/WriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick Tagging
 

2. Build a collaborative tag stream for a community of practice

One of the best things about tagging URLs is that all kinds of RSS feeds become available. One community of practice, a loose group of nonprofit technologists, uses the tag "nptech" to mark items of interest in del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, youtube and elsewhere. The feeds for nptech items in all of these services are then combined into one NPtech metafeed.

That makes a good community news feed, but it can be taken even further. At one point as many as 2000 people were using the tag nptech - that can be a lot of information. Consultant Beth Kanter now publishes a summary of each week's highlights from the Nptech feed over at NetSquared.

3. Create a shared items feed and put it on your web page

Many of our readers probably use the shared items feature in Google Reader. That service continues to grow more sophisticated - last week it added any shared items feeds from your Gmail contacts to your list of subscribed feeds, for example.

While that's pretty hot - there's something to be said for baking your own, too. If you tag items something like "toshare" in a service like del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia then you can share URLs that you find outside of Google Reader and you can switch feed readers/tagging services without loosing all your shared items subscribers.