Flickr Updates Search Feature

Flickr is one of the largest and most used photo sites, but its search function hasn’t always been the most intuitive. This week the company announced a noteworthy redesign that makes searching for photos easier.

For starters, the new “View” control (located at the top of the page, just below the search box) will display results in a thumbnail gallery view across different sizes and formats (small, medium, detail, slideshow). As Flickr’s blog states,”both small and medium views have an ‘i’ icon on every thumbnail.”

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'Happiness meter' analyses blogs, tweets

A method of measuring happiness based on blogs and Twitter has helped researchers highlight the happiest days in recent US history.

The software created by Dr Peter Dodds and Dr Chris Danforth of the University of Vermont, collects sentences from blogs and 'tweets', zeroing in on the happiest and saddest days of the last few years.

"We wanted to capitalise on the explosion of blogs and now Twitter to build an instrument that would give us some measure of the emotional signal from a large collective of people," says Dodds co-author of a paper that appears in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

"All this new data is basically helping us gain insight into social phenomena that didn't exist a few years ago."


The scientists started at the website wefeelfine.org, which combs through 2.3 million blogs looking for sentences that begin with "I feel" or "I am feeling."


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Google Doc Now Supports Office 2007 File Formats

Google on June 1, 2009 declared that its Google Docs will support Office 2007 file formats such as docx, xlsx, pptx and so on. The extensions .doc, .odt, xls, .ods, .ppt, .csv, .html, .txt, .rtf, and others were already supported. Now it will support

* For spreadsheets: .xls, .xlsx, .ods, .csv, .tsv, .txt, .tsb
* For documents: .doc, .docx, .html, plain text (.txt), .rtf
* For presentations: .ppt, .pps

Google Docs is an web application or service provided by Google that you can use to share, create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with people all over the world. It offers you free Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and form application. Advantages are clearly visible. You never need to worry about overlapping revisions or heavy email attachments. Above all, you can store everything online, that implies you need no additional back up and that you can access the files from anywhere you like. With so much to avail and all for free, I find its a great tool to manae your documents online. Still when Microsoft Launched Office 2007 started stuck. This now has solved and you can enjoy Google Docs in full fledge.

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Update Sulumits Retsambew - Blogging Tips

1. Consider your audience
Even if your blog is generally personal, still, it would be better to consider the minds of your readers. You have to think of something that would interest them.
After all, most of the reasons of people who write blogs are not at all confined to their own personal motives. Most of them would love to be “heard” (or read) and would love to be known, in some way or another, even for just a minute. Hence, it is very important to come with a write up that everybody can understand, not necessarily that these people can relate to it but they can understand it.

2. Pictures speaks a thousand words
To make your blogging worth the browsing effort of your readers, it would be extremely nice if you will put some pictures in it. It does not necessarily mean you have to place a picture of yourself. Any photographs will do as long as it does not pose danger or insult to anyone who will be reading your blog.

3. Make constructive and beneficial blogs
Even if you are free to write anything you wan to say to the world, still, it would be better to create some write-ups that would be beneficial to your readers. After all, its information technology that you have there so better be inclined to provide information rather than sheer quirky entertainment.

4. Avoid making multifaceted and complicated blogs
In order to have an interesting blogs, try not to use some highly technical and highfalutin words. After all, it is not a science discourse or a debate that you are making, so better stick to simple facts and short blogs. Bear in mind that most people who use the Internet usually do more scanning than scrutinizing each site word for word. Therefore, it would be better to come with blogs that will not bore your readers just because you have these lengthy articles.

5. Make it interactive
As much as possible and if your capacity will allow it, make your blog interactive. Yu can do this by placing some video or audio clips in your blog.

You can even place an area for comments or for some feedbacks. In this way, you can get some impressions or reactions of other people. Who knows, you might even gain some friends just by making them feel at home in your blog site. Indeed, blogs are not created just for the mere fun of it. It also has its own purpose in the world of the Internet. therefore, for people who wish to harness their craft, as far as writing is concerned, blogs are the best way to do it. And as they say, blogging is the contemporary term of creative and commercial writing.

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Bet on Office Web Apps Over Google Apps, Analyst Says

Microsoft may have had its hand forced by Web-based alternatives, but the software giant will deliver a free Web version of Office, called Office Web Apps, that will launch in tandem with the paid, desktop version of Office 2010, which is in technical preview now and due to launch in the first half of next year.
With both online (Office Web Apps) and offline (Office 2010) versions of Office forthcoming, Microsoft seemingly has all the bases covered: a new, feature-rich desktop productivity suite and a lightweight online version to compete with emerging Web-based free alternatives such as Google Docs and the Zoho suite.

Slideshow: A Visual Overview of Office 2010

But Microsoft is also in a challenging position where it must avoid cannibalizing sales of its own lucrative desktop productivity suite ($20 billion in revenue forecasted for 2009), yet not lose out to online alternatives.

Sheri McLeish, analyst at Forrester Research, says that Microsoft's expansion of Office will be good for the industry and provide Microsoft with a worthy one-two punch.

"If we didn't have these free alternatives from Google and Zoho, surely Microsoft would not be doing this," says McLeish. "But all the competition in the productivity tools space benefits businesses and consumers."

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Top 5 non-obvious feature enhancements to Office 2010

The question has been asked, who really needs to use Microsoft Office these days? The answer is, anyone who is in the business of professionally generating content for a paying customer. Word 2010 may not be the optimum tool for the everyday blogger, and Excel 2010 maybe not the best summer trip planner, just as a John Deere is not the optimum vehicle for a trip to the grocery store. But in recent years, Microsoft is the only software producer that has come close to understanding what professional content creators require in their daily toolset.

So far, the improvements we've found from actually using the Office 2010 Technical Preview released Monday (as opposed to the ones Microsoft told us about) can mainly be described as usability enhancements -- tools that appear to be responses to how people actually use the products. Compared to Office 2007, which threw out the old instruction manual with regard to how applications should work, Office 2010's changes are subtler, slicker, and less ostentatious. Of those we've noticed in our initial tests, here are five which we feel will make compelling arguments for at least some users to upgrade:

5. Embedding Web videos in PowerPoint presentations. Technically, it's possible to embed a YouTube video into a PowerPoint 2007 presentation, but you need a third-party plug-in to pull it off. Otherwise, PowerPoint is only geared to play locally accessible files, essentially using a Media Player component.








One of the very few functional changes to PowerPoint 2010 is the addition of a mechanism that enables you to embed YouTube and other videos into a presentation the same way you'd embed them into a Web page: by copying the HTML code directly in. PowerPoint 2010 (gauging from the Technical Preview) will allow you to preview the video in-place without having to view the presentation as a slideshow first, which demonstrates the depth of functionality Microsoft truly intends for this component -- apparently an in-place Adobe Flash object. It will be even nicer when this feature works; in our tests, the new component often did not locate the video online and looked for it in the "My Documents" directory instead.

A new restricted editing feature in Word preserves the formatting while enabling named editors to add and change content.4. Restrict Editing command in Word 2010. Many publishing organizations use Word as their principal tool for editing textual content, which means collaborators shuttle multiple documents between authors, editors, and proofreaders. Microsoft's collaboration tools are supposed to enable only certain parties to make changes. But in the publishing business, formatting codes are the keys to the final formatting of a production document, and if someone who has access rights can change those paragraph formats, even accidentally (which is easier to accomplish than you might imagine, thanks to customizable document templates belonging to each user), the entire production process can be held up, sometimes for days, while formatters work out the kinks.

This simple tool may go a long way toward preventing these kinks from popping up. On a per-user basis, Restrict Editing (located in the Developer panel, which is not displayed by default) can prevent named individuals from making certain types of changes to a document, even if he's generally permitted to make changes. Among the available restrictions are changes to styles, which creates the possibility for a safeguard that publishers can use to prevent authors from changing manuscripts willy-nilly to suit their tastes. (Can you tell I've been in the editing business?)

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Microsoft planing free, online version of Office

The technology titan tries to stop Google Docs from encroaching on its turf.

Everyone predicted Microsoft Corp. wouldn't take long to fire back against Google Inc.'s latest foray into its home turf.

It took less than a week.

On Monday, Microsoft said it would offer a free version of its popular Office software suite that would run on the Internet.

The Redmond, Wash., company didn't mention its archrival by name, but analysts saw Monday's move as a strategy by Microsoft to protect one of its most profitable businesses against Google, which already dominates the Internet search market.

The Web-based version of the Office suite will be available next year.

"Microsoft was forced to provide a free product" as an answer to Google Docs, a suite of free, browser-based document and spreadsheet editing software, said Sheri McLeish, an analyst with Forrester Research. "It's a very competitive market out there, and this was Microsoft's opportunity to one-up Google by offering a much better product."

The announcement, made at Microsoft's developers conference in New Orleans, is the latest tit-for-tat in an intense competition between the two technology giants.

The Mountain View, Calif., search giant said last week that it would develop an operating system designed to attract users away from personal computers, where Microsoft is ubiquitous. Google's Chrome OS and software would run on the Internet, where Google has a commanding share of the Web audience.

Last month Microsoft released Bing, its answer to Google's popular search engine.

By giving away versions of its Office software, Microsoft risks cannibalizing one of its most profitable products. The company's business software division, which includes Office, made $9.3 billion in profit from $14.3 billion in sales during the first three quarters of its 2009 fiscal year. The unit also has revenue from other software applications and services such as Microsoft Exchange, but the bulk of its sales comes from Office, which includes the Word and Excel applications.

About 80% of companies recently surveyed by Forrester use Microsoft's Office. Less than 8% use other document editing software, including IBM Corp.'s Lotus Symphony, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice and Google Docs.

For Microsoft, the imperative is to maintain its dominance, according to Melissa Webster, an analyst with IDC. She said a recent survey found that nearly everyone who used Web-based document editing software such as Google Docs also used Microsoft Office.

Many, for example, create a document using Excel, then upload it to the Web to share with colleagues, who may read and edit the spreadsheet using a Web-based program such as Zoho Sheet or Google Docs.

"Web-based tools are not taking share away from Microsoft's desktop Office suite," Webster said. "But to the extent that these products are complementary, Microsoft needs to get in the game. They risk losing users as people get more comfortable using Web-based tools. And they risk losing their edge."

Microsoft's group product manager for Office, Chris Bryant, said its customers were increasingly using the Web to share and edit documents.

"It's something our users have said they'd like," Bryant said. "Customers are telling us they expect to use the Web-based applications as companions to their desktop software."

Bryant declined to outline how Microsoft would make money with the move, but hinted that business models could include advertising and fees for premium services such as online storage of large files.

The free versions won't include all the features of the desktop software, priced between $70 for a basic student version and about $350 for the professional version. For the upcoming software suite Office 2010, Microsoft plans to let users edit video in PowerPoint and manipulate images in Word -- features that would be unavailable in the free versions.

Investors didn't appear to be concerned about Microsoft's proposed giveaway. On Monday its shares gained 84 cents, or 3.7%, to close at $23.23

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