Bookmarklets that I use regularly

What is a bookmarklet?: Bookmarklet is a small javascript code which helps you achieve something directly from your browser without leaving the page. To use a bookmarklet, just drag the link in the subheadings below to your browser bookmarks bar and just click it for the desired functionality.

Readability bookmarklet: Open any Indian news site like rediff or times of India or Economic Times. If you want to read any article, it is very distracting. One very good bookmarklet which can make your life very easy is 'Readabiliy'. You can customize how you want to see the page and it will be rendered like that. No ads no distracting flash. Try one and you will not look back.

bit.ly sidebar : You are reading a good article and you want to tweet it to your friends. You can press the retweet button on the site or go to twitter copy the url and send. But in the first case, there is no easy way to enter your comments and in the second case, the url is very big so you cannot write your comments. This bit.ly sidebar opens on the side after you click with the url shortened. You can enter your comments and tweet it.

Share on Tumblr: You are reading something interesting. You wanted to save  few lines of it for yourself. You can do that with tumblr. You can have a tumblog and using this bookmarklet save text, pics and videos to tumblr directly. See my tumblog here. Visit it for amazing quotes.

Add Zemanta: This is a helper in your blogging. Suppose you are blogging and how good it would be if somebody directly help you link important text, related blogs, contextual images and good tags. That is Zemanta for you. If you are a blog, this will surely help you.

Delicious: The best bookmark manager of the web has a bookmarklet too. You can save your bookmarks by just clicking a button and after saving you will be redirected to to the original page. And whats more, you can even tweet directly from there.

Read Later: If you have opened too many windows for reading and suddenly you feel that you don't have sufficient time to read all of them now you can save them later for reading and read them later. There is another site or ReadItLater also which is also quite useful. But I like the Instapaper's presentation better.

Try them out and  suggest any good bookmarklets that you use.

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Thanks to the NET

This is a post where I want to thank the creators of the internet for it has changed my life in ways i cannot imagine.

How could I hang out with the likes of Seth Godin, Fred Vilson or Steve Pavlina if not for the internet?

How much would I have missed the experienced words of Joel or the head first way of Kathy Sierra?

How much the hacker and painter in me would have lost if not for the essays of Paul Graham?

How would I have missed the satirical takes of Atanu Dey on India or the touching posts of Rajesh for his kid, or the passionate posts of Rashmi and the well researched posts on Sastwingees ?

I am not even touching the increase in my productivity due to the various web applications which we use day in and day out.

Internet like never before makes it easy to hang out(blogs, twitter) with any person of our choice so easy and I am so happy for that.

Apart from being grateful for allowing us to learn from the experiences of the very best in their fields, I want you to point you to two great resources on the net which I am currently using.

I know youtube has lot of videos and channels for various things, but videos in these two places have inspired me very much.

1. TED talks: Ideas worth spreading.

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.

Some of the interesting talks there are why are or aren't we happy? or why we do what we do?

Head over to Ted.com and browse the various videos out there, you will not be disappointed.

2. Stanford University Enterpreneurship corner:

The Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) Entrepreneurship Corner is a free online archive of entrepreneurship resources for teaching and learning. The mission of the project is to support and encourage faculty around the world who teach entrepreneurship to future scientists and engineers, as well as those in management and other disciplines. The site has been developed by a dynamic team of educators, entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP)

Some of the popular videos here are The black swans of Energy Innovation by Vinod Khosla, Dont Kill projects morph them by Merissa Mayer

The whole lists of talks is here.

Dont you think internet deserves kudos for this. How on earth it could have been possible for you to attend those conferences in Stanford University if not for the net.

Thanks to the creators of the internet, you have changed the world definitely for the better.

What do you think the best thing about the internet for you?

Google Notebook Rocks

I didn't use any online notebooks till now, but when I saw the announcement of google notebook on official google blog I decided to try it once. I have to accept that I am hooked. First of all the functionality of notebook is so cool. whenever we are searching for some topic on the net and we encounter variety of materials on the web. We read the material, even if we like only a part of the material presented there, we had to save the whole page or file or else we had to copy the material and place it in a notepad or a doc. It was a little cumbersome. Imagine if we close and accidently hit no on the confirmation dialog..! All our efforts are lost. Come notebook, noting information on the web is very easy. You can copy paste the matter into the notebook using your google account. But what was the feature I liked most was the plugin into the browsers which when installed would make your life mighty simpler. All you have to do is to select some text which you want to note and click on clip on the notebook. This feature is lovely. It gets saved into the notebook. The interface is also clean as other google products. Try it..!

Get Alerts on your mobile for free with Google Calendar...

I was trying the google calendar and was trying to find the similarities and dissimilarities with my most used calendar application - MSOutlook. I found that the differences were not in terms of functionality but it was leveraging in its online nature. There was collobaration between calendars, we can search public events. Calendars can be shared. With the help of shared calendar we can map all our telugu holidays in my calendar. It helps for better planning..All these features on one side... I was not convinced about going for google calendar..But one feature is very impressive.. In my opinion, it can make a lot of difference to our schedule and the way we work.. We can configure google calendar to alert us not on the computer screen... but on our mobile phone... Suddenly the possibilities are unlimited.. We are not at the mercy of sitting in front of our system to get an alert. Mobile phone being a ubiquitous device will help us get alerts any where in the world.. If we take enough time to plan our day..then google will do its mite to help us achieve our goals.... Long live Google...!!

Its a superb peice of software and you should surely try it.. If not for anything else... You can atleast set a reminder for your friends birthday so that you dont forget it and get gyan from him for not wishing...!!!!!!! Try it out at Google Calendar and comment about it ...

Good Telugu Website www.nalamothu.net

Today I was searching for reviews of radio channels in hyderabad. I found an article in a blog which was written by a doctor. Clicking my way through this site I found a complete website in telugu with all the links like a portal. The link for review of radio stations is
http://telugu-talk.blogspot.com/2006/12/fm-radio-stations-in-hyderabad-review.html

It also had links to various blogs and websites. I was really very happy that a telugu person has a commendable web presence serving all the other telugu people. Whats more is that he even offers free services to other people.

Free Services: Search engine optimization and Adsense placement. Guidance on System and software problems. Advice on Medical and Health issues.

These are the lines directly taken from the site. visit the site at www.nalamothu.net
There are various links and the link for currently running contests on the net was interesting. visit it and enjoy..

Looking beyond general search engines--Dont Search and filter but Search on filtered results

I dont know how many people's first web stop is google for information they want... but I think its a massive proportion of the web users. Remembering url's is almost passe now. Just type it into to google and off we go. But the problem with the contemporary search engines is that we have to wade to lot of search results to exactly reach our point, I mean the information we wanted. But in the age of web 2.0 which is all about collaboration, there is a better way of getting the most relevant results. The answer is social bookmarking sites.

Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as Social bookmarking is a web based service to share Internet bookmarks. In this system, while surfing the net if a person comes across a highly interesting or useful topic he can submit the link to the bookmarking site with a tag or a set of tags. Other users can search this links with the set of tags users have submitted and directly going through the whole cycle of searching, reviewing and deciding its usability. In this way he can use his time better and also discover obscure but relevant posts. In this way the site can become more accessible. The next advantage is that it automatically ranks the links on the basis of the number of people submitted this link. If more people like the matter in that link more people will submit it and hence it will become more popular and its rank goes up. Thus the next advantage is that most relevant links will always come at the top and also that the relevance is measured by a human and not a machine and hence it will be more useful to the end user.

It has some disadvantages also.

It is still in infancy as people still have to know about this and submit the link to these type of sites for other people to browse.

The tags with which the pages are labelled are not standard and the user may use his own tags for a link which has been tagged with other label by other person. Hence search may not always produce the right results.

Some people may use this to manipulate the popularity of their site by submitting their url many times to such sites thereby increasing the ranking of the site, even if it doesn't contain the best information on the labelled topic.

But on the whole it is a alternative to the contemporary search engines where the ranking is decided by a non-humans. If this technology matures and good checks are in place to filter out manipulations for traffic then I think it can be more useful and may even race with contemporary search engines.!

Famous social book marking sites are delicious and digg. I have placed links for them after the post. If you find this article useful and informative you can submit it to respective sites.

I have also added the feed options on the site. You can subscribe it via a reader or directly subscribe via e-mail.

My most visited sites in 2006.

http://google.co.in

As for most of the people this is my the default page on the internet. What is new this year is that I have customized my home page to include the rss feeds from the blogs that I frequent,a crossword puzzle, gmail and some photos which keep scrolling. This is the first thing I visit daily.
http://news.google.com

This is the place I visit for the latest breaking national and international news. I used to visit it more frequently but now the news is not getting updated in realtime.Now I mostly use rediff for news
http://mail.yahoo.com

Even after lot of mail services launched, none has made me leave yahoo mail completely. This year it launched a new outlook type reading pane interface which made me hook to it completely.
http://orkut.com

I joined this in febrauary 2006. This is a place where I keep in touch with my friends without really chatting or talking but just by reading their scraps. I fell in love with the orkut communities which have given me access to lot of lovely books which I would have never read otherwise.
http://in.rediff.com

This is the best news site for indian news in my opinion. I always spend atleast 15 minutes whenever I visit this site. Cricket is covered well. There are lot of news comments and also inspiring stories. Its rediff bol messenger allows us to send sms to any mobile in india free of cost.
http://news.cnet.com

This has opened my eyes to the world outside and the various blogs that regularly discuss the issues of software and the internet. This is my best find for the year.
http://esnips.com

This is a site I learnt through orkut and I am using it for uploading and downloading various files. I have downloaded all the best sellers from this site. My favourite find of 2006

http://meebo.com

This IM has made possible IM conversations even when lot of companies including mine blocked the IM communication through firewalls. It has also allowed simultaneous communication over two different service provided and hence attracted me very much.
http://wikipedia.org

This is also one site which never loses its popularity. It is the best online encyclopedia in the world and I have used it for numerous searches and sometimes to finish my never ending books by reading the plot from that site