Opinions, Expertise, Passion.

I often come across new websites, quite often by accident, or by indirection in links from looking at other details. The Internet is an amazing place, and one could spend all day reading such a variety information and only touch on just a few specific topics.

I think it’s important to share interesting and new sites, often it’s a referral from others that provide for enjoyable and useful reading. Here are mine in return. Sites which I bookmarked and intended to review again.

99 Designs — www.99designs.com

Need something designed? 99designs connects clients needing design work such as logo designs, business cards or web sites to a thriving community of 17,781 talented designers.

Wufoo — www.wufoo.com

Wufoo strives to be the easiest way to collect information over the Internet.

Our HTML form builder helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code.

Mako Templates — www.makotemplates.org

Mako is a template library written in Python. It provides a familiar, non-XML syntax which compiles into Python modules for maximum performance. Mako’s syntax and API borrows from the best ideas of many others, including Django templates, Cheetah, Myghty, and Genshi. Conceptually, Mako is an embedded Python (i.e. Python Server Page) language, which refines the familiar ideas of componentized layout and inheritance to produce one of the most straightforward and flexible models available, while also maintaining close ties to Python calling and scoping semantics.

Venture Beat — www.venturebeat.com

I came across this site when reading Developer Analytics: Facebook game Mob Wars making $22,000 a day.

VentureBeat’s mission is to provide news and information about private companies and the venture capital that fuels them. Founder Matt Marshall covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News until he left in Sept. 2006 to launch VentureBeat as an independent company. VentureBeat will focus initially on Silicon Valley, and gradually expand to cover innovation hubs around the globe. Its mission in each region will be the same: to provide insider news and data about the entrepreneurial and venture community that is useful to decision makers.

Developer Analytics — www.developeranalytics.com

The previous article referenced this site, with the tagline “the world’s first social media ratings and reporting services.” I like the categories used in reports.

• Reach - Unique traffic.
• Audience Profile - Demographics and sociographics breakdown. Interest clouds.
• Engagement -Impressions. Average page views per user. Return users.
• Growth -New Users. Churn Rates. Viral Factors.
• Monetization - CPM and CPA revenue potential.

SXSW Interactive — www.sxsw.com/interactive

I’ve heard of South By South West Conference before, and this is it. SXSW Interactive: March 13-17, 2009 -The Brightest Minds in Emerging Technology

SXSW Interactive The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

Actually sounds rather interesting, and different.

Pulse 2.0 — www.pulse2.com

Pulse 2.0 is a company that is driven by our passion of technology and entrepreneurship. We use Pulse 2.0 to share our thoughts on Web 2.0.

I posted on my Plurk I wished for an easier way to update my status on social sites such as Facebook , Twitter and Plurk . The answer I got was Ping.fm. It is a closed beta, but the code is pingyoulater to get it.

It’s wicked cool, easy and just works. It also interfaces to 17 different sites, I only use 4 of them.

I came across a wicked cool tool at wondle.net. I wanted to create a word cloud for the back of a business card, now I know how.

I’ve been researching what software exists for a Mac to produce video like screen recording and audio. Multiple people have recommended Camtasia however this is Windows only.

I today with some research came across Jing Project which at first test seems perfect, easy to install, use and even deploy to an integrated Screencast. And it’s free.

What’s perplexing is it’s a product from the same company, techsmith yet it’s not listed as a product?

I just came across Moo as a link from Fotolog.

This site gives you the option to get a photo like card on the front, and text on the back. The interesting part is that you can do 100 different photos in the batch of 100, and it’s the size that grabs me. I’ve been looking for something different with my various sites including Admiring Creation and Heavy Horse Day and GeekErr. Just now trying to get all my photos ready for printing!

I came across an interesting site while reading World’s Best Presentation Contest Winners Announced by Guy Kawasaki called SlideShare.

It’s a happy medium between the bulk of image sites like Flickr and Yahoo Photos and video sites like Revver and YouTube where you can easily add Text to what you are wanting to say in a Slide Show. Interestingly enough, like most Web 2.0 Communities people will come up with ideas you never considered, for example check out Evangeline Lilly where this is effectively a portfolio photo shoot of an actress. Clever.

As I write this blog I have over 90 draft blog posts. That’s 9-0. Why do I have so many posts? The main reason is I want to say something, and I’ve either not completed it, or researched it sufficiently to consider the entry complete.

This frustrates me as sometimes I just want to get the word out on something, or of my opinion, or of something great I’ve discovered. I do it for me, I don’t really care if anybody actually reads my stuff, but I’m surprised sometimes when I get comments how people actually get to see my blog.

JotThat is a surprisingly simple yet brilliant idea. It’s quite simply a site for making Jots, making quick notes, making a passing comment, noting a thought, something you want to either remember or something you want to say in a simple Jot form.

What makes JotThat in my eyes? Well it’s simple, and I strive for simple. It’s extremely easy to use. It’s built on MySQL, so that gains my attention. It’s something just a little different from everything you see each day.

I especially like the new feature of being able to email your Jots to your account. I was at the train station tonight, then later at dinner with some great input from somebody. I wanted to write it down (I forget things a lot more these days), so instead of adding it to notes in my PDA, I simply emailed it to my JotThat account. Easy as!

The site is still in early stages, but please get behind a project. I always like to get referrals from people on everything from websites, products, even services like a good dentist. I recommend you check this one out, as well as supporting the MySQL open source community.

Want to know your Internet Connection speed in a real world test?
Want a fancy graphical presentation of your internet Speed?

SpeedTest.Net has you covered. As you can see that even provide graphics results to can use on your own site.

So just how much does my Bittorrent download of Stargate and StarGate Atlantis weekly epsiodes affect my link (Azureus states about 20kB/s down and 20kB/s up. Here is the results. Hmmm, seems if affects my link much more then it really states!

WebSite: www.meebo.com

If you use Instant Message (IM), but can’t use within an environment, do it via the web. Way Cool

WebSite: del.icio.us

keep your favorite websites, music, books, and more in a place where you can always find them.
share your favorites with family, friends, and colleagues.
discover new and interesting things by browsing popular & related items.

WebSite: www.eyeos.org

eyeOS is an Open Source Web Desktop Environment, commonly known as Web Operating System or Web Office. With eyeOS you can be organized, work and have fun anywhere, using your own personalized Web Desktop. For using eyeOS, you only have to go to your eyeOS server (or use the official eyeOS public server) and log in with your username and password. If you don’t have a username and password, you can create an account from there too.

WebSite: www.protopage.com

Dynamic Web Page with graphical feeds and movable windows (like postit notes)

WebSite: www.thumbshots.org

This site enables you to embed a thumbnail image of a website. Rather cool, except there must be some level of caching for new website requests. This page at the time of saving doesn’t show the thumbshot of the official site.

Below is an example output from website that I got the idea from: