Sometimes Silent

Read this over at Mashable: http://mashable.com/2007/02/28/zoto/

Here’s an excerpt:

If you have a free account on Zoto AFTER 10am CST on Wednesday, your account information will be imported into Zoto 3.0, and flagged as a non-paid account. When we launch 3.0 sometime on Thursday, your account will be available for limited login, but you will be required to upgrade to a paid account to have immediate access to your photos….For those of you NOT wishing to upgrade to a paid account, your images from your 2.0 account will be available for download (or deletion at your discretion) after the 12th of March on a landing page when you login to 3.0. Those archives will contain ALL photos and meta data added to your account while it was on 2.0. Once you start the download, you will be given 24 hours to complete any other archive downloads you need. After that, your account and archive will be deleted from the Zoto system.

I signed up early with Zoto and have pictures hosted there, one of my photos was even featured by them. However, this is the first I’ve heard of the free account option going away. Unfortunately the Wednesday mentioned, is the one that has already passed and I can no longer get to my photos there. It’s too bad, I did like their options for blog posting, but not enough to pay for the feature. I have copies of the photos I had uploaded there so you’ll see more pics from my free Picasa / Google hosted site now.

Update on the Zoto situation from their devblog: http://www.zoto.com/dev-blog/?p=103

You upload a picture and choose what you want it for from a dropdown. It’ll crop it and you can download it for free. Handy if you just want a quick way to make an avatar and if you change your avatars often.

Link.

So awhile back I opened an account on Squidoo. It’s a web 2.0 site which seeks to get as many folks as possible to create articles for them on whatever they’d like. These “articles” are in the form of webpages and ads are served on them. The nice part is that Squidoo shares the revenue with the author.

As a writer I find I already have enough places for my writing but as a business person I can see that gaining new “eyeballs” could be an advantage if the site gets big and any form of income which can keep giving is also intriguing.

If you’d like to sign up as well (it’s free) here’s my referral link.

So while wandering around the net looking at the so called web2.0 sites (we may as well give up, that term is here to stay) I found this site called 30 Day Tags the bold button saying Add Your Site caught me eye and I noticed that you didn’t need to register anywhere for an account. This was different from all the other tagging sites.

I experimentally added a site and was asked for an email as part of the short form, it was so they could send me a notice when my entry would expire. And they did and that’s the only email I’ve gotten from them since then.

The other main feature once you had an entry was that you could rate resources.

So, I wondered, could a site like this take off? I feared massive spamming by poker sites etc. But perhaps once mass amounts of people join the ratings will filter that out since those will all be pushed to the bottom?

At any rate, I like the graphics of the page and the relative ease of adding items — those items and a bit of luck and attention can get a 2.0 site off the ground and turn it into a hit.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, tagging

So I learned something new the other day about mouse control and Firefox.

If you’ve got a middle button, usually it’s also the scroll wheel, you can use it to open links in a new tab if you’re using FireFox!

I love this because I often open new sites in new tabs rather than a new window or on the same page.

So, there ya go, I’m just a little bit geekier, and maybe so are you!

Technorati Tags: firefox, computer tips

Here’s a short video with a “the show must go on” kind of guy:

Did you notice the one frame ad at the end? Did you click on it?

Well that’s the model of this new video hosting site. They put a one frame ad at the end of a video and if someone clicks on it the ad revenue gets shared with the video creator, with Revver, and even with an affiliate who links to the video (me, in this case).

It could be a neat way to host viral videos whose popularity would normally cost you and arm leg in bandwidth costs if the link got passed around.

As you an see above, Revve offers you code to embed a player on your site, or it gives you a thumbnail or regular text link option.

Technorati tags: viral videos, web2.0

Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body

But the first clues that otherwise healthy people who do not get enough sleep or who shift their sleep schedules because of work, family or lifestyle may be endangering their health emerged from large epidemiological studies that found people who slept the least appeared to be significantly more likely to die.

There isn’t anything conclusive in this article but it has some interesting tidbits including that folks with low sleep levels have trouble balancing their blood sugar level.

Even though I created a Sleep is for the Weak shirt, I am not one who can go on no sleep for a long time. Lately I’ve noticed I like to get at least 8 hours. The time I go to sleep also seems to be a factor. If I go to bed at 4 AM, even if I wake up close to noon, I don’t feel the same as if I went to bed around at midnight and woke up at 8 AM.

Technorati tags: sleep, losing sleep

Spam comments suck the life out of bloggers. I don’t look forward to notices that show up immediately after I’ve posted a comment. Inevitably it is a spam comment which I have to set for spam deletion rather than a legitimate comment for me to “approve”. Trackback spam is even worse.

What breathes life back into a blogger is a genuine comment or a thoughtful email. Or even someone talking about the blog or a post you made.

This also goes for podcasting. I received an email from a kind woman who wrote me a heartwarming note which she has given me permission to share:

Thank you for the podcasts. My son sent me the link to your podcast. At the beginning of the year I lost a lot of my vision; reading had become very difficult if not impossible at times. Being a bookworm I especially missed my books. My son started scouting out sites where I could listen to books. While my vision has recently improved enough that I can read some I find that I still enjoy listening to fine readers like yourself.

Thank you for a much needed service. Many of us depend on people like you to fulfill our need for literature and the sound of words and ideas and knowledge well written and well read.

Darlene

Next time I am having to delete yet another spam comment about party poker, I’m going to re-read her note and take a deep breath.

Thanks again Darlene, and here’s to the bloggers and podcasters of the world plugging away dispite spam, low traffic, no pay and/or little recognition!

Technorati tag: blogging, podcasting.

the electric sheep screen-saver

This is an interesting Open Source app.

When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Props to The Safehouse - The Workshop Forum

Technorati Tag: open source, screensaver

Julie Leung: Seedlings & Sprouts

Well I’m showing how much of a blog newbie I am, I made a comment on Julie’s blog and I somehow think there’s some easy way to show the comment I made here without having to type and copy and paste it.

Or maybe that method is now discouraged because of spam?

At any rate, I’ve been following Julie’s blog for a few months now. I find her writing very calming and yet thought provoking as well. It sometimes includes geek, tech and internet related topics but I see it mainly about life. She usually includes interesting pictures in her posts as well.