Make your vote count - 2007 Weblog Awards

2007 Weblog Awards : Last few days of voting for your favorite blogs, podcasts, vidcasts and independent content sites - besides voting for those that you've followed over the years or just recently, discover new content from the different categories showcased.    

A Blogger Experience Comparison - 2006 vs. 2007

I'm really not sure when all these changes happened to Blogger, but after not opening this account for a whole year, exploring the control panel has been a surprise and a pleasure. What prompted me really to open Blogger was Prism , which is a Mozilla product that works the opposite of what new and modern browsers are -it is simple and takes away the menu clutter and lets you just play with a specific web application. And so, while I was opening my "Web Apps" in Prism I thought of Blogger and wanted to see how it would feel to blog without the distraction of my web mail open in another tab and an article from Wired on another. Just you and application staring face to face. And so I was really surprised to find that you can now customize your sidebar and easily add content to whatever part of your blog. This was not so when I started using Blogger - I remembered sites that featured clever ways of creating Tags for blog entries, for inserting a header image ( which I wrote about 2 years ago ) and for other things that the platform lacked ( or that other blogging platforms offered ). The templates are basically the same as before ( as I remember ) except for 1 or two additional templates. But right now, choosing a template is much easier. Testing how fast it was to setup a blog - I could very well say that it is easier and much more polished than before - setup could take as fast as 5 - 10 minutes including inserting a widget, adsense and tags to the sidebar. Looking back - to add content to the sidebar meant editing the HTML and knowing what you we're doing, which is in contrast to what is capable through the control panel right now, adding anything is just a few clicks, copy-paste and save away. Letting users add javascript without opening the HTML makes customization fast and easy. 

Note:  The new blogger template customization tool needs you to upgrade first - which means that customization that you've done with your current template would be lost, but you can always go back or revert to your old template if you wish to do so.  For this blog, I used the new template for a couple of days but reverted back,  as I'm more used to HTML than XML ( you can download the XML and edit it elsewhere to customize, etc. ,but the point of the tool is to give the user freedom to change parts of the blog without understanding the code )

Overall - improvements may not be "astounding" for most, but they sure made me feel that the product as whole has matured a lot. And after a year of silence, it's nice to be blogging again.

A year after

Yes, we're undergoing a major revamp, both in looks and in content. Right now the template being used is one of the defaults for Blogger, this is a temporary thing, as a new template is currently being designed and should be fully integrated into the site in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we hope to post more stories, reviews, commentaries and other written goodies. Thanks for your visit, and have a wonderful day!

Will Google regret buying YouTube?

Yes, the inevitable has occurred, YouTube has been bought by Google. No one ever really wanted YouTube to die of capital starvation, which at the reported cost of its bandwidth expenses alone amounted to a few months of survival. And with no concrete signs of immediate monetization besides Google Adsense, YouTube was definitely on its way to be listed as one of the first casualties of the "new Web economy". Fortunately, Google saw a future in You Tube that merited a $1.65 billion deal, an amount that is the largest in Google's acquisitions. Now, back to the question, will Google regret buying YouTube? Here are my points:

1. Google had a chance (or not?) to capture the same market with their Google Videos, but the traction probably was slow enough that they decided to just buy the brand of "YouTube". The community behind YouTube was the X factor, that part of the equation that other video sites could not or are trying to equal. And so they were actually buying the brand and the loyal community behind it.
2. $1.65 billion dollars. Wow. That's a big investment for a company that is all potential and has no track record for earning. Long term investment? Probably not a good one if the progression of the Web is to be followed....if YouTube does succeed in monetizing, it has to innovate and reinvent itself to be able to get back even a small amount of the current buyout price.
3. Will Google turn YouTube into a paid video download site, where you can still view sneak peeks of movies and purchase those that you like. Those videos that users upload will for surely remain as a staple feature for the community, and remember, YouTube technically owns anything that you upload. A small price for free hosting.
4. The monthly expenses for YouTube's bandwidth is not a small thing, remember Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr? Well, they are definitely not monetizing through it, and need to shell out the money for keeping Flickr afloat.

Well, Google may have a plan up its sleeves, I just hope that their magic rubs off on their new acquisition, YouTube.

"Registry editing has been disabled by administrator"

Situation : You are logged in as an admin, but this message still appears when you try to access the Windows Registry Editor. This could happen for a number of reasons ( the last time I encountered it was after a WGA update).

What you can do:

1. Open a command window (Start > Run > cmd)
2. Type in the following and press Enter :
   reg delete HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersionPolicies\System /v DisableRegistryTools
3. Type "Y" and press Enter when it asks you to confirm the action.
4. Close the command window, and try opening the registry editor again.

USBCELL : USB-rechargeable AA batteries

Not much "new" developments on battery technology have been made in the last few years, besides using new materials to achieve better or longer performance for our multitude of gadgets.Thus, when I saw the announcement for a USB-rechargeable battery, I thought : "why didn't this come sooner". It was an idea that was just ripe and ready, and with USBCELL's AA batteries , the timing couldn't have been much sweeter.

The USBCELL AA battery acts and looks like a normal rechargeable battery, but instead of using a separate charger, you just need to plug it into a USB port and charging occurs effortlessly. With most us having direct access to PCs that have USB ports, the hassle of bringing a charger is avoided. The capacity of USBCELL is 1300mAH and full charge is achieved after 5 hours of being connected to a powered USB port.

Links:
USBCELL website
USBCELL FAQ

Microsoft Security Updates for September 2006

Yes, it's the time of the month for the Microsoft updates to be automatically downloaded, or applied in some other administrative way. Well, this month's updates are composed of : 1 Critical update for MS Publisher 1 Important update for Reliable Multicast Program 1 Moderate update for Windows Indexing Service See more from the MS Technet.