Creating ‘Moments’ of Your Life

It’s hard to maintain a monogamous relationship with one photo-sharing Web site. You will sign up with a service and use it as your primary online repository for a while. You may even familiarize friends and family with that service so they expect to see your name associated with it in emails. But before long, other sites with flashier features will entice you to start spending time with them while you continue to maintain your accounts on the old site so you don’t lose your digital memories. Can’t they all just get along in one place?

This week, I tested thisMoment.com—a content-sharing Web site that doesn’t mind if you use multiple sharing sites. It acknowledges your accounts on other sites and the fact that you have probably loaded a bunch of photos or videos onto those sites. It even recognizes that you likely still want to remain connected to those services. In fact, thisMoment is made better by your relationships with these other sites. And the service also makes it easy to incorporate into your account material created by others—even strangers.

Source: Wall Street Journal

The Best Online Tools for Personal Finance

It’s tougher than ever to plan your finances. But it’s also easier than ever to find help on the cheap.

There are a host of Web sites that help you lay out a budget and track your spending and investments. Some let you set up a plan for a long-term goal, like college or retirement, and others offer advice about where to put your money. And many of these services are free of charge.

To help you wade through all the choices, we scoured the Web to find some of the best online tools and got recommendations from personal-finance pros. Here’s a look at some of the best sites we turned up, in a range of categories.

Source: Wall Street Journal

From the Article:

This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

Source: D: All Things Digital (WSJ)

Resources of the Week: Just Plain Useful Stuff
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

This week, I figured I’d just a handful of really useful things that have crossed my radar screen recently. Know of others? Please share!

+ MyAwardMaker.com
Need a quick award/commedation/recognition certificate? Look here, where you can generate one online and print it out immediately. You’ll find six template categories:

From the Article:

An online photo-rating system developed at Penn State is the first publicly available tool for automatically determining the aesthetic value of an image, according to a Penn State researcher involved with the project.

James Z. Wang, associate professor of information sciences and technology, is one of the principal researchers on the Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine (ACQUINE), a system that judges the aesthetic quality of digital images. Wang said this tool is a significant first step in recognizing human emotional reaction to visual stimulus.

ACQUINE, which has been in development since 2005 and was launched in April 2009, can be found online at http://acquine.alipr.com. Users can upload their own images for rating or test the system by providing a link to any image online. The system provides an aesthetic rating within seconds.

Wang said the system extracts and uses visual aspects such as color saturation, color distribution and photo composition to give any uploaded image a rating from zero to 100. The system learns to associate these aspects with the way humans rate photos based on thousands of previously-rated photographs in online photo-sharing Web sites such as photo.net.

Direct to Acquine

Source: Penn St. Live
Hat Tip: P.W.

The Nest Unclutterer helps keep your Twitter account tidy

• Can a real person actually follow 700 people? The Nest Unclutterer protects your privacy from marketers and businesses by blocking followers who are already following too many people.
• It removes followers who have been inactive for a given period of time.
• It helps create a whitelist of users exempt from any rule-based actions.
• The Nest Unclutterer will help you render those little nuisance birds as extict as the dodo.

Source: Unclutterer

From the Article:

Virtual-world technology is giving the idea of online training a second life in the federal government.

A handful of agencies are turning to virtual worlds to create programs that bring together the best aspects of Internet-based training and the traditional classroom.

Like standard online training, virtual-world software makes it possible for employees to take classes without leaving their desks, which saves on the time and costs associated with travel.

Source: FCW

A useful guide to a few cool tools. The price is right for all of them, they’re free.

Categories include:

+ Smart Phone Apps

+ Security Tools

+ Social Networking

+ Browser Add-Ons

+ Photo and Video

+ Music

and much more.

See Also: The Complete List of Apps/Services in Alphabetical Order

Source: PC World

At ResourceShelf, we love Zoho tools and services (most are free).

From an Article:

Collaborative technology developer Zoho has released Zoho Mobile, an expanded version of the company’s online application suite for mobile devices. Previously mobile support extended only to Apple’s iPhone; now Blackberry, Google Android, and other mobile devices are also supported through a single common interface.

Direct to Zoho Mobile

Source: THE Journal

From a WorldCat Blog Post:

We now have a WorldCat list widget available - you can see it in action here on the right hand side of the WorldCat Blog. You can customize the widget to display items on your public WorldCat list - just copy the HTML code in to your website and include the ‘List ID’ for your list.

Source: WorldCat.org

+ CaptionTube

With CaptionTube you can create captions for your YouTube videos.

+ twitfunr

twitfunr is a twitter-based service which is integrated with event planner and lets you do following while you are planning your event.
+ Post event information on Twitter.
+ Post event messages on Twitter from personalized event page.
+ Broadcast event proceedings live on Twitter as well as personalized event page from mobile phone.

+ BlindSpeak

Send Synthesized Messages Online

Source: MoMB

Erica Naone writes in Technology Review:

Web browsers remember the sites that they have visited in the past, but few people seem to use this information. Jing Jin, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a new browser-history tool, which she and her colleagues developed after studying how people use their browser history. They demonstrated the prototype in a presentation this week at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2009) Conference, in Boston.

The researchers tested users’ ability to recall Web pages and found that URLs and textual descriptions (by which most browsers organize their history) weren’t as easy to remember as colors or images collected from the Web pages themselves. So the researchers’ tool–currently a plug-in for the Firefox browser–lets users browse images of websites that they have visited in the past, or type in search queries that find previously visited pages.

The researchers also used the new history tool to improve Web search, by adding thumbnails from browser history at the top of Google search results. The thumbnails were selected according to the search terms that the user entered into the search engine.

Source: Technology Review (MIT)

From the Article:

These 11 cross-platform apps based on AIR technology will help you streamline your YouTube experience, track client time accurately, stitch photos into one panoramic shot, and much more.

Source: PC World

+ NewsTrendz

Normalizes Google Trends, Twitter Trends, and Yahoo Buzz to find out why they are hot across Twitter, News, Blogs, and Web Search.

+ Guardian Trends

Produces graphs of how often things are mentioned on guardian.co.uk.

+ Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries

Shows US neighborhood boundaries and neighborhood names, pulling from Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries GIS mapping data.

Note: You can also find neighborhood maps (browse by neighborhood name) via MelissaData

+ Birds of the World

Browse through birds of the world, categorized by continent and country. When you click a bird link, photos are retrieved from Flickr, and Wikipedia integration appears.

Source: ProgrammableWeb

A few weeks ago we posted about a new and FREE question answering service named Aardvark (aka “Vark”). Via IM, it finds people (your friends and friends of friends) who might have the answer to your query whatever it may be. More here. It does not require any new software, you simply use the AOL (AIM), MSN Messenger, or Google Talk instant messaging service. It also works using e-mail.

Aardvark is a closed beta at the moment but we still have a few logins available courtesy of the Vark team. Just send along an email message with the word “Vark” in the subject and we will do our best to get you started with the service.

More about the company and its investors (some big names) here.