My new blog is Online

Al last, my new blog is online, go visit it here www.Technoogle.com, and note to everyone linking to this blog so that they update their links to the new blog.

I will not post here any more, so this blog is officially dead.
RIP blogger you’ve been a nice starting point.

Moving to a new blog

It has been a long time since I last posted, it wasn’t intended that way but other things happened and I got unintentionally busy, and frankly forgot all about my blog.

two weeks ago I decided to start a new blog, one with a private domain name and hosting, no more blogspot, two reasons for this move, the obvious one is having my blog on my own domain and getting rid of .blogspot.com, the other reason is Wordpress which is IMO quite superior to any blogging package out there, with more than enough features capabilities and extensions to satisfy all types of bloggers.

Interesting things started happening concerning my career, I will not go into details as it is too early in this stage, but things are going really well, even more than I anticipated, this is what has been keeping me busy lately, but there’s a lot more work to do until things start taking shape, if all goes well I will achieve things beyond even my wildest dreams, wish me luck.

Now that I have my domain name activated and my server up and running it will take only a few days till I install Wordpress and setup my blog, stay tuned, the next post will be hopefully on my new blog.

Don’t Yawn Game

Don’t Yawn Game
Really hard, especially late in the evening.

Yahoo Launches My Web 2.0 Beta

The newest product from Yahoo called My Web 2.0 Beta is an interesting one indeed; it describes itself as Social Search Engine, something like del.icio.us meets Yahoo search, it allows you to save your favorite search results so that you can easily find them later, and also share them with other people.

You can tag your search results like del.icio.us so that it’s easy to navigate through your big search history, and also easy for other people to pass by your favorite pages.
And you can use this service to navigate through other people favorite sites, and keep up with the popular sites at any time.

Also this service promises to deliver more relevant search results based on your personal habits and relations in the social network, using the new method titled MyRank which is Yahoo’s new secret in the fight for more relevancy.

I’m surprised Google hasn’t done that earlier, since all the innovation comes from Google nowadays, and the social interaction in the web has been around for a while, and certainly it caught the attention of all great players in the market.

This new service is in closed-beta phase, only for a limited number of users; luckily I have access and will certainly experiment with it for a while, see how good it is or if the results will really improve, but I doubt that it’ll replace del.icio.us as a social bookmarking solution, as del.icio.us already has a huge community and a wonderful very simple Interface, in addition to tens of 3^rd part tools that made it much more practical.

Here’s a quick Getting Started Guide, and you can read the FAQ for more detailed info, and finally here’s a blog dedicated for My Web 2.0.

Here’s more coverage:
My Web 2.0: Social Search from Jeremy Zawodny's blog.
Yahoo Blends Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0 from Search Engine Watch Blog.
Search, with a little help from your friends from Yahoo Search blog.
Yahoo Social Search, Act II from Many-to-Many Blog.
John Battele interesting take on this new service.

Technorati Tags: , Yahoo, Google, Search, Engine, Search Engine, Social, Personalized, My Web, Web, My Web 2.0, Beta

New iTunes supports Podcasting

The promised new version of iTunes 4.9 is out, and it supports Podcasting in a wonderful way, it’s a must download for all iPod owners.

Here’s some of the available web coverage:

iTunes Podcasting: Wow! From Russell Beattie.
Some Initial Thoughts from Dons Blog. (must read)
New iTunes hints at coming cell phone support from Cnet News.com.

I’ll update it as more coverage is available, stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: , Apple, Music, Podcasting, Podcast, Podcasts, iTunes, iTunes 4.9

Google Earth

Google released Google Earth yesterday. Very cool 3D view of the world.

Key features of Google Earth include:
• Free software download available at http://earth.google.com
• 3D buildings in major cities across the United States
• 3D terrain showing mountains, valleys, and canyons around the world
• Integrated Google Local search to find local information such as
hotels, restaurants, schools, parks, and transportation
• Fast, dynamic navigation
• Video playback of driving directions
• Tilt, rotate, and activate 3D terrain and buildings for a different
perspective on a location
• Easy creation and sharing of annotations among users

Google is releasing new products like crazy; it’s getting real hard to keep up with all the updates they introduce, I wonder how much they can persist with that enthusiasm.

Technorati Tags: Google, Earth, Google Earth, Virtual, Map, 3D

Google to launch Online Video Playback

John Battelle confirmed that Google will launch today an online in-browser video playback feature; this means that you’ll be able to playback video files from Google natively in the browser without the need for external video Player, like Winamp or Windows Media Player.

This feature will be based on the open-source VLC media player, which is rumored to be available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

This will go nicely along other services like video search and video upload, according to John the service will be used first to allow users to easily playback freely available video files uploaded by other users, and later it will be used to playback video purchased from Google via the upcoming Google Payment System.

What is the importance of this new feature?
These are my early thoughts:

-This represents yet another assault from Google on a Microsoft’s product, this time it’s Windows Media Player, another battle in the Media War, the most important war in the next decade, forget Operating systems or web search, Media is where the real money lies.

-Confirms my earlier predictions here and there about Google Plan to move all applications from Computer-based to Web-based, in advance for its WebOS or its Unified Interface for all your needs.

-Another step in Google’s direction to depend on the open-source community to further develop its products, and in my opinion it’s one of the wisest choices Google has made recently, as open-source community proved many times how far they can take a product (Firefox) and how much features they can add to a product for free.

This is only the beginning, no one can predict where this product will go and how will it be used in the future, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: , Google, Microsoft, Media, Video, Playback, Player, WMP, WebOS, Open Source, Search, Upload

Being Alive

Mira was wondering in her last post "I'm alive or am I alive" what it means to be alive for real, I worte a comment on her blog that was very long, she suggested that I post it as a trackback so here it is:

Being alive for real can be done first by finding your true beliefs, embrace them, live by them, and work very hard under them in the course of evolution, in the hope to add something valuble to the world, and in case you couldn't, at least you've tried.

I don't mean that you should only work for your beliefs, no I mean work whatever you like the most without it being against your beliefs.

But your work must be productive and in the course of evolution, meaningless work can't make you satisfied only happy for a short period of time.
Lots of people spend their life following just happiness, only to discover at the end that it was only instant and lasted for a short time, and that they've been living a lie running after an emotion.

Happiness is only an emotion, even a cheap one forms and fades very quickly, and it's wrong to depend on it in your life or work, becasue it'll never make you satisfied.
The true happiness in life is not what makes you happy, but what makes you satisfied with yourself to the fullest, and not regret your actions and life.

Only that way, you'll feel satisfied and content with your life, or in another word you'll be actually LIVING.

You must not be satisfied with the generic choice, the one 95% of the people follows: study, work, make lots of money, get married have children, buy expensive stuff and property then die.
You'll have to find your own life even if it was against your Environment, family, friends.

Everyone has a unique life and interests, and it's utterly wrong to be a passive and follow your society and surroundings, you'll be insulting your intelligence that has been giving to you for a reason.

Before you think of how to live and survive, you must first choose your life, consciously and courageously, before you reach a point where you'll regret your whole life.

RSS turning point

You may be surprised to read that, as RSS had been there for years, but yesterday marks a great day in the history of RSS and the Internet as a whole, it’s the day Microsoft acknowledged RSS and announced widespread support to RSS.

It includes:
1- Full RSS Support in upcoming Internet Explorer 7.
2- RSS Support in its upcoming OS Longhorn.
3- Adding new Extensions to RSS to support listing among other things.

The announcement came from Dean Hachomovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, and took place yesterday in Gnomedex 2005 technology conference in the US city of Seattle.

According to him, Microsoft has decided that subscribing via RSS, will become the third leg of its information-access triangle, Browsing – Searching – RSS Subscribing.

I felt that Microsoft had a thing for RSS from the day they announced XML file formats for upcoming Office, I knew that they had yet unknown uses for RSS.

A few years later expect that RSS will no longer be just a way to subscribe to Blogs or Podcasts, it’ll be an integrated part of user experience from browsing to Email to Document creation and even co-editing, it’ll be more of a way to handle and present information on a global scale with things we can never yet imagine.

Microsoft is THE Mass-Market company, and it’s the only company that can take RSS to the masses, RSS supporters and enthusiasts can rest now as Microsoft is more than capable of taking RSS to the next level.

You can check out these links for more coverage:
Steve Rubel: The Day RSS Turned Pro.
Dave Winer has linked to various stories in his blog Scripting News.
Also Robert Scoble has gathered many useful links on blog reactions on RSS news

Technorati Tags: , Gnomedex, Gnomedex2005, Gnomedex 2005, RSS, Microsoft, Longhorn, IE, IE7

Blogger now offers free Image Upload

At last, Blogger came to its senses and did the thing that should’ve been done from the beginning.

Blogger now offers native image upload for free blogs up to 300MB, now you can include images in your posts. Just click the new picture icon and it will allow you to upload an image from your computer, for detailed instructions look here.

No more wrestling with Hello, or linking from Flickr.

Technorati Tags: , Google, Blogger, Image, Upload