21 Oct 07 Blogger, WordPress, now it’s Blogonize time

For all those of you who want to start a blog and make it look cool; for all those who hate the outdated interfaces of Blogger and WordPress; for all those who really want to take it easy while starting a blog, we now have an answer: blogonize. This is a completely new and completely free blog creation, editing, and hosting service. It’s very Web 2.0 in terms of look and feel. And to make this a review, let’s dive into the Good and Bad:

Good

• Very quick signup.
• Very pleasing UI because of the nice Web 2.0 look and feel.
• Good Editing UI for writing posts.
• Lots of functionality built-in: Calendar, Tag Cloud, Links, Archives,etc.

Bad

• I kept getting errors whenever I would view the blog.
• A little on the slower side.
• It’s apparent that it is a beta. When I logged in to the Admin Panel for the first time, it was showing me comments on my blog (a number of them). This was when i had just created that Id for testing
• Help is missing.

Other than the beta problems, it looks like a very nice tool and should be a good bet for the long run.

17 Oct 07 Do you need to conduct an Online Survey?

Today we review a solution for conducting online surveys. Vovici is a company which offers online survey software for configuring, conducting, and reporting on online surveys. Their service offers a large number of features and benefits:

• Access to out-of-the-box professional survey templates and also samples for helping you design your survey/questionnaire.
• Import from MS Word to create a survey.
• Or, use a survey wizard to construct your survey.
• Manage survey libraries by adding questions to them. These can then be used in future surveys.
• A feature that lets you enter data into a survey so that your respondents do not need to re-enter information that is already recorded with you.
• Multiple Language support.
• In-depth reporting and analysis available.
• You can even get help from a survey expert to help you design your survey.

To top it all, they have a free 30 day trial period which allows you to test drive the service and publish surveys. This allows you to take advantage of most of the features and see if they suit your needs. This service is already being used by a large number of large companies, yet their offering is customizable enough to be used on a personal blog. So, if you have a need for running an online survey try giving Vovici a try.

14 Oct 07 Finally, someone can tell you which movie you will like

I signed up for Criticker today, and immediately it made a good impression on me. But before I tell you about the good impression, let me tell you about Criticker. It is an online movie ranking and taste comparison service. Actually, it is much more. What Criticker does is that it allows you to find people who have a similar taste in movies as yours. This way, when you want to go for a new movie you can see if any of your ‘friends’ have seen it and what they think about it; or if you want to rent out a movie, you can check out one of your friends’ rated movies and chances are what they have highly rated is something that you will like as well.

So, how does it work? Criticker lets you rank movies on a scale of 0 to 100. The way it does it is that it presents a random selection of movies to you and if you have seen a movie, you give it a score between 0 and 100. The random nature of these selections ensures that you also get to rate movies that you would have hated.

The way they do this is by building a Taste Compatibility Index. This allows them to match people with each other. Of course, it gets more accurate as you rank more movies.

The other amazing feature which gets things bang on is the recommendations section. Based on your rankings, their system develops a list of random recommendations for you. Not only that, for each recommendation, it guesses what kind of score you would grant to this movie if you watched it.

Now the good and bad

The Good

The Usability is amazing. I had to stop myself from continuing to rank movies. I just went on and on and on. It takes about 5 seconds to rank one movie and within minutes I had ranked more than 50. The UI is very responsive.

It takes only 10 rankings to start getting some meaningful matches. This ensures that you don’t get bored and walk away before you get value out of your time spent.

The signup process is instant.

Overall, a very good experience.

The Bad

The only bad is that the UI is a little crowded, it seems. A little to complex as there is too much information at any given time.

The only other bad is a funny signup process. It is the only signup process where I had to click on test after entering the password, but then again.

Overall, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

11 Oct 07 WidgetBucks - The New Kid on The Block

We take great pleasure in reviewing the latest in advertising services that has come out this month. It’s called WidgetBucks. As some of your might have noticed, we have got it running on our homepage for some time now and our review stems from our experience with it so far. Oh yes, before we start giving you the ropes, the image above is from the WidgetBucks blog and shows the how well it is being accepted: that is the first week of launch.

10 Oct 07 360Desktop - more desktop space than ever before

We reviewed the excellent product called DeskSpace some time ago. However, what we are about to preview today makes DeskSpace look a little less nice.

It’s called 360Desktop. This is a yet to release software which is why we are previewing it. It allows you to add infinite space to your desktop and it was previewed recently by us.  A couple of things came to our mind. Cool is the first one, and Useful the second. However, the best thing about it is that it is FREE. Or will be when it is released in the fall.

360 Desktop allows you to create panoramic 360s, as they are called. So think of your wallpaper as a continuous panorama of pictures one after the other. What they do with these 360s is that they add the ability to insert active content on them. They have Widgets which can pretty much run any of your web widgets on your desktop; they have APIs through which you can insert videos in the desktop, or show ads, etc.

Actually, we can not do justice to it by just previewing it. We need to let you do the same. Head over to the website at http://www.360desktop.com to see the preview; or just view it here:

08 Oct 07 Make money while you search

Google doesn’t pay you to search does it? What about Yahoo? or Live? None of these pay you to search using their search engines. Yet, we still use them because they give good results and usually they are very fast. However, there are a large number of search engines cropping up all over the WWW, which are different in one way or another. One such engine is called ZotSpot.

ZotSpot pays you to search using their search engine. Nice, I would say. However, when I search, the results are nowhere as good as Google or Yahoo. However, they are somewhat relevant, so you may find what you are looking for on the second page or third. Well, I can put up with that, I think; after all, I am being paid to do this search. How much am I being paid? Well, according to the FAQ, if I just search using their search engine, I will make a decent amount (notice no amount specified). However, we get a hint of this amount further down the FAQ.

There is a referral program, and in that they assume that every person you refer will make an average of $0.25 for you per year. This tells me that if I don’t refer anyone, just by using the site, I am not going to make more than a couple of bucks. That’s too little for me to give up Google. Anyway, I did try out the ZotSpot search for some time, and at the end of that, I have got $0.00 in my earnings.

We think the only way to make money on that search engine is to refer thousands of people to join up, and then hope that they refer others and also use the search engine at the same time.

06 Oct 07 Bix - a yahoo company

This is what it says on the home page of Bix. What is Bix? In essence, it is a platform to create, participate in, and win online contests. You create a contest, enter the contestants, and make the contest go live. Then you sit back and wait as visitors choose who is better amongst the contestants as they are presented each one compared to the other.

There are contests already up there for "Best Movie", "Best Movie Duo", "Best Simpson Character", etc. There are also plenty of Karaoke and Lip Sync contest. You can upload pictures, videos, and audio for people to judge.

All very nice, but I found it to be boring after a very short while. I started judging the Best Duo contest. Now, the way they do it is that they show you two contestants at a time and let you pick one over the other. So, if there are 2 contestants in the contest, you just have to do this once; if there are 3, you need to do this thrice; and this number goes up very quickly of course as the number of contestants increase. So, for the Best Duo contest, there were many contestant entries, and after about 20 clicks to choose which one is better than the other, I made a quick exit from the site.

Overall, it may be a good way to pass your time if you have nothing to do in the world. Or of course, if you create a contest of your own, it might be fun to see the results.