Liz thinks we are SOB

Writing a blog is no easy task. You write and write and never know what you audience thinks (not so true as web analytics and post comment do give us some sort of insight on our readers).
Imagine my surprise when I saw that Liz's blog named Successful blog thinks we are SOB - which stand for Successful and Outstanding Bloggers.
See more of Liz's SOBs here: http://www.successful-blog.com/1/thanks-to-week-27-sobs/

Google Alerts - Tracking information over the net

Google alerts is not a new tool in the market, but it is widely unknown and provides a great service to those users who "need to know" whenever they or their company is mentioned online.
I have configured Google alerts to send me an email whenever my name or my blog is mentioned in a web page or news page that Google finds.
Creating an alert is an easy process involving specifying the search item ("Ohad's Internet News" in my case), the type of item to search for: news, web or news groups, and the alert frequency which can be once per day or week or on-the-fly which means you get alerts whenever google finds new information about your search item.

Traffic based investment

Can published traffic statistic for publicly held internet based companies aid us in future investments?
Lets take for example two of the major internet companies Google, and Yahoo.
A fast comparison in Alexa web-traffic service shows that Google have closed a reasonable gap:

Can these results help us predict quarterly financial results for both companies?

Judge for yourselves. Shorting the last 6 months Yahoo against Google would have returned the following results:

Where as risk against internet bubble blow-up is minimal. Good enough for you? I know it was good enough for me.

New tool from google - 3d modeling software

Google just released a new 3D tool by the name of SketchUp
SketchUp is a simple but powerful tool for quickly and easily creating, viewing and modifying your 3D ideas. SketchUp is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program that enables you to explore the world in 3D. With just a few simple tools, you can create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects - even space ships
SketchUp is also integrated into Google earth and allows you to post your models into it.

Screenshot:

Ofer Zinger joins Ohad's Internet News

News break: Ofer Zinger to join Ohad's Internet News as a contributer.
Ofer is an internet veteran with vast knowledge in technology and finance. You will probably see his first post in the next few days.

What your homepage tells about you

What is the default page that loads when you open your browser? Is it a blank page or is it a local news portal? Maybe it's one of those new personalized homepages such as Netvibes or My Yahoo? If you are a corporate user then it might be your company's website or intranet site.
It could be your browser's default webpage such as MSN for Internet Explorer.

Here are some options for your home page and what that says about you:

1. Blank page - You like your envoirnment to be clean and organized. you probably get upset when your space is messed up.
2. News page - You have a lot of spare time at work and like to read around when nobody is looking.
3. Sports page - You know what interests you and need to keep up to date with the latest soccer news (the Mondial is just around the corner)
4. Company's website - You are the company's owner
5. Company Intranet - You are a hard working employee.
6. Personalized homepage - Internet freak. You are doing what everyone else will be doing in a few month.

If you disagree with me or have some more ideas for this list, send me your comments.

Catch 33 - a fun online game

Got some time to kill? Try this game named Catch 33
The game is quite simple and all you have to do is chase 33 numbers on the screen with your mouse. To catch a number just hover your mouse over it starting with the number 1 and ending with 33.
Let's see how fast you can do this now. My score is 54 seconds.
Got a better score? Let me know by posting a comment here.

Job Interview 101

I know it's not a site or technology, but Liz's post on Job hunting is such a clear and articulate article on job hunting that I just had to point people to it. If you are looking for a job, this is a good place to start preparing for the interview.

MuseList - web application directory

If you ever tried looking for a specific application on the web and couldn't find it, MuseList can help you. Or, if you are a developer who wants to post his new web application where everyone will see it, MuseList is also for you. MuseList is a directory of web applications created to make it easy for people to find great, useful applications on the web and share it with others.

My favourite application there? LivePlasma which is a graphic mapping of movies and actors and bands.

Email subscription to Ohad's Internet News

Great news everyone,
My blog can now be subscribed by email at the form provided in the sidebar to the left.
If RSS is not your cup of tea, just subscribe here and get your updates of Ohad's Internet News via email. email services courtesy of feedburner

Let me know how this works for you.

Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia

Are you using wikipedia as your online encyclopedia? If not, then you are missing out on the fun.
The Internet is a perfect medium for finding out facts. wikipedia is the first encyclopedia whose content is edited and managed by the users. According to Jimmy Wales who is wikipedia's co-founder it is "an effort to create and distribute a multilingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language"
In my opinion wikipedia is one of the greatest examples of community generated content.

So, drop by to the wiki and see if you find anything you are looking for or maybe even contribute yourself. Anyone who adds an item is welcome to comment about it here.

Internet Movie Database

Did you ever watch a movie and thought you recognized one of the actors? Didn't she play in ...?
The IMDB - Internet Movie Database, allows you to search it's entire movie collection by either movie or actor name and see all relevant information on it. Just yesterday, I watched a movie named "In her shoes" and after running a query in IMDB on one of the actresses it turned out that she starred in a 1994 movie named "Muriel's Wedding".
Use it when in doubt or just track your favorite movie stars.

New toolbar from google offers auto completion

I have been using google toolbar in my browser for over a year now and found it to be nice, useful but not so impressive. It does serve it's purpose of saving me a click on the google link i have in my favourites when I want to search but it does not go the extra mile.

If you take a look at the (BETA) new google toolbar you will see some added features such as saving bookmarks in the toolbar, adding custom buttons, sharing of web pages with friends and more. But what caught my eyes as the most impressive change is the addition of auto completion to the search bar. while typing your searches, the new google toolbar tries to guess the phrase you type based on your search history and common search phrases.

This is a real major change in the way i use the search bar and allowed me to find stuff faster... much faster.

Are you using it yet?

2006 Browser wars

Which browser are you using? I noticed that the answer to this question is no longer the Internet Explorer I've come to expect. In the 8 or more years since beating Netscape there were several competitors to the IE but none ever reached a critical mass.
Firefox which has a lot of fans worldwide is quickly becoming the new browser that everyone keeps talking about. Myself, I use AvantBrowser which is a light-weight multi-tab browser.
While Microsoft keep pushing the release date of IE7, I feel that more and more users will switch over to Firefox and realize it's potential. My blog's statistics show that over 25% of my readers use Firefox.

What is your browser? have you tried Firefox / AvantBrowser / any other browser i am not aware of?

Google calendar

Google has just released it's google calendar (code name CL2).
It supports everything that we've come to expect from a calendar plus the ease of use we expect from Google.
I just opened mine and started experimenting with it.
Next step for me would be to import my outlook calendar and see if I can migrate all my data to it. I can't wait to see how smooth the integration into gmail will be.

Let me know what you think, send comments here.

VOIP - using the internet to make calls

One of the ways in which the internet is changing the world, is by enabling phone calls to be made over the web. Some solutions only allow calls to be made from computer to computer (like the MSN messanger) but others also allow (for a fee of course) calls to regular phone numbers anywhere in the world for very cheap prices. I personnaly like the SKYPE software and use it on a daily basis to communicate with my friends all over the world. the technology that enables these calls is named VOIP or voice over IP and allows to translate our voices into digital packets that can be sent over the internet and then translated back into voice.
In the past year, several companies in the USA (such as vonage) started offering VOIP based telephones for home use. By providing a VOIP phone adaptor, these companies allow you to use you high speed internet connection to call and recieve calls all over the world for a significantly reduced price compared to the old-school telephony companies. A friend of mine who travels all over the world also mentioned that he takes the VOIP phone adaptor with him wherever he goes and connects it to the internet to recieve calls just as if he were at his office and not somewhere else.

BlackBerry - access your email from anywhere

I want a blackberry!!!
Ever since a friend of mine who visited Israel a few month back showed me his blackberry device, I decided I had to have one. Can you imagine reading your email wherever you are?
it's a cool device that keeps you always connected to your email (which, let's admit it, has become a work tool that we cannot live without). I liked the mini keyboard in the device that allows for pretty fast email writing. Now I need to figure out which model I want.

Let me know which model you recommend...

Riya - Photo album with face recognition

Have you ever tried to find a specific picture in your photo album?
Riya is a new photo album site that implemented a new face recognition technology.
What this means for us, is that during upload of pictures, Riya automatically recognizes faces within our pictures. After an intial training session in which we let Riya know which faces belong to our friends and family, it starts finding them in other pictures we uploaded.
I have already uploaded over 6,000 pictures and was amazed to see how easy it was to search my albums by people in them.

Check out Riya

Netvibes - your personal dashboard

If you use the internet like me, then you have quite a list of websites you visit on a daily basis to catch up. Netvibes is one of the new RSS dashboard that allow you to aggregate data from several websites into a single website personalized for your own use. Since finding out about it I have created an account there (it's free) and started customizing it to my own needs. Today, I cannot think how I managed before. Check it out...

http://www.netvibes.com

Getting started

Welcome to my blog.
Soon you will be able to find here reviews on new sites and technologies that I liked. As a starting point please look at Pandora, an amazing music channel that lets me personalize music according to my own preferences. I started adding favourite songs and artists to my personalized channel and got some new songs that matched my taste. for several weeks I have a browser open to their site to play my music.
Why take my word about this?
Try for yourself @ Pandora