Orangeinks

Wired’s Celebrity Meter Measures Your Internet Popularity

I just found this interesting widget from Wired that measures your popularity in the internet. All you have to do is enter your MySpace URL, Twitter URL and your personal website of blog. So how does this widget work? It crawls to your personal pages and scores your internet fame based on websites linking to your blog/website, your friends on your social networks and pages linking to your photos.

If you ask me, it sounds like their ranking algorithm is somewhat similar to how Google ranks a page, which is by counting the number of links to a certain page. The Celebrity Meter is still in beta phase. As you can see, the only social networking site available in it is MySpace. This means that if you more friends in Facebook, you’ll probably get a much lower score than MySpace users. You can expect to see more social networking sites added to Celebrity Meter in the near future.

You can embed Celebrity Meter to your blogs or website to give your readers a bit of fun by checking their internet popularity right on your site. Users can also measure their popularity by comparing scores with internet celebs linked on the widget or from a custom list created by the owner of the site. Check out the widget below.

Source: The Inquisitr

Tags: Facebook, internet popularity, Myspace, Social Networking, twitter, widget

Speechable Adds Speech Bubbles to your Photos Plus Quick Sharing

Speechable is like a simplified PikiStrips. It’s a simple and free image tool which lets you add speech bubbles to your photos. Although creating comic strips from your photos can be fun, sometimes you just want to make your photo say something by placing a speech bubble and nothing more. This is the perfect tool for doing just that.

The service does not require you to register. Just upload a photo and you can immediately start placing your bubble. Once you are done, you can save your image or immediately share that image to your favorite social networking site such as FaceBook, Okrut and Myspace. Embed codes are also available to quickly share the image/photo to your blogs, forums and websites. Of course, the quick email service will deliver your edited photo to your friends instantly.

Since there is no registration needed in order to use the service, management features in Speechable does not exist. It means that when you upload a photo, it stays there and can be viewed by others. So you have to be responsible for the images that you upload in Speechable. From the looks of it, Speechable is still in early beta and still a bit buggy. Maybe a privacy feature is in the works as well as getting rid of some bugs when saving images.

Tags: photo, pikistrips, speech bubble, speechable

Is Cuil Going to be as Cool as Google?

Maybe! Cuil is another search engine which was recently launched. If you are tired of Wikipedia always being first in Google’s search results, then this might be the search engine that you are looking for. It is said to index 120 billion web pages and promises to return better results than Google.

Cuil’s page ranking is not based on popularity metrics but rather on content and relevance. What it does is find a page which contains the keywords you entered, analyze the rest of the content of that page, its concepts, inter-relationships and coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil, pronounced as “cool” is derived from an old Irish word meaning knowledge. It is made by former employees of Google which makes it even more interesting to follow. The way it delivers search results is very different from the search engines that we normally use. Cuil displays results in a more visual way by adding photos across the results page that include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about any given topic.

The search engine is creating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere. Some are already saying that this is a Google killer. Aside from the frequent downtime and outage that Cuil is experiencing since its launch, there is just one thing that I find quite odd when I tested the search engine. It returned great results for a bunch of keywords that I used but when I searched orangeinks, Cuil returned a rather unusual result. In one of the results for the orangeinks keyword, a rather peculiar image is included in the result. (Check out the screenshot). When I clicked the image, it redirects me to my Entrecard profile page. I don’t know how this happened or how the algorithm of Cuil managed to come up with this result along with the image. This just shows that the search engine is still in its infancy and will take a lot of work and tweaking before it can match Google. However, it shows a lot of promise and I am personally interested on how the search engine will fare in the search engine wars, especially with the Microsoft acquired Powerset.

Tags: cuil, powerset, search-engine

Free File Hosting for RAR Files

RarHost is a free hosting service focused on hosting RAR files. RAR is the native format of WinRAR archiver. What makes RarHost so great is that you can actually view the content of the RAR file before making a download. This will give the user the ability to scout the inside of the compressed file for malicious wares that might me included in the RAR file.

The service offers unlimited hosting for RAR files as long as it is below 350MB per file. If your file is larger than 350 MB you have to split it in order to upload it in RarHost. Files uploaded by non members will only be hosted for 30 days on inactivity. Members will be given 2 months of non download activity before the file is removed from the database.

Registration is quick and free so I see no reason for uploading files as a non member. Members can access the file URL anytime in their dashboards and can manage uploaded files a lot quicker by taking advantage of the monitoring service. You can check how many times your RAR files have been downloaded. The uploader also has the ability to delete the files that he/she uploaded in RarHost. A special file URL will be available to the uploader for quick sharing to friends. You can also set a password to the uploaded file if you wish. This is great if the file you are sharing is only for specific downloaders.

There are many free file hosting services available online where you can also upload RAR files. The only thing is that the other user, which is the downloader, will never know what is in that file until the download is finished. RarHost provides literally more transparency when it comes to viewing the contents of the uploaded compressed files.

Tags: compressed file, file hosting, Free, hosting, rar file, rarhost

Photoshop: Create Custom Brushes

This Photoshop tutorial shows us how to create custom brushes and some more tips about Brush Dynamics. This is pretty awesome and fun. Great for adding little somethings to your photos using custom brushes.

Click to Play

Tags: brush dynamics, brushes, custom brush, Photoshop

StumbleAudio: Stumbleupon for Music

StumbleAudio is the Stumbleupon for music lovers with over 2 million available tracks for you to stumble. Judging from the name of the site, the idea was generally taken from Stumbleupon. StumbleAudio is like the “I’m feeling lucky” of music search sites.

StumbleAudio does not function like Stumbleupon in every way. You do not need to install a browser plugin in order to use the service. You can do your music stumbling in the StumbleAudio page. This is managed by flash, since stumbling music is so much different from stumbling webpages and websites. It only takes up a small space and a little flash. You have to register for an account though in order to rate tracks and save them in your profile.

You can choose a genre that you wish to stumble. Once you start stumbling, a random music will automatically play along with some information like album cover, artist and of course the title of the song. You can also browse and play the songs in the stumbled album and rate the track according to your liking. A thumbs up and thumbs down button (Like in StumbleUpon) is used for rating tracks. There is also a quick share button which will automatically copy the track URL to your clipboard.

This is another great site for discovering music semi-randomly. A search bar is provided if you like to filter your stumbles by the keyword(s) you enter. The service also allows you to make quick purchase of the playing track from iTunes, Amazon, PayPlay and CD Baby. Check it out and start audio-stumbling.

P.S. And, yes, artists do get paid when their songs are played on StumbleAudio.

Tags: Music, music discovery, recommendation, songs, stumbleaudio, stumbleupon, tracks