Orangeinks

Share Your World Changing Ideas with Google

Do you have a great idea that can help the world? Try sharing it through Google’s Project 10 to the 100th and get it funded. It’s Google’s way of calling for your ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible.

Our goal is to set as few rules as possible. However, we ask that you put your idea into one of the following categories and consider the evaluation criteria below.

•Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
•Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
•Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
•Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
•Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
•Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
•Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
•Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.

Criteria
Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
Longevity: How long will the idea’s impact last?

The giant company will be committing $10 Million Dollars to implement the projects. Up to five ideas will be chosen by the advisory board. You can also recommend an organization that you think can implement your world changing idea.

The deadline for submission will be on the 20th of October, 2008. One hundred chosen ideas will be announced on January 27, 2009 in which the public will be allowed to choose 20 semi-finalists. The advisory board will then choose the final five ideas which will receive funding for implementation.

No matter how big or small your idea is, if you believe that it can help a lot of people and change their world, share it.

Helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike.

Tags: 10 to the 100th, Google, ideas

Splicd: Direct to the Point YouTube

There are times that you just want to share a portion of a YouTube video rather than putting your friends through minutes of irrelevant video. Splicd can be a useful tool for sharing a portion of a YouTube video.

To splice a video, just enter the YouTube video URL in Splicd and set which part of the video you want to share by placing the playback time of the video. A custom URL of your SplicD video will be generated for you to share with your friends. It would have been great if it allows us to embed the spliced video but that would mean hosting the videos on their servers or probably generate a hacked code to show the portion of the video we want to share.

Splicd is free and you do not need to register to use the service. It’s a simple but useful tool for people who wish to omit portions of YouTube videos.

Tags: splicd, splice video, youtube

Photoshop: Define Brush Preset

This is another Photoshop tutorial about brush presets. Additional tips are included which could be helpful if you are using a digitizing tablet.

Tags: brush, Photoshop, tutorial

Rososo: A Simple News Reader that Works

There are lots of bookmark services and news readers out there with lots of cool features. But sometimes, you just need a simple news reader that works. If you are looking for such a news reader, then Rososo might be just the one for you.

Rososo is a very simple news reader without the complications of other RSS readers. It’s so simple that it doesn’t even show the title of the latest news article of the blog you are subscribed to. It just displays the name of the blog and when it was last updated. If a blog or site has not been updated in a few days or so, it goes to the stale bookmarks. This way you can stay up to date with your favorite blogs without going to the actual site and remembering the title of the last post. It will just show you if your favorite blog has been updated or not.

Rososo is actually a pretty cool service. Its simplicity just plainly works. I think that Rososo will work great on bookmarking blogs that does not update frequently. Using it to check out blogs that update everyday with four of five posts takes away its usefulness.

Tags: bookmarking, news reader, rososo, RSS

Check your IP Neighbors

Most self hosted blogs and websites are on shared IP hosting. This means that you are sharing an IP address or one machine with several other sites. If you would like to check you IP neighbors there are online tools which will allow you to do that.

AbouThiSite is one of those web services which give you information about a website. It will give you the usual general information like IP address, owner, daily visitors, pagerank and language used. AbouThiSite will also give you information about where the site is hosted and the location of the host including the country and city of the server. It even displays the longitude and latitude of the server the website is installed along with a map. It is totally unnecessary but it’s still good to know. The service can also be used to check if a website does not comply with W3C standards.

AbouThiSite displays in list the domains which are hosted with the website that you are checking out. You can see the list on the lower left corner of the page. On the right side will be a form in which you can preview the IP neighbors of the website.

Tags: aboutthissite, Blog, IP, shared-hosting, shared-ip, website

PodiPodi’s Joyful Version

PodiPodi, a website enhancement tool which launched a few months back, just released a new version called the PodiPodi Joyful Version. Users can now choose from the Geeky interface in which you need to type a command in order to open up a service and the “Joyful” where you can browse the service you wish to load.

When PodiPodi was first launched, there were mixed feedback about the service. Some said the service is unnecessary while others gave great reviews and thought that it’s a great enhancement for websites. The old user interface confuses most visitors and it usually takes a while to open up a service. One needs to click the PodiPodi icon or press Shift+Spacebar to load the command interface, type help to see what services are available and load the command interface again so that you can type the command for the service. With the new version, the user just clicks on the icon or press the shortcut key and the choices will be instantly available. You can also type in a letter or the service name and it will bring you to the service that matches the letter/name that you entered.

This is a great upgrade for PodiPodi, even if some of the features from the old interface are still not included. You can head over to their site to check out the old interface. As for the Joyful Version, you can check it out right here. Just click the PodiPodi icon or press Shift+Spacebar after this page fully loads.

Tags: podipodi, website enhancement