Orangeinks

SnappyFingers: The Question and Answer Search Engine

SnappyFinger‘s goal is to answer all those FAQs (frequently asked questions). It’s a more focused search engine that gives relevant results to frequent questions. Whether you are doing research or home work, or you just have a plain old question, you might probably find your answers through SnappyFingers.

We are building the most comprehensive database of Questions and Answers on the web.

There are tons of search engines that are online now and probably more are on the way. The only problem on those search engines that are popping out nowadays is that they only aggregate search results from other search engines. Some search sites are just acting as portals for more popular ones. It’s good to know that there are developers who are concerned in creating new algorithms for better and faster search results.

What I like about SnappyFingers is that the search results are not limited to very few characters. It actually lives up to its promise to provide answers to your questions and not just links. You can actually get the idea by just reading the search results. If in any case you don’t find what you are looking for in SnappyFingers, you can always ask someone (a real person) from the Yedda Community. The Yedda widget can also be found on the SnappyFingers site.

Tags: FAQ, Question and Answer, search-engine, SnappyFingers

CMF Ads: A Credit Based Advertising Network that Rocks

CMF Ads is a credit based advertising network slash social networking site started by three bloggers namely Turnip from Turnip of Power: Social Networking, Stan of Razzball (Fantasy Baseball) and Ben of Top Ten Blog Tips. They aim to provide a low cost advertising for bloggers while helping them sort out blogging problems.

The concept is very simple. Place the CMF ad widget on your blog and others will advertise. The widget features an ad sharing system which rotates adverts each time it is loaded. This is done to keep the ad costs down. For example, if a blog has a daily traffic of 5000 and five ads are running on the widget, each ad will receive a page impression of 1000 per day. If the ad cost for that site is 10 credits ($2.50) per month, then I must say it’s an awesome deal, even if the publisher accepts a few more ads.

You are allowed to place multiple ad spaces if he/she chooses to, for better ad performance. There is also an option for you to accept ads from non blog sites. You can set the ad price (minimum or 1 credit per month or $ 0.25) and use those credits to advertise on other blogs or sell them back to CMF for half the purchase price.

CMF has a great advertising concept (well, it’s not yet perfect but I have high hopes for the startup). They have very reputable standards, which other networks have been neglecting, in accepting publishers and advertisers. This means spam blogs has NO place in the CMF Network.

Features Breakdown

• Ad space sharing to keep the costs down – a typical ad costs 5 credits, or just $1.25, for 30 days.
• Set your own ad price for each of your sites – it must be at least 1 credit ($0.25).
• Advertising history – view the ads you placed on a site in the past, and how they performed (we display views, unique views and clicks for all ads).
• Publishers earn 100% of the credits for ads placed on their site – these credits can be used to advertise, or the credits can be sold back to us at 50% of the purchase price.
• Every credit in the system is paid for – we don’t artificially create credits based on blog activity – which means our economy is stable.
• If you have multiple sites, you can easily manage them without having to maintain multiple accounts or switch between the sites. Your balance is shared across all of your sites, and you can easily choose which site to advertise with via a drop down.
• Our blogging forums provide a central location for bloggers to exchange tips and get help.

If you’re looking for an advertising network and a great community of bloggers who are more than willing to help in expanding your reach, better check out CMF Ads.

Tags: Advertising Network, Blog, blog advertising, CMF Ads, Social Networking

BlindSpeak: Create Synthesized Text to Robotic Voice Messages

BlindSpeak is a service which allows you to send digitally synthesized messages to friends. You can easily do that by typing in your message and let BlindSpeak do the rest. Your message will be synthesized and converted to a very robotic sounding audio message.

A user is limited to sending up to five messages per day to prevent abuse of the service. The IP address of the sender is recorded and therefore can be banned to protect others from receiving threats and other synthesized verbal abuse. However, you can download your created message by sending it to yourself. You will receive the message in the form of an attached MP3 file or a weblink. Each message created through the BlindSpeak service has a retention rate of 30 Days, after which, the message will expire and will be inaccessible.

BlindSpeak is quite similar to iSpeech. The only difference is that BkindSpeak does not require you to sign up. On the other hand, iSpeech allows you to embed the converted message to websites which makes it more accessible to others.

Tags: BlindSpeak, convert, Synthesize, text to audio

ShortText: A Dead Simple Online Posting Tool

Whenever you want something to be posted online, it is a requirement to have your own website, join a social networking site or register for free blog services. However, there are quite a few services out there that let you post your content with minimum fuss and ShortText is one of them. It’s a simple tool to post text online which does not require you to register or sign in. It’s an on demand web presence for your information.

The service will create a ShortText URL for your content. The URL will remain active for as long as someone visits it at least once a year. You can make a post private by placing your own password key or by generating a random one. You are also allowed to link to images and videos by simply ticking a check box. You may allow comments and use rich text (the codes are similar to the ones used in forum sites). With a maximum of 30000 allowed characters, I’m sure that it’s quite hard for you to run out of text space for your content.

ShortText is a simple service that can be used by anybody who wants to publish content anonymously. Since it is not a requirement to register, it makes it very convenient for such publishers.

*They also have a Firefox extension which makes it easy for you to publish text found online by highlighting the text and creating a ShortText URL.

Tags: online tool, Post, ShortText, web app

Uatuh: Automated Ebay Product Search

Uatuh is a search service that automatically searches for products that you specify. When the product finds a match to your search, you will get a notification from the service. You will be notified via email or instant message.

The search service’s pro user account will get you extra features. You will be allowed to search Amazon and Google base and get additional notification via SMS or Twitter. The free account is only good for Ebay searche which is already a great thing if you want to monitor a product being auctioned by different users.

If ever you are searching Ebay for a product and did not find it the first time, try using Uatuh to get notification when that product becomes available. This will save you a lot of time going to the site and performing a search every hour or so.

Tags: alerts, automated search, ebay search, uatuh

CitySpeek: Enhanced Micro Sharing Site

Micro blogging is a thing of the past. They are calling them micro sharing sites nowadays. With all the enhanced features of sharing images and videos along with micro messaging/blogging that micro-social-networking sites are placing in their service, I am not a bit surprised. CitySpeek is one of those services with such features. Sharing links and 140 characters long thoughts are great but people are going to want more.

CitySpeek enhances communication by integrating pictures, video, categories and groups. It is easy to use and really nice to look at. It has a great interface and adding a picture or video to your update can be done in just a snap. You can also categorize your message by news, rumor, for sale, question, funny and others. Categorizing your messages will allow others to easily filter and find related messages. If one is looking for funny posts, it can easily be found using the filtering tool.

If you are looking for a Twitter-like social networking site, you might want to give CitySpeek a shot. Aside from looking great, it might give you the functionality that you are looking for that is not present on other micro blogging sites.

Update ( January 29, 2009)

Today we flipped the switch on our new translation feature.We have used the Google Translate API and integrated it right into CitySpeek. Users still write messages in their native language and the viewer of that message is given the option to translate the Speek into their default language with just one click. It couldn’t be simpler and we support over 30 languages. Now you can find new friends, trends, and news globally. We invite you to reach out to people in other countries and connect in ways you never thought possible.

Tags: City Speek, CitySpeek, Micro Blogging, Micro Sharing, Social Networking