What if an YouTube video sucks?

All right what if? Okay, the answer lies with Vidavee Graffiti. They call it the "artful vandalism". Yes with the tool you find at that site you can "graffitize" any video you want to and the pass it around.

There is an instruction video that starts playing as soon as you land at the site. The only problem I find with the video is the hair cut of the girl who gives out the instruction. It just seems that someone has already vandalized her hair. The cool thing is that you can work on that instruction video itself to get a glimpse of what all you can do.

Ok, now the really fuming ones can go mess up some videos or the creative ones can use some creative ideas to add their personal style to the videos with some artful touch.

Disadvantages of iphone.

After a whole lot of hype the iphone was finally launched but apart from all the hype, when it comes to the practical aspects it seems the iphone has not lived upto it's image. Here is why:

• The iPhone will not sync to Outlook or allow you to sync with other 3rd party PIM applications.

• It will not allow you to view or edit Office documents.

• It may not work as a modem for a MacBook or laptop

• iphone only responds to skin touch with no fingernail or stylus response.

• Can only be used with Cingular (maybe for as long as 2 years).

• It has a closed Mac OS X variant operating system.

• Has no removable battery.

• It has no memory expansion slot.

• iphone has no GPS.

• Currently the iphone has no voice dialing capability.

• The 8GB memory can be a bit too limiting and if it has to be a complete multimedia device this kind of memory won't be enough.

• Since there are no physical keys and only the touch screen feature it can be very limiting for people who are on the go, especially the ones who are driving.

The above information was gathered from Matthew Miller's article he posted at his blog. He also gives a comparison of the iphone with the Nokia N95 and Cingular 8525. It is a very informative reading. I suggest people who are inclined towards shelling out that US$450 read his article and get some insight before making that decision.

New Blogger related tips and links.

Here are some tips and useful links I gathered from the web which would be helpful to the bloggers who have started using the new Blogger.

1. Christine's Blogger template: This webpage is maintained by Christine. Check this page if you want to have a customizable Blogger template for the new Blogger. Each of the template costs $15.


2.How to upload a banner into the New Blogger: This article will help you to upload a banner into the new Blogger. The method used here is to remove the Header widget by going to Layouts and clicking on "Edit" and then "Remove this page element". But the problem is that many of the users does not have a "Remove this page element" button on the Header's Edit options. But there is way around to get the "Remove this page element" option on your Header's Edit options. To get that what you have to do is:

Go to 'Edit HTML' and look up for this line of text: (between <> brackets)

b:widget id='Header1' locked='true' title='Your Title (Header)' type='Header'/

Then change 'true' to 'false'. Save the template and go to 'Page Elements', now the button 'Remove Page Element' in Header should appear.

The credit for this idea goes to Pinzón Azul.

3.How to remove the Blogger nav. bar from your blog: This post I came across at Betabloggerfordummies will help you to get rid of the Blogger nav. bar from the new Blogger. Please do read about the legal issues before you do it. You can also find a link on that page which lets the bloggers using the old Blogger to get rid of the nav.bar. There are also many other Blogger related articles on this page like:

How to add picture to beta blog header.
How to customize your header.
How to insert banner link to your blog.
How to add banner link in footer.
How to add widget to provide button link to your blog.

I hope these links provided here helps the bloggers to have a cherishable blogging experience.

Related reading:
14 things to be avoided for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Adsense inside the article/post in new blogger(beta).

Tools to optimize Google Reader.

As most of you are aware Google Reader is an excellent tool to subscribe to news feeds. And along with a new and popular tool one can always expect third party add ons. And that is beauty of the Internet. Just when you start to fall in love with a tool these adds can make you fall head over heels in love with an amazing tool. And as it was inevitable several add ons have popped up that will make your experience with Google Reader a more rewarding one.


So without further adieu here are some of the Google Reader add ons that add more spice:

Google Reader Notifier (For Mac OS X Tiger users): Google Reader Notifier is a private open source project utilizing the unofficial Google Reader API, and is not related to Google. This tool displays the unread items of your Google Reader account right from the menubar of Mac OS X Tiger. This keeps track of new items within your entire reading list or just for a particular tag.

Godita: This tool is a Google Reader Del.icio.us Tagging bookmarklet. This tool lets you copy Reader items that interest you to del.icio.us, along with all the other items you've bookmarked over the Web.

Google Reader Optimized: This is a tool that optimizes the Reader taking away all the unnecessary UI elements. It's a skin that can be applied using either the Stylish user styles Firefox Add-On, or the Greasemonkey Add-On. This set of user styles maximizes the reading area.

Using your cell phone to Control Google Reader (Mac users): Romeo is a tool that is available for free which allows the user to control their MAC remotely using a blue tooth and a compatible mobile device. It lets you control your iTunes and DVD Player, as well as presentation applications. Now Ben Wong has come up with a Google Reader Romeo Script that lets you control your Google Reader using a blue tooth enabled mobile device.

Google Reader button for Internet Explorer 7: This a button that integrates with the Google Tool bar for Internet Explorer 7 and notifies the user about new items through an icon that offers a color change (green) to notify a user of new content.

And finally, for those who are not yet aware of the Google Reader keyboard short cuts, take a look here.

Reference:
The Official Google Reader blog.

Opera users should update to 9.1

Secunia has reported that Opera 9.x has two vulnerabilities which can be used by an attacker to compromise a users system.

The two errors that have been reported are:

1) A error within the processing of JPEG files can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow via a JPEG file with a specially crafted DHT marker.

2) An error within createSVGTransformFromMatrix() can be exploited by passing an incorrect object to the said function.

Opera has been going through a phase without any big vulnerabilites being reported. But this has changed that. The last reported vulnerability with Opera before this one was the URL Parsing Heap Overflow Vulnerability.

It is advised that all Opera users update their browser to Opera 9.1 which was released very recently with a whole lot of innovative features including the Real-Time Anti-Fraud technique.

14 things to be avoided for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Ok, folks I came across a very informative article related to some basics of search engine optimization at Google Blogoscoped, a blog that covers Google and the tech world since 2003 with 80% focus on Google. The person behind Google Blogoscoped is Philipp Lenssen and his posts are widely read.

(Philipp Lenssen has also interviewed Matt Cutts, Google’s Gadgets Guy back in Nov.2005. If you are interested, read the interview here.)

In this article he gives some basic tips about search engine optimization and somehow what caught my eye was the 14 steps he has mentioned, that should certainly be avoided while trying to optimize your search engine rankings and I thought of sharing it with all the fellow bloggers who have just started setting their sights on the Blogosphere.

Here is the 14 things that are an absolute no no:

• Don’t stuff too many keywords into places where they don’t belong.

• Don’t optimize for search engines at the cost of human visitors; if someone told you adding a dash to the domain name helps your rankings, but you feel that dash might confuse your customers, then don’t add it.

• Don’t trust people who promise you “instant #1 rankings”, “guaranteed top 10 positions” or anything of the sort.

• Don’t link to others from your site just because they promised a link back to you.

• Don’t link to others just because they paid you, unless you know exactly what you’re doing (i.e. you know about “bad neighborhoods,” the “nofollow” attribute, PageRank, JavaScript-ads vs text links, what it means to get googleaxed and so on).

• Don’t create multiple pages with exactly the same content.

• Don’t let others people “litter” URLs on your site; if you have a web forum, keep it spam-free.

• Don’t “litter” your URL on other people’s sites.

• Don’t invest in a cheap server that won’t be able to cope with your traffic; don’t build your whole site on free website tools only – if you want to have a high-quality site & server, you need to pay for it.

• Don’t worry about a page’s meta descriptions, meta keywords and such; your time is better spent creating content.

• Don’t use tools that automatically submit your site’s URL to directories, search engines and such.

• Don’t present different content to search engines than you present to users; for example, don’t hide your text to visitors and show it to search engines.

• Don’t “over-optimize"; relax, if search engines required webmasters to heavily optimize, they’d be doing a very bad job.

• In general, don’t try to outsmart search engines (unless perhaps you intend to dedicate your life to that task); those maintaining search engines are paid to outsmart webmaster tricks, so in the long run, chances for successful tricks are low.

You can read the basics of Search engine Optimization at Google Blogoscoped.