Rapidshare.com is one of the top file hosting companies in the world and continues to remain the same. Recently, i came to notice that the whole website was redone with new features and designs. It was just yesterday that i noticed their update on their homepage regarding why they updated the website and what new changes have they included.

The Rapidshare V3 site as they call it, quotes the following as their reason for the recent changes and updates.

I have always been an admirer of HTML5 and CSS3 and with websites like rapidshare.com switching to them, I really see a really bright future for both these technologies. You can read more about this update on their website. You will find the HTML5 tab on the footer menu.

With iphone 4 creating a lot of buzz in the past few days, the spammers have taken due advantage of the same social media buzz. Facebook, the social networking site, which  crossed its 500 million users milestone yesterday, has still not figured out how to fight the spammers, who have been targeting them from a long time from now.

With this spam attack, anyone who clicks on the link claiming to provide you an offer to iphone 4, posts a similar post on your friend’s walls. Usually facebook’s application used to ask whether to grant access or to deny, but this time it direct attack it seems. So if you see something like the above screenshot on your wall or any of your friends, alert them not to click on the same. Just remove the post from your wall and that would solve the problem.

Facebook has always been a target of spammers and its high time facebook develops a mechanism to strike back. After all, facebook now has to answer to its 500 million members.

Youtube is one of the leading online streaming websites today and is the website of choice of millions. Today, there is nothing you can’t find on youtube. Yes, starting from tutorials on how to use a pc to how to assemble an AK-47 has been provided on youtube   .

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I have compiled a list of 12 best youtube tools that will help make your life easy.

1. KeepVid

Keepvid.com is an amazing site which lets you download videos from a variety of websites like youtube, metacafe, dailymotion, google video, facebook videos and a lot more. One thing I like about them is the varying range of quality they provide. You can videos according to your choice of quality from low to HD videos. Its even easier when you use their Keepvid Bookmarklet. While viewing any view youtube, just clicking on it take you to the download page of the video.

2. TubePopper

Tubepopper is an interesting concept that lets you make cartoons out of any youtube video, subtitling a video, commenting on a video and translating an existing video into any other language.

3. Video Focus

Video Focus is a greasemonkey script that lets you get rid of the annoying advertisements from your browser page. Other features include removal of chats, comments, Auto browser resize, video scale, custom background color, comments on/off, related videos on/off. These features are not just limited to youtube but to around 70+ streaming websites. To use greasemonkey script. you will need the greasemonkey addon for firefox.

4. YouTomb

Youtomb is a tool developed by MIT Free Culture that monitors the popular videos aon youtube and tracks down the videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. Some interesting information provided by the website includes who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown.

5. TubeOke

TubeOke is a great site if you like to sing along while the video plays. Tubeoke lets you search for the videos of your favorite artists and alongside provides the lyrics of that song in a small window next to the video when you play them.

6.  Youtube Thumbs

This is a handy greasemonkey script which lets you preview the youtube thumbnail videos by just hovering the mouse over them. for google chrome, there is the youtube thumbs extension which performs the same task.

7. Splicd

splicd lets you clip off a particular part of a youtube video or snip a small portion and share it with your friends. By this, you can save time and share the relevant part of video you need to show them. All you need to do is, note the start and end time of the video bit and enter in at splicd and follow the instructions.

8. Loopy for YouTube

Loopy is a handy greasemoneky script that adds a loop button  below the YouTube videos to enable/disable auto replay. Loopy lets you Loop your favorite music clips over and over again.

9. video2ringtone

As the name suggests, this great tool lets you convert your favorite youtube videos into ringtones. You can clip your favorite portion of any music video and  download them in a audio formats including mp3, aac, ogg etc.

10. You Old Enough?

This firefox addon lets you bypass the youtube age verification, hence enabling you to watch any video on youtube video without any registration/sign-up.

11. DeskTube

Desktube is an adobe air youtube tool for desktop. It lets you view the youtube videos from desktop without opening your browser. It also comes with twitter and facebook integrated with it. Hence you cans share videos simultaneously while you watch them. As for now, the direct link is not available but you can get DeskTube here.

12. TubeSpy

Tubespy is an interesting tool which shows you the videos that people are watching. It updates its list in real time and some of the most interesting videos which you may have missed, can easily be found out with this tool.

13. GoogleTube

This firefox addon adds a youtube icon next to the Google search results and lets you watch them and download them from the search page itself. the same applies to youtube videos in  Yahoo! and Bing search results as well.

HTML 5, the next major release in the HTML version, is a very much hyped release and brings a lot of hope and expectations to designers and developers. The upcoming release is said to be a major threat to Adobe Flash as the new standard incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop. HTML 5 brings you a number of new elements and attributes that will ease the work of web designers to a greater extend. Although there are not many websites that has incorporated HTML5 yet, here’s a list of some awesome websites that has used HTML5.

1. No More Stupid lights

2. Neo Design

3. Julie Vien Tran

4. The Green House

5.m-m Studio

6. The Göteborg Opera

7. PushDialer

8. Ousmane-Ndiaye

9. DoveTail

10. Idea Foundry

11. raffaele mariotti

12. NZ International Arts Festival

13. Smiths GardenTown

14. Standardista

15. TheEnergyCell

16. Raphael Goetter

17. DS3

18. CursoClio

19. MMMRI

20. Freszki

21. Resers

22. lomme bags

23. Zoocha

24. Super Size Art

25. Spaghetti

I have recently been into some Photoshop learning and was pretty caught up with how amazing, working with Photoshop actually is. After doing a little bit of research on it, I finally got to make some designs, basically a few miscellaneous ones for myself and I came across some absolutely wonderful tutorials which basically made me spend more time on Photoshop. I have come up with a great of tutorials which I found very much easy to follow and implement, so basically anyone who is interested in trying out their skill should definitely start off with these tutorials.

[note]1. Smoke Type in Photoshop in 10 Steps [/note]

[note] 2. Spray Paint Text Tutorial [/note]

[note] 3. Smooth Glass Type Text Tutorial [/note]

[note] 4. Create an amazing Ad in Photoshop [/note]

[note]5. Mysterious Lighting Effect Tutorial for Photoshop[/note]

[note]6. Amazing Photoshop Light Effects In 10 Steps [/note]

[note] 7. Design a Glossy Download Icon [/note]

[note]8. Colorful Glowing Text Effect in Photoshop [/note]

[note]9. Awesome Digital Bokeh Effect [/note]

[note]10. Papercraft Text Effect [/note]

[note]11. Typography Wallpaper in Photoshop [/note]

[note]12. Transparent Glass Lettering [/note]

[note] 13. Text In Stitches [/note]

[note]14. Create a Copper Photoshop Text Effect [/note]

[note]15. Create A Gold Text Effect In Photoshop [/note]

Google chrome is turning out to be an insanely cool browser with its light weight interface and a cool extensions collection that will definitely keep you glued to the chrome browser. I recently started using chrome browser some days back and I am really loving it. Apart from its cool extensions for developers, it has some great multimedia extensions to have fun with.

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So I am sharing some of the most coolest plugins which I found interesting and useful to work with.

1. TV Chrome

TV chrome is an awesome plugin that brings you the best TV channels from around the world on your chrome browser and he best part is, its free.

2. Chrome.Fm

Chrome.fm is a great extension that lets you integrate the last.fm browser into your browser. Listen to your favorite last.fm stations plus it comes with a nice little icon for your browser with which you can play, stop, skip, love and hate songs.

3. YouTube Music Video Lyrics

This extension as the name suggests gets you the lyrics of the song you are currently viewing on youtube from popular lyrics sites and made available though a pop-up.

4. Auto HD for YouTube

I am a great admirer of quality and nothing beats HD videos. This extension filters out and plays all youtube videos that you view in HD(as long as an HD version is available).

5. Youtube Thumbs

Youtube thumbs is a great extension for chrome browser that lets you preview the thumbs. Hover the mouse over the thumbnails to get a preview of the specific video.

6. Dailymotion Videobox

Dailymotion is one of the leading online video streaming site next to youtube. This extension lets you perform an instant search on the the millions of videos on Dailymotion for those matching the subject of the page you’re on in a single click.

7. Fast YouTube Search

This extension adds a button to your chrome browser making youtube video search easy.

It is quite natural that you make mistakes while writing and making grammatical mistakes is a common mistake that often annoys a blogger. When you are not so used to talking in english, you often tend to be weak in it as well. Such an error shouldn’t be a problem to bloggers who wish to share their knowledge with people. For such people, there are like a hell lot of tools available online to rectify their writing once they are done with it.  After the Deadline is one such tool but they have now made a bloggers job easy by providing a plugin.

After the Deadline is a extremely handy tool that helps you write better and spend less time editing. All you need to do is download and install the plugin. Once you are done writing a post, click the proofread button in the visual or HTML editor toolbar to check spelling, style, and grammar. It uses artificial intelligence and points out the typical spelling errors and provides you with suggestions for the right spelling as well. The grammar errors are indicated by a green underline and clicking on them gives you one or more suggestions.

Download The Plugin

I have always loved google for its amazing capability of providing me with everything i want, starting from assignments to the latest updates. I joined twitter on January 1, 2009 and it took me sometime to figure out why people actually loved twitter. Now it has almost been one and half years. For the first few months, i remained silent and observed of what and how things are done on twitter.

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Well, now i have almost figured out most of it about twitter. I would like to share some of my views of why twitter is a greater of a blessing to bloggers.

1. Latest Content and Trends Accompanied By Real Time Updates

Twitter is a well known real time micro blogging platform and twitter has become the source of the latest of the news updates. you don’t actually need to rely on google or other media sources for the latest updates.

2. Free Flow Of Ideas

Twitter is the house of great ideas and opinions coming from great minds. Almost the brightest and high profiled people around the people around the world are on twitter. And following them is the easiest thing you can do to improve your knowledge.

3. More Specific Access To your Niche

Twitter is not just source of technology, but also a ultimate source of art, photography, marketing and more. So depending on your field of interest, all you need to do is to follow the appropriate people who have excelled in your field.

4. Advanced Twitter Search

Twitter search lets you perform advanced search based on specific keyword, people, places, Dates, attitudes and other related criteria.

5. Source of Inspiration

Lastly, i would like to point out the most important fact : Inspiration. Twitter has always been a source of inspiration for me and giving new ideas and methods on how things are done. Whatever your niche or interest might be, twitter will always have the latest trends and information for you.

The above mentioned facts are something i have  learned about twitter in the past 1 year. Twitter has also given me a lot of new friends and i am happy to have my Twifamily.

Facebook, the social networking site has made yet another update to its website. They have rolled out the hover card feature as its latest update. With the hover card feature, you can view a summed up details about a friend or a fan page by hovering/moving the mouse over their names.

As for now, facebook displays the display picture, common friends and lets you sent message to the particular person as well using the hover card.In the future, you can always a lot more additional features added on to the hover card for sure.

Do let us know what you think about this update from facebook.

Starting off with a business on internet is not an easy job. In many a cases, people tend to loose interest over time when they don’t get a satisfactory response from it.  When you kick start an online business, it is a wiser decision to keep track and record all the data and statistics associated with your blog. It will give you a better understanding of how to optimize your website.

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I have listed out the top tools you should definitely utilize to the maximum for better results.

1. Google Analytics

If you are a webmaster, you will definitely love the google analytics. It is one of the best analytical tools ever. It gives you detailed statistical data of your website and a better understanding of traffic, traffic sources and impression rates of your pages.

2. Pingdom

Pingdom is an awesome tool to keep track and monitoring of the uptime status of your   website. Pindom’s desktop notifier instantly notifies you hen your website faces a downtime. A detailed information of the uptime and downtime can be viewed at the your pingdom cpanel. A better understanding of the reliability of your web hosting company can be made with this tool.

3. Alexa

Alexa is the most used tool by webmasters to get the ranking of your website. Alexa analyses your website and gives global ranking of your website, search traffic, contact info of the website(if any) and other relevant information. Recently Alexa has starting showing the average page load information of the analyzed webpage as well.

4. iWebTool

iWebTool is an ultimate collection of all the vital tools a webmaster would definitely want to try. iWebTool comprises of tools like Ping Test, Website Speed Test, Visual PageRank, Keyword Suggestion  and a lot more which can give you better understanding of your website.

5. Web Page Analyzer

Web Page analyzer is a great free tool which gives you a detailed report about the total webpage size, object sizes and their download times. It also gives an in depth analysis and various recommendations for optimizing your web pages.

I hope all those who cant afford the premium SEO and related tools will find these definitely useful to enhance their website.