Vivek Wadhwa, a Senior Research Associate at Harvard and visiting scholar at UC-Berkley, has written a guest post over at Techcrunch asking the American President to make it easy for H-1B visa holders to become citizens of the US.

I completely agree with Vivek Wadhwa and feel that the US is actually hurting itself by laying all these restrictions on legal H-1B holders to get green cards. He is 100% correct when he says that green card applicants who have been waiting in the line for years are getting frustrated with the whole process. These are folks who are highly knowledgeable and intelligent in their field of work. They could be starting companies that can provide employment to many Americans and help boost the economy.

Lets hope that the politicians, who hold all the power, are listening and make it easy for the H-1B visa holders to become citizens of this great country.

Microsoft is scheduled to release its latest Windows Operating System, Windows 7, on October 22, 2009. Windows 7 has received some good review from beta testers and is expected to bring in some big revenue for the software behemoth. Windows Vista had a huge launch, but it left many users unhappy with its features and unnecessary bloatedness. So far Windows 7 seems to have left a positive impact on its many beta testers.

If you are currently using Windows XP (home edition or pro edition)  then you would have to do a custom install to upgrade to Windows 7 i.e. basically do a complete install of the new OS. The same holds true for many Windows Vista versions. Take a look at the following Windows 7 upgrade chart created by Walt Mossberg of Mossblog and see what you may have to do to install windows 7 depending upon your current windows OS.

Lets hope that a custom install (a full complete install) of Windows 7 proves to be worth the effort for XP and Vista users.

There has always been a debate in the SEO industry on the real importance of sitemaps. Some feel that sitemaps are non-essential to SEO as the search engine bots are smart enough to find their way through your pages and index them. I have personally always felt that if you can generate a sitemap for your website then why not? It definitely would not hurt to help the bots go through your pages quicker and faster. I have had some good success in getting pages from some of my new websites indexed faster in Google and Yahoo. Alan Bleiweiss of the Search Engine Journal also agrees that Sitemaps and Internal links of a website can go a large way in increasing organic search traffic and the number of pages indexed by search engines. Check out this interesting case study of the magic performed by sitemaps on a new website that he developed for a client (www.storageseeker.com).

Spam email is a problem that has plagued the internet since its invention. Spammers are usually smart people who figure out new ways to spam all of us. Shut a door or two on them and they will find a hundred new doors to still get into your email inbox. They are always a step or two ahead of the minds that are involved in fighting spam and now they are targeting popular social networks to get into your inbox.

LinkedIn is a popular Social Network connecting professionals and is ranked by Alexa as one of the most visited Websites on the web (Ranks : US – 28, UK – 42, Australia – 55, India – 20 ). One of the features that LinkedIn provides to add more friends and colleagues to your network is by allowing you to invite them and send them a personal note from you. The personal note and the invitation are sent out as an email to the intended recipient. It is this feature of LinkedIn that has now become a target of spammers. Look at this invitation i received from someone by the name of “Rebekah Stone”. She wants me to check out some sexy websites.

How is LinkedIn going to fight this kind of spam? One way you can help them out is by using the “mark as spam” link that is displayed in the LinkedIn inbox.

My favorite screen capture tool is Cropper. Cropper is a light weight utility that gets the job done (but needs the .NET framework) for me. But this new web based tool, called Talon, from Aviary will do screen capture and screenshots of web pages without the need of any specialized software. All you need to do is prefix the website URL (of the web page) in your browser  with aviary.com/ (even before the http://)

For example, to take a screenshot of http://www.techdugout.com, all you need to do is change the url to “aviary.com/http://www.techdugout.com”. This will take you to aviary’s screen capture tool that will then automatically provide you with a screen capture of techdugout.com. You can then choose from a variety of image editing tools like resize, crop, Rotate & Flip among others to edit the screen capture. You can also choose the screen resolution, quality, region of the web page and browser/OS that you would like for the screen shot to be generated. Here is a screen capture that i was able to generate in no time (I was also able to resize the image to 400×300).

Aviary also provides a firefox plugin that will do the same job as their web based tool. The web based tool can also be directly accessed at http://aviary.com/launch/talon

[via : techie-buzz.com]

I can finally start using GMail as the front end for my work email account. Today the GMail team announced that they are enabling support for third party outgoing email servers. Sweet!! This step from the GMail team has definitely made GMail fans like me more than happy. Earlier Gmail used to allow using a non-Gmail email address for sending emails. But to comply with mail delivery protocols, your Gmail address would still be used as the “Sender” and the outgoing message would show up as “From mygmail@gmail.com On Behalf Of myworkaddress@myworkxyz.com“.

The Gmail team posted the following images to show the difference on how Gmail would now work for sending email from non-Gmail addresses.

Gmail Before Third Party SMTP Server Support

Gmail After Third Party SMTP Server Support

To turn on support for third party SMTP servers in your Gmail account, go to Settings->Accounts->Edit Info Link in “Send Email” Row->Use your other email provider’s SMTP servers.

So is it finally time to stop using Outlook for work emails? I guess so, at least for me.

Related posts:

1. Gmail Can Now Add Your Current Location To Your Signature Using IP Detection
2. WhiteHouse.Gov Gets Makeover After Obama Becomes President, Obama Staff Using Gmail
3. Google Adsense Now Allowing Publishers To Change Font On Ads.

There are times when all of us have tough times open files that have extensions that we are unaware of. Your operating system may not have any installed software associated with such an extension and you may be required to download additional software to open such files.

OpenWith.Org comes to our rescue in such a situation. OpenWith.Org is run by a group of “Computer Programmers” who want to help out friends. The site provides information on almost every kind of file extension that is out there and provides information and links to open source and shareware programs that you can use to open a file with a particular file extension.

The website layout is clean and pretty straightforward. File extensions are arranged and sorted by categories (like Audio files, images, videos, etc.). The website also provides reviews of some open source software that can be used for burning files to CD/DVD and Photoshop substitutes.

They also provide their own desktop tool so that users can search for software right from them their desktops and without visiting their website. With this desktop tool you can right click on the file you would like to open and the tool will find matching software for you. Here a couple of screenshots that show how this tool works. For complete information about this desktop tool, go to their desktop tool instructions.

Related posts:

1. Screenshots & Screen Captures Using Aviary – No Extra Software Needed

Google has now joined the bandwagon and started tweeting on Twitter. You can follow Google at @google on Twitter. The first tweet from Google was geeky and this is what it looked like:

“I’m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010”

That is binary for I’m F E E L I N G L U C K Y – Loren Baker of SearchEngineJournal.com coined a new term for Google on Twitter. He calls it Twoogling. This new term caught fire on Twitter and everywhere on the web.

Bloggers are also suggesting that Google may buy Twitter because when it comes to real time searching on the web, Twitter is the king and easily trumps Google.

Amit Agarwal (Digital Inspiration) recently presented some of his Google Adsense optimization techniques and tips at the WordCamp conference. He lists out some excellent points on his blog post, which i think every blogger and webmaster should make note of. Adsense Optimization or optimizing for any other ad network is always a trial and error method. There are no fixed set of rules that dictate how and where ads should be displayed. Here is the slideshow that Amit used at the WordCamp conference. For full explanation, please go to his blog post.

Related posts:

1. Google Adsense Now Allowing Publishers To Change Font On Ads.

Yes, I have found the perfect recipe to making money online. This perfect recipe has put me on the path to reach my goal of making a million dollars this month. But today i have decided to give away my recipe for making money because i want people like you to also prosper and making a living online. First off, here is some proof that i have indeed made all this money.

Oh Boy! How i wish this was true. Sorry guys, i was just trying to have some fun here. The image you see above was generated using the fake Google Adsense Generator at www.googleadsensegenerator.com. The fake generator can be used to build an image like this with whatever numbers you would like to show as earnings.

You should always treat claims of making big money online with some suspicion. We see many fake offers and scams that entice unsuspecting folks into buying something by showing fake images like the one above. You now know how easy it is to generate fake images like this.

So always Remember – there is no shortcut to making money.