Etisalat Unblocks Stumbleupon After Blocking it Couple of Days Ago

To those who do not know, Stumbleupon is a website that allows users to rate websites and share them with their friends and with other users who have the same interests as them. Just by installing the Stumbleupon toolbar on Internet Explorer or Firefox the user sets his interests and by just clicking “Stumble” he will be able to jump from one website to another, so for example if one of his interests is gardening he will come across gardening websites, then he can rate it and like that Stumbleupon will understand what the user likes and dislikes to refine choice of websites to be stumbled.

Web surfers in the United Arab Emirates got the bad news two days ago that Etisalat the largest Telecom Company in UAE have blocked access to StumbleUpon and users were getting errors when clicking on their StumbleUpon Toolbar. People were angry, mad, and all kind of bad feelings you can think of, all sort of people from your regular web surfer to the Web Developer, all did not like the news and tried to contact Etisalat and ask why is this happening, but you always would get your regular answers. Some Web Developers and Bloggers actually use StumbleUpon as a way to promote their websites.

But today morning, and like every morning (I know am addicted ) I clicked on “Stumble” button of the StumbleUpon Toolbar and was shocked that it worked, I tried again and again and it worked, then just to confirm it I went to www.stumbleupon.com just to check if the homepage would load fine and it did. So I hope this comes as good news to all stumblers in UAE .

2 comments July 8th, 2008

Use VidMetrix to upload your video to all Video Sharing Networks

Upload your videos to the major 9 video sharing networks automatically, you can also track those videos and get all different kind of statistics such as views stats and share stats and others more. You can also send those stats to multiple emails.

And if you upload your video to VidMetrix using their uploader you will be able to track where your video gets embedded, what kind of traffic it gets on those embedded sites, and for how long was your video played.

The 9 video sharing networks you can automatically upload your videos to are: AOL Uncut, Daily Motion, Google Video, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, Veoh, YouTube, Yahoo Video

Add comment December 5th, 2007

Buzzword, now that’s what I call a "Word Processor"

Google Docs, Zoho Writer and now Adobe Buzzword. Since the start of the rise of online document editors, I always asked myself, why those websites do not use flash instead of Ajax and I still don’t really get it. I always thought "FLASH" would be better and faster. I know that "Live Documents" will also use the FLASH technology.

Adobe Buzzword although came a bit late to the game, but there are couple or more things that makes it better than the others. Obviously being in FLASH is the first that comes to mind, it really makes it super fast. Buzzword is far more simpler and easy on the eye’s too. It works on any operating system, your computer just needs to have Adobe Flash installed, which is available in most computers by default anyway.

To read a full review click More…

As soon as you finish your registration you are quickly switched to the main page. In the main page you can basically either create a new document, open a saved document in Buzzword or open a document from your harddisk.

The beauty of Buzzword, being in flash, the menus are smooth and fast. And nicely organized, and on your first look you would get the wrong impression that BUZZWORD lacks features and options.

But you will be very mistaken to think so, just click on any of the icons and it will slide revealing various features. The picture below shows some of them.

We shouldn’t forget the pull down menus too, which also hold a number of different kind of options.

The "History" feature keeps track of different changes that you make on a document so you can switch between them easily.

In Buzzword you can also insert Pictures and Comments.

Document sharing, you can make a document private or share it with others in a very simple way, setting a role for the person you are sharing the document with. There are three roles. Co-Author where he can do anything with the document, Reviewer where he can read and comment on the document, and Reader where he is only allowed to read the document.

There are other great features also, such as Zooming, using a slidebar you can zoom the document in and out which automatically resize everything in it.  You can also insert special characters, and Offcourse, the automatic word count is useful when you are limited to number of words.

Now that is all great stuff in BUZZWORD, but there are couple of things that I found negative in it, nothing is perfect in this world. Anyway, the first thing that bothered me is the limited number of fonts available, which are only seven fonts.

The second thing is what happens sometimes when you upload a picture, it took me three tries to upload an image, a message keeps coming up stating that "Buzzword could not contact the server to complete our action". I tried doing this using IE, Firefox, FLOCK which is Firefox anyway, and I tried it from my Toshiba G30 Notebook and My Desktop PC. Sometimes the image is uploaded from the first time, but the error window do appear quite often.

For a full help guide for Buzzword Click Here.

In the end I would like to say that Adobe Buzzword is a good, easy and fast Word Processor. Couple of enhancements here and there and it will defiantly become THE web REAL Word Processor.

Add comment December 4th, 2007

SeeToo: Stream Videos Privately

There is a huge number of video sharing websites on the internet, that is no new news, but what if you want to share a video with a family member or a friend and you don’t want all the world to see it.

Here comes “SeeToo”, a new service that allows you to stream videos directly from your PC to your friend. All what you have to do is download a client and then give a link to your relative or friend and when they go to the page you will be able to stream videos live from your PC and chat. The video will not be saved on “SeeToo” server. Which means if you give the link to your friend and you are not connected he wont be able to see anything. Simply put, its live broadcasting your videos privately to whoever you want.

“SeeToo” is still in Private Beta and they might start Public Beta by the end of the year.

[Via AppScout]

Add comment November 22nd, 2007