I have created more than a hundred PowerPoint presentations till date - for new business pitches, for my clients, and for internal office purposes. I love creating my PowerPoints with pictures on every side. Over time, I realize that I have used so many pictures, those I sourced from the Internet and other places and thought was creative and nice, that I wished I had a master folder on my PC containing all those pictures. Then every time I create a new ppt, I can quickly go to that folder, choose a good suitable picture, and use that, instead of going online and searching the photo stock sites. So there will be no more the ‘Ah! I can use that press conference picture on this slide but where did I used that picture before? I have to remember’. This will save so much time.

I needed a software that would search all the PowerPoint files on my computer, and extract the images out of them. After some searches, I found the answer. The solution is called the MS PowerPoint Extract Images From Presentations Software. It is a small file that you can download and easily install. You can load individual ppt files or an entire folder (like the D drive for example) on the tool and it will start opening each ppt file and extract the pictures to a location you specify. Very neat.

The software comes at USD 19.99 for the full functional version license. The unlicensed version just works well also though.

With all the rush and chaos for booking fancy .me domain names since yesterday, I decided to do a quick search on finding some cool words ending with ‘me’. I found two cool tools that will do the work for us.

The first one is More Words. Simply enter ‘*me’ in its search box and it gives you a list of 407 words ending with ‘me’. Examples: time, summertime, slime, overcome, and so on.

The next tool is WordNavigator. On a similar search on the site for words ending with ‘me’, it came out with a list of 647 words.

Now with more domain name extensions coming up, I am sure webmasters and domain name buyers will want to play around with these tools, if they aren’t already.

Out of curiosity, I did a search of words ending with ‘in’ (.in is the India domain extension) on WordNaigator and it threw up a list of 1,148 words. Bin, aborigin, begin, coin, dioxin, wherein, wolfskin, ……anybody interested?

By the way, in case you want to play around more and come up with names like del.icio.us and blo.gs, check this nice domain finder tool.

We all are aware of Google News Alerts, that nice service from Google News that keeps us sending email alerts on a particular tag/word we specified. Now take that into a new level with Alerts.com. This new service supports not just news alerts but more than dozen types of alerts including birthdays, gas price, corporate press release alerts, forecasts, horoscope, jobs, wake up calls, flight alerts, traffic alerts, hotel price alerts, RSS update alerts, and more. You can set up a to do alert as well.

Aother nice feature is that Alerts.com can send you the alerts through email, SMS, or voice on your mobile phone, home phone, or work phone, depending on how you want it. If you prefer, you can set up a ‘Do not disturb’ time period when you don’t want any alerts.

Currently the SMS and phone alerts seem to be working only in the US, but I am sure they will soon support more carriers globally. Despite this, the service is neat and I am really starting to like all my alerts configured under one service.

I think one of the reasons why OpenID is not catching up as fast as it should be (it should have been a rage) from the users’ community is because with all the dozens of OpenID providers and OpenID urls, most of us are taken to a new and unfamiliar territory. I can today register at one of the open ID service providers but when the time comes to use my open ID url, bang..I have forgotten it. What was it? Some pip dot palin dot whatever? Or palin dot what ID dot com….

Sure some of the techy among us can install a Firefox addon (Sxipper, Seatbelt)  that will autofill OpenID forms for us, but for the majority, it’s always …oh! what was my ID?

Another concern that I have is that these are not my urls. These are borrowed urls that I have opted out of compulsion in a bid to establish my identity. I didn’t like it. My identity is not Wordpress, nor Verisign, nor myOpenID, nor AOL, or whatever.

At least to address the first issue, we have hacks and plugins with which you can make your website/blog address as your OpenID. I love this concept. At least I don’t forget what my url is, even though after login, I am redirected to my OpenID service provider.

The latest on this is that for those of us who don’t have blogs or websites, we can make our email addresses as our OpenIDs. Email to ID is new neat service that enables this. You can register your email addresses with the service and associate your OpenIDs with the emails. Next time, you need to login at a OpenID-enabled site or comment on a blog, simply enter your email address as a your OpenID. You are not likely to forget your email address, are you?

EUfeeds is an Alltop and Popurls like site from the European Journalism Centre that aggregates more than 500 European newspaper feeds. The feeds get updated every 20 seconds. There are flags of the various countries in Europe on the site header that you can pick to see the newspaper feeds of that particular country.

For someone who is not familiar to the region, this is one site to get some good information on the top newspapers, and follow the updates from one centralised location if you don’t want to visit their homepages individually or if you are not too familiar with feed readers.

This is a kind of service we can build one for each region - US, Asia, Africa, etc. And will do good too. Any takers?

Sometimes when we see a picture of a person on the net while browsing, we go, ‘Oh! Who is this person?’. If the name and details about the person is mentioned on that particular page, good for us. If not, what can we do except a wild guess? Think of situations such as a group picture, a random shot, etc. etc.

Now Polar Rose comes as a new face recognition service that aims to do the guesswork for us. The service, in beta now, comes as a neat Firefox plugin that will show a red flower icon whenever there is a picture of a person on a web page. When you click on that icon, there is a pop-up that displays the name of the person. See picture on the left.

If you are the nice types, you can help by adding the names of people, if Polar Rose fail to recognize the picture.

At the main Polar Rose site, you can search for a particular name and the site will take you to the webpages where the pictures of that particular person you are searching for were marked at. So for instance, if you search on my name, it will take you to my MyBloglog profile page and this blog.

What differentiates Polar rose from other image search engines? This is what its recent release had to say - A search for ‘Peter Jackson’ in today’s image search engines result in various images featuring multiple ‘Peter Jacksons’ plus a number of images not featuring people at all but instead just images close to the text ‘Peter Jackson’. Polar Rose will instead sort the entities to include faces only, and group the individual Peter Jacksons.

I think the service is innovative and definitely has a good chance to make it big, though I would like the flower icon to be smaller, as sometimes, it could be obstructive and on the face. Does it slow down my browser, as it keeps on looking for human faces on websites I open? Common sense tells me it might, but who knows. Till now, I haven’t seen any problem though.

Socialthing is still in private beta and those of us already a fan of FriendFeed might think Socialthing has no scope of big life. However, when I recently got into its private beta, I was surprised to find a nice feature of Socialthing that FriendFeed desperately requires.

I am talking about Sociathing’s update notification that comes on top of your profile page whenever there is some new update from your friends. We have heard of Friendfeed users refreshing the page periodically to check if there are updates. This update notification feature is one that many would love.

To top this up, Friendfeed can do the updates with AJAX just like in Gmail. That would be lovely.

The Firefox 3 download site crashed just after 4 minutes of launch in its attempt to set a new world record for the most downloaded software in a day. Friendfeed is abuzz with the discussion around the topic. One’s loss is another’s gain.

Update: On Firefox blog, ‘The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!).  Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly. …..’

All the best Firefox.

Update: Finally Firefox is up, around 2 hours after launch time, and running.

On Father’s day, perhaps it might be a nice idea to check out some sites and forums dedicated to dads. Here are 8 of them.

GreatDad - A popular site for advice for dads. Good lists of resources.

DadDaily - A social networking site for dads.

DadStaysHome - A forum for dads to share their daddyhood experiences.

AtHomeDad - A resource and community for stay-at-home dads.

BrandNewDad - A social networking site for new and expectant dads.

Dadosphere - Another social netowrking sites only for dads.

JustDaddys - Another forum only for dads.

The DadLabs Crib - This is a dad’s community at Ning.

I love this site - Cleepr. It is a clean, elegant, and no-frill search engine for music videos that aggregates content from YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Google Video.

So now instead of visiting various video sharing sites individually, all I do to get a link of my favorite new song that I hear on radio is to search on Cleepr and I am rest assure I will get some good results. From the latest Colbie Caillat’s Bubbly to yesteryears’Johnny Cash numbers, they are all there.