Next time you head to Wikipedia to search for anything, stop and redirect yourself to Qwika. This new search engine indexes 1158 wikis in 12 languages and has 21,964,380 articles in its index. Most of the search results you will find are from Wikipedia’s various language editions and Wikia pages, but it is definitely a time saver, if you are the wiki researcher types.

There is also a IE and Firefox toolbar that allows topic search, keyword search, and even unlikely features like pop-up blocker, search highlight, and site ranking displays.

So now we have Qwika for search on search on wikis, Twing for search on internet forums, Truveo and Blinkx for video and audio search, and Pipl for people search, besides the omnipresent Google. Good for researchers.

Also check out Top Online Research Resources for PR and marketing Professionals

Google Adsense is without doubt the most popular online advertising network and used by many small and big site owners alike. And we would love to hear how we can earn more from the system. Here are 10 useful tools to help you boost your usage of the service, understand it better, and perhaps help earn more.

Adsblacklist

Adsblacklist is a site that lists the Made for Adsense (MFA) sites and Low Cost Per Click (LCPC) ads that Google Adsense users can add to their Google Adsense Competitive Ad filter tool.  To use the Adblacklist tool, you need to register yourself and your site. Once that is done, click on the Generate Filter List link on the left hand sidebar of the Adsblacklist site. This tool can generate upto 200 MFA sites or LCPC ad sites if you have a free account, or generate all that it has in its database if you are a premier account holder. You can also contribute to Adsblacklist by reporting MFA sites or LCPC sites that you have discovered.

Adsense Earnings RSS feed

Adsense Earnings RSS feed is a script that you can use to generate a RSS feed of your Adsense earnings, clicks, or other reports. So if you are the RSS buff who wants every information on the RSS reader, this is the tool for you. To use this, simply download the script, customize it a little by adding your Adsense login information and the range of days you want to aggregate data of. Then you can upload the script on your own server or some secret place on the web.

Ads Preview and Comparison Tool

Ads Preview and Comparison Tool is an online tool that allows you to preview the ads that will appear on your site from Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher, and Chitika.  You can preview Google Adsense text ads, adlinks, and image ads in various sizes or compare them with corresponding ads from Yahoo or Chitika. This is quite an interesting tool and you might be surprised with some of the ads that may come up on the preview.

Adsense Charts and Graphs

Adsense Charts and Graphs offers eight charts for your Adsense data based on impressions, impressions (Cumulative), clicks, clicks (Cumulative), clickthrough percentage, earnings, earnings (Cumulative), and earnings per click. If you are the type who likes to study your Adsense data thoroughly with charts and graphs, then this is the tool for you. To generate your charts, you have to download the AdSense CSV file from your account and upload it on this online tool.

The charts can come out with some useful information like when did your earnings peak, when did it subside, which are the best performing channels, etc.

AlternateURL

AlternateURL replaces the Public Service Ads from Google Adsense on your site with paying ads. You can register at the site for free and generate the AlternateURL code to use on your site instead of the Adsense code. Simple as that. AlternateURL works on a 50:50 revenue sharing model with its publishers. They pay through Paypal monthly. You can also track your click reports from your AlternateURL account page.

There is a similar service to this from Adsense through which you can color mask your ad block, use an image, or make your ad unit collapse whenever there are no paying ads to display.

ClickAider

ClickAider is an online tool that will track clicks to Google Adsesnse ads and ads from other ad networks that are displayed on your site. This can be an useful tool that will provide you information like which advertisements are the most preferred by your readers. ClickAider also tracks where your site visitors come from and which outbound links they follow from your site.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is essentially an online tool for Google Adwords users but Adsense users can take advantage of it as well. You can use the tool to generate a list of top keywords on any descriptive word, phrase, or website address. The generated list of keywords are also rated based on the amount of advertisers bidding on them, search volume in a particular month, and the average search volume. This gives you a sense of high paying keywords that you can used on your site to attract high paying Adsense ads.

FilterTool

FilterTool is a cool online tool that you can use to find a list of sites whose Adsense ads are likely to come up on your site. You can pick the bad sites from this list and add them to your Adsense filter list. You can also sort out the good sites and keep them separately so that the next time you run this tool, those sites are exempted from showing up. FilterTool is available for a free trail of 14 days.

Pubmatic

Pubmatic is a tool that you can use to optimize the ads you get from your various ad networks including Adsense. Once you register at Pubmatic, you can add your Adsense account details and generate the html codes that ypu can use on your site in place of the Adsense code. That’s all. PubMatic will get the best ads in terms of size, color, text/banner/video format, etc. suitable to your site.

SysSense

SysSense is a light tool that will sit on your system tray and monitor your Adsense account. The first time you run SysSense, you will be ask to set up your Adsense account. You can provide your Google adsense login ID and password and you are done. There are lot more features here than you will find on the Firefox addon tools providing similar services. For instance, there is the currency convertor, and the auto update that you can set from anywhere between 1 minute to 5 hours. You can set what information you want SysSense to show including page impressions, clicks, clickthrough rates, effective CPM rates, or earnings.

Once upon a time not so long ago, DivShare used to be my best file sharing service, beating Box.net and all the others in terms of features, usability, interface, or space. DivShare doesn’t limit your file uploads to 10 MB like Box.net does on its free account. It provides you with a big 5GB space. Its features such as the AJAX search and fast multiple file upload tool are wonderful. The service was even nominated for Webware 100.

Not anymore. Why am I saying that? Read on.

Apparently the company is running sort of funds or whatever and are doing all it can to get ad revenues and get the free users to turn premium. I understand every business needs funds and DivShare is no different. But whatever they are doing now, they are becoming a little too much for my liking at least and not what I would like my (trustworthy and solid) file storage site to be like.

For instance, now when you log in to DivShare, their premium account rates and super discount charts greet you instead of your dashboard. When you do a ‘No Thanks’ and continue to your account, everything seems fine and looks the same as before. But wait until you send a file to your friends and this is what they will see when they open the file link.

This is a page full of ads and looks no better than a spam site. Just imagine you are sending that link to a client or a business partner and this is what they see, along with two pop-up ads. Not only that, when you click on the download link, you are taken to a new page , again full of ads, and asked to be waited for 15 seconds before getting redirected to the final download page.

What also made me lose complete faith in DivShare is that they have recently made their services unavailable in 12 Asian countries. Reason: “the online advertising market in China and Southeast Asia is much weaker than in other parts of the world”. This is bad news not only for the DivShare users there but also means that you cannot send files to people in those countries. Thankfully Indian companies still advertise in the site and the service is still active here. But I don’t know for how long.

I don’t mind paying for their premium account but when there are so many services providing the same services free of cost, it’d be a bit silly to find a service provider who asks you to pay up.

By the way, I don’t work for any other file sharing service providing company. This is genuine consumer dissatisfaction.

There have been many Greasemonkey scripts and Firefox addons that do the job of adding pictures and links on Gmail signatures. As you know Gmail, on its own, doesn’t support the use of html and pictures in its email signatures in order to prevent misuses. So these scripts and addons have been the favorite lot of many who wanted to spice up their emails a bit. However since the new version of Gmail debuted, many of them have ceased to work.

But luckily here is one script called Gmail HTML Signatures that still works. It not only adds pictures and links on your signatures but also enable float. In other words, when you are replying to an email, your signature will be visible just below your message and not after the copy of the original email embedded in your reply. See screenshot of a signature below.

For newbies, please note that you first need to install the Greasemonkey addon on your Firefox browser and  then this script. After you have installed the script, when you open your compose editor, you will see that just after the ‘From:’ section, you will see a link called ‘Create Signature’ . When you open that link, you will see a window where you need to add the html code of whatever signature you have created.

If you don’t know how to create a html and want a quick solution, you can use a free online WYSIWYG editor like this one at Real Graphics. Create your signature, format it well, add the font colors and the picture. When you are through, click the toggle (< >) button and copy the html code from there.

Remember if you using pictures, be sure to fill the  description of the picture in the ‘Alternate Text’ in the upload window. Whatever you fill there will come out in the alt=”…” section of the html code. For example: alt=”StumbleUpon”.

This will ensure that the image description is shown whenever your email recipient can’t receive html emails. Just like in the screenshot above.

Do you know Linkedin is the smartest website in the world, followed by Facebook and Simple Spark? This is the ranking calculated from the cumulative IQ scores of their users. MySpace ranks 5th, Twitter is on 8th, and Google is on 9th.

Might be fun to calculate the IQ of your site as well. Head to IQ League where you can calculate your and your website’s IQ. You can take a simple 60 second test to determine your IQ level.

For you website, it is a little elaborate as your website readers are the real IQ of your site. You need place a link on your site and ask your readers to take their IQ tests. For each visitor, IQ League will remember were he/she came from and automatically add that visitor into your site’s data. Once you have 5 people taking the test from your site, IQ League will calculate IQ of your website. You can view the stats at http://www.iqleague.com/group/mysite-com

Is it a surprise that India is the smartest country in the world, followed by Netherlands and Serbia.

Web18 seems set to become the destination for your social bookmarking needs, video and music sharing, online travel portal, start up page, feed aggregation, and emails. Their latest venture, In.com, so apparently, is a huge effort in this direction. If the name, targeting all those who yearn for small email addresses, doesn’t strike you, then check out the features. These guys must have figuring out hard all this while on what kind of online sites tick well with the masses. And when they did, they assembled all of them together in one. So now you have your Digg, YouTube, Gmail, MakeMyTrip, Netscape, Zapak, and JukeboxAlive under one domain. That’s the story.

Do I like it? Definitely. In fact, I dare say this is finally a web 2.0 site from India after a long time that I honestly like. The design and look are neat. The music and video streaming is fast even on my dialup. The email service is with a whopping 10 GB space and I particularly find it quite thoughtful that they have introduced folders, made compose editor or for that matter every mail that you read open in a new tab. The inbox page is clean and they don’t insert any ad on the footers of emails that I send to my acquatntances, like our so big Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail do. Plus, In.com is a 2-letter good name (it has supposedly costed Web18 2 crores) to have an email with and being new, you can have all the mayank, sita, teena, and what not @in.com, instead of going for the tenna20008 type usernames.

In.com doesn’t have to worry about the news. They aggregate it from other sites. Maybe many people would prefer that instead of having one publication house to read the news from.

What the site lacks is the functionality in some areas. Site navigation can still be a pain. if you venture somewhere as when you are adding your feed or reading a feed, you cant find the go-back buttons so easily. You cannot move back to any part of the site from your inbox.

Would I prefer In.com over gmail? Unlikely , but it can definitely become my second best and I can close down my Rediffmail, Yahoomail, AOL, and Hotmail.

I hope they keep the site clean and don’t insert ads like there’s no tomorrow, something so characteristic of web18 sites.

Final words: This site is here to stay and so watch out, Indiatimes and Rediff. I cannot yet start comparing it feature by feature with the biggies like Gmail and YouTube, that won’t be fair, but I think web18 has got it right.

For users like us, all I can say is grab your ID before anybody else does (provide your mobile phone number not email for instant invite code on the site) and the ad campaign starts.

There are so many online dictionaries. But using them is a different thing altogether. Some of them ask for membership, some are full of ads. But here are two online dictionaries that are fun to use and and a bit more convenient to use than the rest.

Check out Word.sc. No, you don’t need to click that link and visit the website. All you need to do is in your browser address bar, type ‘word.sc/your word’ and click enter. There you go. It saves you the process on opening an online site homepage before entering your word to search for.

For example if you need to search for the word ‘advocacy’, type word.sc/advocacy in your browser address bar.

Word.sc also has a social networking features. You can upload your picture for any word in the dictionary (Tell your friends to look up the word genius and see your picture), rate and tag words, vote for user photos, and earn word points to redeem rewards, profile badges, and monthly prizes.

Now if you are not satisfied with this, you can check out the Ajax powered online dictionaries that will display the meaning of your words as soon as you start typing without loading a new page on your browser. I like ObjectGraph the best as it has the fastest speed. You can also check out Dictionary.hm and Define It Fast.

Tired of receiving email forwards from your friends, whose email address you don’t want to block. You might not also want to write back and tell him/her not to send forwards anymore.

Try StopForwarding. You can simple add your friend’s name and email address at this site and they will send your friend a polite email asking him/her not send anymore spam emails and that spamming is bad. They won’t include your name in the email.

Well, I tried to add one of my colleagues’ email address to the site just for kicks. And you know what? I got an error message saying ‘An email has already been sent to this email address, in last 1 month. We do not promote spam. Use a different email address.’

Enterpriser.in, the Indian news and resource portal for small and medium businesses, recently did a story and quoted me on how SMBs can use blogging as a marketing tool.

To me, blogging can be a cost effective communications tool for SMBs. It can be a good way to build up the profile of the senior management in the market. Unlike large corporations where there are multiple protocols to follow, SMBs can get engaged online and respond to queries and complaints in quick time. A number of clients we are planning to kick start social media campaigns for currently are from the SMB segment, and we are confident that it can bring some good positive results. I will keep you informed. Read the full story here.

You can check out more of my writings on PR 2.0 and social media here.

Check out Yahoo New Globe. Set it on automatic and let the globe rotate on your browser screen showing you the important news happening across the globe. You do do it in the interactive mode as well.

The News Globe pulls out the top news new from Yahoo News Top Stories feed, runs then pass Yahoo Maps to get the latitude and longitude of each news item, and then uses 3D classes in ActionScript to get that visual experience.