Sometimes viewing pictures in rows and columns can be dull. Luckily, there are a number of services dedicated to making the photo search and viewing experience more interesting.

Check out my latest post on Mashable for 8 sites that provide a new approach to searching and looking at pictures online.

Also one that came on the comments that I would have loved to include is Tag Galaxy. Check it out.

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.

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.

There are hundreds of Wordpress plugins out there and you can use as many as you want. However, there are some plugins that are must-used for all. This is  a list of 11 such plugins that you just can’t live without.

In no particular order…

Akismet - This plugin that seemingly seem to do nothing visible has protected my blogs from over thousands of spam comments. Need I say more.

You need your Wordpress.com API key to activate akismet. You can get it by registering at Wordpress.com and by going to your profile page.

Feedburner Feedsmith - Sooner or later, you are going to burn your blog’s feed on Feedburner, and when you do that, this plugin will make sure all the default Wordpress feeds of your blog points to the Feedburner feed. For example, http://advocable.com/feed will always point to the Feedburner feed - http://feeds.advocable.com/newposts

Google Sitemaps - Ah! Who wouldn’t want to use Google Sitemaps. This plugin creates that necessary sitemap for your Wordpress blog effortlessly.

Wordpress Mobile Editon - Today, people are increasingly using mobile phones to browse the net, and you don’t want your site to look garbled on their handsets. This plugin displays the content of your blog in a mobile phone screen friendly format that is easy to browse and read.  this is one of those just-installed-and-forget-it plugins.

Maintenance Mode - When you are fidling with the design and layout of your blog, you don’t want your visitors to see you site all crippled. Right? This plugin will display a simple note to your site visitors saying your blog is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance and so please try back after some time. You, as the admin, can continue to work and see how your site actually looks like on screen.

Subscribe to Comments - When I comment on blog post, I ask questions and give my views on a particular topic and expect the post author or other readers to reply to my comment. Now since I can’t be bookmarking or remembering all the comments that I keep making, I’d love it if the replies are somehow sent to me. This plugin does exactly that by giving me the option of subscribing to the follow-up comments when I am leaving a comment on a blog. For a blogger, this is a good way to keep their readers engaged.

Wordpress.com Stats - Now there are so many stat providers like Google Analytics, Sitemeter, Statcounter, Woopra, and more, but I haven’t seen any that is quite as nice as this one. Though not quite so comprehensive, this plugin provides all the key stats you need to know about your blog on your Wordpress dashboard itself. No need to add any javascript that will slow down your blog’s page loading.

All-in-One SEO Pack - This plugin is no longer supported but is still one of the best out there to ensure that your post titles, descriptions, and keywords are in place, duplicate content are in check, and other on-site SEO optimisation is done.

Similar Posts - You can use this plugin to display a list of 5-10 or more similar posts below your blog posts. This helps in atrracting your readers to other similar content on your blog and perhaps make them stay longer on your site.

Popularity Content - This plugin helps you to display a list of the most popular posts on your blog based on certain criteria you have set. Displaying such list is important as your visitors know what are the best your blog has to offer.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade -  Wordpress keeps updating itself to new versions every now and then, and who would have the time and patience to delete some folders from the server, upload the newer versions, and take care that nothing is wrong in all these deleting and uploading. And plus the reinstallation. You can escape all this by getting this plugin do the upgrading for you automatically.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

Do you use Facebook status as your twitter and love updating your Facebook status regularly? Unlike Twitter that you can use from your IM or phone, you would have realised that you need to visit your Facebook profile page to update your status.

Not anymore. Now you can update your Facebook status from your Firefox browser with the Boost For Facebook addon. After installing the addon, it will reside on your browser as a toolbar showing a sidebar button, search Facebook box, Facebook shortcut links, and an ‘Update your Status’ box. You can type your new status in this box and hit enter on your system keyboard. That’s it. Your Facebook’s profile gets a new status update.

First time you installed the addon, you might not get the status update feature working on the toolbar. If so, visit the Boost for Facebook Help Page and see the instructions on the FAQ/ Feature Specific page.

To update your Facebook status from your mobile phone, add the Facebook Mobile application. This will allow you to text your status to Facebook. This application is currently available for users from the US, UK, and Canada.

If you are a new business development executive and are looking for new ways to leverage your online social networking in your work, here is one Facebook application that might help.

Post Your RFP is a Facebook application that you can use to browse a list of RFPs that other users have posted. There are more than 800 RFPs listed so far and you can see them listed in various industry categories.

If you are in an organisation, you can use this service to post RFPs and let your friends and contacts know about it. Post Your RFP can also draft and review proposals for you.