For a change, I’m using ScribeFire for this post

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004

Impersonal is correct: Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.

However, of late, wherever I tried to run an upgrade on both the blogs using the plugin, a blank page would appear during the process, between step No. 3 or 4 or somewhere in between. I had to start afresh again many times and weren’t able to figure out what went wrong until recently when I disabled all the plugins before I start the upgrade process. Viola, it worked, on both the blogs.

Although the Automatic Upgrade plugin also has a step as part of the upgrade process, in which it disables all plugins, I guess doing that manually doing it yourself before the process starts was quite worth it. Anyways, you can now select all plugins at once on the Wordpress dashboard and activate/deactivate them all together at once. So there is not much effort required at all.

Something I’m increasingly seeing on Chrome: unsupported sites. One reason among others why I’m still sticking to Firefox.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.