Publicity Wheel is a new internet startup that adds a new spin (mind the pun) on advertising your website.

“The Publicity Wheel is a fun and unique way to achieve a boost in traffic and exposure for your website at absolutely no cost.

Each spin of the wheel, a featured website is collaboratively promoted via banners and text links by the Publicity Wheel community. You will earn publicity points each time somebody clicks on a banner or link on your site. At the next spin, a new website is selected based on publicity points and promoted once again.” (Source: Publicity Wheel)

Simply sign up and provide details about your website and upload 3 banners (125 x 125 pixels, 200 x 200 pixels and 468 x 60 pixels) and then your banner may well be seen on other members websites resulting in more exposure.

Personally, I think this is a great idea, the only downfall is if it doesn’t get many members then you wont get much exposure but it is certainly something to look out for.

Publicity Wheel - reinventing the wheel check it out here

If you have never come across Twitter before then here is a fantastic video on it, worth looking at even if you do know what it is:

Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

You can view the post and visitors comments on Techcrunch here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/14/twitter-testing-advertising-in-twitter-streams/

Co-founder Craig Walker said:

I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.

Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. - Craig Walker

Source: http://blog.grandcentral.com/?p=144

Google acquired Grand Central back in July 2007 for a cool $50 million. It is designed to use VOIP (Voice over internet phone) to link together customers phone numbers. “Whenever the customer’s GrandCentral number is called, the chosen phone or phones ring, allowing the customer to answer his or her chosen phone. The phones can be chosen based on time of day; for example, the home phone can be turned off during business hours, and based on groups (Family, Friends, Work, Web Button, Others) or personalized based on an address book.” (Source: Wikipedia)

So not really a great thing to happen for its users, as Micheal Arrington on Techcrunch said: “If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead“

Uniprint is a service that allows you to create 3D applications from your word, excel, powerpoint or PDF documents that you can embed into your site to give a rich interactive experience to your readers or embed it into emails, great for online subscriber magazines.

The application will allow you to flip through pages, zoom a page, even search the magazine for keywords. You can export it to a PSD file and email it to a friend. This type of online application has been around for some years however the pricing for it was ridiculous.

UniFlip offers a free service for personal use and a business service for well, business use. Pricing is modest at just $79 for the basic service for one publication and you save a percentage for every extra publication.

The application is fast to use, although I saw some lag in the zooming so if you are on slower connections this may be a problem, however everything else worked great.

Overall a nice application although one let down is the design of the site, they have a great service but the site doesn’t represent this, it looks like something hatched together overnight.

You can go to the site here: http://www.uniflip.com/
There is a demo of the application outcome here: http://www.uniflip.com/catalogs/1233/2806/pub/index.html
and a Killer Startups review here: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/UniFlipcom—Customize-and-Publish-3D-publications/

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The site was full of images of applications and web pages which is okay but I probably wouldn’t keep going back to the site. After all a site like this is a gimic that people wont keep going back to, it acts more like an image upload site with a lot of bells and whistles.

Navigating around the site is similar to most web 2.0 sites through the use of tags. When a screenshot is uploaded the user attached tags to the image so people can find it.

There are options to embed the image in your own site which means that webmasters can save bandwidth and hosting space.

Users can leave comments on each others screenshots and each user is assigned with a profile which has a section about the user as well as all the screenshots that they have uploaded and RSS feeds so you can keep up to date with the users uploads.

There are also widgets that you can add to your site with the latest three uploads.

The site is currently in private beta so you cannot sign up at this moment but you can sign up to receive an invitation and you can still browse through all the screenshots on the site.

I rate this site at 4 out of 5, the site is packed full of features, has a nice design and is fast and simple to use.

Adobe Photoshop Express isn\’t what most people would say was Photoshop in the desktop version that we use when we are designing a new site or tweaking a photograph but it is far ahead of most photo editing applications available online at the moment.

It boasts features such as tuning photos and adding effects such as tinting and sketching etc. You can also crop, rotate and all the usual functions in a photo editing application.

You can add photos by uploading them, or logging into either Facebook, photobucket or picasa and it will automatically add them for you to edit.

The application is new so works quite slow as you would expect, but it is packed with features and really shows the way forward in online software.

I feel that they probably shouldn\’t have called this application Photoshop Express because I would expect an application similar to Photoshop but instead it was just an average image editor. I would definitely recommend this application to people who would like to perform quick fixes such as red eye removal, but for more complex fixes I would use a specialist application and it would be a lot faster than this.

The application is free to use and is worth taking a look at, but there are plenty of alternative applications that show similar features such as Picnik

OK, well it had me going for a while, well until he said that:

“Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, things got out of hand. When our team of lawyers offered to settle for a mere $50 million, Kelly told me Facebook would “bury you and bury your crappy blog” if we filed the suit. He then threw his steaming hot triple soy latte espresso at me, which caused extensive second degree burns over the top half of my body. Later on, he also unfriended me.” (Source: Techcrunch )

It was all an april fools joke, actually quite a funny one. I better link to it else he will probably try to sue me, lol. The full article can be found here.

In this review I am going to show you some of the main features of the new version, this is from the culmination of playing around with the new wordpress for about half an hour so I may miss some things, so I apologise in advance.

New Design
The new design uses a nice combination of dark gray, white and a sky blue colours and really makes wordpress a pleasure to use. It has kept the tab layout it used to have but has spaced some of the items out a bit, for example, the dashboard link is now a text link at the very top left of each page. It also has a lot of smooth animations, for example on the widgets page, when you edit a widget instead of in previous versions where it put a lightbox over the page and show a little area with the widget settings, it expands in a nice smooth action and pushes down the widgets underneath. They have applied the design on the main site as well: http://wordpress.org/

Dashboard
Screenshot: click here

The dashboard has a selection of widgets which you can edit, you can have your visitor stats on this page which is a new development and of course it shows stats like number of posts etc. It’s all nicely set out like a lot of the new admin area is, nothing is cluttered into small places anymore.

Posting
Posting has become a much better experience. In previous versions there were a lot of formatting issues, these have been fixed and now what you write is actually what you get when you view it on the blog. There is still the HTML option if you want to go that way.

You can add media such as images, videos and music much easier now and even manage it easier, it is a lot more user friendly. You can upload multiple images and add a selection to a post and it will display the thumbnails in the post. When a user clicks on a thumbnail it will take them to the image as if it was a separate post and they can even comment on the image.

If you are working on a long post and want more space for writing you can now make the writing area full screen which gives you more than enough space, as if you were writing in a word processor. A nice addition because a lot of people write really long posts and that little box was never enough space to do anything, especially if you were adding images to your posts.

Tags make a come back in wordpress 2.5 and this time they work. Adding them is simple and it has intellisense so that if you already have a tag you can add it by selecting it from a list, just makes it much quicker.

All the usual stuff is still there, it is just much nicer set out, making it much easier and nicer to use, to view a screenshot of the post page, click here

Changing the look of your blog
As a wordpress designer myself, one area I looked at first to see if it had improved was the design area (where you can select and edit your theme and settings).
The new design area is much easier to use. A big problem before was that when you were adding widgets to the sidebar you would have to scroll down, grab the widget then scroll back up to drop it onto the sidebar. Now the sidebar items are on the right of the page and the options for widgets are on the left, you simply click the Add link and it adds it to the sidebar and you can then rearrange the sidebar widgets easily. There is also no need to go down the page and add text widgets to widget selection area like in previous versions, all you have to do now is keep pressing the Add on the text widget. You can see a screenshot of the new widget page here

Conclusion
Although I have only touched up on a few things that the new wordpress has to offer, there is plenty more to see, the best thing to do is go ahead and install it and test drive it. It has only just been released in stable version so there may be a few problems, one that I found was that you couldn’t align uploaded images which is a problem but on the most part it all works fine. Good job wordpress team.

The article was “a Hungarian biography of of 16th century painter Nicholas Hilliard” (Techcrunch, 2008) if you were interested to know what tipped that see saw over the edge.

Wikipedia has seen unprecedented success since its release in January 2001, theres not a common word or phrase that you type into Google that doesn’t show you a wikipedia page within the first 10 results so its unsurprising that it can top the 10 million mark in just 7 years.

Wikipedia hosts articles in 250 languages but English is still the most used language on the site with 2.3 million articles.

So there we have it 10,000,000 articles on Wikipedia, can you imagine a world without wikipedia, I certainly wouldn’t be passing my assignments at uni.

Fancy yourself an artist? If you want up your profile as an artist but aren’t too tech-savvy, head over to showthatportfolio, a site where you can do as the title says, and show off your art portfolio. You don’t have to paint frescos or even be the next paint by numbers luminary. Showthatportfolio showcases everything from modern art to digital art, logos and yes, manga. Creating a portfolio is easy too. Simply make yourself a profile by entering a username, password, and email address. Once you receive an activation email, you’re good to go. Upload the art you want to share and create an online portfolio. You might even get work out of it. Showthatportfolio also acts as a marketplace for artist. If you’re in need of a logo or corporate design, check out what the showthatportfolio artists have to offer. Each piece has a price and you can drop them a line through their profile.

Source: click here

What are your thoughts on the site, you can check it out at http://showthatportfolio.com.