Web Talk

I don’t know what is wrong with me, but lately I have been thinking about food too much, really too much! That’s why I have been posting two websites speaking about food in a row. This time it is the turn of a perfect example of Web 2.0 website. Its name is We Eatt and promises you to deliver hundreds of recipes to play with in a while. This juicy website is a big box containing lots of recipes, pictures and videos of the best food you can find on earth. Other features include:

• Store your recipes in a secure place.

• Share your most interesting recipes in different ways. You can show your stuff to everybody, keep your stuff private or send an invitation.

• Search whatever you want in a breeze thanks to a powerful search engine optimized for food and gourmets.

PicApp is a nice website, in perfect Web 2.0 style, which lets you pick up the best pictures available in the Internet for free. If you are a blogger you know only too well how difficult it is to choose a photo from the Internet since, in most cases, it is copyrighted. One solution is to use this nice plugin (if you have Wordpress) that gets all the picture you want from Flickr. Anyway, if you are looking for a simpler solution, PicApp is for you. But lets see how it works. Once you are in the website you don’t have to do anything apart providing an e-mail. In fact, no registration is required. You can start getting your pics right away. But if you think to get the pic itself you are wrong. PicApp lets you use a photo but not the file itself. That’s why it provides you a code you have to copy and paste wherever you want in your blog. Remember, you can not save any file. Furthermore the pictures include an advertising mechanism to facilitate royalties to the content owners. Of course there was some kind of trick, right? Nothing is for free, but in this case the fee to pay is very little. As a matter of fact, these pics are quite nice and in some cases show actors, famous people, politicians etc. In a word, they could cost you a leg and an arm if you would buy them! Anyway it is a good service just flawed by this little advertising. If you are a pro blogger you can find this website of no use, since it doesn’t provide any file to save, but if you are a beginner this site could save you hours of search through the Web!

This nice website is 1 year old but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know about it at all. But what is Yahoo! Pipes? Basically it is a place where you can set your fantasy free and try to create nice widgets for your blog (TypePad, Blogger, WordPress, iGoogle). To start using it you need a Yahoo! account. The thing you don’t need to start playing with it, its the hard-to-get-without-studying-hard programmer’s knowledge. As a matter of fact, you can start creating nice widgets from scratch in a few steps, and without knowing any piece of code. The way it works is rather simple. Once you are in, click on “create a pipe” and a white page will appear. On its left there are lots of buttons describing what they do or the functions they represent (most of them are related to feeds. The application itself is based on a fetch-feeds system). Drag them on the screen, link them to each other, debug the widget created and you are done! The widgets you create are available in one of these three combinations: the widgets show you a list of infos such as news, the widgets show you results on a map, the widgets show you pictures. Is it too easy to be good? Watch the video and get an idea about what I am talking about.

Are you one of those people who like writing tons of notes to remind yourself phone numbers, names, streets, work stuff etc? If so, then Ubernote is the right service for you. In fact, Ubernote lets you save and store a variety of things such as: Task lists, Bookmarks, Web clips, Notes to self, Meeting notes, Recipes, Research and random thoughts or ideas. Everything is stored in your personal space, available for free and without any limit, in the website itself and because of this, you can access your own stuff everywhere you are. Of course this is another nice example of Web 2.0 which is taking over more and more in the Web, and which is bounded to redesign the way we think of the Internet itself. If you want to know more watch the video now.

If you have a PDF file but you don’t want to use any software to open it, the only solution you have is to convert such a file, thanks to an online application, into a flash webpage readable directly from your preferred browser. Thanks to PdfMeNot reading a PDF file without using Adobe Reader (which, in some cases, slow your computer down) is not impossible anymore. As a matter of fact this nice website lets you converter any PDF documents located on your computer or in any website with a couple of simple steps. But PdfMeNot goes beyond all this. In fact, it lets you download a Firefox extension to have such an important resource always at hand in your browser. Besides, if you are a webmaster PdfMeNot may be very helpful to you. In fact, if you want your visitors to read important PDF documents within your blog’s pages, you can do it by embedding a special code provided by PdfMeNot once a certain document has been converted. Look at the example here. I like this website a lot and I strongly recommend it to bloggers who are always looking for applications to embed documents and pics in their blogs in an easy and painless way.

How familiar are you with viruses, spywares, spammers, malware and phishing? If your reply is a lot because you had to do with one of them or with all of them during your surfing, well, today there is a new threat called SPLOG you have to deal with. But what is a splog? If you are a regular Internet user, sooner or later you will have to deal with it, because a splog is just a normal-looking blog with the only intention to get as much money as possible by using Google Adsense. All its content comes from other blogs, thanks to a simple “copy-and-past”. Nothing it is original and the person behind it, is just a guy who wants to make a lot of money. He is not interested to speak about certain topics or reply to his readers or help others. You will never get any reply from him if you try to send him an email. If you are a blogger, sooner or later you will see your articles, posts and guides in one of these splogs. There won’t be a lot you can do, apart from getting angry and see your own writing used by people just interested to make money, without giving you any credit for your works. Recently Wordpress stated to have deleted around 800.000 splogs. This figure represent about 30% of all Wordpress blogs! Of course this new pestware has not just to do with Wordpress. Lots of famous blog platforms are involved too such as: Blogger and Google blog. So far, there is not any solution at hand (no matter if you are a surfer or a blogger) to this new dirty way to spam the web 2.o.

A few days ago I spoke about a nice application that lets you convert your .doc documents into the new and hated .docx format. Today I want to speak about a web application I already reviewed but that, in the meanwhile, has implemented among its features the nice .docx converter. This free web application is called Zoho Writer. But Zoho goes beyond this and in fact lets you create from scratch a .docx document without installing any software! Good job Zoho!

Some time ago we spoke about Issuu that lets you covert your documents into nice magazines to browse online. Today, I want to speak about another online application that, like Issuu, lets you convert your documents…into something different and more Web 2.0. In fact with iPaper you can create fully customizable flash widgets with your personal documents. No matter what format your documents are (PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenOffice ecc.), iPaper will change them into something that can be compared with YouTube videos. Try it now!