WebLens Updated

More changes at WebLens ...

Cayole Cruises added to the Travel Bargains page.

Announcing .. The WebLens Daily!

Lots of new developments at WebLens right now. We've been twittering up a storm, so we've just launched The WebLens Daily, a handy digest of relevant Twitter posts delivered to your desktop each and every day. Subscribe or follow us on Twitter to stay up to date with tweets relating to Internet and net search news, as well as web design, social media, and SEO and online marketing trends. Updated daily with fresh and timely content, and links to useful resources and interesting and entertaining sites. Drop by today and let us know what you think.

NEW!! The WebLens Toolbar

Announcing the brand new WebLens Toolbar. Keep all your favourite resources right at your fingertips, no matter what site you are viewing. Compatible with IE, Firefox, and Chrome, the WebLens Toolbar can be downloaded from any page on the site. It comes loaded with all the WebLens menu contents you've come to know and love, plus loads of extra goodies, like quick links to Facebook, Twitter, local weather, Amazon deals, Groupon, Flixster movies, Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Youtube, and more!

The WebLens Toolbar also includes a radio player and one particularly useful resource — Similar Sites, which displays thumbnails of sites similar to the one you are on. Best of all, the toolbar is fully customizable, with a marketplace of thousands more apps to choose among.

Get it today at our download page.

WebLens Updated

Several new resources posted to WebLens today:

• CruiseNow added to Online Travel Reservations and Trip Booking
• Restaurant.com added to Destination Research > Dining Guides
  
• Study Navigator added to Academic & Scholarly Research
• Govt Navigator and Military Navigator added to Finding Government

Hope you find them useful.

Ferrofluid Defies Physics

This is WAY cool! I haven't blogged for a while, but I just had to share this! Ferrofluid is a liquid that becomes polarised in the presence of a magnetic field. Here's the technical definition, straight from Wikipedia: "Ferrofluids are composed of nanoscale ferromagnetic particles suspended in a carrier fluid, usually an organic solvent or water. The particles are coated with a surfactant to prevent their agglomeration. Although the name may suggest otherwise, ferrofluids do not display ferromagnetism, since they do not retain magnetization in the absence of an externally applied field. In fact, ferrofluids display (bulk-scale) paramagnetism, and are often referred to as being "superparamagnetic" due to their large magnetic susceptibility."

A bunch of scientific mumbo-jumbo to me, I'm afraid, but the behaviour of the fluid is fascinating to watch. This YouTube clip is wonderfully entertaining and demonstrates the fluid's seemingly impossible properties. There are lots of examples on YouTube, accompanied — not surprisingly — by abundant debate re whether or not it's CGI fakery. There's even a television commercial using the fluid.

Kinda reminds me of those 50's Wooly Willy toys we had as kids, with a goofy-looking guy and iron filings you dragged around with a magnet, to give him hair and a beard.

Ain't the web grand?! Every now and then, one tends to forget the incredible marvels this technology has brought to our desktops.

Test Your Vocabulary and Help Others Too

Came across a site a couple of days ago that, as a writer and avid Scrabbler, I couldn't resist. FreeRice lets you test your vocab skills and donate food to the hungry at the same time. Each word you get right is worth 20 grains of rice.

You gradually work your way up the levels, with the top score around 50. I hovered between 44 and 47 most of the time, and quit when I hit 48.

Can't believe how many words I've never heard of! Give it a try. Great fun.

The World's Chocolate Shops at Your Fingertips

Here's one for chocophiles everywhere. Get your daily fix of the sweet treat with Chocomap. This new Canadian web site, sponsored by Ecole Chocolat, uses the Google Maps API to find chocolate shops throughout the world. Using the standard Google Maps interface, you can search geographically then zoom in on a location. Read brief descriptions of chocolate destinations or post your own review. There's lots of other useful information too, including recipes, chocolate e-cards, interviews with top chocolatiers, tips on cooking with chocolate, and background information about the origin and cultivation of the plant that gives us this wonderful food.

Already, the site has more than 1,000 listings in over thirty countries. Definitely one for my favourites list.

New Corbis Microstock Debuts

The beta version of SnapVillage — Corbis' long-awaited foray into the microstock arena — debuted a few days ago. I've done quite well online with some of the other microstock sites, so I was curious about how the traditional stock photography giant might approach the business of microstock. They had, after all, been slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the mounting competition coming from this quarter.

So far, I'm colossally unimpressed. I uploaded half a dozen images over a week ago, and as of this writing they still aren't processed. No acknowledgment at all.

Worse, the site times out quickly after the upload completes, so that if you do not immediately enter descriptions and keywords (that's right, the site doesn't support embedded IPTC information), you're bounced out, and you have to RE-LOAD everything all over again.

I was not impressed with the lack of support for IPTC data, which is pretty standard in the industry, as is the ability to upload via FTP. The site is still in beta, so one can only hope these features will be coming shortly. If they don't, SnapVillage will fail to attract professional photographers who have come to rely on such functionality at other microstock sites.

The quality of the existing images is poor, but then — in fairness — I guess Corbis faces a bit of a branding dilemma. They need to somehow differentiate this site from their costly "high-end" site. Unfortunately for them, some of the other microstocks have really raised the bar. Sites like Shutterstock, iStockPhoto, and DreamsTime feature excellent photographers and many professional quality images.

Corbis is late off the mark, and disdain virtually oozes from this site. It's evident in the name they chose — snapvillage — the word "snap" more than a little denigrating in its suggestion of casual snapshots rather than serious photography. It's almost as if they're targetting the Flickr amateur shutterbug crowd. Indeed, some of the images look like they came straight from the worst of Flickr.

All in all a failing score. One would expect more from a company backed by the Corbis brand and bankrolled by Bill Gates.

Monetize Your Blog with Job Listings

SimplyHired.com's Job-a-Matic service allows any blog or web site owner to monetize a site with paid job listings. Target by industry and set your own pricing for listings you attract, and the company shares revenues with you 50/50. If your listings are on the skimpy side, Job-a-Matic "backfills" with relevant postings from SimplyHired.com's five million strong database of jobs. Click-throughs are rewarded with a 30/70% revenue split. You can target jobs by keyword or geographically, or both. (One down side — the service is currently limited to the U.S. only.)

Job-a-Matic generates a customizable listings page and lets you create widgets and ads that you can paste into your blog or site, as I have done at left below. The backfilled listings served by Job-a-Matic are attractive and easy to read, with some useful enhancements such as the ability to quickly and easily access geographically relevant salary information. Any listings you attract are added to the database, and promoted through SimplyHired.com's extensive network, which includes MySpace and LinkedIn.

The service debuted in February of this year, and already over 600 blogs have signed on. SimplyHired claims to be the world's largest job search engine and was lauded as one of the 50 Coolest Web Sites by Time magazine.

Microsoft's Sexy Search Avatar

Just stumbled across this site in my stats this morning, and I can't believe I've missed it up til now. Ms. Dewey is an attractive search assistant from Microsoft, of all places, meant as an experimental interface for MSN search. Played by actress Janina Gavankar, best known for her role as Papi in The L Word, Ms. Dewey debuted in October 2006. She flirts, pouts, and entertains while waiting for your search term, then produces standard MSN search results, annotated with amusing commentary. She makes various random gestures while waiting, producing various props from behind her desk. She got quite frustrated with me, leaning forward to tap on my screen when I had failed to type anything for several seconds.

According to Wikipedia, Ms. Dewey is a viral marketing campaign — Microsoft is not actively marketing the site, but relying on the user community to spread the word. Her responses actually consist of about 600 video clips recorded over several days.

To experience her fully, you'll need the Flash player, as well as a high bandwidth connection. Check her out!

Photo Duck Funnies Right On

Saw a link yesterday in the Shutterstock discussion forums to a clever online comic strip about the trials and tribulations of daring to earn a living as a photographer. What the Duck is shutterbug Aaron Johnson's wry take on all things photographic. Johnson lets his readers name each strip through his blog's comments feature, and just reading the comments on some of the strips can be pretty entertaining. Check it out. Some of the strips are hilarious.

25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

Just sent to me this morning by my daughter, this link is worth sharing here. InterGovWorld's recent article, The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time, makes for an interesting read, and will no doubt bring back some cringe-inducing memories for those of you who have been around high-tech for a while. The short-lived IBM PCJr. Iomega zip drives. Real Player. AOL (remember all those "free" CDs?) A wearable DVD player (I kid you not). PointCast's push technology (replaced, interestingly enough, by today's Web 2.0 RSS feed technology). And so much more.

Check it out.

The Web's Most Useful Site?

I may have just stumbled across the Internet's most useful site — for webmasters at least. The Scrutinizer is a single page from which you can run dozens of different tests on the content of any page in your site. Available tests run the gamut from HTML and CSS validation and link popularity and rank checks to pings and traceroutes, plagiarism checks, site speed tests, and more.

Just enter your URL, select the test(s) you want, and click Go. Great resource.

Happy Accident

Silly thought. The blog graph illustration from my previous post (which you can see full size at my Flickr page) looks oddly like a bird — right down to the beak, feet, and pouffy tail. It's even got a little tuft of head feathers, like a quail.

Reminds me of one of those plastic bobbing and drinking birds from my childhood, like the one you see here. Ah for simpler times.

Have a great weekend.

Graph Your Site Code!

ProBlogger's Darren Rowse has a post this week about an entertaining little Java applet that graphs the HTML entities that comprise your web site. Websites as Graphs generates a swarm of colourful — and strangely mesmerizing — dots that coalesce into interesting patterns representing your site's structure.

Rowse used it to illustrate his post with several graphs that plot competing sites, including Google versus Yahoo and Engadget versus Gizmodo.

Already, a community is growing around this tool. Check out the graphs that people have posted at Flickr.

I was curious to see how it would treat WebLens. You see the result here. Give it a try for yourself. Just type any URL (web address) into the screen form and watch the fun begin. (Tip: scroll down the results screen for an explanation of the colors used.)

This Glossary's a True Knowledgebase

Ever need a quick tech definition? Motive Corp has put together a pretty impressive Web Design Glossary. The definitions they have amassed aren't extensive in quantity, but they certainly are in the depth of information provided for each term.

In fact, this handy resource borders more on knowledgebase than mere glossary, providing concise mini-tutorials and links to further reading on various web-related topics. It's not as comprehensive as a Wikipedia entry, but provides quick introductions to various Internet concepts for those in a hurry. Definitely worth a look.

For more Internet glossaries, scroll or jump to the bottom of WebLens Reference Tools page.

Create Your Own Super Hero

With the six-episode reality television show Who Wants to be a Superhero airing this summer, there's bound to be renewed interest in super beings. Here's an online tool you can use to design your very own Spidey or Wolverine. Hero Machine, from UnderGroundOnline, is a slick little applet that lets you create a superhero from the ground up.

You can choose gender and body type, then select among a wide range of facial features, clothing elements, extra appendages and armament. Once you've designed your hero (or villain), you can colourize him/her, choosing both outline and fill colour from the palette provided. You can see my fierce defender of freedom, nicknamed Randomella, in this post's illustration.

Once you've created your superhero, you can share him/her with others or discuss the finer points of gaming in the UGO forums. Or use your new superhero as an avatar in those online blog directories that require a visual!

For more about super heroes, see this wikipedia article.

Keotag: Metasearch for Social Bookmarking Sites

Every once in a while, an idea so original — so brilliant in its simplicity — breaks out of the pack of Digg and del.icio.us clones debuting daily online that you're left wondering how come nobody thought of that before? Keotag is just such a site, offering a unique but obvious twist that may become to social bookmarking sites what Technorati has been to the blogosphere.

(In case you've been living in a cave the last few years, social bookmarking is a Web 2.0 phenomenon. Sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Raw Sugar, Shadows, Ma.gnolia, and too many more to name here, allow people to create "social networks," whereby they can save, share, tag, rate, and comment on each other's web favourites.)

So, how do you extract value from these sites? I, for one, have no time to spend searching, browsing, or monitoring them all. Enter Keotag. Essentially a social bookmarking metasearcher, this nifty little tool allows you to simultaneously query over a dozen of the top social bookmarking sites on any tag or keyword, finding sites recommended by people rather than produced by search engine algorithms or seo manipulations.

Keotag also offers links and tag generators for several of the more popular social bookmarking sites.

Want more of these sites? These two lists will keep you going for a while:

• 3Spots: All the Digg-Style Applications
• Listible: 76 Social Bookmarking Sites

If you found this post useful, sign up for our feed for more on this topic. And if you're enjoying Random Bytes, please support us with a link from your blogroll.

Cookie Joins the Blogosphere

You know blogging's hit the big leagues when cartoon characters embrace the trend. The latest funny pages character to jump on the bandwagon is perennial teen, Cookie — of Blondie fame — seen today blogging in comic strips everywhere. Cookie isn't the first; she follows in the footsteps of Between Friends and Doonesbury, both of which have poked light-hearted fun at blogging ethics (or lack thereof).

I'm sure these intrepid bloggers aren't the only ones. Do you know of cartoon bloggers I have missed? Drop a comment here and let me know.

Dont Click It: Interface Breakthrough or Usability Nightmare?

I stumbled across an interesting experiment in user interface design a couple of days ago that may make you re-evaluate your relationship with your mouse. How hooked are you on clicking that button? Can you explore a web site without using your index finger? How easily can you navigate when deprived of a mouse click and a keyboard? How will you feel about the experience? Should you even care?

We are so accustomed to the point and click approach to navigation that clicking on something that interests us is second nature, almost instinctive. Or so believes the Institute for Interactive Research. They built an experimental Flash-driven site to learn more about how people interact with content, and whether there's a better way.

DontClickIt is a content-rich site that will challenge you to experience it fully. It provides background information about the rationale for the project and several user interface experiments you can participate in. It even lets you spy on others who have visited the site.

This is a site you will either love or hate. I imagine many people click away after only a few seconds. If you can stick it out and get the hang of it, there's some very interesting content there. So, what's your take? Visit DontClickIt and drop a comment back here. Web breakthrough or usability nightmare?