English blog Tech.co.uk have been invited to a special event in which Google will be revealing a “product for mobiles”.

Whether this will be the launch of the long rumored Google Phone is unknown. It could just be another one of their endlessly ‘in beta’ services, but we have our fingers crossed. Whatever it turns out to be, you’ll hear about it here tomorrow.

Is Google about to unveil the Google phone? [Tech.co.uk]

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Hotmail now offers 2 GB of storage for free, coming closer to Google’s 2.6 GB. This is a significant upgrade for Microsoft because they had been offering only 1 GB of storage. Although Yahoo limits their free service to 1 GB of disk space, they are expected to offer unlimited space this month. Their email service is free as well, but may not work perfectly with all browsers including Firefox.

The competition is fierce between the three rivals. Yahoo still charges $20 per year for POP3 service which allows users to access their email clients including Outlook and Eudora. Google offers that service for free, and Microsoft is expected to offer POP3 service later on for Outlook only.

Free POP3 Service and mail forwarding is the biggest advantage for Google, and one reason they have become so popular. With the Yahoo and Hotmail free service you have to use your browser to access your email. With Google, you can use your browser or your email client to access all of your email accounts at once, free of charge. Offering these POP3 servers is a huge expense for Google, but it is a big advantage for their users.

All three services use spam blockers and virus protection. Google gives users a total of nine months of dormancy before an account is deactivated. This means that if you don’t use your account for nine months it will be declared dormant and then finally deactivated. Yahoo and Microsoft give their users less time before their accounts are deactivated.

Google has also integrated their Google Talk and instant messaging service into gMail. Google Talk enables users to make free voice calls through the computer.

Sometimes it is better to go second, and in this, it was an advantage for Google to learn from Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s mistakes. They developed gMail with POP access and other capabilities from the ground up. Yahoo and Microsoft had to work with their older technologies to provide users with upgrades.

Google has also unveiled a new and improved iGoogle personalized home page for their users. The free iGoogle is similar to Yahoo’s personalized homepage, but with new and improved gadgets. With your new personalized homepage you can preview your email letters with one of the free gadgets. The iGoogle has various fun themes that change throughout the day depending on what time it is. There is nothing to download and it operates like any homepage, except it is customizable. No wonder Microsoft is feverishly working on upgrades to their existing services.

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Download TVUPlayer >> http://dl.tvunetworks.com/TVUPlayer.zip

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Enjoy a Better Web Experience

There’s a lot to do on the Web, and Firefox 2 is full of helpful features to make your time online more productive.

Improved Tabbed Browsing

We love tabs as much as you do, so Firefox 2 will open new web pages in tabs by default. Each of those tabs has its own close button, but don’t worry – if you accidentally close a tab, just go to the History menu to bring it back from the list of “Recently Closed Tabs.” You’ll never be crunched for space anymore, either. When you have too many tabs open to comfortably fit in a single window, scroll arrows will appear on either side, and a button on the right side will always show you an easy-to-read list of all your open tabs.

Spell Checking

Sometimes you’re in a rush, and can’t remember if it’s “i” before “e” or the other way around. Firefox 2 has built-in spell checking to keep you from making any mistakes in your blog posts and Web-based email, so you can worry about more important things.

Search Suggestions

Some of the search engines in Firefox 2 can read your mind, and actually suggest search terms for what you’re looking for. Just start typing into the Search bar, and a drop down list of suggestions will appear. (Works for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com.)

Session Restore

Losing your place while you’re doing things on the Web is a pain. Now, with Session Restore, if Firefox has to restart or closes when it comes back you’ll pick up exactly where you left off. The windows and tabs you were using, the text you typed into forms, and the in-progress downloads you had running will all be restored. You can even set Firefox 2 to always restore your previous session instead of loading a home page, so you’ll never lose your place again.

Web Feeds (RSS)

What do news headlines, indie rock podcasts, and pictures of kittens have in common? They’re all things that you can subscribe to with Web feeds. Firefox 2 gives you full control over Web feeds, showing you a preview and letting you choose how you want to subscribe. You can use a Firefox Live Bookmark, or a feed reader that you’ve installed on your computer, or through a Web service such as My Yahoo!, Bloglines or Google Reader.

Live Titles

Keep an eye on that auction or the status of a delivery using the new Live Titles feature in Firefox 2. Compact enough to fit as a bookmark label, Live Titles are regularly updated summaries of the most important information on a Web page. As the information on the page gets updated, so does your Live Title. Try one out in Firefox 2 by bookmarking www.woot.com.

Integrated Search

Firefox helps you find whatever it is that you’re looking for. The Search bar comes pre-loaded with search engines for Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Answers.com, and Creative Commons. Wherever you are on the Web, you can enter a search term in the Search bar and receive immediate answers from the search engine you’ve chosen. You can select a new search engine from the Search bar menu at any time, and add search engines from hundreds of your favorite Web sites.

Live Bookmarks

Firefox Live Bookmarks let you view Web feeds such as news and blog headlines in the bookmarks toolbar or menu. With one glance, quickly review the latest headlines from your favorite sites and click to go directly to the articles that interest you.

Pop-up Blocker

Firefox keeps you in control of the Web pages you’re viewing, blocking annoying pop-ups. Firefox’s pop-up blocker notifies you when pop-ups are blocked via the information bar or icon on the lower right of the screen.

Streamlined Interface

The user interface in Firefox 2 has been updated to improve usability without altering the familiarity of the browsing experience.

Accessibility

Firefox delivers a better browsing experience for everyone – including those who are visually impaired. Firefox includes support for DHTML accessibility. Web developers can create pages that reduce the amount of tabbing required to navigate a document to minimize keystrokes for those with mobility disabilities. Firefox also includes support for Microsoft Active Accessibility, Microsoft’s accessibility API standard for Windows. This support allows Firefox to work with screen readers such as GW Micro’s Window-Eyes and Freedom Scientific’s JAWS. Firefox 2 (Windows version) meets US federal government requirements that software be easily accessible to users with physical impairments.

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Users have a number of options to customize the search engine: choosing which pages they want to include in their index, how the content should be prioritized, whether others can contribute to the index, and what the search results page will look like.

This isn’t new – Rollyo, Eurekster and Yahoo already have similar products. But Google is also offering, as an option, to bundle the service with Google Adsense ads and share revenue with websites that embed the custom search engine into their site. Only Eurekster currently shares revenue with users. Yahoo’s product, which got a lot of press at launch, has barely been mentioned in the nearly three months since then.

For bloggers, using Google Co-op may be a better choice than the built in search feature. A search engine can be created that searches just a single site, and Google search is generally better than search features included with blog software, and with the addition of Adsense this will generate a separate income stream as well.

Check it here : http://google.com/coop/cse/

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You can simply create a new account from here.

Also there are many new features added to Orkut. Like Quick Reply, Delete multiple scraps. The best new feature is the facility to Add Moderators . I have been waiting for this feature from a long time. It will be easy for community owners to manage their Communities with the help of other users.

Orkut also has significantly rolled out a new feature today which allows to get friends request from people who speak just your language. No more Spanish or French SPAMS.

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However, while marketing campaigns definitely have an important place in any company’s strategy, this latest by Yahoo! looks a little like a desperate move. Can’t compete with rivals on the same level (whether it’s technology or being deemed passé)? Then turn to commercials.

With Google taking over the online search market and other Internet portals eating away at Yahoo!’s market share, Yahoo! is trying to build awareness with the commercials. The problem is that I’m not sure ads shown on TV are the way to go. Internet users get to sites more by viral marketing than commercials — unless perhaps a specific service is provided, such as anti-virus, let’s say. And a site becomes a favorite because it offers something unique, not because its yodel is heard night and day on the radio.

If we consider Google or MySpace, how much TV and radio advertising have they done? (Not to say they’re not spending heavily on marketing, especially Google, but not like that).

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Approach 1

Google, Yahoo, WorldLingo and Altavista Babelfish provide free online language translation tools that let you convert webpages from one language to another.

The trick is to instruct the translation tool to translate a given webpage URL from English to English (or any other language pair like Arabic to Arabic)

By doing so, you get to see the exact blocked webpage on your computer served from the translation service server bypassing the government internet filter – all the page formatting, javascripts, hyperlinks, comments, Google ads and other layout elements are preserved.

babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?lp=en_en&url=XYZ.COM

Click the above URL to see this trick in action. If the page you are viewing is in a different language, replace the en_en pair with the corresponding pair like de_de for German or it_it for Italian. XYZ.com must be replaced with your URL that’s blocked.

This translation trick works only with Altavista Babelfish and not with Google or Yahoo babelfish even though the underlying Systran technology is the same.

Approach 2

The following approach may be used when you visit the website several times in a day like a Blog or a News site. What we do here is add the webpage to our watchlist and doing so, we automatically receive an update when the contents of the page changes (like some new content is added or exiting content is updated) –

Watch this Page for Changes – Enter the webpage URL and your email address – you will be notified daily of the changes.

I recommend this approach for reading sites like Indian Uncut, Lifehacker or Boing Boing where all the recently published stories are available on the homepage.

Approach 3

Use the following approach when you need an exact replica of the online story in print for your PhD thesis or for pasting in the scrapbook.

Adobe Create PDF Online – Create a free account at Adobe website and provide the URL address that you wish to convert. This service will create a nice PDF of the webpage and send that you as an attachment in an email.

 Approach 4

      You can setup a proxy on ur firefox. Google for annonymous proxies and select one.Go to tools>options>connection settings and select manual proxy. Enter the values and accept. If a particular proxy fails, use another one. Repeat until u get a stable and reasonably fast proxy and then stick to it. Here is a list of free proxies from samair

 Approach 4

SwitchProxy lets you manage and switch between multiple proxy configurations
quickly and easily. You can also use it as an anonymizer to protect your
computer from prying eyes. NOTE: In Firefox you can use the toolbar
element to save space   get it from Here

                But all these methods are not enough.We need Indian Govt to unblock these domains which i hope they will do within a week after they sort out what they want. Until then use these methods..

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Yesterday when i was going through my ususual routine of checking RSS feeds of various blogs.And all blogspot accounts returned error.When i checked some blogger accounts it returned a timed out error.(Some people says they get a banned error!!) . I thought blogspot server may be down.Even after a few hours there is no change. Even at night things where same..I googled and found out some news in rediff.com. Indian ISPs are blocking blogger accounts! WTF!!  I agree that there are some anti-Indian blogs in blogspot.But what about others? Almost all my friends blog in blogspot as it is simple and free.Backed up by google , it gives reasonable service with less downtime. Thats the reaseon why everyone opted for blogspot for satrting their blog. I used to blog on Blogspot and later switched to my own domain. I know people who run business through blogspot blogs.Some use it as a news service. And now..!! I think indian govt is taking some harsh steps after the mumbai tragedy. Its ok to ban anti-Indian sites.But it has to be precise. You cant block entire domain just because of having 1 or 2 violent sites. Even mumbai help(a blog created after the trajedy for providing help and service to people affected by the bomb blast) was blocked! So the next step will be blocking google.com as one can reach a “anti-indian” site by searching in google.I think its the time to react . We , the bloggers need to protest.No one else is going to give pressure as i dont think the polititians even know about blogging.First i thought about mass mailing.But now..i think it would be better to tell them directly about it through telephone(I thought abt this after reading this blog ) . Phone numbers are available here and here .

Till then you can use this simple trick to bypass the ban

PS : If you are from govt and you think this site looks offensive .. GO Ban it!!

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