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Live Screencasting - Stream Your Desktop over the Internet with Procaster

Online video broadcasting services like Ustream.tv, Mogulus, Justin.tv or Qik.com have made it possible for anyone to stream live video over the internet for free. Just connect your web cam (or DV camera) to the computer or switch on the video camera of your cell phone and you are all set to broadcast live video on the web.

Now there’s a new live streaming solution in town called Procaster that goes beyond webcam video and lets you broadcast your desktop screen activity live on the Internet. Video gamers may also enjoy using Procaster as it supports game-casting so you can even live stream your video game sessions to anyone in the world for free.

To get started, you need to download Procaster - it’s currently available for Windows though a Mac version is also in the works. Now run the Procaster application and choose whether you to want to stream webcam video or your desktop screen or a video game that you may be currently playing on the computer.

Live screencasting is on

As you hit the record button, a semi-transparent information bar fills the bottom of your computer screen that shows a live preview of your current broadcast. It also has zoom buttons in case you want to limit the broadcast area to only a particular portion of the desktop screen.

That’s all you need to do at your end. People can visit the mogulus site and watch your live broadcast in their browser without having to download anything (see the following screenshot). Or you can embed the mogulus player into your blog and visitors can watch the live screencasts from there itself.

Mogulus is free but if you are looking to broadcast HD quality screecasts, you may want to go for the Pro version.

The previous versions of Camtasia Studio had a live output feature that turned the screen recorder into a virtual video camera so you could directly stream desktop recordings into any hardware device that required a "video source". Live Output was removed from Camtasia Studio 6 so this Procaster utility looks like a good replacement.

Want Windows 7 on your Laptop? Attend a Local Workshop

For people in Bangalore, Gurgaon (Noida, New Delhi), Mumbai, Pune, Siliguri, Chennai, and Hyderabad.

The official release of Windows 7 is expected to happen later this year but Microsoft is working hard to get as many people as possible to try the beta version of Windows 7.

Windows 7 beta was available as a free download on the Microsoft site for some but if missed that opportunity, here’s another one.

Microsoft India & local IT User groups are organizing a day long workshop on April 18 in select Indian cities with sessions on getting started with Windows 7 and attendees will have opportunity to use this new Windows Operating System at the venue itself.

And if you carrying your laptop along, the volunteers at the venue would be more than happy to install Windows 7 on your computer without you having to download the 2+ GB ISO from the Internet. You may later obtain a product key for Windows 7 from the Live website and use the software without restrictions until August 1, 2009.

To register for Windows 7 day, please click the name of your city: Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Bangalore, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Siliguri.

Registration is free but beta testers won’t be getting a free copy of Windows 7 once it’s released to manufacturing.

Organize Firefox Tabs as the Folder tree in Windows Explorer

Are you are power Firefox user and simultaneously work with a few dozen tabs? Or are you using Firefox on a small screen laptop ("netbook") and need some extra viewing space for web pages?

Then watch this 1 minute long screencast video to understand how the very-impressive Tree Tabs add-on can help you in both the above situations.

The tabs in your Firefox browser are arranged below the address bar as a long horizontal strip - Tree Tabs takes that strip from the top and arranges it as a vertical pile that you may display either towards the left or the right of your computer screen.

Let’s say you are Google.com and open a few pages from the search results. Now all these pages will appear under the child node of Google.com (makes sense as they are logically related to the parent) - you can collapse the main Google.com site and all these child nodes will hide as well. Or you can close all of them in one go by close the Google tab.

The other advantage is that you save lot of screen space. The stack appears on the side, like the built-in Firefox sidebar, and you can even set it to auto-hide for more viewing space.

The Tree Tabs view in Firefox may initially appear a bit confusing, but the more time you spend with it, the more you’ll love it.

Yay! Digg is Permanently Removing the Diggbar for all but Digg Users

Good news folks. If you are not logged into your Digg account, you’ll never ever see the controversial Diggbar on web pages again even if you visit these pages via a Digg short URL.

The strong, and often negative, feedback from bloggers, SEOs and concerned site owners have pushed Digg back to the drawing board and they’re in the process of making some big changes to the Diggbar.

Here’s a summary of what’s coming in simple English:

1. If you are anonymously browsing the Digg website, all URLs will point directly to the publishers web page and they’ll appear without the annoying Digg frame.

2. The Digg short URLs will do a 301 permanent redirect instead of rel=canonical thus flowing all the Google juice back to the publishers site.

3. Since search engines bots are equivalent to anonymous visitors, they’ll never see any short URLs on the Digg.com site.

4. Diggbar will be visible only if you are logged into your Digg account. But don’t worry, you will still have the option to disable the toolbar from settings and opt-out permanently even if you are logged-in.

The above changes are expected to go live sometime next week. For someone like me who rarely uses Digg, the Diggbar is now just another URL shortening service similar to tinyURL or bit.ly.

Spammers Can Get Your Email Address from Google Profiles

A word of caution for people who have their email accounts on Gmail and are planning to use a vanity URL for their Google Profile.

Vanity URLs are available across all Google Accounts but you can pick a custom username for your Google Profile (like this) only if your Google Account is not associated with a Gmail address.

Gmail users have two choices - they can either continue using the default cryptic URL for their Google Profile (like this) or they can have their Google email username in the Google profile URL.

Now that may sound tempting because a URL like google.com/profiles/google_username is definitely search friendly and more easy to remember than google.com/profiles/121221 but before you jump, here’s a quick warning.

When you add your Gmail user name to the Google Profile, you are indirectly exposing your email address to spammers. They can simply take the username from any Google Profile, append @gmail.com and they have gold in their hands because its you real Gmail address.

All public Google Profiles are indexed in search engines so think twice before turning vanity URLs with your Gmail username. Hat tip Seer.

Planning a Road Trip in India? Get Driving Directions from Google Maps

You can now find detailed driving directions for India roads through the Google Maps website.

The more-handy print version of Google Maps splits the whole route into smaller blocks that are zoomed-in for easy viewing and you can further customize the map area visible inside these individual blocks. Do remember this when you plan your next road trip in India.

Driving Directions on Google Maps - Overview

Detailed Driving Instructions for Print

A Time-Lapse Movie of the Digg Front Page

This Time-Lapse video of Digg will help you visualize how stories move up or go down with time on the Digg front page.

For this movie, I initially captured some 8+ hours of continuous activity on the Digg front page and later squeezed it into a 80 seconds video for your viewing pleasure.

This is an HD screencast so make sure you watch it in full screen.

Export all your Files from Google Pages as a Zip

Starting next month, all existing websites hosted on Google Pages will be imported into Google Sites automatically and the Page Creator service will shut down in June 2009.

Google won’t move any of files from Pages into Google Sites (since the latter doesn’t provide hosting) but they have created a simple online exporter that you may use to download all your files from Google Pages into a zip archive.

Here’s how you can access the Google Pages exporter:

If the URL of your Google Page Creator site is http://site_name.googlepages.com, the export utility will be at http://pages.google.com/migrationInfo/site_name.

There you’ll have a link to download the latest version of your web site in zip format for personal backup.

The export utility provided by Google requires authentication so you won’t be able to download files from Google Pages unless you’re logged into your Google Account.

Translate Your Outlook Emails into Other Languages

If you have a contact in another country who frequently uses non-English words in her emails or if you are subscribed to an newsletter that’s written in some foreign language, here’s how you can quickly translate email messages into your native language without leaving Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft has released a tiny utility that, upon installation, will add the Live Search translation service into Outlook, Word and all other Office programs.

You can then select individual words, paragraphs or the entire text of your email message and translate into any other language through the "Translate" command in the contextual menu or from the Research task pane of Office.

Anything new? Language translation is available in all Office programs by default but it was powered by WorldLingo - now that Microsoft has developed their own Language translator, the above utility will simply replace WorldLingo and that may mean some addition language pairs for your Office. Hat tip Kip Kniskern.

Navigate the Archives of any Blog in an Interactive Timeline

Google today introduced a new timeline based blog reader that could be a perfect fit for people who follow a very limited number of blogs. And it’s great for researching blogs as well.

Go to newstimeline.google.com, select "Blogs" from the drop-down menu and type the name of any blog in the search box (e.g. labnol). Use the same search box to add add more blogs to the Timeline.

You can then zoom the timeline from months to weeks (and vice versa) or jump to a particular date in the timeline by specifying that in the search box. You may also use the mouse to navigate through the timeline in horizontal direction (either side).

Research Blogs in Google Timeline

Google News Timeline offers at least one unique feature that you may not find in any of the standalone "feed readers" and that’s got something to do with the blog archives.

When you subscribe to a feed in Bloglines or Google Reader, it will display only the latest 20-30 stories from that feed but with Google News Timeline, you can navigate through the entire history of that blog in a smooth and zoomable timeline.

This may also come very handy when subscribing to a new site - you can use the Google News Timeline view to quickly determine what kind of topics is that site covering, the frequency of posting new articles, etc.

I just wish there was a way to embed the feed timeline into the blog itself as timeline based navigation of archives definitely looks more user-friendly than page-by-page navigation that is currently used on most blogs.

The Oprah Winfrey Effect on Twitter

The traffic chart from Hitwise shows the daily market share of visits to the Twitter website from January to April.

On April 17, the day when Oprah Winfrey joined Twitter by sending a tweet from her Friday TV show, share of US based visits to the Twitter site increased by 24% and some 1.2 million new users signed up for Twitter on that day alone.

And this looks all the more impressive because Twitter is already the 69th most visited website in the US.

How the Internet Works - Explained in Video

If you are a novice, these short animated videos will help you understand the basic concepts of the Internet and how the "World Wide Web" has evolved since the Arpanet days when networks were limited to defense laboratories and university labs.

World Wide Web - What happens behind the scenes

The Complete History of Internet explained in 8 minutes

Find & Download Online Documents using Firefox

There are certain limitations with document search engines that now all over the web.

First, they are written as fixed wrappers over Google or Yahoo and it’s therefore not possible to change the underlying web search engine for finding documents. The other limitation is the search interface itself. They present results in a Google like format which is good for displaying regular web pages but you need something extra for online documents.

Enter OutWit - a free add-on for Firefox that turns your web browser into a proper document finding application. With OutWit installed, you can use Firefox to locate online files as well as documents that may be stored on your local hard drive.

Here’s how it work - start OutWit and type your query in the Firefox search box. You may also use the drop down to select any other search engine that is installed inside your Firefox.

Outwit will scan the search results and display documents in a Windows Explorer like view - you can hover the mouse over any file to read the properties or even sort the search results by size, document type, web location and so on. You can right click and save the documents locally or collect them in a virtual bin and do a batch download later.

The next useful feature in Outwit is that it lets you browse (and download) all documents that may be linked from a web page. For instance, I could open the Investor Relations page of a corporate site and download all the Quarterly Earnings report that match a certain criteria - for e.g., file names that begin with 2008_Q will give me all reports for the year 2008 and such a filter is easy to implement in Outwit.

Outwit is available for the latest beta version of Firefox and works across Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

Filing a DMCA Complaint to Google Gets Easy

Some may say that WordPress, Tumblr and a dozen other services also offer free blogs but Blogger seems to be the most preferred choice for creating splogs as there are people who have this impression that Google favors blogspot.com blogs is search results.

There could be other reasons as well but if you ever discover a blogspot blog copying content from your website without attribution, you can file a DMCA complaint to Google and they will comply (read my experience) but this process can be a bit tedious as Google would only accept DMCA takedown notices that are sent via fax or snail mail.

Well, not anymore. If you don’t have a fax machine and aren’t inclined to spend money on a web based fax service, here’s some good news. Google has dropped the fax or mail requirement for Blogger and you can now submit DMCA complaints to Google online via an online form.

This “facility” is available only for filing DMCA notices against Blogger blogs but you’ll still have to take the fax or paper mail approach for reporting copyright infringement on other Google sites like Google Base, Orkut, AdSense and so on. Hat tip Nikhil Pahwa.

Twitter Is Deleting Tweets Without Notice

This problem could be related to the Twitter worm that surfaced over the last weekend but Twitter has deleted all tweets from my account that were written during the last three days.

Deleted Tweets can be recovered

Though the messages have been removed from my twitter profile, you can still retrieve a copy of the deleted updates from the Twitter Search page as in the following screenshot.

Luckily, the permalinks of all deleted tweets are still valid so any links pointing to your Twitter updates won’t break. For instance, this sample tweet is erased from my profile but it continues to exist as before on Twitter.

Update: Looks like I am not the only one affected due to this mass but silent clean-up happening at Twitter. They should have at least informed us beforehand.