New Star Wars Game Distorts Right and Wrong for Gamers
Not one to usually get on any soap box, but after reviewing the new game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed I couldn’t help but be dissappointed in George Lucas. Let me say that I am a diehard fan of the original three movies. I was out of the country when the first of the next […]
Acrobat 9 is PDF on Steroids
Just released, Adobe Acrobat 9 is a major upgrade offering many slick new features such as:
Play media within the document. Acrobat will now convert MOV, WMV, FLV and H.264 files to Flash to for playing audio and video content.
Easy file conversion from Office products.
Robust management for permissions, encrypted data and digital signatures.
Drag and drop documents […]
Day Three of Search Engine Strategies New York
The keynote speaker this morning at Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York this morning was Gordon McLeod discussed the evolution of the online Wall Street Journal. Interesting to note has been the bounce-back of mainstream online media. Like the WSJ many outlets have come of age in their online environment catching-up with the blogosphere. […]
Day Two of Search Engine Strategies New York
While staying in New York I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to stop-by the John Lennon Memorial. It was a moving experience to think of that fateful day when John was taken at a young age. I knew that Scott Blitstein from mythermos.com would appreciate this in particular. The memorial is right across the street from […]
Day One of Search Engine Strategies New York
This is my first trip to the Big Apple. As a history major in college, I have a deep appreciation for the architecture and history of this amazing city. Attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York is an amazing experience of witnessing a city rich in history while learning from cutting-edge marketing and […]
Computer Purchase Decision I Can Live With
After reviewing my options for a new home computer setup, I am pleased with the outcome of my decision. My requirements were: purchase a new machine for home computing and entertainment, upgrade parts to my old Dell desktop and network the two together.
Initially I debated over whether to go Mac, Windows or Linux. While […]
Track Specific Information with RSS Feeds
RSS feeds provide a means to extract topical information from a website. Often there are subtopics within a site that hold particular value or interest to me that I want to track. Instead of subscribing to the site as a whole, I often add select feeds to my reader. This can be extremely useful in […]
Google Says Hello to Micro-blogging
If you float around in the micro-blogging world of Pownce, Twitter or Jaiku, you will most likely have heard today of the recent acquisition of Jaiku by Google. This news has my engines gunned, so much so that I wrote a short post on it at TechFires.com as well.
Now, before you think of me as […]
Blog Stats that Rock and those that Don’t
Doing the job of webmaster for a business-to-business website has trained me to be a web stats fiend. I daily check Google Analytics for the latest trends across all the sites that I publish or manage. The proof is in the pudding and stats give you some great feedback for decision making in what to […]
Photo Sites Must Adequately Inform Copyright Usage
With the exponential growth of photo sites like flickr, zooomr, and stock.xchng, there is a real need to raise the awareness of copyright laws and infringements. I ran across this photo on flickr entitled "Never Mind Your Copyright" (which I’m using appropriately under the Creative Commons some rights reserved). He writes a rant about this […]
TechFires.com Ignites
TechFires.com is now officially kicked-off. This site will be a rapid fire location for the latest and greatest tech-related reviews. TechFires.com will serve as a complimentary blog to Thoughtsparks.net with screen shots and very brief reviews. For all of you thoughtsparks.net readers, no worries, thoughtsparks.net will carry-on with Web Helps, Productivity tips, extensive Reviews and […]
Brew-up Some Short URLs with urlTea
Every once in a while I run across an application or online service that works its way into my everyday life. Quite often the most meaningful ones have such a narrow focus and perform one function very well. One of these services is urlTea.com. urlTea essentially does one thing, it makes long URLs shorter.
Now, […]
Jing Makes Desktop Screen and Video a Snap
I have recently started using a new desktop screen and video capture program called Jing. Overall I have been impressed with this utility and it shows a promising future as a utility for web publishing, teaching, tech support and other uses involving screen image and video desktop captures.
Just this week I used Jing to capture […]
ScribeFire: Hot Blog Editing Plug-in for FireFox
ScribeFire is a very well designed FireFox plug-in that enables a blogger to write posts right in their browser.
The features that I enjoy most about ScribeFire include:
Launch the editor right in the browser with an icon that rests at the bottom of the browser window.
Continue viewing a webpage while you write in the bottom-half […]
Flash Player 9 Rocking the Online Media World
Adobe Flash Player 9 Update is in Beta. This is big news folks with some really significant features:
HDTV like quality for web video
Enhanced High Efficiency audio support
Hardware acceleration
Multi-core enahnced full screen video playback
It’s still in beta, but mark my words, this is a major advance in online media. The cable industry is going to hate […]
Reasons to Pounce on Pownce
A new, more refined communication platform has been developed with the features of Twitter and other micro-blogging apps but is packed with many functions. Pownce is a robust contender for the mind share of users. It offers essentially the functions of Email, IM and microblogging rolled into one.
Remember, all you early adopters, when email emerged […]
Do You JimDo? Simple Website Creation
A new, super user-friendly website platform has recently premiered at JimDo.com. It’s a new service out of Europe. I played-around with it and setup a site in literally a couple minutes. Check out thoughtsparks.jimdo.com for a peak. While it does not yet have blog functionality incorporated into it, you can do RSS feeds. Great concept […]
Finding a Good Domain Name with “Bust A Name”
As one who has more ideas than they know what to do with, I regularly search domain registries to see if a certain domain is available or find a domain that fits a new idea. It’s a past-time of mine to think of all the great sites I could be developing. Perhaps I should spend […]
MyBlogLog Pitfalls
MyBlogLog is one of the best social media concepts for bloggers. It has many solid features and will likely only get better as it matures. There are a couple of pitfalls however, that it needs to avoid, if it’s going to have lasting value for it’s members.
Spam. Message spam is on the rise. The new […]
Bloggers Getting Younger
My 12 year-old daughter has started a book review blog. She’s using Tumblr and posts reviews of the books she reads as part of her homeschool experience. She’s an avid reader and blogging is a great outlet for her to hone her writing skills. I won’t be surprised if she is a writer or editor […]
Meebo is for Me
Meebo.com enables users to setup an account that aggregates all of the popular IM services into one location. Services include: MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, GoogleTalk, and Jabber.
This site is convenient for several reasons:
It is more efficient CPU and bandwidth utilization which is important for power users.
It eliminates the need to install another program on your […]
Thought Sparkers Making the Thinking Blog Meme
After being tagged by Not Fearing Change and by Christy’s Coffee Break twice, I figure I am due to pass on a little link love and also tell about some of the dynamic thought provoking bloggers in the blogosphere. While there are many that come to my mind, here are some that may not have […]
Best FireFox Plug-in Ever
I just discovered Foxytunes. Check out: www.foxytunes.com to download. Foxytunes is a music tool that integrates into Firefox allowing you to control the music player of choice from the browser. It’s highly configurable and as you can see is compatible w/ a good number of players. It also has a slick search function that allows […]
Harmony Restored
I’m not crazy about MS Windows, but until recently I have to say that my Dell Desktop with WindowsXP was pretty rock solid. That all changed after I upgraded to IE7. All of a sudden the machine started running slower, the browser itself grinded along and the CPU utilization shot-up. Finally, this past week, I […]
Yahoo and Google Shoot-out: Local Search
It is interesting to watch Yahoo and Google jockeying for position in the search engine wars. Google often comes out on top, but Yahoo makes some good gains with some of their offerings that give Google a run for their money. Comparing http://local.yahoo.com and http://local.google.com I’d say Yahoo may have one this one. The yahoo […]
Bloggst Has Potential
New site http://bloggst.com/ has some real potential for a thought sparking site. I nominate it as the thought spark site of the month. Lars-Christian is a young man w/ vision to promote ideas and build a site through shared ideas for blogging. Check out the site and register. You’ll be glad you did and probably […]
Adobe Users Beware: Not Compatible With Vista
You heard it right. Designers and developers who use Adobe products will have to upgrade to new versions to run stable apps on Vista, reports InformationWeek.com. Somewhere in the wrangling between Microsoft and Adobe, a very important player was neglected…the customer. While this news will hit a significant segment, I imagine this is just the […]
Nine Year Old Daughter Reviews MS Office ‘07
This weekend I installed my complimentary copy of Microsoft Office 2007 on my desktop at home. As a developer, Microsoft gave me a full version copy at the Vista Launch. I haven’t really spent much time w/ the new app yet, but my daughter has. Tonight when I walked in the door she shouted, "I […]
Google Now Offers 1GB of Photo Space
ust when you aren’t looking, Google ups the anti again for free web services. They just announced that picasa web now gives users 1GB of space. This is some pretty beefy storage space if you, like me, want to off-load your photos from your overloaded HD at home. Very cool and very flexible. I’ve been […]
Product Review: Hellium
So I finally decided to give Helium a try. It’s a site where you write short articles and if they rank well, they pay you. I thought, what the heck I’ll try it. Shortly after posting I noticed that my article ranked number 15 out of 28 for the thread. Pretty cool. Read it at: […]
Why Google Apps is so Cool
In one evening I "developed" an intranet system for my household complete with email, calendar, file sharing, chat, customized views of information, widgets and RSS feeds. If you’ve used gmail before, it’s basically the same concept only they are extending it to allow shared info under your own domain. I also have pointed the domain […]
H&R Block is On the Money
I wrote an entry comparing TurboTax to TaxCut and within a day there were two unique views by H&R Block. (Data from Google Analytics). Kudos to them for doing their market research. Heck, I was giving them a glowing review, so I’m sure it was a happy read for them. The same night I filled-out […]
Product Review: TaxCut vs. TurboTax
For all of you wondering what the bottom line difference between the two major contender’s in tax preparation software. From personal experience: $1. That’s right, the total return I’ll receive amounted to a $1 difference. I tried going through the free TurboTax software but upgraded twice to accomplish basic tasks like mortgage insurance and Section […]
