Let’s be honest now, we all make a mistake from time to time. But, would you      expect a large corporation like Google to ever make a mistake, especially when it comes to their own logo.

You may be aware of Google’s habbit of changing their logo design upon certain cultural celebrations like Christmas, Presidents Day, Lincoln’s Day, and ofcourse Valentines Day.

Well, Google decided to display a logo containing a rather confusing design to celebrate this year’s Valentines Day. The logo consisted of a strawberry with a large green stem, most likely representing the [L] in Google. There is no doubt in my mind that this logo can definitely be confusing at a first glance.

Many have gone to the extent of claiming Google has misspelled it’s own name as being “Googe”. The Google Blog did however react to the claims by clearing up the whole situation with a post stating that there was no mistake, but only a misinterpretation by the users.

Hopefully, Google will stick to designs that are not so vague in the future. Atleast that way they can avoid a whole lot of undeserved embarassment.

Many were speculating about the true release date of Google’s popular web  based email client known as Gmail for some time now. Rumors were fueled with an additional boost, when Google (by accidently or not) released a page allowing anyone to sign up to use Gmail.

Then to everyones suprise, the page was pulled down for reasons unknown to anyone. It could’ve of been a mistake, like the many made by google blogger team last year.

Since the release date of 2004, Gmail was limited to those lucky few invited by email or registered through mobile phone. These were methods ensuring the quality of Gmail remains stardard and to prevent spam accounts from being created.

The long beta period does seem unusual for a google product as popular as Gmail. Google has become extremetly efficient at providing users with quality products and so this waiting period does seem legitimate.

Google being the generous company it is today decided to gift you this valentines day with a completely free registation process. By free, I mean without those hassles I’ve mentioned. Anyone can now sign up for a free Gmail account offering 2.8GB of storage space.

Some of the features you will find useful with gmail include advanced spam protection, integration with other google services, and ofcourse the much loved search feature. Additionally, you can even access your email on the go with complete mobile access.

Sign Up For GMail

[Source: Google Blog]

Lets say, you come across a interesting quote or information that may be  beneficial to a friend of yours. In order to send it via email, you have to open up your favorite email client, copy the given text, and then you have to paste the text. All this can take some time if your computer isn’t exactly what you may call a Power PC.

Sometimes it can be a pain just to open up your email client and paste text that you have selected. This all depends on your mood ofcourse.

Snip IT is a simple add-on for Microsoft Internet Explorer that can assist you in this situation. While making the whole process simple, it can also save you a good amount of time.

Using the add-on is a breeze. While Internet Explorer is open, just simply highlight text that you want to send by email. Then upon right click, You will be given choices at the bottom of the menu to send the highlighted text by means of various email services. You can click any of the clients provided in the menu, which will open up a new window enabling you to send it to anyone of your choice.

The add-on currently supports Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and default installed MailTo client in Internet Explorer as e-mail client options. Yahoo Mail Beta is not currently supported.

[Download Add-On]      

[Thanks, Neowin]

Transfering text based documents can be a difficult task to say the least,  especially with the addition of rival companies favoring their own type of formating, instead of one truly universal format.

Microsoft has been working towards helping users achieve the task of transfering text documents between various office programs. Specifically, Microsoft seems to focus on the ODF format established by Open Office application that is becoming a rival to it’s own standard. 

Infact, they have released a translation program that converts Word documents into more open formats to ease the diffulty and fustration involved in this process.

Users can already save word documents in several different formats, but this process does not seem to preserve all of the layout and styling. This new program is supposed to allow Word users to save, open, and edit text documents that have been previously saved in the ODF format, which is favored by the ever popular Open Office application.

Microsoft Word users can already download the translation program at the sourceforge site but official release at the microsoft download section will follow in the coming days. Add-ons for PowerPoint and Excel will also be ready by the end of 2007.

[Download Add-on]    [More about Add-on]

This century has been named the age of technology or even the more famous  term Digital Age by many note worthy people. We have been hearing about many strange events taking place due to all the technology available today.

A recent article published by CNN about a novel written completely by text messaging caught my attention. The novel is titled “The Last Message” and it’s about an IT excutive who resigns his job in Finland to travel throughtout europe and India. All throughout his journey he keeps in touch with his family with only one means of communication which is text messaging.

The novel is completely fictional but you have to give the author credit for his orginality. All the messages and replies total to about 1,000 - are listed chronologically in a 332-page novel written by Hannu Luntiala. Its interesting to note that even the common abbreviations used in texting are included in the novel.

Sari Havukainen, spokeswoman at Finnish publishing house Tammi, said the company is considering translating the book into other languages.

All those text messages must of cost him a substancial amount but still a remarkable idea none the less. I am sure many of the older readers might find it harder to comprehend the text used in the novel but the young tech crowd will surely find it interesting.

The navbar was originally made to help enhance the readers experience by allowing them to search through millions of blogs of their interest. Intentions are worthy of admiration, but a blogger set on representing professionality might find it disturbing or even turned off by the diversion of traffic this feature causes.

Bloggers were able to disable the navbar found in the previous version of blogger using a simple CSS code. However, if you have switched to the new version of blogger, you might of noticed that the CSS code seems to stop functioning. This is due to the fact that google now uses a different CSS tag to control the navbar in Blogger Beta.

If you want to hide the display of navbar in the new Blogger, then simply copy and paste these lines into your blogger template.

<style type=”text/css”>
#navbar-iframe {
height: 0px;
visibility: hidden;
display: none;
}
</style>

Note:If you are using a classic template in the new version of blogger, then simply search and replace the #b-navbar with #navbar-iframe, which will successfully hide the navbar.

Now, you might be wondering if this method is violating any google blogger TOS or any type of licensing. There is no mention of anything relating to the removal of navbar in the google policy. Also, many have been using methods such as this, since the early days of blogger in itself.

[via:Digital Inspiration] 

Dont be fooled, there is no actual service called PayPerWiki, but thats what  is causing a storm in the blogosphere. When a company like Microsoft makes even the slightest move, they should know the whole world will come to know about it sooner or later.

The most recent controversy deals with Microsoft’s decision to a pay a fellow Australian blogger by the name of Rick Jelliffe to edit Wikipedia pages containing information regarding the company. The Wikipedia pages were detailed postings stating the various technologies developed by Microsoft relating to open office standards.

You can be assured that anytime a company of Microsoft’s size and influence is mentioned, it will hit slashdot or other social media type sites. Just as you very well guessed, it did top slashdot and to further fuel the discussion,Matt Mahugh at Microsoft admitted to doing so in a comment.

Microsoft claims that they were not comfortable making direct changes to an article about their technology. According to Microsoft spokesperson, he states that the Wikipedia articles were written by authors of a competiting brand known as IBM which has adopted a different office standard, many of the details mentioned in the wikipedia articles were incorrect.

Wikipedia is designed in a way that anyone from anywhere can make changes to articles found in the site and so accuracy is somewhat comprimised. But, why would a company like microsoft care about Wikipedia, when they have such large public representation compaigns to deal with their image. Tech enthusiasts might be the only people, who would even care to read details regarding such technologies and they are aware of wikipedia’s flaws and advantages.