Web Freebies Circle

April Fools’ Day or All Fools’ Day although not a holiday in its own right, is a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, enemies and neighbors, or sending them on fools’ errands, the aim of which is to embarrass the gullible. Traditionally, in some countries, the jokes only last until noon. If you play a trick on someone after this time you are the April Fool. Elsewhere, for example in France, the jokes may last all day (Wikipedia). We want to thank Alex Boese for making a good collection of the most famous world-wide hoaxes, which we’ll use as a starting poin for this Rating List generation. Have fun everyday, not just on April 1!

VoIP is an acronym for Voice over Internet Protocol, or in more common terms phone service over the Internet. If you have a reasonable quality Internet connection you can get phone service delivered through your Internet connection instead of from your local phone company, or in addition to your traditional phone service. VoIP service providers usually offer better rates than traditional phone companies, but sometimes do not offer common phone services as 911 services, phone directory listings, or 411 services.

Three well-known tech bloggers have had heart attacks since December, and a story in the New York Times suggests that the high stress of blogging may be a cause. Many obsessive bloggers complain of weight fluctuation, insomnia and exhaustion. "There is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic," said the newspaper. "But friends and family of the deceased ... say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style."

There are good news came to the WordPress Blogging Platform fans. New software WordPress 2.5 has been released today, marking significant improvements and bringing new functional features to the bloggers. Among the obvious software enhanced features are multi-file uploading, one-click plug-in upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages. One of the biggest changes is related to better appearance of the administration backend, which is described as being a “Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard.” It is now widget friendly, and users can include items such as stats, matching the functionality of MovableType Blogging Platform.

24-Jan-2007 version 1.5 released of the neat and much demanded software Easy Video Downloader. Title says it all. With this program you can easily download videos from YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, and save the output as AVI (higher quality for PC) or MPEG4 (lower quality for for iPod, PSP). The user interface of Easy Video Downloader is very simple intuitive interface, so you do not need any technical knowledge to use it. All you need to do is to paste URL of movie and press Start button. If you do not have a flash player on your PC to play the videos from YouTube, just select "Save as AVI" and Easy Video Downloader will automatically convert video to AVI format. Easy Video Downloader is a completely free. It contains absolutely no adware, no spyware, no registration, no pop-ups, no malware or other unwanted software.

Please submit your articles on the topic:"Best Free Software for General Use"
There are so many free alternatives to the costly software, that can be used on daily basis in multiple categories. Let's share our best discoveries. Freeware should match the following definitions:

Until recently, I was using Web-Based Editor to make post on my Blogs. But, as my activities became more frequent, and overall amount of the Projects increased, I started to look for the suitable desktop solution. It is easier to compile and format the post in convenience on your Hard Drive, and as it ready, just publish it. Appeared, that there is a descent choice of the free products, available on the market, to complete the task. I am still looking for the one that I will permanently use, but almost every product I tried, is more convenient that the Web-Based editing solution.

My Heritage (http://www.myheritage.com/) is one of the most successful family networks focused on the genealogical research. You can create and show your family tree online, and exchange pictures with your friends and relatives through the shared workspace.

There are so many revenue sharing sites these days, that in most cases, I just pass them by after brief review. But, with this company, it was different. I decided to join it after thorough investigation, and so far, I do not regret a bit.

Based on the Google Zeitgeist review (http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2007/index.html) eBuddy application has captured the line 7 of the top 10 searches, performed on Google, at the last quarter of 2007 worldwide. If so many people are interesting in checking this piece of freeware, it is a good chance that the software is worth our review.

Koma-Mail is a freeware portable email client which is comfortable, easy to use, and has very nice set of the features. As it does not need an installation, you can run Koma-Mail from your USB drive, getting advantage of using the POP3 email agent on multiple computers. It is useful, if you want to check your home email account in your office, but you prefer not installing an additional account at your office email client.

Lazzeo is a new social networking community, offering revenue sharing program. You can place your own advertising program such as Google AdSense or Yahoo Adsyou’re your profile, for free. If you decide to upgrade your account for a small fee ($5.99) you will increase your earnings even more by earning 85% of the advertising revenue generated by Lazzeo. You also get paid $1.00 per qualified referral.

I am announcing the Blog Carnival on the topic that is in the center of my interests, as well as in the center of interest of many other bloggers, no matter what is the topic, they are writing on.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT

Sponsored Reviews
Recently, this method of the Blogs promotion gained an enormous popularity. As Blogs eventually became the powerful and the wide-spread way of the content delivery to the readers, some Blog owners started to invest on ordering the sponsored reviews from other Bloggers to be posted on their sites on the promoter’s Blog. Usually, it means that for your money you get a nice attractive review on your site and its content that supposed to bring additional traffic to the site, and consequently additional income source that should justify the monetary investment. It also became an additional income source for the fellows’ bloggers, while they can find the “orders” on multiple “paid reviews” sites. This method of the blog promotion, while being quite effective and popular, does not fit well to the main idea of this article to include just free methods of the blog exposure. There are also warning voices claiming that sponsored reviews, while not violation the business laws, are “contaminating” the free and non-biased spirit of the information exchange in the bloggers’ communities. With all respect to the revealed concern, I personally consider this method of advertising to be completely acceptable, as far as the posted review or article is marked with clearly-visible and well-articulated disclaimer that the post is a part of the “sponsored” or the “paid-per-review” advertising campaign. Let the reader decide than, what credibility to be granted to the sponsored post.

Imagine a very realistic situation, when you need to make a soft copy of the document, and you do not have scanner in the neighborhood. Or, another one, when you need to make a scan, consisting from multiple pages, but your flat-bed scanner can take just one page at a time, making the scanning process time-consuming and requiring your continuous involvement in the scanning process.