Super Cool Digg Spy Widget

Opera Widgets - Widgets are small AJAX applications that provide specific functionality like getting your favorite news, converting currency and so on. It is a unique feature ONLY available in Opera 9. Other features are BitTorrent client, customizable search engines, improved content blocker, improved pop-up blocker, site specific preferences, thumbnail preview (as shown in the screenshot).

Digg spy is a widget for Opera 9.0TP2 that provides a real-time view of digg. The current version is 1.1.0 and has been downloaded by 6559 times.

Download Opera 9 here and Digg Spy here.

Top Story of the Top 10 Technology Site @GMT1130

CNN.com - Technology
Origami unveiled - Microsoft unveiled its "Origami" project Thursday, a paperback-book sized portable computer, which is a hybrid between a laptop PC and a host of mobile devices that the world's biggest software maker hopes will create an entirely new market. Read More

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact
A Fast and Simple Cocaine Detector - New biosensors could provide an inexpensive and portable way to detect everything from drugs to signs of cancer. Read More

Java Technology
Seeing Shouldn't Be Believing: Solving Java Puzzlers With Google's Joshua Bloch - Sun Joshua Bloch, chief Java architect at Google, explores the mysteries of Java puzzlers and optical illusions. Read More

Technology News - Technology News
Amazon Considering Downloads - Amazon.com is in talks with three Hollywood studios about starting a service that would allow consumers to download movies and TV shows for a fee and burn them onto DVD's. Read More

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Conference brings Latin American leaders to MIT Sloan. Read More

Seagate Technology
Hard Drives Take Gamers to a New Level with the Seagate Gaming Tour - A multi-city tournament is traveling around the U.S., demonstrating how hard drives are at the core of today's pulse-pounding, adrenalin pumping game action. Read More

National Institute of Standards and Technology
Experimental Atomic Clock Uses Ytterbium ‘Pancakes’ - NIST researchers, working with Russian colleagues, have significantly improved the design of optical atomic clocks that hold thousands of atoms in a lattice made of intersecting laser beams. Read More

Technology Administration
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH AWARDS NATIONAL MEDAL OF TECHNOLOGY HONORING NATION'S LEADING INNOVATORS - President Bush presented the National Medals of Technology and the National Medals of Science for 2004 at a White House ceremony on Monday, February 13, at 10:40 a.m. Read More

Georgia Institute of Technology
Tech/Emory Announce Health Systems Institute - New technologies to connect players in health care. Read More

California Institute of Technology
Study Reveals Primates Evolved Color Vision to See Each Other Blush - We old-world primates evolved our particular brand of color vision so that we could subtly discriminate slight changes in skin tone due to blushing and blanching, researchers say. The work may answer a long-standing question about why trichromat vision (that is, color via three cone receptors) evolved in the first place in primates. Read More

Joseph Wu's Origami Collection

Origami is the art of paper folding. The word is Japanese, literally meaning to fold (oru) paper (kami). Here is a selection of a huge collection of origami by Joseph Wu.

i) Fantasy Gaming


Goblin Warrior


Wraith


Displacer Beast


Nightmare & Rider

ii) Creatures of Myth


Manticore


Hippocampus

7 Unique Wi-fi Signs

How do you find the place with Wifi hotspot? Searching online at WiFinder | JiWire is certainly one way. How about spotting the wifi sign yourself? Here is a list of wifi signs. Enjoy and share the ones that you see on the street.



Image may be scaled down and subject to copyright.

Fixed & Mobile WiMax

Sean Maloney , executive vice president and general manager of the mobility group Intel, said his engineers are working on putting Wi-Fi and WiMax on the same radio chip, code-named Ofer, in three years. This is a major move by Intel into popularizing WiMax in the same way they did with Wi-Fi, a technology that delivers much wider coverage than Wi-Fi.

There are two usage model for WiMax in Metro-Access Deployment - Fixed & Mobile. The IEEE 802.16-2004 standard is designed for fixed-access usage models. This standard may be referred to as “fixed wireless” because it uses a mounted antenna at the subscriber’s site. The antenna is mounted to a roof or mast, similar to a satellite television dish. This technology provides a wireless alternative to the cable modem and digital subscriber lines of any type (xDSL).

The IEEE 802.16e standard is an amendment to the 802.16-2004 base specification and targets the mobile market by adding portability and the ability for mobile clients with IEEE 802.16e adapters to connect directly to the WiMAX network to the standard. The 802.16e standard is expected to be ratified in early 2005 and uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA).

Source: Redherring

Bring Google into your office

What can you bring into office these days to distinct yourself? Perhaps with a few Google products from the Google Store will do the trick.

The most unique product you can buy is Google Icon Vase Speaker for £15.99. It is a single 2-way surround sound speaker with innovative audio lens technology, a tweeter tuned for clarity. What is a 2-way surround sound speaker? Is this a virtual surround technology?

The speaker is powered by a single USB plug (no adapter required, hurray!), and the clever on/off knob at the top emits an orange LED glow when it's on. Well, how clever can it be to grow? Perhaps Google can explain to us.

Here is a gallery of other interesting products.

Google USB Mouse Pad £9.99


Jack In A Box Modem Cord £5.25


"Summer Of Love" Translucent Wide Body Pen Set £4.49

Bloggers are out of main Google Search

How many of you are aware of Google Blog Search?

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. You can easily find any topic based on the keywords you key in. Google Blog Search lists a blog that publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com). Bloggers can also manually add their blogs (soon) to the search index in case Google Blog Search haven't picked up automatically.

Google Blog Search is just another example of vertical search engine that focus on blogs. The problem with this kind of search engine is that if your blog is indexed in Blog Search, it won't be listed in the main Google search. This is a valid problem simply because most of the Internet users are using the main Google search and not Google Blog Search.

For example, if you do a "internetex" search on my blog in Google search, you will find only one result (listed number 7) which is the home page of my blog. The result does not include any of my articles but only the links from other sites. If you do another search on Google Blog Search, you will get 77 results, which is pretty much close to the 62 articles I have published so far.

Without the aid of Google on bloggers side, the temporary solution is to post your article to a site that allow you to publish articles. A lot of bloggers actually publish their articles on these sites in order to generate traffic. The difference is quite dramatic, in the range of 5 to 10 times more traffic. If you manage to hit a popular topic, you will get an instant 1000 times or more traffic. Examples of these sites are digg.com and reddit.com.

Here are the descriptions what they are from their FAQs.

What is digg?
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

What is reddit?
A source for what's new and popular on the web -- personalized for you. We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you'll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is from users who are rewarded for good submissions (and punished for bad ones) by their peers; you decide what appears on your front page and which submissions rise to fame or fall into obscurity.

China Blog Fever

Blogs are extremely popular among the young in China. We are talking about an age range of about 15 up to until 40. Many popular public figures have their blogs. If you want to know what is popular and the life of average Chinese, you have to read their blogs.

The Chinese government is now joining the force to boost public interest in its figurehead parliament and its companion advisory body according to Audra Ang of Associated Press Writer. However, I believe this should be followed by all governments in the world. Never before in the history have we had a platform that is so good for direct expression of opinions. The Internet has this unique environment in that you don't have to take it seriously if you choose not to. This environment promotes open discussions not possible if you do it face to face.

The blogs are housed at http://blog.people.com.cn, which also features public reaction and "hot" essays and discussion topics. If you read Chinese, here is a unique chance of knowing who the lawmakers of China are. Time to learn Chinese anyone?