Pek Pongpaet

Popularity: unranked [?]

I’m a little behind on my blogging. I was wrapping up my old job and started a new job this week. This week’s favorite links features sites that I found useful to me and therefore hopefully to my readers as well:

• How to Easily and Inexpensively Create Eye-Popping Video Ads
• Nine Signs of an Effective Blog Post by Darren Rowse. He’s a 6-figure professional blogger. I listen to what he has to say.
• Yelp Angers Its Merchants By Deleting Their User Accounts. Just when I thought I had it bad because they were deleting my reviews. They have to work on creating a good balance between good service and good content quality.
• Picsviewr – a really user friendly Flickr slideshow generator. I have to keep an eye on these guys – they might be trouble. I’m pretty impressed with them.
• Stanford Technology Ventures – Entrepreneur Thought Leaders podcasts. I just got an iPod touch and was looking for podcasts to subscribe to and found this little gem site worth its weight in gold. As you know, I’m too cheap and lazy to actually get an MBA but I’ll settle for this sort of free stuff.
• 10 Ways to Optimize a Popular Post on Your Blog. Another great post by Darren Rowse. I will need to study this post more carefully as I did have some great posts last month that accounted for much of the traffic.

Popularity: unranked [?]

I checked out PicLens a while back when the tool first came out. They’ve added a whole bunch of new features so it seems like a good time to revisit them. PicLens by Cooliris is a plugin that integrates with your web browser to display you the photos (or whatever media) on whatever website you’re on in glorious fullscreen 3D.

Screenshot of PicLens on my Flickr Page

Basically the way PicLens works is when you are on a page with images, you mouse over an image and you’ll see a PicLens icon. When you click on the icon, PicLens takes over and you switch you a fullscreen view of the images in 3D. PicLens takes advantage of 3D hardware acceleration to provide a really smooth browsing experience even if you are flipping through 1000s of photos.

Screenshot of PicLens on my Flickr Page

What’s cool about PicLens since I’ve last saw them is that they’ve added support for so many more things. You can view images from Flickr, PhotoBucket, Facebook, MySpace. On top of that, you can also browse Youtube, MSNBC, ESPN and movie trailers. PicLens has definitely come a long way. PicLens is definitely worth checking out especially if you like browsing in totally cool immersive experiences.

Popularity: 7% [?]

This week’s favorite links will have an emphasis on my favorite subject matter – Rich Internet Applications or RIAs.

• Zoomi is a virtual Amazon bookstore. All the books are organized into categories and are shelved. What’s cool about this is that it’s an AJAX application. I probably would have used Flex. If you look closely, they’ve added a subtle hint of realism by adding a shadow that the bookshelf casts on the books. Sweet.
• Snackr is a desktop RSS ticker that runs on the Adobe AIR platform. It’s pretty slick. You can “throw” it on any edge and it will stick to that edge, resizing itself.
• Destroy Flickr is a really cool alternative to browsing Flickr. This one is also an Adobe AIR app.
• 72photos is a new photo hosting site. It’s got a very clean slick Web 2.0 design. I’m not sure what this has over something like Flickr, but the site is pretty cool.

Popularity: unranked [?]