If you like music discovery engines that recommends you new music every time you listen to a song then you will definitely appreciate the new addition in the Youtube Labs – Youtube Music Discovery Project.

This new feature is not only a music discovery tool but also a video playlist maker for youtube. The page has a big search box on top of which says, “Find>Mix>Watch,” and once you enter a name of artist and hit the “Disco” button, the system automatically finds related artist/songs and mixes them on one single playlist for you.

You can enter any music group or artist, and it takes only few seconds before it populates you a nice play list, along with a thumbnail video and a description of the band right on the page. You can find related artists, create a mixtape, and save playlists directly from the page as well. The best part of this Youtube Music Discovery system is it lets you add or delete songs as you are listening to music and watching videos.

So lets say if you search for Pearl Jam, the results that you are likely to get in a playlist are Eddie Vedder & Co., Nirvana and Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins and Black Crowes etc.

So do you feel like discovering new music today? Try out youtube.com/disco

For those who love to bake & also love the Helvetica typeface, I present to you Helvetica Cookie Cutters by Beverly Hsu.

How to Buy Helvetica Cookie Cutters?

Send an email to Beverly Hsu and she will add you to a mailing list and send you more information once its available to public.

Now who would like to have some Helvetica Cookies?!

What is Userfly?

Userfly is a web usability testing tool that lets you see a ‘screen cast’ of user activity on your website/blog. After you install userfly on your site – you will literaly see what your visitors are doing, where they are clicking just like a movie.

How does Userfly works?

Setting up userfly is very simple! You can register for a FREE Userfly account that is good for 10 screen captures/month. If you require more captures, you can opt in for a 100 captures/month for $10 or 1000 captures/month for $25 and so on.

The beauty of userfly is its very easy to setup on any website. Just grab a simple javascript code and put it on your site and you are done! The user activities will automatically be captured and put under your dashboard, and you can then start playing each captures on your computer and watch exactly how they look at your website. Userfly also provides detailed information on the user’s browser, each page visited, and time spent on each page. Clicking on a particular page plays back the interaction, showing where the user moved his or her mouse and where he or she clicked etc. Once you’re finished watching, you’re prompted to rate the usefulness of the capture. Then, you can decide to keep it or delete it permanently. All videos older than 30 days are deleted automatically in the free account.

I personally used this tool in a couple of e-commerce stores i worked on and the results have been tremendous. By studying the user behavior and how they browse/navigate your site – you can really make a lot of adjustments to increase your Click through rate & sales.

See Userfly in Action

Don’t believe me? Play this video to see Userfly in action!

So what are you waiting for? Signup for your Free Userfly Account now and do a free web usablitly testing on your website.

With the help of Tweetbeep it would be easier for you to keep track of conversations that mentions you, your products, your business or anything that interests you. It comes with an hourly update so that you won’t miss a thing. Another great thing about Tweetbeep is it lets you keep track of who’s tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL service like (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com). However please note that the domain alert feature doesn’t come with the free account.

This service has been around for quite a while, if you still haven’t used them – Try it out today!

Most of the cloud services that we use today are FREE, thus the companies that provide these services offers very limited or no technical support to an ordinary user like you and me! So recovering your data or even getting them to look into your issue may take weeks if not months! So definitely you will need a failsafe so that in case anything happens you will still have your data for restoration or even just for your access.

Backupify has created a very interesting product that lets you backup your personal clouds. No matter where you are and what online services you use, backupify probably has it covered. It currently supports over 15+ online services including Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, WordPress, Friendfeed, Flickr, Delicious, Zoho, Google Docs and many more. It is also in the process of including Youtube, Tumbler, Xmarks very soon.

How Does Backupify Work?

Backupify is very simple to use. You sign up as a FREE user (Only until 31st January 2010), and you will get unlimited storage to backup all your data that you have on the cloud. After signing up you will be given the option to add the services that you would like backupify to backup for you Daily / Weekly. You will just need to set this thing up once and this service will keep on backing up your data forever! Did I just say forever? Yes thats right folkes! If you sign up before 31st January 2010, your backupify account will remain FREE for life! However, those of you who join after 31st January 2010 will have to pay a yearly fee.

How to Get a Free Backupify Account?

To Register, simply go to: http://www.backupify.com and fill up a small registration form. Make sure that you sign up before 31st January to have a free life-time account.

Some Features of Backupify

• Backup your data from various web services including Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Zoho, Google Docs, Photobucket, WordPress etc.
• You can automatically tell Backupify to backup your data either daily or weekly
• Your data is 100% safe. Backupify uses Amazon S3 for their storage which has been an industry standard for many years now.
• You will receive email notification every time a backup is performed. You can also check the backup history from your Account control panel
• Signup before 31st January 2010 and get a FREE account for life!

Interview with the Backupify Co-Founder Rob May

I managed to do a small email interview with the Co-Founder/President of Backupify, Rob May. Most of the basic Q&A about backupify are already on their FAQ Section. However here are some interesting ones that Rob answered for me:

Me: How much would you be charging users after 31st January 2010?
Rob: $49/year for unlimited usage per user.

Me: For backup of services like Facebook & Twitter, what exact data do you back up? (e.g. Status updates, Friends List)? How can a user restore these data back when a disaster happens?
Rob: Twitter backup includes friends, followers, updates, DMs, favorites. Facebook backup includes status updates, wall posts, photos, notes, links. Neither can be directly restored because we can’t time stamp data when we push it back to the service, we can only post it at the present moment, so if we re-tweet all of your tweets they wouldn’t have the right time and date.

Me: For wordpress backup, do you take a backup of the whole word press database? During a failure, can a user just get the .sql file from backupify for restoration? Do you also backup the wordpress files & uploads?
Rob: Yes, we back up the whole db and file structure. A user should be able to upload the sql to the database and ftp the files back to the server and have the whole thing back and working.

Me: What is the future plan of Backupify? Any chance of you working closely with the service providers so that they can provide you a better way of backing/restoring?
Rob: Yes, we are working on an API that other services can use to integrate with us. We are also integrating more storage options other than Amazon S3.

Thanks a lot Rob for your time! I wish Backupify all the best! It is indeed a great product and I’m already loving it. So if you still haven’t signed up yet and don’t want to pay the $49/year, here is your chance! Register before 31st January 2010 and you will get a free account for life!

Visit the Backupify Homepage today for more info.

It has quickly become a commonplace that the internet has made the world much smaller than it ever was. Friends, family, and businesses based thousands of miles across the globe are just seconds away through email, facebook, or skype, just to name a few of the many examples of online communication. However, international businesses, large or small, still need to appeal to a distinct regional or national base to be successful. Globalization and the internet have not – yet – made the world completely homogenous. Linguistic, cultural, and economic differences exist between regions in a country and between countries in a continent, let alone between continents in the world. For example, there is the distinction between amazon.com and amazon.co.uk, selling different products at different prices. There are also major variants such as the French amazon.fr and German amazon.de, appealing to a wide linguistic and cultural consumer base distinctly different from, but using the same familiar template as, the company’s English language versions.

Every aspect of a business’s online promotional material, from websites to banner ads to e-newsletters, needs to be designed with the target audience in mind. To discover the specific qualities of that audience, a business needs to research what the audience has already shown an interest in – what other websites are being accessed? What do they offer? How can your own business improve and offer content and products more specifically tailored to that market? Put simply, what does the target audience want to know and how can you deliver that information? With international markets, this is particularly tricky as there is myriad of cultural and linguistic intricacies that must be faced. In the European Union (EU) there are 23 official languages spoken in the 27 member states. Although English is the most widely spoken, German has the most native speakers in the EU with almost 20%, followed closely by English, Italian and French.

Understanding the nuances within languages is crucial to the translation/localisation process too. For example, the differences between French and German are obvious, even to mono-linguists. But the differences between French in France and French in Switzerland or Belgium aren’t that obvious. In France, déjeuner means ‘lunch’, but in Switzerland and Belgium it means ‘breakfast’. Additionally, dîner is ‘evening meal’ in France, but in Swiss and Belgian French the word is souper. Similarly, Swiss German often uses a different grammatical gender to that used in Germany (e.g. ‘das E-Mail’ instead of ‘die E-Mail’). Assuming you intend to adopt a fully localised marketing strategy, what are the practicalities involved in launching an international advertising campaign? Well, there are many similarities to that of a domestic campaign.

Online marketing is becoming the basis of many company’s promotional activities, moving away from traditional print promotion. The European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA) recently conducted research revealing that 70% of advertisers were intending to increase their spending in online marketing in 2009, a figure that is likely to increase year by year. The internet has developed in a way which makes targeting local and individual interests a far more precise and successful practice than traditional forms of advertising. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) means that a business can know the exact interests of a customer and can target individuals with specific and relevant advertising. Advertising on individual websites also makes targeting particular interests simple – it is clear, for example, what kind of products a visitor to a canoeing and kayaking website is interested in.

Directing internet users to your own site is key too, and becomes easier because of the many tools available on the net. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a method that many businesses use to push their name to the top of Google’s search results; EIAA’s research also indicated that 64% of advertisers were going to increase their use of SEO in 2009.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising also helps lead potential customers to your site and the beauty of PPC is that you can set how much you spend on each month in advance…it can be as little as £5 if you want. This lets you test the water to see how effective it will be – if it brings in customer then you can increase your spend, if not then you can investigate other means.

RSS feeds, which alert existing customers to updates on a website, are a useful way of keeping customers loyal to your business. A surprisingly low percentage of web users take advantage of RSS feeds – just 11% – but these users are the most internet savvy and the most likely to buy products online. Having a customer base continually returning to a site makes the site more popular; these users are also the ones most likely to recommend a site to friends.

As its name indicates, the whole point of the internet is interconnectivity. It enables a business to reach an individual customer directly and personally and, likewise, for that same individual customer to find the business that best suits his or her needs. A business needs to access and appeal to those customers by researching the specific interests of each target audience. It is a conversation between business and customer conducted from one side of the world to the other; as ever, the customer usually relies on a business to start the conversation.

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This is a Guest Post by Alexandru Rotaru of Lingo24.

Lingo24 is a global translation services provider that also specialises in website localisation. It has over 100 employees based in the UK, Panama, Romania, China and New Zealand, and a network of 4,000 translators. Its projected turnover for 2009 is £3.7m.

Background of RSS

OK, now let me start this post with a simple question – How do you normally browse the web for the latest news? Do you like to go to specific websites individually (e.g. Techcrunch, Mashable, CNN) or do you go to some of the news aggregator sites like Google News, Techmeme, Yahoo News? Or Maybe you prefer the news to come to you via sources like Twitter, Friendfeed and RSS.

Well traditionally most non tech-savvy people browse the web in a very old fashioned way. They fire up their browser, enter the URL, click enter and they are on! And they do this everytime they are hungry for new information/news. Well visiting websites manually to check for news does serve the purpose and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However as the web has evolved in the last couple of years and more and more information is cluttering up the web – it has brought in a new problem, which is “information overload”.

There are now so many web sites on the web today that you can’t even remember their names straight without scratching your head. And relying on the main stream media like (CNN, BBC, ABC), too much doesn’t always bring you the right news at the right time.

Ask yourself, when and how did you hear about the Iran election issues first or say the tragic death of the king of Pop – Michael Jackson? Most likely your answer would be either from friends, social media or from the blogosphere. Because on both occasion the main stream media was kind of late to cover the story. But I don’t really blame them; Due to their corporate ‘red-tapes’ they have less flexibility when it comes to bringing on the news at the right time. This is the reason why, many people (like myself) keep ourselves attached to the blogosphere quite a bit.

Anyway going back to the original topic – How do you keep track of all these big/small websites that are out there? Like for instance, I am interested in Technology, Gadgets, Search & a few other things. In order to keep tabs on my industry I need to keep an eye on about 100 different blogs/websites. So everyday early in the morning, if I can quickly scan over all the stories/posts that these blogs has published then I’d pretty much get an idea of whats happening on my industry. And because web is not like the old media, morning is not the only time I’m checking for news. A new story may pile up every 10 minutes depending on what you are interested in. If i were to check all these 100 different sites everyday even once at a time and go through all their stories then I probably won’t be able to do any other job because even thinking of opening 100 websites from my bookmarks really scares the hell out of me!

This is exactly where RSS comes in pretty handly. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication is basically a technology that sort of makes it very easy for you to ‘digitally subscribe’ to a website or a blog. It works exactly like a newspaper/magazine subscription. For example – if you like a particular magazine a lot (e.g. Readers Digest), you may just buy it at a book shop every month physically (just like browsing a website manually for news), or you can be smart and just subscribe to it! So the benefit of subscribing is – you don’t need to ‘remember’ when to go and get the new issue and you will always get it at your convenience (they usually ship the magazine to you).

The concept of RSS is exactly the same. You sort of pick the sites/blogs that you like and mostly visit at all times. You know for sure that you’ll keep on coming back to these sites everyday to check if there is anything new on there. But do you know that most of these websites offers something called “RSS” that actually lets you to subscribe to that website for FREE? Yes, thats right! And every time they have a new article or information the news gets delivered to something called a “RSS Reader”.

RSS Reader is like one-way email program. It has the ability to receive things, but it can’t send anything out. So basically using your RSS Reader, you are going to subscribe to your favorite blogs/websites that you visit frequently. Your RSS Reader then keeps track of all those websites for you and automatically displays all the latest news all in one single place. So you don’t need to go to 100 different websites, but you can just open one program (Your RSS Reader) and get all the updates there!

Now RSS Readers doesn’t necessarily has to be a software that you need to install on your computer. There are also many web based, and simple browser based RSS readers that just works fine, in fact great! Personally I’m a huge fan of Google Reader, which is google’s web based RSS reader. But there are also other desktop RSS reader that you can install on your computer and have access to all your feeds (your subscriptions). My favorite RSS reader for desktop probably would be – FeedDemon . But anyway I sort of dedicated this post to my current and most favorite RSS reader – Feedly!

Feedly – RSS Reader Review

Feedly is basically a Firefox addon that you can install in your Firefox browser to read and manage your feeds. It basically uses your Google Reader, in conjunction with Twitter & Friend Feed and gives you the most amazing feed reading experience that you have ever experienced anywhere else.

Feedly takes your boring RSS reader and gives it a very shiny magazine like look. It has several different viewing options that you can choose form – Magazine, Overview, Summery, Picture grid etc. – each having their own advantages. The main problem with most of the RSS readers that I have used is, if you don’t check it for few days, hundreds of stories gets jammed up and you tend to miss out the important ones. But with Feedly and its social integration with twitter, friendfeed & Google Reader – it is more intelligent to understand what is hot and what is not. Based on your previous reading pattern, it sorts of guesses your favourite feeds that you can’t get enough of. It also has easy ways of reading the full stories on screen or even quickly scan through the title and a brief summery of hundreds of stories all on one single page.

The best part about Feedly is the way it organizes and displays your feed. Reading your feeds inside feedly is genuinely pleasing and takes very little effort compared to any other web-based or desktop based RSS reader that are out there.

Other than handling feeds, it also lets you to integrate your twitter and friendfeed account inside feedly so that you can keep track of what is happening in the social media. When you are browsing a page or searching for something on a search engine like Google, it looks at your keyword and pulls up the recent stories about those topics from your feeds and nicely overlays a list of stories at the bottom of your screen.

Feedly does so many things, that as I’m writing a review on my favorite RSS reader, I just can’t think of words that will convince you enough to try this awesome free firefox addon. So if you use RSS and have firefox on your computer, I’d really urge you to give Feedly a try! You will love it! In case you have never used RSS before, don’t panic! I have already sort of explained the whole concept of RSS at the beginning of the post which, I believe is sufficient for you to get started with RSS. So try feedly and see how it goes!

By the way, don’t forget to subscribe to my blog via RSS for more great resources. Let me make it very easy for you, click on the huge button below to subscribe -

So have you tried feedly yet? Share your experience!