Alexa today introduced HotURLs – it’s a list of web pages that are currently hot on the Internet in terms of traffic. It displays the most popular pages visited by Alexa Toolbar users during the last hour and is updated every five minutes according to Alexa.
While Alexa Hot URLs is about finding hot web pages, Google Trends is another useful tool to learn about the popular search queries on the web.
Does it seem like everyone around you has a cold? Turns out that might be true, and Google has the data to prove it. The search engine giant on Tuesday launched Google Flu Trends, which will provide up-to-date flu-related activity estimate for all 50 states in the U.S. Google will combine flu-related queries entered into its search engine with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to track cases of the flu throughout the country. "We found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week," Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, Google software engineers, wrote in a blog post. "As a result, if we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness." Flu Trends has been in the works since last year when Google software engineers met with the "predict and prevent" team from Google.org. "We decided to focus on outbreaks of infectious disease, which are responsible for millions of deaths around the world each year," Ginsberg and Mohebbi wrote. Why not rely solely on CDC data? Early detection, according to Google
Google shared early results from the 2007-2008 flu season with the CDC's influenza division and "we saw that our search-based flu estimates had a consistently strong correlation with real CDC surveillance data."
Google stressed that the project is still very "experimental" but that flu-related search data it collects will be anonymous. "Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week," the company wrote.
According to current data on Flu Trends, flu activity in the U.S. is at "low" - on a scale of minimal, low, moderate, and intense.
I use Gmail for Web mail and even use Google to host mail for a number of my personal domains, so if something happened to them, I'd be lost. No one seriously expects a major outage or data loss at Google, but it's always good to make sure you keep your own backups in case something catastrophic does happen. Enter Gmail Backup, a utility that allows you to copy the entire contents of your Gmail account to your computer for archiving or safekeeping.
Gmail is one of those services that no one anticipates going down, but the fact remains that Google still considers Gmail a beta service, and changes can be made at any time. If you experience massive data loss, your account is compromised, or Gmail goes down when you need to grab an important e-mail, having a backup of your mail and files can be a lifesaver. Gmail Backup takes advantage of IMAP support in Gmail to retrieve copies of your messages and store them on your system.
Once you have IMAP enabled on your Gmail account, the app will log in as you and download copies of your messages. The process can take minutes to hours depending on how much information you have in your Gmail account. Gmail Backup stores your messages in EML format, which means you can import them into a desktop e-mail application if you need to access them.
If you're migrating from Gmail to domain-hosted Google Apps and want to use the version of Gmail set up for your domain, Gmail Backup allows you to download all of the messages from your Gmail account and then re-upload them to your new domain-hosted Gmail account when it's created. Once it's set up though, Gmail Backup supports domain-hosted Gmail. The utility is normally a one-way backup tool, only downloading messages and only uploading them when you ask it to.
With account storage limits at Gmail as high as 7GB now, the possibility of losing all of that data can be frightening if you use Gmail as a main e-mail address. It's always important to keep your own backups, even though it's highly unlikely that something major will happen to your Gmail account. The utility might be more useful if you're worried about being hacked, banned, or your account being otherwise closed inadvertently. Gmail Backup is free and works under Windows XP and Vista. Command-line versions are available for Linux and Mac OS X.
Pixlr is a lightweight photoblog application, based on photos from your flickr account. Pixlr gives you the possibility to easily present your photos in the usual photoblog manner but without the need of administering two different sites (your flickr account and your photoblog).
If you are looking for a clean and simple online image editor app then Pixlr is the right choice for you. Get started with Pixlr app.
Offbeat Guides creates personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology, and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts. With five simple steps and in under five minutes, we can create a guide for you based on your personal travel preferences, ensuring that no two guides are ever the same.
The site allows you to enter your name, travel plans, and hotel. The system then pulls information from various sites including data from Accuweather and notes and articles by professional travel writers along with Creative Commons licensed homebrew content. It also includes maps, restaurants, and attractions in the area.
Once you’ve built your book you can download it as a PDF for $9.95 or purchase it in physical form for $24.95, which also includes the PDF. You can also connect to the Internet and read it online on the go.
On the Gmail blog Justin Uberti, software engineer for Google, writes, "[T]oday we're launching voice and video chat -- right inside Gmail. We've tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video -- all for free."
In order to access Gmail Video and Voice Chat, users have to install the voice and video plug-in, and, as the Uberti states it, Google "takes care of the rest."
Gmail Voice and Video Chat was designed using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP and H.264, making the Google program able to interact with separate, third-party applications, assuming those separate voice and video applications decide to allow Gmail's offering to interact with them.
Installation is easy and only takes a few seconds to download the plug-in. Once the browser is restarted, a "Video and more" menu will appear at the bottom of the Gmail page. Go to the menu and select "start video chat." It will take a few moments for the video call to connect with your friend of co-worker.
Once the video and voice session is initiated, users can pop the window out of the Gmail interface, just like an Gchat instant message window. Users are then given the option to go full screen with the chat, for an up close and personal experience with your chat partner. In order for Gmail Voice and Video to function on your machine a Web cam is required.
Google and the Gmail team are in the initial stages of rolling this feature out to PC and Mac machines, which means the functionality may not appear right away. But don't worry, the Gmail team guarantees that the functionality will be available to everyone in the next couple of days.
Talk face to face right in Gmail with free, high quality video and audio. Get started at http://gmail.com/videochat
