Last day, at a seminar,  I was about to give a presentation on SEO, and to break the ice, I asked a question - “Which is the one website that you can’t afford to visit a day.” As obvious, I was expecting someone to answer - Google. But he came up with an answer that stunned me. I’ll never ask that question again. :D

What happens when you overdo things? You reach the dead end. Sometimes you get stuck just because you have too many ideas in your head, sometimes because you just had too much of what you were doing. All of us need a break at times, from blogging, from researching, from calculating and coding. Luckily, there are lot of junk sites available on the net, that will help you wile away your time, just like the guy who answered me.

Just managed to create a list of those sites which will help you get a break from your chores and at the same time give you that extra juice to be more productive at work. Whenever I face a readers block, I visit these sites and all the time, I manage to get an idea or two to blog from each of them.

	Windows Live Search Now this could come as a surprise right? The reason why I select Windows live search is that it throws up weird results unlike Google, so it’s kind of fun to play around with it. Type in whatever comes to your mind, hit search and it will give you the weirdest results.
	Digg It’s interesting to see the top stories on Digg. What I personally like is to study the pattern of the top dugg stories. Doing a search to find the top stories dugg, and the top stories buried itself will give you great insights on how to create popular articles on your blog.
	Go Daddy This guy is my favorite. When I search for a particular domain, it throws me the synonyms, the antonyms and everything in between. Most of the times, just to see the results, I do a interesting domain name search.
	Seth Godin Of course you know what the man is all about. But what I admire at his blog is his writing style and how he manages to inspire you with his outstanding persona. Read a few posts from his yester years and you’ll get some awesome ideas to blog.
	Smashing Magazine These guys rock! If you ever wanted to learn what “Digg oriented stories” are, you better learn from them. They have enormous list of the coolest stuff on the internet, that you can’t deny bookmarking them. A reference point anytime.
	Mashable Pete Cashmore, does it best! One of the top websites in the world, with a traffic any website will envy for. They have all the upcoming web 2.0 stuff with them and no one misses their radar. One stop shop for all the trendy and coolest stuff online.
	ProBlogger Everybody knows him. What I’m more interested in the site is it’s archives. A read at the archives provides you with insights on how to write articles the popular way! Reading the archives is like taking a tonic !
	Gizmodo Ever felt guilty of not being able to track the latest arrivals in the technology front? Just visit gizmodo and the next day you’ll be the winner at office chats and discussion boards. Valuable information, every first time. all the time!
	Stumble Upon Another favorite of mine,perfect to wile away your time, if you are running out of creative juices. One look and a few stumbles can rejuvenate you just like an ayurvedic massage !
	Flickr We all know this guys cool ! What I’m personally interested in is browsing the flickr collection through the flock browser. If possible I favorite a couple of pictures that I could use on the blog. Good one to wile away time, productively!
	Blogging pro Everything for wordpress is here, widgets,themes,plugins,tweaks,hacks and what not? Blogging pro has links to all the resources here, perfect for bloggers, who want to spice up their template every single day.
	Lifehacker Tips, tweaks and news on technology. Gina manages to put in every information possible, on the above updated daily. Perfect if you’d like to learn how to write a technology blog.
	Digital Point forums Got a domain to sell? Have doubt on installing a software, Got Adsense doubts? There are guys here waiting to answer you. It’s like the song by scorpions - You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!
	Yahoo Answers A great place to check your proficiency in any selected category. People ask questions there, if you take the role of an advisor, people rank you for the quality of answers you provide. A great place for knowledge sharing!
	Deviant Art Great place to rejuvenate yourselves with some art. Got loads and loads of stuff you can stare at and feel the awe! If you had enough reading text stuff, this is the place to be. A visual treat for your eyes.
	Ouch My Toe Another personal favorite of mine. This guy knows what’s comedy to you and what’s not. I can bet that he’ll make you laugh in the very first read. A good place to start your day or  escape from that stressful day.
	Google Blog Search Another great place to find interesting blogs. If you’d like to read a bit more on your niche topic and see what the competition is like, you better go here and search for related stuff. No no technorati here!
	Wordpress plugins database If you are on wordpress, you’d want to visit this place too often. Because this is the official place for all the plugins and latest arrivals. If you love to tweak your template too often and play around installing new plugins, go for it!
	A list apart No idea what’s CSS? Bad design skills? Then it’s high time you visited this site. You don’t need to know CSS deeply, but this guy will help you get a taste about it the standard way. Can get a bit boring after a few visits, but worth a visit in a while.
	Web master world One of the oldest forums around. They have both amateurs and professionals as members so you might want to indulge in. What I like personally is the conflicts and debates there. You gain yourself some knowledge being involved in it.
	Lorelle on Wordpress If you are looking for quality articles on blogging then this is the place to be for some inspiration. There could be some repetition here and there, but overall a great place to be when running out of ideas to blog.
	Facebook My favorite social networking site. With it’s rich applications and great network of members, it’s a great place to network with professionals. Yes, there are lot of junk applications available but if you know how to maintain a professional and serious profile, this is the place to be.
	Top youtube videos If you’re looking for some fun, this site is the best choice. It lists the top videos on Youtube, under various categories and it’s updated regularly.
	Download Squad This is a blog about computer related stuff. There are lot of software review and download sites available but this one stands out because of it’s quality. A visit will give you access to some cool softwares and tools which you will miss otherwise.
	Webware This is a great site for updating yourself on web 2.0 application and it’s tweaks. If you don’t want to be lost out on the web 2.0 front, you better grab these guys feed. If you are running out of ideas to do review applications, this guy can help you.

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It’s easy to scrap your friends in Hindi. With the Indic  Transliteration technology combined with Google suggest, it’s even more easy now.

Go to the Indic transliteration technology page here and type in your hindi words in english.

Hit space and the word shows up in hindi.

If you want to get more suggestions on the word, then double click on the hindi transliterated word and a drop down list (like Google suggest) shows up with the possible variants.

Copy down the text in hindi and scrap your friends on Orkut.

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There are a lot of tools out there that helps you to download and save videos and sound tracks from youyube. Here’s a compilation of the best of them.

1. Save by submitting url
   This service let’s you download the video to your pc, if you give the youtube url into it.
   Simple one, but it may get you incomplete videos some time.
2. Online download
   This service requires you to install a plugin to your firefox browser, so that you can download the video right from the window where you are playing it.Clean and simple tool. But can get a bit slow and sluggish at times.
3. Online download - submit url
   This service too lets you download the video if you submit the youtube url directly to it. Requires you to collect the youtube url correctly.
4. Convert yuotube video to any other format
   This service will help you convert the youtube video to any other format like 3gp, avi,mov or Mp4. Requires no softare download, just give the youtube url, and select the final file format you need. It will convert the file online as well as enable you to download the file.
5. Download and share the youtube videos
   This service allows you to download a youtube video, by submitting the youtube url and also help you to share the file(downloadable file) with your friend.

In order to play the downloaded youtube files, you need a FLV player.
Here is the list of best players around.

• FLV Player
• Free FLV player
• FLV file streamer

Related post - Download youtube videos using Firefox browser

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Technorati is undisputedly one of the preferred stops on the internet, when you are looking for content and news. (others being Digg,Reddit etc)

Getting a top rank on technorati is definitely something to cheer about, cos they always throw you with that “not among the top 50,000″ graph to you when you visit it. Mark Robinson - does a little trick to get him top rank to technorati, and in almost no time.

He says that going on a commenting spree on a top A-list blog like(John Chow) can get you rank high on technorati. This is because of a glitch in technorati’s algorithm where each post (you comment on) is treated as a separate linking page(He explains it here).

So if you want to get into the top ranks of technorati - Select a A-List blogger and go on a commenting spree until you are satisfied > Ping technorati and wait for a few hours! Presto.

Well, i would like to disagree with Mark that technorati rankings are totally rubbish. Technorati ranks cannot be compared to a Google PR, but it gives you weightage over other bloggers in the same niche - Doesn’t it?

Image courtesy - customersarealways.com

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Thanks to Blogger, the option of using a custom domain for your blog withouth loosing the Google Juice has left everyone with Godaddy ot ENOM - registering their new domains.

To help you, many expert bloggers have penned down their recommendations and suggestions on things to keep in mind when selecting a domain name.Just google for “selecting a domain name” and you will come across similar points on almost all sites.

Some of them are - Keep it simple - Keep it short - Make it recallable - Do not put characters in it like hyphen or numbers - Make it typeable etc etc etc…

Truth is that many a times simple domain names aren’t available and often you end up selecting domain names you thought you never would take.

But today I’m looking at it from a different perspective.
Why does domain names have to be short or simple?

Here are a few answers i coud think of.
- SEO purposes - linking.
- Help a fellow blogger link to you with ease.
- A reader should find it easy to remember the name.
- You don’t want broken links to your blog.
- You shouldn’t forget your domain name.

What if they were difficult to remember and confusing?
- Readers would book mark you.
- They would add you to their favourites so that they can come back.
- They may join your mailing list so that they don’t have to take the trouble in visiting your blog often.

So, i think selecting a seemingly complicated - difficult to remember domain name will help you get more readers, increase your subscribers, and get more bookmarks and links!

Thanks to Philip’s blog - his blog’s got a hard to remember name(but a popular one), which made me write this article.

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Last day I was doing a search for an old image file on my local disk and I had no luck the first few times - getting desperate, I tried a few alternate file names yet, no luck this time either.

What added to my frustration, more than not finding the file was the Microsoft’s search assistant doggy. All the while during the search, I had to watch his histrionics and this was disgusting!Also, I think it slowed down my system and wasted my time.

How I loved the old Win98 search tool - No assistant, No frills, yet efficient.

Finally I decided to remove the search assistant from my system. Now I have the classic search ON. If you are a fan of the Windows classic search tool here is a work around that will help you get it back!

It’s a registry edit thing - So follow the instructions carefully.

- Goto Start > Run

- Type in “regedit”

- In the registry goto HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState

- Right click and add a String Value called “Use Search Asst”

- Again right click on the string and enter the value “no”

- Press F5 to refresh the registry

Goto “Search” and ha - you killed the poor doggy -but for the good

Now you have a fast, efficient no frills attached - good old windows search tool !

Enjoy that bit of Nostalgia.

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