Hindi Song | Web Search 101 for Dummies - New Common Craft Video

You probably know about all the web search tricks mentioned in this latest screencast video from Common Craft but it’s still a worthwhile watch because of their ‘very’ creative approach:

Tip excerpted from the video transcript:

Words often have multiple meanings. Consider the word MULLET which is both a fish and a hairstyle. A search for MULLET may give you a number of results about the hairstyle, but fewer about the fish.

To remove the results about hair, place a hyphen or minus sign just before the word you want to exclude, which means “show me the pages about mullet, but take away results relating to hair.”

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Hindi Song | Feed My Inbox Delivers Blogs as Email Messages

SendMeRSS, RSS Forward, FeedBurner Mail and FeedBlitz are some popular blog-to-email services that let you read RSS feeds as email messages without requiring a news reader.

Now there’s a new player in the game called FeedMyInbox which works more or less the same as above mentioned services but offers some distinct advantages:

For instance, you may supply the address of a website that doesn’t have feeds (e.g. google.com) and Feed My Inbox will automatically suggest related feeds like the official Google blog, Google News, etc.

And incase a page is associated with multiple feeds (say, CNN or Yahoo! News), you’ll get a list of options to choose from – you can either select one or multiple feeds and they’ll come to you as an email digest with all that news that was published the previous day.

Nick Francis of Feed My Inbox says that "each time a user enters a site that cannot find a feed, our team gets an email. We go check it out for ourselves to try and attach a feed to that site if applicable so that anyone entering that site in the future gets a successful message."

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Hindi Song | Danish Newspaper That Printed Muhammad Cartoons Puts Mahatma Gandhi In Their Ads

Uncle Gray, an advertising agency based in Denmark, has created a series of print ads featuring famous personalities like Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Dalai Lama.

The ads are actually designed to promote Morgenavisen (jp.dk) – the same newspaper that had earlier sparked world-wide protests after it printed those controversial cartoons of Muslim prophet Muhammad.

The tagline of this latest advertising campaign says - "Life is easier, if you don’t speak up" and probably suggests what these great political mind would have done had they not taken up leadership roles.

These ads depict Dalai Lama skiing in Himalayas, Nelson Mandela surfing on a beach while Mahatma Gandhi is shown having beer and cooking meat on a barbeque grill. Looks like another controversy is waiting to happen again.

Here’s another video ad from Telecom Italia featuring Mahatma Gandhi.

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Hindi Song | Microsoft Hiring Windows Gurus To Explain Vista Advantages In Retail Stores

"Do your friends and family turn to you when they want to learn more about their PCs? In your free time, do you turn to your PC for fun—or just to create or learn something new? "

If you are a Windows Guru or a tech enthusiast and based in the US, Microsoft may be interested in hiring you.

Called Windows Retail Live, this is a new and slightly unique job position at Microsoft where you’ll be required to help retail stores like Best Buy and Circuit City sell Windows based computers and also arrange how-to trainings and workshops for customers.

When I first read about this "Windows Guru" position, I though Microsoft was building their own Geek Squad style team but this is more about convincing customers to buy PCs and not related to fixing or troubleshooting problems.

These Windows gurus are not ‘official’ employees but are recruited and trained by Microsoft. They even ask in the application form whether you have a blog.

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Hindi Song | Visualize Internet Traffic in Real Time with Akamai Charts

Akamai, a company that handles anywhere between 10-20% of all the web traffic, offers some interesting real-time charts to help you visualize traffic on the Internet in real time.

Geographic regions with the most Web traffic - Akamai

For instance, this chart highlights geographic regions on a world map that are currently receiving the highest amount of traffic. You also get to know about cities / countries that are getting hammered with malicious web traffic.

Another very interesting chart is this News Index that details the news consumption pattern over a period of time. Web traffic on news sites is more or less constant across the entire day except between 11 PM and 8 AM.

Visitors per minute on popular news websites

And finally, here’s a consolidated chart showing the total number of visitors who are online at any given point of time. This may be a good indicator of the overall traffic pattern since Akamai claims to handle 20% of all the web traffic.

Visitors per minute across Internet delivered by Akamai

Akamai also publishes a quarterly State of The Internet report that details all the network outages and web site hijacks that had an impact on users. The report is available for download as a PDF.

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Hindi Song | Add Yahoo Messenger to your Website & Chat With Visitors

Yahoo! today introduced Yahoo! Messenger 9 and a new service called Pingbox which is like a live chat box (in the form of a Flash Widget) that you may embed in any website or blog including your MySpace page.

Like the Google Talk badge, site visitors can send your private messages via the Pingbox chat box without requiring any IM client.

There are however some differences and the most noticeable one is that Yahoo! Pingbox embed inline in your website while Google Talk opens a pop-up window. The downside of Yahoo’s approach is that it extend the loading time of web pages because the widget will always download with the page.

Themes inside Yahoo! Pingbox Studio

Another difference is that you can customize the look-n-feel of your Yahoo! Pingbox through the dozen or so themes available in the Pingbox studio.

Thge Pingbox widget on the site will reflect the current status of your Yahoo! Messenger and will automatically become unavailable when you go offline or set your status as ‘invisible.’

Related: Blog Add-ons

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Hindi Song | Yahoo! Makes Backdoor Entry In Google Search Results via their Glue Pages

Yahoo Glue is an interesting tool for searching information on the web – type in a query and you get results from sources like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, blogs, news, etc. on a single page.

When you perform a search on Yahoo! Glue, the results page has a very clean URL structure something on the lines of Wikipedia. For instance, a search for ‘delhi’ would show the following page:

http://in.glue.yahoo.com/page/delhi

You can substitute ‘delhi’ in the above URL with another term (say madonna) to see the corresponding Glue page.

http://in.glue.yahoo.com/page/madonna

The surprising part is that these ‘yahoo! glue pages’, which clearly fall in the category of auto-generated content, now rank in Google search pages. In fact, there are at least 143,000 ‘glues’ that are indexed by Google – that’s more than knol.

So how did Google discover all these ‘glues’? After some digging, I came across this page that is probably a directory of search queries and may been constructed for other search engines to find and crawl all these ‘virtual’ pages hosted on Yahoo! Glue.

Related: How to Enhance Yahoo! Search Results

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Hindi Song | A Video Game That You Can Play on YouTube

Sometime back Google introduced video annotations in YouTube that can either be plain text appearing over the video or they can be links which point to other videos hosted on YouTube.

Now this may seem limiting because you cannot link to external content from YouTube videos but Hexolabs, a mobile game development company, found a creative use for annotations.

They have developed a very basic but probably the first video game for YouTube using just the annotations feature. Called "A Car’s life" you can play this YouTube game here or via the embedded clip below:

Car’s life - video game made for youtube.

The rule is simple – a button will momentarily flash on your screen while the video is playing – you have to click that button before it disappears else your car meets a crash. If you click at the right moment, you jump to the next level.

This is where it gets interesting. The next level is actually another YouTube video clip that is linked to the button you just clicked in the previous level. Good idea.

Hindi Song | Upload Pictures from your Mobile Phone to Photoshop.com

Photoshop.com is a Flickr like service from Adobe. You can use this place to upload photos (the limit is 2GB for free accounts) and there’s a built-in image editor for tweaking pictures.

The image editor earlier launched as Photoshop Express but is now integrated into the main Photoshop.com site.

Adobe Photoshop Mobile

Today, Adobe is adding a new member to their expanding Photoshop family called Photoshop Mobile – this is a downloadable app that lets you upload as well view photos on Photoshop.com from a mobile phone. There’re no photo editing feature yet.

Video Tour - Adobe Photoshop for Mobile Phones

Photoshop mobile (type m.photoshop.com in your mobile browser) is currently available for only some Windows Mobile phones including Moto Q, Palm Treo and Samsung Blackjak.

If your phone is not supported by the Photoshop mobile app, there’s a nice alternative – just download the shozu client as it now works with photoshop.com in addition to other photo sharing sites like Flickr, Facebook, etc.

Skip the Registration Firewall

Bonus Tip: If you like to explore Photoshop.com without registration, try this URL – it won’t let you upload new pictures but you may use all the image editing features available inside Photoshop Express using the sample pictures.

All Photoshop.com accounts also get an easy-to-remember URL (e.g., abc.photoshop.com) where they can share public photos with the world.

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Hindi Song | Disable Facebook Chat Forever

If you like to turn off Facebook chat, click the chat icon in the lower right corner of your Facebook page and select ‘Go Offline’.

None of your Facebook friends can IM you as your name won’t show up in their friends list even though you are logged in. And this setting is preserved for future sessions as well.

Related: Put Facebook Chat in Firefox Sidebar

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Hindi Song | Click Hyperlinks on Web Pages with Keyboard Shortcuts

As the WSJ screenshot suggests, Mouseless Browsing adds unique numbers next to every hyperlink on the current web page – that link could either be in the form of text or even images.

Now if you want to click any of the hyperlinks to visit the target web page, just type the corresponding number with your keyboard and hit Enter.

The extension also works with search boxes and regular web forms. Here are some examples from BBC News and the CNN home page.

While you may think that this will only add clutter to web pages, that’s really not the case. Everything can be customized including the style of these "unique numbers" that appear next to web links.

In fact you could can URLs (with wildcards like *techmeme* or *google.com) to automatically suggest sites where this feature should be enabled or disabled by default.

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Hindi Song | ‘Stumble Upon’ Interesting Websites through Delicious

StumbleUpon toolbar has this nice "Stumble" button that, upon clicking, takes you to some random but interesting website. Click the button again and you’re transported to another site and the cycle continues.

Now if you don’t have StumbleUpon installed in your browser, try this easy hack that lets you channel surf the web on the lines of StumbleUpon but using public del.icio.us bookmarks.

Let’s say you love exploring web pages that are specifically about Photoshop. In that case, simply click the link below or drag-n-drop that into your browser bookmarks bar as a bookmarklet.

http://delicious.com/tag/photoshop?random=1

If you like to only explore popular content related to Photoshop, use this bookmarklet:

http://delicious.com/popular/photoshop?random=1

The trick is simple – if you add the ‘random’ parameter to a delicious page, it takes you to one of the bookmarks that’s already saved on that page.

Just replace the word ‘photoshop’ in the above links with any other topic – say web2.0 or lehman or sarahpalin.

There’s something more. If you are looking to explore completely random sites via delicious that may or may match your interest, use these links:

http://delicious.com/recent?random=1

http://delicious.com/popular?random=1

The former will take you one of the bookmarks that was recently saved on delicious while the latter will limit surfing to only sites that recently got popular on delicious.

Also see: Use StumbleUpon without the Toolbar

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Hindi Song | Read Wall Street Journal Articles for Free

There are at least two know workarounds for reading The Wall Street Journal Online for free – one involves changing referrer to Google News while the second is through Digg search.

Now here’s another but more simple trick that will give you full-text access to all subscriber-only articles available on The Wall Street Journal website including old archives.

How to Read Wall Street Journal for Free

If you see that ‘key icon’ next to a story, that means you only read a preview of that article and the full article will become available only after you login. Let’s see how you can bypass this:

The URL of all news stories published on WSJ.com follow a particular pattern:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122176966568653611.html

This URL structure is maintained even when stories move from the front page on to the archives where they become available only to WSJ subscribers.

Now if you like to read the above WSJ story in your browser, just prepend the following text to your story URL:

http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL=

Now your new URL would look something like this and this, as you expected, points to full article and not just the preview.

http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL=http://www.wsj.com/article/SB122176966568653611.html

The above method should also work for the Asia and Europe editions of Wall Street Journal since they also follow the similar URL structure.

Here’s another working example:

Original (limited) version: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122177625215054207.html
Full Text: http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.php?mid=&CALL_URL=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122177625215054207.html

Bookmarklet for Wall Street Journal Online

If the above step sounds confusing, just skip them and drag this link into your browser bookmarks bar -

Hindi Song | Use Windows? See Your Photo on the Microsoft Website & even Times Square

So you have see the new "I’m a PC" ad campaign from Microsoft that’s aimed squarely at the popular "Get a " campaign of Apple.

In case you missed watching those brilliants ads, go to microsoft.com/windows (not YouTube) as the video quality here is far better. You can download all the videos here.

There’s another very interesting part of this campaign where you may see your photograph on the Microsoft website or it may even show up on a screen in Times Square.

To participate, go to lifewithoutwalls.com and simply upload your picture or record a short video using the webcam. Once approved (no offensive or adult content is allowed), you’ll see yourself on the Wall of Windows users – Microsoft will email you a link with the exact location of the photo.

Now Microsoft is running these ads in Times Square for the next three weeks (see live screens below) and your picture could show up on the Times Square screen at any point during that time.

Reuters screen on Times Square – Live Camera

Live NASDAQ screen on Times Square

There’s no need for you to fly to New York for catching a glimpse as you’ll automatically get the photo of your Times Square appearance in an email. Not bad.

Who’s the guy on the home page (the guy that looks like John Hodgeman)? That is . He is an actual software engineer at Microsoft.

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Hindi Song | Linking to Stories Hosted on Google News may not be a Good Idea

Google News used to be a search engine but since last year, they started hosting stories from news agencies like the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse as these services, unlike Reuters, don’t have dedicated websites to publish their own content.

This is probably a very successful experiment because according to bloglines, more than a million blog posts have cited Associated Press stories that are actually hosted on Google News. Similarly, there are over 3,000 articles on Digg that again link to news stories hosted on ap.google.com.

The Associated Press and other newswire agencies may have never seen that kind of exposure had they not done a syndication deal with Google but there’s a small problem – all wired news stories published on Google News have a very short life-spam and expire after 30 days.

That means if you link to some current Google News story from your web page today, that link will return a 404 only after a couple of weeks and all your site visitors will see is this message.

Broken links are an absolute no both from the perspective of visitors and search engines. It may therefore be a good idea to link to CNN, NYT and other news websites where those stories will stay forever.

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Hindi Song | Amitabh Bachchan’s Blog Stats

Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan, who is also India’s best known blogger, recently revealed some details about traffic flowing through his blog.

Amitabh has been blogging at bigb.bigadda.com since April this year and following is a summary of his blog stats:

• Total Page Views since April: 11.5 million
• Total Number of Unique Visitors since April: 1 million
• Total Number of Unique + Regular visitors since April: 2.5 million

While these are extremely impressive figures for sure, it does hint that only a very small fraction of India’s 1 billion strong population may actually be reading blogs online.

At the same time, stars like him have definitely helped popularize the concept of blogs here.

Hindi Song | Google Speech Recognition Technology Is Now Called Google Audio Indexing

Sometime back, Google introduced speech recognition in YouTube that enables you to search for words spoken in the video and you could also directly jump to the portion where that word was said.

Initially you had to install an iGoogle gadget to experience YouTube’s speech recognition but now there’s a dedicated search page for this at Google Audio Indexing - this not just enables you to find spoken words in videos but also share that video portion.

If you like to share a clip where that word was found (or uttered), just click that ‘people’ icon in the YouTube Video player and you’ll get a direct link to that particular video segment.

http://labs.google.com/gaudi?q=obama&start=0&num=10&longId=-5906960400639115923

Like Blinkx, Google too has developed its own speech recognition system (called GAudi, for Google Audio Indexing), which powers both Google Audio Indexing and the Google Elections Video Search gadget.

Google Audio Indexing currently searches only videos related to US Elections that are uploaded on the YouTube political channels.

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· Tazti - Free Voice Recognition Software for Web Search & iTunes

Hindi Song | Translate & Subscribe to Blogs Feeds Written in Foreign Languages with Mloovi

A Technorati report suggested that only 36% of the blog posts are written in English while the rest are published in Japanese, Chinese, Italian and other languages.

While this data may be slightly old, it does hint at the multilingual nature of blogosphere and how we miss majority of the published content by limiting subscriptions only to RSS feeds that are written in English.

Now if you like to expand your daily information sources and read feeds published in foreign languages, Mloovi could be an ideal service for you.

1. Mloovi translates blog feeds from one language to another using Google Translate.

2. The translated version is available as a feed so people can directly subscribe to it in any news reader.

Founder Mike Robinson says that Mloovi is also available as a widget for blog publishers - this will help non-English speaking visitors to directly subscribe your blog in their own native language without using language translation.

For instance, here are links to this feed in Hindi, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Arabic. You only get partial summaries because of Google Translate API limitations but they should still be good enough for getting a basic idea about the full post.

Related: Google AJAX Language Translation Tutorial

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Hindi Song | Compress Office Documents with PPT Minimizer - Free Licenses

Compression tools like PPTMinimizer come handy in situations when you have to email documents that are too large for your email program. These tools can reduce file size by optimizing the embedded graphics without affecting quality.

Now the new version of PPTMinimizer can compress Microsoft Word documents as well in addition to PowerPoint files. It also works with presentations created in StarOffice and OpenOffice.

PPTMinimizer is portable so you can carry the whole program on a USB stick. They’ve also included an Outlook add-in so you can compress and email documents / presentations in minimum number of steps.

If you like to grab a copy of PPT Minimizer for free, go here and key in your email address - they’ll send you the license keys via email.

The above giveaway is valid only for the next few hours so if you miss the deadline, here’s another option - just put a comment below. Balesio has given 10 additional licenses for DI readers that will be distributed once the official giveaway is over.

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Hindi Song | Never Lose Web Pages That You Ever Bookmarked Locally or Online

The moment you see an interesting website, you save it to your bookmarks for future reference.

Thus, with time, you have created a huge list of favorites that’s not just long but is spread across different places like Firefox, delicious, Google Bookmarks, Opera, etc.

Though backing up favorites is easy but are they worth anything if the underlying web page changes or disappears off the web completely ?

You definitely don’t want to miss access to all these food recipes that you have painstakingly collected on the Internet over the past couple of months.

Now you could either save web page manually using these web clipping tools or a much better option is Iterasi - they have come up with a very elegant solution where you just have to upload a file containing all browser bookmarks and they handle the rest while you take a coffee break.

Iterasi create an archive of all web pages associated with your bookmarks and saves them permanently into your account so you always have access to all your favorite content. And the price is perfect - $0.

Archive Web Pages Automatically at Regular Intervals

There’s some more - Iterasi can also archive different versions of your favorite web pages as they change over time. For instance, if you CNN is your favorite website, you can do a "Daily" check and a new copy will be uploaded to your account each day so you can see changes across time.

Iterasi can either accept your local browser bookmarks or you can pass your del.icio.us credentials and it will fetch all your online bookmarks. For this to work with other online bookmark service like Yahoo! Bookmarks, ma.gnolia, Windows Live Favorites, etc - you’ll have to first export them local in the standard bookmark format.

If you ever used bookmarks to save links, this is definitely something your should not miss. Available on both Mac and Windows version of Iterasi.

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Hindi Song | Google AdSense Reports in Analytics - Screenshots

AdSense publishers will soon have access to extremely detailed stats about ads via Google Analytics reports.

You’ll know about web pages that get more clicks, revenue generated per page, CPM rates, top referring sites, etc. For more, check this story on AdSense and Analytics integration.

The screenshots were inadvertently published on TheGoogleCache.com and were cached by different newsreaders. Here are more screenshots from the same source that give exciting hints about what’s coming next. (click to enlarge)

AdSense Overview

There’s a new AdSense section added to the Analytics Reports that displays complete statistics about how visitors interact with Google Ads on your site and how have the ads performed over time.

Top AdSense Content

This report gives a consolidated view of AdSense earnings made along with information like clicks per page, CTR, CPM and total number of ad impressions.

AdSense Trending

This Analytics report will give an overview of how your AdSense earnings have changed over time (like your site traffic in Google Trends).

AdSense Revenue Per Page

This report is similar to the ‘Top AdSense Content’ report but that was for the entire site and this is on the page level.

Top AdSense Referrers

Let’s say site abc.com and xyz.com have linked to a page on you are website and you are getting referral traffic. With the AdSense Referrer report, you’ll know the exact revenue that you are making from visitors that are coming to you via two different sources.

Great for AdSense Revenue Sharing Sites

All these new AdSense - Analytics reports will also be very useful if you plan to have a site / blog with multiple contributors and their payment is a fixed percentage of AdSense Revenue generated from articles that they have written. No complex Excel sheets required anymore.

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Hindi Song | Special Social Networking Sites That Are Not Facbook or MySpace

Facebook and MySpace may be the hottest social networking sites around but there’re so many other online social networks that are also very popular and cater to some special interests. Let’s take a look:

Muxlim - It is like MySpace for Muslims but family-friendly and free of any nudity or adult content that may offend the Islamic community.

MyChurch - This is online community of Christian Churches. Each Church on MyChurch has a profile page that allows its followers to join and then the church members can also inter-connect with each other. Ministers can also post sermons as audio podcasts on MyChurch.

Eons - Eons is a social community for people who have crossed the age of 50. One of the most active groups on Eons is ‘50+ Singles Group’. From the founder of Moster.com.

CafeMom - This is a hugely popular social networking site but just for moms - you won’t even find a gender column on the sign-up page.

Dogster - A social network for pet dogs and dog owners. Like Facebook gifts, you can "leave a bone’ when you are on any dog’s page to show your appreciation. Doggy Space and My Dog Space are other social communities for dog lovers. Cat owners can flock to Catster and My Cat Space.

Geni - This is more than just another family tree builder. You begin by adding your own name to the tree, followed by relations who are then invited to complete their details and also join own your private ‘family’ network.

First Wives World - This is a social network for anyone who has been affected by divorce, directly or indirectly. Members include divorced women, children of divorced parents, family members of divorcing women and so on.

Totspot - This is a social network for new born babies and kids maintained by their parents. If you are expecting a child, you can also join but keep the birth date same as the expected date given by your doctor. Totspot will also keep a record of other members who have recently viewed the profile page of your child.

Resources for further reading:

• Start Your Own Social Network with Ning
• Map of Popular Social Networking Websites
• More Internet World Maps

Video: Social Networks in Simple English

Hindi Song | Free Website Building Tools That Are Good Replacements for Google Page Creator

Google Page Creator is awesome - anyone can build a good looking website in minutes using the built-in templates or they can write pages externally (say in Dreamweaver) and upload them to Creator.

And everything is free - there are no ads on your pages and Google takes care of all the web hosting bills. But as they say, all good things come to an end, and so is Google Page Creator getting replaced by Google Sites.

Compare Google Sites with Google Page Creator

While Google Sites and Google Pages have common feature (like the WYSIWYG AJAX editor), they are still quite different. For instance, you can’t upload HTML pages to Google Sites and are therefore limited to using one of the built-in themes for your site design.

The second issue is that if you make a Google Site public, the associated ’site activity log’ also becomes public - most website publisher will have reservations sharing this data with unknown visitors. Lastly, all external hyperlinks are ‘nofollow’ if that means anything to you.

Free Alternatives to Google Page Creator

Here’s a roundup of some website building services that are free and non-technical.

1. Office Live Small Business - While the name may suggest that the service is only for small business owners, just about anyone can create their website here.

Website Builder inside Office Live Small Business

Office Live is easy and filled with goodies - you have tons of professional web templates and color themes to choose from, there’re ready-made modules for common tasks like web forms, photo galleries, live maps, email newsletters, etc. plus you can also upload office documents to the website.

Everything is free including web hosting and server space.

2. Weebly - This is powerful but very user friendly and easy web page builder where you start with a blank canvas and build the page by dragging elements that include text, videos, pictures, maps and more.

Geeks can write their own HTML and add them to Weebly pages. There’s support for Google ads as well so you can even monetize sites created inside Weebly. Another advantage - site publishers download their full site with pictures and CSS as a zip file. Free users gets 100 MB of free storage space and there’re no bandwidth limitations

3. Snap Pages - This is Flash based website editor that is very beautiful and may be a perfect place if you looking to create a small website for sharing some photos and your calendar. The options are slightly limited for non-premium users as they can’t create new pages.

4. Edicy Pages - It’s a new website creation tool that is just perfect for the techie crowd who wants more control over their site layout.

Start by picking a design from the template gallery and then you may completely change the look and feel of your site by editing the blog template similar to WordPress themes or Blogger template. It also supports JavaScript code and like Google Sites, Edicy tracks all changes made to a site.

5. Synthasite - This is again an easy yet very powerful tool for building websites but unlike competition, Syntasite is completely free. Images uploaded to Synthasite can be diretly edited in Picnik just like you have in Flickr. The tool also lets you embed Google AdSense ads in web pages much like Weebly.

Some more site builders worth checking out are WebOn, WebSketch, Viviti, Wix and Webs.

• Know Everything about Websites