Social Networking is an inevitable part of our life today but honestly, it is nothing more than an extension of our Social life onto Web. We prefer connecting to folks who’re real life friends of ours, not strangers.

Our cause of friendship on these social networks is our pre-established real life relations. This is all what Facebook, Myspace, Orkut etc are all about.

Now, it’s time to for you to explore a new social life, purely built around you and everything that’s just about yourself,  in a different, refreshing way altogether. Meet

Social Networking is an inevitable part of our life today but honestly, it is nothing more than an extension of our Social life onto Web. We prefer connecting to folks who’re real life friends of ours, not strangers.

Our cause of friendship on these social networks is our pre-established real life relations. This is all what Facebook, Myspace, Orkut etc are all about.

Now, it’s time to for you to explore a new social life, purely built around you and everything that’s just about yourself,  in a different, refreshing way altogether. Meet Youtego.

Youtego is a Social Networking site that lets you explore and befriend other mates on the site, on the basis of overlapping interests, characteristics, academics, profession etc. This might remind you of Lunch.com, if you’ve heard about it already but the true novelty of Youtego doesn’t lie in Interest based exploration and networking but Self-visualization.

Youtego lets you self-visualize yourself with the use of images. On Youtego, instead of filling out long in-depth forms or answering questions about your interests or passions, you pick pictures from various sources(Flickr, Picasa, Google Images..) or upload it directly, that identifies you, your interests, academics, profession etc. This might not sound that interesting but do it yourself and it won’t take you long to realize how interesting it would turn out to be.

From end user’s perspective, filling out user’s profile feels like a burden at the beginning of any new account at conventional social networks but Youtego reverses the game altogether by making Profile creation, quite a fun actually.

It sparks quite an excitement to even imagine how would a social networking experience be, when everything about you and other mates on that network would purely be symbolized by staggering images.

After you sign up, you get to have six default ‘Tegosets‘(I, I Know, I Can, I Love, My Work, My Education) and you can simply start picking up pictures from available sources and associating them with respective Tegosets. It is all about how you self-visualize and depict it in the form of pictures.

The moment you populate your tegosets with appropriate pictures, you start getting suggestions for matching tegomates, who happen to share some or many traits/characteristics with you. You can then look at their profiles and send them friend request.

You can also create Tego Tours, a basic video using your choosen pictures with a background music and the good part is that you can also share these TegoTours outside Youtego as well. Here’s a TegoTour that i created within my account.

Take a note that you create a Tegotour by using your existing Tegosets only so you got to have some tegosets before you create your first Tegotour. You just need to think of anything that you want to share with Tegomates and outside world  and start creating it by adding appropriate Tegosets within the tour. Putting some ‘description text’ is recommended as it would make things more elaborative for Tegotour viewers.

Take a look at this TegoTour !

Branding terminology such as Tegos, Tegosets, Tegomates, Tegotours might not be very intuitive to new eyeballs but as one gets used to it, there shouldn’t be much problems in understanding their meaning.

Overall, it’s an all-new and innovative way of exploring and building interest oriented social relations. The overall website and UI design is pure visual treat to the end users.

Torrent is one such word that’s hugely popular across the web and most of us very well know why we need it but ironically, it is among those words in the tech glossary, that general public feels most perplexed about.

Users know what’s the core purpose of a torrent but they hardly have any idea about its actual meaning and fundamental concept behind it. Surrounding the word torrent, there are several other words being regularly used but the literal meaning is not yet clear.

This write-up sheds light over the most ...]]>

Torrent is one such word that’s hugely popular across the web and most of us very well know why we need it but ironically, it is among those words in the tech glossary, that general public feels most perplexed about.

Users know what’s the core purpose of a torrent but they hardly have any idea about its actual meaning and fundamental concept behind it. Surrounding the word torrent, there are several other words being regularly used but the literal meaning is not yet clear.

This write-up sheds light over the most common keywords used in torrent world but hardly known in literal sense. Let’s get started !

What is a torrent ?

A small file that carries the necessary information, required by the BitTorrent Client, for downloading the desired file. Torrent files are generally obtained from a torrent indexing website, dedicated for the purpose of indexing torrent files.

Torrent Indexers do not host or generate the content being shared. They merely index the torrents, which enables BitTorrent Client download the content being referred by the torrent.

What is BitTorrent ?

A peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, which was developed by Bram Cohen back in 2001 and is now maintained by BitTorrent Inc. BitTorrent was developed for the purpose of providing end users with a pathway to transfer and share large sized files on the Internet in a decentralized manner.

BitTorrent, also known as Peer-to-Peer protocol, doesn’t follow the conventional Client-Server file hosting mechanism but actually distributes the responsibility of hosting and sharing files across all the connected peers(network nodes). Such a distributed mechanism reduces the dependency and network load on any single machine and helps distributing large sized files without any infrastructural need.

What is a BitTorrent Tracker ?

BitTorrent Trackers are servers that provide assistance in the inter-communication between peers, whenever data download through a torrent initiates and periodical communication during the downloading process as well. As more and more peers(leechers) download the data sections of the file from the original source, these peers start behaving like sources(seeders) for other leechers. Hence, regular communication with Torrent trackers ensures that newly added seeders are also utilized by the leechers.

What is a Torrent Indexer ?

Torrents indexers are websites that work as search engines for torrents. They keep looking around for newly created torrents and index them on their site, to get found easily by the end users. Again, similar to Torrent trackers, Indexers do not participate in generating the content being shared via BitTorrent. They merely play their part in P2P networking by providing an easy-to-access aggregated torrent resource.

What is a BitTorrent Client ?

Just like we need a desktop application(web browser) to access internet using http protocol, we need a desktop application to download and share data using BitTorrent protocol. This desktop application is known as BitTorrent Client.

What is P2P ?

P2P or Peer to Peer is referred to the networking configuration used in BitTorrent protocol, to enable distributed data hosting and sharing across multiple peers. Just like we have a Client-server configuration for data hosting and sharing via http protocol, there is Peer-to-peer configuration for BitTorrent protocol.

Here you will find some of the most popular torrent trackers on the web.

Microsoft Office has been facing a strong challenger in the name of Google Docs for quite sometime but MS Office is the reigning enterprise app suite for years and the situation hasn’t radically changed so far. Early bird advantage and resistance to change are the two factors that are paying off hefty dividend to Microsoft Office till now.

But one space, where things are appearing to drift away slowly but steadily from Microsoft’s grip is the Academic space. Schools and colleges are one of the fastest adopters of Google Apps, ...]]>

Microsoft Office has been facing a strong challenger in the name of Google Docs for quite sometime but MS Office is the reigning enterprise app suite for years and the situation hasn’t radically changed so far. Early bird advantage and resistance to change are the two factors that are paying off hefty dividend to Microsoft Office till now.

But one space, where things are appearing to drift away slowly but steadily from Microsoft’s grip is the Academic space. Schools and colleges are one of the fastest adopters of Google Apps, thanks to Google for keeping it feature-rich and Ads-free for student fraternity.

We’re talking about ‘Google Apps for Education’. Google Apps is a popular application suite for individuals/enterprises for web based collaboration, data sharing and document sharing. It offers an MS Office alternative to end users and lets them do all the work right there on the web. ‘Google Apps for Education’ is a free suite of collaborative and communication applications, exclusively designed for Schools and Universities.

Here are some of the most prominent reasons for switching to Google Apps for Education. Take a look

1. Save money by outsourcing your infrastructure overheads to Google : Google Apps for Education takes all your IT overheads off your shoulders by providing you cloud based hosting on reliable Google servers.

2. Domain centric approach for Schools/Universities : As schools and universities are generally domain centric and prefer maintaining an email system, exclusive for that college or university, ‘Google Apps for education’ provides that facility and lets schools create domains such as abc@xyz.com where ‘abc’ can be any student/teacher/anyone and ‘xyz’ is the name of the school/university. This way, content, calendar, documents, presentations and other academic stuff can be limited to that domain, that is, within that college or university.

3. More web and email space : Generally, users within a self hosted domain(in case of schools and universities) get much lesser space(tens of MBs), both web and email space and therefore, feel congested as they are used to virtually unlimited sized mail accounts offered by popular mail services such as GMail, Yahoo! and Hotmail. Google Apps for Education lets schools/universities provide ample web and email space(no need to delete any mail) to every student/teacher, no matter how many.

4. Everything remains under control : Schools/Universities generally prefer spending hefty sum of money in maintaining IT infrastructure, mainly for the sake of keeping things under control. With Google Apps for Education, you can administer allowance of all ‘Google Apps for Education’ services such as Email, Calendar, Docs, Talk, Sites, Video, and Web Pages to authorized users of the school/university.

Here are some of the videos of students, teachers and authorities talking about Google Apps for Education and why does it matter to them. Take a look !

Hypertext Markup Language, popularly known as HTML is well known to most of us. It is probably the first lesson taught to any guy who aspires getting into the field of web development. But XML, although high relevant to the web, has not gained awareness to great extent.

To keep things simple and digestible, here is an in-depth brief-up of XML, explaining its meaning, basic purpose and relevance to the web. Take a look.

What is XML

eXtensible Markup Language, abbreviated as XML, is a markup language which is meant for the ...]]>

Hypertext Markup Language, popularly known as HTML is well known to most of us. It is probably the first lesson taught to any guy who aspires getting into the field of web development. But XML, although high relevant to the web, has not gained awareness to great extent.

To keep things simple and digestible, here is an in-depth brief-up of XML, explaining its meaning, basic purpose and relevance to the web. Take a look.

What is XML

eXtensible Markup Language, abbreviated as XML, is a markup language which is meant for the purpose of presenting structured documents over the web. XML, although similar in few aspects to HTML, differs from the fixed and defined nature of  HTML tag sets.

In HTML, tag semantics are standard and well defined and therefore can’t be customized at all. For instance, a <body> tag has a defined meaning and the tag <product.name> has got no meaning.

In case of XML, tags can be customized as per the nature and information stored in the document. In simpler words, XML is meant to encode text and data, to make it simpler and more interpretable to humans as well as machines/applications.

Where does it belong to

XML is an application profile of Standard Generalised Markup Language(SGML). To give a brief-up overview about SGML, it  is a prevalent web standard for the purpose of maintaining repositories of structured documents. SGML is not preferred for serving documents over the web due to inefficiency issues and therefore , XML, being a subset of SGML, is used for this purpose.

Why XML

We already have HTML (and even HTML5) to create webpages for publishing information on web so one might wonder if XML is a replacement of HTML or otherwise. It is important to understand here that XML was created so as to serve richly structured documents over the internet. The existing options, namely HTML and SGML, due to customization and efficiency issues, were not practical for this purpose.

An example

Below is a basic example of an encoded XML document, which is interpretable because of the use of customized tags.

<?xml version=”1.0″?>

<notice>

<to>Peter</to>

<from>XYZ Ltd</from>

<heading>Violation of official policy</heading>

<body>You are required to produce all the official documents to CEO by tomorrow</body>

</note>

For detailed insight into XML specifications, we recommend looking at this documentation here.

USB Flash drive is primarily a data storage device consisting of a NAND-type flash memory. It also posseses a Universal Serial Bus(USB) interface for ease of connectivity with computers or laptops using integrated USB port.

USB flash drives have today become the De facto standard of portable data storage, replacing older data storage devices such as Floppy disks and even CD/DVDs. As a double layer DVD goes to a maximum of 9.6GB of data storage only, USB flash drives are way ahead of  data storage capacity, going upto 64GB or ...]]>

USB Flash drive is primarily a data storage device consisting of a NAND-type flash memory. It also posseses a Universal Serial Bus(USB) interface for ease of connectivity with computers or laptops using integrated USB port.

USB flash drives have today become the De facto standard of portable data storage, replacing older data storage devices such as Floppy disks and even CD/DVDs. As a double layer DVD goes to a maximum of 9.6GB of data storage only, USB flash drives are way ahead of  data storage capacity, going upto 64GB or even more. Although, the cost of USB is comparatively higher than CD/DVDs but there are several other benefits of USB Flash Drive, which make it a High utility product and a much preferrable(or killer) option compared to other conventional data storage media.

Rewritability: A USB Flash drive can be erased and re-written even hundreds of thousands of times in its whole lifespan. A CD/DVD may be re-writable or not. In case of Re-Writable(RW) CD/DVDs, the issue is with the limitation of rewriting cycles(only 1000 or so) and also the appropriacy for large scale re-writing only. For the need of small scale re-writing(such as writing a 140kb word file), CD/DVDs prove highly impractical and hence USB drives are most preferred.

Compact size: USB flash drives are so small in size that they are often kept as a part of keychain or carried in the wallet itself. They are often termed as Pen drive, just because of their similar size and shape as that of a pen(even smaller than a pen)

Faster data transfer: Compared to older storage media, USB flash drive transfers data much faster, reading data at about 30Mb/s and writing at around 12-15 Mb/s. Upcoming upgradations such as USB 3.0 are certainly going to enhance the data transfer rates by multi-folds.

High capacity: USB flash drives have a huge storage capacity, going to a maximum of 64GB, much higher compared to storage capacities of CD(700MB) or Dual layered DVD(9.6GB). For more storage along with portability, one has to switch to Portable harddisks.

Longer lifespan: As write and erase cycles go in hundreds of thousands in count, the lifespan of a USB drive goes beyond 10 years(for general purpose usage). Within this much time, the user is expected to actually switch to more advanced USB solutions.

Sturdy Design:  Unlike fragile Floppy disks or CD/DVDs, USB flash drives are much more resistant to wear and tear. USB Flash drives are generally scratch-proof and have lesser chances of any mechanical damage. They are also protected against dust penetration.

Portability & Comfort: It is very convenient to use a USB flash drive on modern PCs and laptops. Almost every PC/laptop has multiple USB ports and therefore, you will hardly find a moment when you cannot find a USB port for plugging your flash drive into it. As the size of USB drive is ultra small, its very convenient to carry along as well.

All the above advantages of USB flash drives have made it the ‘Most popular portable data storage device’ today.

Ubiquitous support

Google has a spectrum of high-utility web services, few of which have gradually become a necessity for a large majority of population on web. Services like Google search, Gmail, Google Maps, Youtube are certainly the most utilized web services among the array of web services run by Google.

There are plenty of other Google services which are a great utility but are still to gain mass attention by end users. One such web service is Google Transit.

Google Transit is a web service that helps users reach their destination by providing ...]]>

Google has a spectrum of high-utility web services, few of which have gradually become a necessity for a large majority of population on web. Services like Google search, Gmail, Google Maps, Youtube are certainly the most utilized web services among the array of web services run by Google.

There are plenty of other Google services which are a great utility but are still to gain mass attention by end users. One such web service is Google Transit.

Google Transit is a web service that helps users reach their destination by providing an easy-to-follow routes and direction information using available public transport. As public transport is usually the ‘most utilized’ transportation service in any city/state by general public, Google Transit proves very useful as it gives detailed information about the transit stops, station information, schedules, journey duration(estimated) and even fare information.

As precise route and schedule information is usually controlled by the Public transport authorities, Google urges the local transport authorities of cities in various countries across the globe to provide Google with the relevant information so that the information may be integrated in Google Transit service and made publicly available for more convenience to the users of those public transport services.

So far, more than 405 cities across the globe have some or all of their public transport services integrated in Google Transit service. 50 of these covered cities are even supported with a latest feature addition called Transit layer in Google Maps. Transit layer lets you virtually superimpose the Public transportation map over the normal map of your city. This will prove helpful mainly for those who’ve the option of travelling through personal conveyance(say ‘car’) and want to check if there’s a cheaper , faster and convenient way to drive to their destination via available public transport.

With Google Transit, both ‘Public transport authorities’ and ‘end commuters’ get the benefit as it promotes Public transport usage and eases off the daily commutation hassles for end commuters.

How to access Google Transit

• Go to Google Maps,
• Click on ‘Get Directions‘ tab on the left side on the map page
• Enter the ‘source‘ and ‘destination‘ fields according to your requirements
• In the menu option below, select ‘By Public transit‘ and press ‘Enter’ key

In case, your city is not one of those 405 cities where Google Transit service is currently available, you will be notified about the service unavailability

Ways to access Google Transit

• Through your Web browser
• Through Mobile Phone

As Google Transit helps you plan your trip using public transport, its will prove much useful and suitable to be accessed via mobile phone. As its not feasible to carry your PC/laptop everywhere and start using it while on the go, its great to utilize Google Transit via Mobile Phone.

Although ‘Google Transit’ is so well integrated within Google Maps that it actually appears to be one of the many features that Google Maps provides but the utility that Google Transit serves is really appreciable.

The popularity of any celebrity is time-bound and it fades away with time as someone else takes away the ’most popular’ spot from the former celebrity.

And when it comes to judging who’re the most popular celebrites in the world,the very first parameter to evaluate this may be Who’re the most searched celebrities in the world ?

But as wikipedia tops hundreds of thousands of search results when a particular celebrity is searched(wikipedia mostly shows person’s biography,achievements etc) so Who’re the most popular celebrities on Wikipedia ? has its own significance.

So,we have compiled a ...]]>

The popularity of any celebrity is time-bound and it fades away with time as someone else takes away the ’most popular’ spot from the former celebrity.

And when it comes to judging who’re the most popular celebrites in the world,the very first parameter to evaluate this may be Who’re the most searched celebrities in the world ?

But as wikipedia tops hundreds of thousands of search results when a particular celebrity is searched(wikipedia mostly shows person’s biography,achievements etc) so Who’re the most popular celebrities on Wikipedia ? has its own significance.

So,we have compiled a list of popular celebrites which are currently the most viewed (bringing maximum pageviews) on Wikipedia. Some of the results are really astounding but fact is a fact…

So here goes the list….

..Popular Celebrity #1…………………………………………………………………….

Most Popular Politician : Sarah Palin

Monthly Pageviews       : 4 Mn

Overall rank(Wikipedia) : 7

..Popular Celebrity #2…………………………………………………………………….

Most Popular Sportsman : Michael Phelps

Monthly Pageviews         : 3.5 Mn

Overall rank(Wikipedia)   : 9

..Popular Celebrity #3…………………………………………………………………….

Most Popular Actor : Bernie Mac

Monthly Pageviews       : 2 Mn

Overall rank(Wikipedia) : 11

..Popular Celebrity #4…………………………………………………………………….

Most Popular Band : Jonas Brothers

Monthly Pageviews       : 1 Mn

Overall rank(Wikipedia) : 26

..Popular Celebrity #5…………………………………………………………………….

Most Popular Superhero : Batman

Monthly Pageviews          : 0.9 Mn

Overall rank(Wikipedia)   : 34

..Popular Celebrity #6…………………………………………………………………….

Most Popular Wrestler : The UnderTaker

Monthly Pageviews        : 0.35 Mn

Overall rank(Wikipedia)  : 173

………………………………………………………………………

Online searching tendency(and hence wikipedia popularity) is event driven and short termed. All these results display the rankings for the month of August 2008. This might change drastically in any other month.

But anyways, the above listed popular celebrities are a blend of long lived and short-term celebs. For instance, ‘The Undertaker’ has been gracing the list of  ’Most popular celebrities’ for decades now. On the other side, ‘Jonas Brothers’ are relatively new entrant in the exclusive list of popular celebrities.