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Picasa2 and Flickr are not made for each other; in fact they are the picture-perfect brainchildren of two fierce competitors, Google and Yahoo!.

Picasa2 was designed to work with Picasa Web Albums, a Google web-application with similar purpose as Flickr although the latter is far more superior than PWA. Used alone, these gadgets are superb products, but coupled together, they are a match made in Web 2.0 heaven.

I’ve been using Flickr for years and completely happy with it. However, Flickr only serves the online need and overlooks the offline part of a complete photo management process. Up until yesterday, I have tried and used other desktop applications, Adobe Photoshop, Gimp and Irfanview to manage and edit my photos. These software are best for viewing and editing , but still leave the organizing of the photos to me.

So when I tried out Picasa2 yesterday, I was very pleased. Not only Picasa2 has all the necessary, basic features: cropping, sharpening, tunning and filtering, it has the extra collage
feature which proves to be extremely useful for many topics of my travel blogs. Last but not least, Picasa2 acts as photo library and explorer (think Windows Explorer), automatically searching for and collecting images on the computer.

Picasa2 and Flickr combo brings the best of both world: an easy-to-used and feature packed offline photo management tool plus a kick-ass online photo sharing website.

Up until now, Flickr was simply a photo-sharing site where I showed off my pictures until out of the blue, Pricelss.com contacted me and asked to use some of my photos taken in France.

Wow! Was that for real? For a while, I’d been searching for photo competition and submitted my pictures to a few sites and did not get any response from them. Then now, without any effort searching for buyers, I earn from those photos enough money to pay for my Flickr hosting around 20 years.

Many of my friends have better cameras and accessories than I do, cost up to thousands of dollars. They also have far more technical skills and knowledge. However, in this information era, skills and talent though important but do not matter as much as the ability to marketing oneself. My photos on Flickr have far more chance to be noticed by interested parties than my friends’ photos which sitting on their computers.

Not only Flickr is an exceptionally cool photo-sharing website, it is an increasingly popular internet marketing tool which you should definitely try out.

["Success Intelligence" by Robert Holden]

Google’s newest 1 billion-plus acquisition has been splattered all over the news. On many blogs I regularly read, I saw variations of “Google Bought Doubleclick.” The speculation, analysis and sizzling discussions reminded me of Google’s buying Youtube not so long ago. I did not care about this news becase at the time, it wasn’t relevant to me. Then I recevied a newsletter from Performics, an affiliate network I have recently promoted, spreading the same news and disclosing that it was owned by Double Click. (No matter what you do, there is Google. ;-D)

MSN, like Yahoo!, is desperately trying to compete as if they can even catch up with Goole when it comes to online advertising. I occationally read news from MSN site and sometimes peek down to the bottom of the screen to behold their ads. These financial-oriented ads are nowhere irrelevant. The much-anticipated MSN’ Contextual Ad Program has not yet opened to public.

So what was MSN’s next step? Well, it brought an … antitrust case against Google. Ummm, do you see the irony of this action or want me to spell out to you?

For the moment Microsoft is being a sore loser. Along with AT&T, it was quick to cry antitrust wolf upon hearing that Google had won the bidding for DoubleClick-sweet irony, given that Microsoft and AT&T have both fallen foul of antitrust regulators in the past for abusing their monopolies. “Advertisers don’t want a Wal-Mart-isation of digital advertising,” where one firm (like Wal-Mart in retailing) becomes so big that it can dictate prices, says Tom Chavez, the boss of Rapt, a firm that analyses online-advertising data on behalf of publishers and advertisers.

You might think that if other software and hardware companies could plays (they did) the same antitrust card against Microsoft and won handsomely, why can’t the former defendant do the same thing now?

Of course, they can. However:

That said, Mr Chavez adds, Google is still far from becoming a Wal-Mart-and even Wal-Mart is not facing an antitrust investigation. Unlike AT&T and Microsoft, both of which exerted a strong technological “lock in” over their customers, Google operates in a more open market that is easier for competitors to contest. Regulators will scrutinise the Google-DoubleClick deal, as they should. But Google is not a monopolist-just a company that is, for the moment at least, ahead of its peers.

I am not sure about the non-monopolist statement, but a deserving winner, definitely.

[The Economist, Apr. 21 Edition]

Segolene Royal lost her bid to come the first female president in the France Republic after being defeated in both rounds by Nicolas Sarkovsky. For a brief while, I toyed with the images of two powerful countries in Europe led by women, Angela Merkel of Germany and Royal of France and Hilary Clinton emerges soon after from the US.

Oh well, it would have been fun.

It seems that the yellow notepad continues to haunt you even long after you depart miles away from school. I hated taking notes because I just could not take good notes. My typical note would start out neatly with pretty hand-writing all lined up, then quickly deteriorated to worm-like creatures crawling either downhill or uphill.

I could barely read my notes later and, at the time, too disorganized to file them. However, if I can overcome gazillion nuisances in life, I should at least try to tame this ugly note-taking habit. So should you.

There are two ways to take notes, and master only one of them will not only simplify your yellow pad but also your life–the part of life which depends heavily on these silly notes.

1. Jot down everything - You attempt to write down every thing as if you will pay dearly if you don’t. For you, note-taking is a matching game, word-for-word, between the apathetic speaker’s tongue and your lifeless notepad.
2. Outline key points - Because you want to save trees, you write as little as you can. Moreover, you’re not head-over-heel in love with the speaker’s words so you only scribble just keywords, important phrase and brief summaries.

Pros and cons

1. Jot down everything
   • Pros: You have all information given by the speaker; whether you recognize your hand-writing or understand these information later is another matter. Where and when do you need to master this note-taking method? I can’t think of any except for one situation: to succeed with your study in most Asian academies where precise memorization is essentials.
   • Cons: You cannot possibly write down all information. You will get lost in this jungle comprised of your thought process and the speaker’s verbal “abuse.”
2. Outline key points
   • Pros: This method is preferred over the other as it allows you to digest the speaker’s message, enabling greater comprehension.
   • Cons: Since you do not always fully understand the big picture of the issue, you might not be able to accurately evaluate the message and correctly include all necessary information.

So next time you sit in a class room, seminar or a conference, you’ll get far more just by simplifying your notes.

Have you noticed that you don’t receive process and react to all messages passed on to you the same way? Many messages basically enter one ear and go out the other while some demand your utmost attention and critical ability. Improve the skill to identify the difference of these message can benefit your both personally and professionally.

There are 4 different types of messages.

1. Casual - This type of message requires the least amount of effort from your part. Examples of casual message can be from an every-day greeting, chit chat, and small talk to random conversation you pick up from the environment.
2. Sympathetic - In this situation, the speaker simply looks for a supporting shoulder to express his feeling and vent his problem. He might not expect you to offer any opinion, so don’t be overtly critical or better yet, be a passive listener.
3. Advice seeking - While the first two require very little effort from you as a listener, the third form of communication requires you to be more active while listening. You should evaluate the message thoroughly, consider options and look at many sides of the points in order to give the speaker a sound advice.
4. Comprehensive - Depend on the importance of the issue, “comprehensive” message demands your full attention and critical skills to receive, comprehend, evaluate and process the information.

I have 3 Joost invitations to give away to the first 3 bloggers who contact me. Joost is the newest technology which lets you customize and watch TV from your computer.

I downloaded it today, played around with it and couldn’t stop thinking, “Wow, these people are impressive.” The interface is dashing and easy to use. The picture’s quality is excellent.

By the way, Joost is the brainchild of the same people who created Skype.

For over a month, I was baffled seeing my PageRank disappeared on and off, and didn’t know why. For example, just hours ago, I clearly saw the pagerank of 4, and then later 0. This happened over the course of a month until I discovered that the pagerank of 4 showed only with the full address: www.beyondsarajevo.com. Removing “www” reduces the pagerank to 0.

Will this affect your site? According to Dailyblogtips, it does pose a problem: “Having two different versions might damage you in popular lists and social bookmarking sites as well.”

DBT offers very simple yet detailed explanation on the www or no www issue in addition to provide an easy step-by-step instruction on how to do it.

I followed one of the approaches to enforce only one www. version of my site; everything worked great.

Remember that after the change, previous URLs without www. will be invalid. So if you submitted your blog entries, you have to edit the URLs.

That was what I discovered at Associate Content. After spending months reading and implementing SEO (Search Engine Optimization), I finally took up a common advice to write more articles and submit them to Ezines and article directories, creating link back and exposure to my sites.

My first Associate Content’s article is an existing blog entry from my other site which I modified and added more content to meet the 400-word minimum. Then a week later, I received an email from AC offering me money for this make-shift article out of the blue.

WOW! The pay was very little, but it was reasonable given the article barely hit the minimum-word requirement, and I had just started out with AC, with no feed backs and page views for my section.

This revenue source will definitely stay high my list. I see many advantages of writing articles for Associate Content:

1. Time - I don’t have to write anything new. All I need is to modify my blog entries to meet the requirement and submit them as articles.
2. Flexibility - I can write about any topics I like. This last point makes it much more attractive than writing paid reviews.

Check out Associate Content now!