This week we’re featuring Bethany’s (our Threadless Contest winner) roundup, the influence of Michael Arrington, Omeo blog reader, website snapshot tools, Getting Real, Reddit Acquired, online radio Last.Fm, and more.
Threadless.com - a Threadless interview was featured on Juxtaviews a few weeks back, I believe. It’s an online store that features a tee shirt design competition and picks the top designs to be printed and sold on the site. In addition to its awesome shirts, Threadless has a thriving community in the forums, home to contests for free shirts and general craziness.
Urbandead.com - Zombies! Halloween may be past, but urbandead is a web-based RPG set in a quarantined city home to a zombie outbreak. Players can create characters that are zombies or humans that have escaped a zombie fate (for now).
Woxy.com - WOXY is a radio station turned internet broadcast. Visitors to the site can tune in for free to listen to alternative rock with no commercials, and is a haven for music lovers turned off to the mainstream.
Fictionpress.com - a branch-off of popular fanfiction mega-site fanfiction.net, fictionpress features original poetry and prose by nearly a million users. FP’s free registration means anyone can join, and as a result there is a lot of bad teenage poetry. But once immersed in FP culture, one can find amazing unprinted writers - and rumor has it that publishing companies sometimes use the site to find undiscovered talent.
Greatestjournal.com - The overlooked cousin to LiveJournal, GJ has over a million users and gives bloggers ad-free space, free photo hosting, and all of the flexibility of LiveJournal.
Last.fm - Track your and your friends music listening habits. Makes it easy to also share your music history on your blog or your myspace. If you love music, you will love this site.
Ex-Surfer Is Newest Silicon Valley Power Broker - WSJ article about the influence TechCrunch and Michael Arrington has had on silicion valley and today’s web start ups.
Compete - SnapShot - Get’s traffic data from it’s toolbar and also ISPs, could it be better then Alexa.
Reddit Acquired - The good people over at Reddit were acquired by Wired this past week. Reddit was our first feature interview and they gave an unknown website a good amount of their time answering questions for us. We will always appreciate that and we wish them the best on their new venture. One of the co-founders, Aaron Swartz, had some pretty interesting stuff to say about the acquisition in his blog. You can also listen to a TalkCrunch interview with the founders of Reddit shortly after their acquisition was made public.
Omeo Reader - what I use to manage all my RSS feeds I read. I wouldn’t/couldn’t do it any other way. And its free!
Video Jug - My wife found this one. “Life explained on film.” is their tag line. Basically tutorials via video. Instead of reading that recipe or reading that auto article, watch the person make that dinner or change that flux capacitor - what, you don’t have a flux capacitor in your car?.
Getting Real - the peeps over at 37Signal published their book “Getting Real” online version for free. Interesting read.
Thumboo and WebSnapr - Two useful tools for capturing screenshots of any website. First there’s Thumboo which was created by Michael Schwarz, who is the same man behind the awesome lightweight/powerful Ajax Framework Ajax.Net. Michael gives you the source code and database schema so you can run your own version. Then there’s also WebSnapr, which was Michael’s inspiration. Both are rad.
Outsourcing Health Care - Pack your bags hun, we’re going to India to fix this bad hip of mine. Seriously, we need to get our health care back on track over here in the USA, before it becomes every man/women/child for him or herself.
Test Driven .Net - If you’re into Test Driven Development, and you write unit uests for your .Net code, then you MUST have this amazing Visual Studio .Net Add-In. And yes,m there’s a free version.
Zamzar - Free file conversion. This site is a dream. Ever want to convert a PDF into HTML, Word doc to PDF, but you don’t have the software, and don’t want to buy it? This is the answer. I tried it out, and it works… at least going from PDF to Word!
Carbon Copy Cloner - Ever wonder how to clone/ghost a Mac? Here’s your answer. Simply boot up a blank Mac in Firewire Target Disk Mode and run Carbon Copy Cloner.
HackTV - This article shows us how to capture TV or transfer old VHS tapes to a Mac for free. Read this before purchasing a PVR TV tuner card!
OpenDoc vs. OpenXML - Let’s shed some light on the standards wars. This is an interesting comparison of XML source for OpenDocument, the Open Office standard, and OpenXML, Microsoft’s standard! After seeing this, I don’t envy folks who will have to migrate content from OpenXML to some other format.
Gmail Mobile - Google has relaunched its mobile Gmail application. The search giant claims the new application will be up to five times faster to access and use, thanks to automatic pre-fetching of messages. The company also claims the application’s use requires fewer clicks, scrolling, and keystrokes.
Dreamweaver Tools For Google - Enhance your websites with Google apps without ever touching the code. Dreamweaver Tools for Google lets you easily add functionality to your site such Google Search, Google Maps and Google Checkout. And did I mention, it’s free.
Adobe Acrobat 8 - Your favorite PDF product line has now reached lucky version 8. The new Acrobat 8 product line features Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 8 Standard, Acrobat 8 Elements, Acrobat 3D Version 8, Acrobat Connect, and Acrobat Connect Professional. Acrobat Connect is built on Flash technology and allows for “always-on” personal meeting rooms.Meeting rooms allow two people to share a screen, chat, see each other’s whiteboards and make and share notes.
iPod News - The new second generation iPod shuffle is now available in retail stores. Apple has also just announced that an 8GB iPod nano will now be available in the (Product) Red line. Apple will give $10 of the purchase price of each “Red” iPod Nano to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa. iTunes version 7.02 is now available for download from the Apple site.
Marvel Comic Book Creator- This software program enables users to make their own comic books with almost any digital image, including personal photos, Internet images and screenshots from video games and DVD movies.