Webware

If you're a frequent Amazon shopper, you might be looking out for tools to help enhance the experience of buying products on the site. There are services on the Web to help you get more out of Amazon than simply picking up a few products from the company's pages.

Let's take a look.

Get your Amazon on

AmaDig If you're looking for a different way to search Amazon, AmaDig will provide it.

When you get to the site, you can pick which Amazon category you want to sift through. From there, the site lists images of different products offered in that category. When you click on a respective product, you can view its specs, pricing, and reviews. You can also view the listing on Amazon or add it to your shopping cart from the site. It's a neat tool, but beware that the interface is a little clunky.

AmaDig has a unique way of displaying items.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Amazon Mobile If you're ready to buy a product at the store, you might want to consider using the Amazon app on your iPhone before you plunk down the cash.

Amazon Mobile not only lets you search for products and pricing, you can also take a picture of a product and have the app search Amazon's database to get its pricing. You can add items to your cart and use Amazon's 1-click payment system to place an order. (Read our full review here).

Amazon Mobile in action.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

If you have a picture of yourself, why not put it to good use? With the help of some online resources, you can do all kinds of neat things to it. You can even put it on greeting cards, avatars for your Twitter profile, and more.

If you're planning to put your picture to use, do it with these sites.

Say cheese

BeFunky BeFunky is a neat way to create pictures that you typically don't find on the Web.

When you first make your way to the free site, you'll be able to choose the kind of effect it will apply to your picture. I was really impressed by the number of options it offered. Everything from stenciling to creating an Andy Warhol-like picture was included in the options.

BeFunky gives you the option to upload a picture from your computer or take a snapshot from your Webcam. When you're satisfied with the design, you can add artwork behind your image, include some text, and more. My picture took just a few seconds to create. And thanks to some nice share options, syndicating it to sites like Facebook and MySpace was quick and easy. Not bad for a free service.

BeFunky lets you do interesting things to pictures.

(Credit: Screenshot by Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

FACEinHOLE If you're the kind of person who goes to an area fair and sticks your head in a picture hole, you'll love FACEinHOLE.

To use FACEinHOLE, you'll need to register for the site. From there, you can pick a "scenario" that ranges from Halloween costumes to movies and television. You can also create your own scenario to put your portrait into.

In essence, FACEinHOLE shows you a picture and lets you modify it to get it to fit perfectly in the face hole. I tried it out on several images. For the most part, the uploading process was quick and easy. But as I started editing the image, I found it difficult to accurately place my face in the hole. It took away from the service. That said, I did like that FACEinHOLE allows you to share your image across the Web. You can even put it on a shirt. It'll run you $19.99 to do that.

FACEinHOLE makes it difficult to place your photo in the right spot.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

After Amazon experienced some difficulties last week with its selling options in the Amazon Marketplace, it made me wonder if anyone decided to start selling some of their merchandise on eBay. If so, they would join thousands of others who are using the online auction site to make a few extra bucks. If that's your goal, check out some of these services for eBay sellers.

eBay tools

Auctiva Auctiva is a full-featured product that allows you to use a variety of templates and modules to help you sell products more effectively on eBay.

Auctiva is quite powerful. You can create side-scrolling galleries with pictures you upload to the site (you're allowed 1GB of storage), change the color of your listing page, and issue invoices. It won't help you determine if you're selling products that eBay users want, but it will help you easily manage your auctions. Admittedly, Auctiva is for active sellers, but at $9.95 per month for so many nice features, it's an affordable offering.

Auctiva helps you add inventory and track it on the site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

eBay Market Researcher Terapeek's eBay Market Researcher tool is a fine way to determine how to get the most out of your listing.

After you sign up for the site and choose a membership (it costs $24.95 per month or $197.95 per year), you can immediately start searching through the app's listings of eBay products. When you find the product you're looking to sell, it provides you with information on the item's average bid, how much the average listing makes, and how page design affected profits. The app even provides you with information on which day is best to list the product and end your auction. It's a powerful tool.

eBay Market Researcher provides you with a variety of research tools.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Web developers should appreciate two of Adobe's latest open-source initiatives announced Tuesday, both designed to help media companies and other publishers build richer Flash applications.

The first project, Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), lets designers create more sophisticated media players to run Adobe Flash presentations. The second, Text Layout Framework (TLF), helps developers add more advanced typography and font layouts to their Flash apps.

Both OSMF and TLF are available for free as open-source applications.

OSMF is the open source piece of the Adobe project formerly known by the codename Strobe, a framework for Flash media players. Using OSMF, developers can create Flash players with not only advanced playback and navigation controls but also plug-ins for advertising and tracking, a key benefit for media companies. OSMF can work with any kind of Flash content, including video, audio, and images.

Developers can learn more about OSMF and download the source code and components at the OSMF Web site.

TLF lets developers add sleeker and higher-quality typographic layouts and effects to Flash presentations. In conjunction with the new text engine in Flash Player 10, TLF offers support for vertical and bidirectional text, flowing text around images and across columns, and multiple languages.

More information and a demo of TLF can be found at the Adobe Labs TLF site.

These latest two initiatives are part of Adobe's strategy to provide more robust programming tools for Flash. For the first time, Adobe is facing potential competition for Flash from other Web technologies, notably Microsoft's Silverlight.

If you're podcasting, you're probably looking for ways to make it both more entertaining and easier to produce.

That's where the Web-based apps and tools come in.

Producing your podcast

Archive.org's NetLabels collection of freely available MP3 and OGG files is fantastic. The site allows you to choose from thousands of songs, which you can download and add to your podcast. Those tracks can be your intro, outro, or bumpers for the middle of your show. It's a great way to add value to your podcast.

Archive.org has some great tracks for your podcast.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Enablr provides a really great service. Instead of making your podcasts available on just a few audio sites, Enablr makes your shows indexable and searchable by transcribing your shows to text.

For $1 per minute, the site will take your audio podcast and convert it to text, thus making all its content available to Google, Bing, and other search engines. The site gives you the transcript in three business days. Enablr claims it will increase the popularity of the show. I haven't tried it, so I can't comment. But I do think it could help some shows that discuss hot topics. It might be worth trying out once to see if it works.

Enablr will make your show indexable on Google.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Gcast isn't the easiest tool to use in this roundup, but it's still worth using if you're trying to find an online podcast-creation tool.

Once you sign up for Gcast, you'll be brought to a page asking you how you'd like to produce your first show. You can opt to record via telephone or upload tracks from your computer. If you choose the former, you'll be forced to pay $99 per year for access to the service. Gcast also lets you create multiple podcast channels if you want to produce more than one show. All of those shows will then be added to popular podcast directories.

Gcast will allow you to upload tracks from your computer.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Hipcast will help you record just about anything on the Web. When you sign up for the site, you'll have the option of calling Hipcast's telephone number and recording up to 60 minutes of audio. You can also record your show from your browser. If you're still tied to the desktop, the site will even let you upload your podcast.

But Hipcast doesn't stop there. You can have a blog specific to your show, save up to 5GB of material, and make your podcast available on iTunes and other directories. But there's a catch: you'll need to pay to do it. Hipcast charges $9.95 per month for its basic service. Its top offering will run you $49.95 per month. It offers a free seven-day trial before you buy.

Hipcast gives you three options to record audio.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Magnatune is a record label that encourages fans to use their artist's favorite song in their podcasts.

Once you go to the Magnatune Web page, you can search through the service to find the right kind of music for your show. Once you find what you're looking for, you can download it, free-of-charge, as long as it's being used in a noncommercial podcast. Those who accept advertising need to pay Magnatune a small fee. Regardless, it's a great service. And believe it or not, some of the tracks are pretty good.

Magnatune's selection might not be big, but it's worth checking out.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Mevio is a great place to go if you want to have your podcast exposed to more listeners. After you sign up for the site, you can either browse the site's huge listing of shows or you can add your own. Once you upload your podcast, Mevio will keep your episodes in the database. Users can search for it by the content of your show. It's a great way to get your content out to more people. You might not add a large number of new listeners, but then again, you just might. Mevio's mileage will vary.

Mevio is a good way to promote your show.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Podcast.com is a huge database of audio and video podcasts. Everything from basketball to music to tech is included in its database. And it's a great place to add your podcast. Doing so takes just seconds. From there, you can share it with friends, check out similar podcasts, or just move along to the next podcast directory. In any case, it's a great place to promote your show.

Submitting a podcast to Podcast.com takes just seconds.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

PodOmatic reminds me of a cross between Twitter, Facebook, and a podcast-recording platform. But it's that combination of different ideas that makes it so compelling.

After you sign up for PodOmatic, the site will ask you to pick a design for your podcast page. From there, you can start recording your shows. You'll have the option of uploading your show from your computer, selecting a file from your PodOmatic Media Library, or simply recording the show online with the help of your Webcam and microphone. Once you're done recording the podcast, you can fix it up and post it to your feed for your subscribers to listen. PodOmatic provides you with 15GB of bandwidth each month and 500MB of storage. Smaller podcasts won't have much trouble meeting those demands, but if you have a large following, PodOmatic might not be for you.

PodOmatic lets you record right in your browser.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

My top 3

1. PodOmatic: PodOmatic has a premise that makes it quite attractive.

2. Magnatune: A record label that makes tracks available for free? Awesome.

3. Archive.org's NetLabels: With so many songs, it's a great way to add some flavor to your podcast.

(Credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla Labs has set up the Open Web Tools Directory, a bid to build a comprehensive list of the open-source developer tools available.

The open-source browser project issued a call this week to the programmer community to help with the construction of the new central database.

"As we've explored different tools we could create here as part of the Developer Tools Lab, we've come to the opinion that in addition to creating new tools, one of the best things we could do is help developers understand the broad universe of tools that already exist and expose some of the fantastic and amazing work that's being done," Ben Galbraith, a member of Mozilla Labs Developer Tools team, said in a blog post.

This new repository comes in response to what Mozilla says is a lack of any centralized and navigable list of open-source tools. The Open Web Tools Directory site features a search box with Design, Code, Debug, Test, Deploy and Docs filters to help direct programmers to the applications most suited to their needs.

"It turns out that keeping up with all the development in this space is really difficult--even for folks like us who have been tracking it every day for years," Galbraith said. "We're looking forward to evolving the directory and working with the Web community to make it a vibrant resource for discovering and tracking the Web's amazing tools universe."

The index is laid out in what Galbraith describes as a "space" theme, with scattered thumbnails rather than a listing. Developers interested in reviewing that index of tools will need a browser with Canvas (the part of HTML5 that allows dynamic rendering of bitmap images) to view the content, such as Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, or Opera 9. However, Mozilla has also provided a more accessible version of the directory with screen reader support and for browsers without Canvas support.

Developers interested in helping to expand the Open Web Tools Directory can use the site's data entry form to submit tool suggestions. Mozilla Labs is looking to the community to "fill up the directory with the hundreds or thousands of items" that they themselves have missed, Galbraith said.

Mozilla will review all submissions before they are added to the live site. The organization is also exploring longer-term concepts for augmenting the database, such as social participation features to enable tools to be ranked and commented on by community members.

Adrian Bridgwater of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Lifestream Backup is a new service that backs up your data from a handful of popular online services including Flickr, Twitter, BaseCamp, Google Docs, and WordPress. You just provide it with your log-in credentials (or give it permission through authentication), and it quietly makes a daily or weekly backup of all your data from each site. It can then be viewed and downloaded if one of those places suffers an outage or data loss.

For $30 a year you get 20GB of storage, which is shared across all of the different services and hosted on Amazon's S3. If you have your own S3 account it's only $15 for the whole year, and it does not impose any storage limits since you're paying for that separately through Amazon. (Note: The prices are slightly lower than these for the next 10 days as part of the site's launch.)

You pick which services you want to hook it up to, and it will back them up automatically.

(Credit: CNET)

To give it a good test drive I tried it on my Flickr and Twitter accounts, as well as my Delicious bookmarks and Google documents. It took a little under a day to pull everything in, although the length of time it takes depends both on when it begins its backup, and how much you have on each service. The only exception was Delicious, which was never imported despite me providing the correct credentials.

For Twitter it saved all of my past tweets in an XML file which could not be viewed in Firefox, IE, or Chrome. Instead I had to open it up in Windows Notepad and parse through coding wrappers to get to each tweet. They were all there though, going all the way back to 2007. Not a bad start, but the presentation left something to be desired; a spreadsheet would have been nicer.

As for Google Docs, what's nice is that it can grab documents from multiple Google accounts. I had it hooked up to two of mine. It pulled them in just fine, although it did not mark which account was which. It also does not tell you what type of document each saved item is. If they're text files this isn't a problem since they display right in your browser. If they're spreadsheets or presentations though, you have to save them to your hard drive and open them in something like Excel.

Of all of the services I tested, Flickr took the longest, and with good reason--photos are big. I've got more than 3,200 photos stored on Flickr. For size reasons, it does not download the full-quality version of each photo, which admittedly would fill up your 20GB quite quickly (my 12 megapixel shots run around 3MB to 4MB a pop). Nonetheless, I found this to be a major shortcoming, especially for pixel-peeping snobs like me who like to zoom into the details of large photos. It also did not keep any of the categorization I had worked so hard on back over on Flickr. Sets, tags, descriptions--none of that gets backed up.

Lifestream Backup's archive pages are not much to look at, but they do save your data, and let you download it in case one of those sites is down.

(Credit: CNET)

I'd also like to see it do a better job at presenting the files. For instance, it shows when the files were backed up, but does not let you see when they were originally created. You also cannot download your files in bulk. Instead it must be done one at a time. For retrieving single files this obviously isn't a problem, but if you're trying to re-archive an entire gallery of photos, or folder full of documents it can be time-consuming.

Faults aside, I think Lifestream Backup is really on to something, and has big potential. Many of the services it backs up have very comprehensive backup systems of their own. That doesn't mean diddly when they go down though. If you're using any of them for business and want a surefire way to access your content, Lifestream Backup provides that. The one weak point there is if the source service is also using Amazon S3, which is what powers Lifestream Backup, then you really are out of luck until S3 comes back online.

We've covered several utilities that have found fun and creative ways to analyze Twitter messages, but TweetPsych takes the cake. This one looks at your past 1,000 Twitter posts and gives you a "psychological" profile, including how much you talk about yourself, work, money, and "negative emotions."

In other words, it's a great way to reinforce the fact that you're probably using Twitter for self-promotion, and/or as a way to kvetch. At least that was its analysis of my tweets.

In an introductory blog post about the tool, creator Dan Zarrella says the it works by cross-referencing the words and phrases you use in your tweets to two different dictionaries that are sorted into various psychological profiles. It then scores you in each category based on the results of other TweetPsych users. This makes it less about psychology and more about your personal lexicon, but the results are still quite fun.

The service works with any Twitter account, meaning you can use it on anyone else you know. As mentioned earlier, it only pulls from the last 1,000 or so tweets you've made, so the results will not be nearly as detailed if you're a new Twitter user.

TweetPsych analyzes your old Twitter messages to figure out what's going on inside that head of yours.

(Credit: CNET)

If you take one search tool and combine it with another, does it make a better product? In the case of Search Cloudlet and Surf Canyon's new creation, the answer is yes.

On Tuesday the two companies put out a new custom search engine (cloudlet.surfcanyon.com) that uses both technologies, and allows users to do enhanced searches without having to download additional browser extensions. Previously both products required the use of add-ons to augment Google's search results.

The benefits of using this tool over Google alone are numerous. For one, you're still getting Google's standard results. You also get Search Cloudlet's sorting technology, which lets you filter results by domain or keyword from its word cloud. You also get Surf Canyon's related results feature, which can recommend results from pages that appear deeper in a search. In my quick go, this was pulling up results from as deep as 25 pages (or 250 results from the top result) into a search.

Search Cloudlet and Surf Canyon's combined engine tweaks Google results with both tools. All without the install of browser plug-ins.

(Credit: CNET)