I was reading in the new issue of PC Magazine about a new, free toolbar / bookmarking utility that helps you manage and keep track of your bookmarks in an interesting way called amplify

Intrigued, I visited the site, downloaded the toolbar and tried it out by organizing some news, pictures, video and my most recent blog entry on Mount. St. Helens (see screenshot below).

They call these files amped files and you can see mine by clicking on the screenshot above or clicking here. You can categorize your amped files and then share via email, IM, or link. To put this together — my very first Amp –it took me about 10 minutes. To add a picture you just click the Amp button and then move the mouse pointer over the image you want, left click on the mouse and choose which amped frame you want to load the image into. You can resize and organize the frames. You can highlight text on a webpage and then right click and choose “Add to Amp” to work on creating your virtual bookmark pizza. That’s my verbiage, not theirs. Here is their official explanation from within their logged in user area of what Amplify is all about:

Amplify’s solution bridges the gap between what people search for on the Web and how they manage what they find by enabling them to create multi-source bookmarks called Amps. Unlike standard single-source bookmarks, Amps allow Web users to pull together multiple pieces of content - including text, images, audio, video and animation - from different web sites they visit into a single page. These pages can then be saved on our servers for subsequent access from any computer and shared with anyone as a single link. And, because all content within an Amp includes one-click navigation back to its online source, users are never more than a click away from the different Web pages they have visited.

You can even post — it is moderated — your Amps with the amplify community, which is pretty cool and could be an additional source of web traffic. Overall, the interface is easy to learn how to use, the supporting website is laid out nicely and it makes bookmarking sites fun and interactive. Grade: A

Here’s the email that went out regarding news at Furl yesterday:

Dear Furl Members,

Tomorrow we will be making an official announcement that Furl has been acquired. However, we wanted you to be the first to hear the news. We are joining LookSmart, a provider of Web search and research-quality articles search, in addition to other high-quality search products.

This is exciting news for several reasons. First, because LookSmart acquired Furl for the same reasons you probably use it - it is a great service that works well - and LookSmart has no intention of changing the things that make it great. On the contrary, LookSmart is committed to making existing features even more powerful.

To show how serious that commitment is, we are officially allocating 5 gigabytes (GB) of storage for each individual member’s public archive, enough space to store tens of thousands of archived items.

We are also now working on many new features, some of which you may have requested. These include a groups feature, and the ability to search across all public archives.

You might be wondering whether Furl will continue to be a free service, and the answer is: “Yes!” Furl will create revenue through the display of relevant, contextual advertising on search and content pages. This revenue source enables us to continue offering Furl free of charge. It also allows us to keep investing in the service. As Furl gets better and better, it attracts more members. They in turn attract new advertisers, creating a cycle of growth that benefits our members as well as our business.

Some other questions you might have:

* Is my current archive safe? Will I lose any data?
Your archive will not be affected. You should not lose any data in the change, but of course you can always use Furl’s export tools to back your data up if you like to take extra precautions.

* Will I have to install a new toolbar?
No, your current Furl toolbar will continue to function as usual.

* Why did Furl “sell out”?
First of all, we don’t really think of this as “selling out.” We are now employees of LookSmart and are still working on Furl every day (we just have a lot more help). The primary reason we sold the company was that we have always believed Furl makes the most sense as part of a larger search offering. We negotiated with several large public search companies and ultimately chose LookSmart. We truly believe this acquisition is in the best interest of our members and of the long-term longevity of the service. We use Furl, too, and want it to continue to grow for many years to come.
To sum it up, Furl is great the way it is. LookSmart is dedicated to making it even better. Furl meets a need that is not otherwise being filled on the Web, and the more people who use it, the more useful it is for everybody. We hope to reach even more members through LookSmart’s other Web properties, so they, too, can start Furling.

To sum it up, Furl is great the way it is. LookSmart is dedicated to making it even better. Furl meets a need that is not otherwise being filled on the Web, and the more people who use it, the more useful it is for everybody. We hope to reach even more members through LookSmart’s other Web properties, so they, too, can start Furling.

– Mike Giles
Founder & CEO, Furl

The Spread Firefox campaign is working well. Their goal to reach 1 million downloads in 10 days has been eclipsed.

After four days, the download counter now shows 1,006,060 downloads, surpassing the 10^6 mark more than twice as fast as they desired! Congratulations!”

Congrats is right, WTG! Whatever browser you are currently using, you should at least give Firefox a chance. It’s free and has plenty of goodies. It is, after all, the browser you can trust. This download excitement reminds me of the early days of Skype (which as of this writing is reporting 23,430,637 downloads) and my early prediction that it “would be huge” — I’m ready to make the same prediction about Firefox. Hey, I even have a new Firefox blog!

Recently, I’ve started using Firefox more regularly to about a 60/40 split with Firefox more than Internet Explorer. Apparently I’m not the only one moving this direction. Saw this over at Leoville:

Slashdot notes that Firefox is gaining on Internet Exploder. According to the latest Engadget log files, only 57% of their users are using IE. MSIE has a 60% share on Leoville so far this month. Mozilla 25%. Safari 7%. I’m using Omniweb on the Mac these days and I’m loviin’ it.

Stats at this blog indicate about 22% are using the Mozilla engine (labelled as Netscape 5x), so the stats here are similar to what other sites are experiencing.

What do I like about Firefox? The tabs are sweet, less crashing, less malicious attacks (at least until/if it becomes #1, and then I expect this to change), plus there are some nifty plugins (called extensions) like Chatzilla, a simple browser-based IRC client.

I even changed my default browser on my main work system, which is not a good statement for my individual support for IE. Someday again will it be like when IE was #2 to Netscape? Who here remembers those days?

In what begins a seemingly neverending war between spyware and anti-spyware coders, Yahoo is entering the fight against the dark side by embedding some anti-spyware code into their Yahoo! companion toolbar.

The launch of the Anti-Spy beta solution is one of many steps that Yahoo! is taking to foster consumer dialogue about the complex issue of spyware. Spyware, hijackers and similar downloaded software, are applications that perform potentially unwanted functions, possibly without the users’ consent, such as displaying advertising, redirecting search results, changing the user’s homepage or monitor surfing habits.

Sure you wanted to know how to make your own bar codes! Free online bar code and UPC code generator and some software you can buy to make offline at barcodesinc.

Scirus is: the most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet: http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/toolbar/

MSN has joined the toolbar arena with their MSN (beta) toolbar:



Problem with this toolbar is there isn’t anything special about it. It has a popup blocker, search for MSN, integration with Hotmail and Messenger. Yawn. Hopefully by the time this one leaves beta it will have at least one feature. This one probably isn’t worth downloading unless MSN is your favorite search engine.

Been noticing many Google search requests here for my irider review, so I thought I’d update you on how that browser is doing for me. Yesterday, I registered irider and I’ve encouraged my webmaster friend Kaiser to register it as well. Noticed that theludwigs also gives irider thumbs up. If you haven’t downloaded the irider browser and given it a 21 day trial, I suggest doing so now. It isn’t feature crippled in any way during this 21 day trial, so you can see if it is something that truly can/will make you more productive.

I have been using irider to compliment Internet Explorer instead of replace it, actually. Since irider takes your favorites from IE if you add something to your IE favorites, it will be added to irider automatically, and vice versa. I’ve setup two books, as irider calls them, which launch my regularly visited sites for me. When I’m done check them out I click the handy “close all” button and then I can start the process anew hours later. It sure beats having a zillion windows at the bottom menu of Windows. Also, even with many windows resources seem to be pretty well optimized in my tests.

So what has changed from version 2.06 to 2.07: This maintenance release fixes various minor problems. so certainly if you are registered user you will want to go and download it ASAP.

I mentioned the irider  browser on the Script School Radio show yesterday. Of all the new and different browsers I’ve looked at, this one caught my attention enough to download it.

Here’s 6 things I’ve found useful (so far) about this browser:

1. You can one-click through books, as irider calls them, and a list of sites you frequently visit will open in a convenient, adjustable pane on the left hand side of the screen with thumbnails of the website.
2. You can search multiple websites easily through the special irider search menu.
3. The ability to pin and unpin certain sites in the thumbnail preview menu along the left hand pane and conveniently close them. You can click one button and close all the unpinned sites, therefore making it easy to keep important sites in front of you.
4. How you can read one site and if you find a link you are interested in then you can right click it and it will load in the background so that when you are done reading the article or page you can click to the link you clicked and it is immediately available.
5. The ability to open many links on a page in new thumbnailed windows at one time.
6. Zoom in and out on any web page by holding down the CTRL + or CTRL -. Useful for guys like me with not so good eyesight and those pages with small text and graphics.

You can download and try it out for free (30 days) and in fact I encourage folks reading this to do just that and use it in tandem with your favorite browser. It ain’t perfect of course, there are features that you will miss in your current browser, but it is useful as sort of a complimentary working browser. There’s no spyware or ads in the version I downloaded, nor is the download version crippled in any way feature-wise. The price is $29.95 as of this writing (2.06).

Will iRider take off? Hmm …

Update 7/11/03: Related review by Kingsley