Unknown videos

Just found this in Orkut, it is showing double the number of your actual favorite videos.

Audio "captchas"

Audio captchas when visual images are unusable via Official Google Blog

"Wikipedia defines 'captcha' as an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" -- a word which is trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. Most web users think of captchas as those hard to read distorted letters or images that one often is confronted by when websites attempt to verify that they're indeed talking to a live human. Google Accounts support captchas. Of course, bloggers (no matter which platform they use) can also use them to prevent comment spam."

Google Reader

Yesterday was "yet another day" of revelation for me. I finally decided fiddling with google reader and obviously the experience was "wow". This is the first aggregator I am using, but again I dont think I would look around for anything more...

IMO the most impressive feature was sharing of articles/news items of your interest. It creates a web page for all the shared items and also provides a feed, so that others with similar interests can subscribe to your discoveries. These shared items can be categorized based on "tags" and each category will be published at a different "url".

I have my shared articles here.

Orkut - Not meant for kids

An excerpt of orkut terms is included:

eligibility and registration
You must be 18 years or older to use the orkut.com service. By registering for the orkut.com service, you represent and warrant that you are 18 or older and that you have the capacity to understand, agree to and comply with these Terms of Service.

So, all those who are not 18+ may have to look into some other site for socializing.

source: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-11-10.html#n44

Customizable Google

Yesterday I have been googling whole day for Web 2.0 sites and the sites tracking 
the activities in these "2.0" portals. Having joined late into the foray, i discovered
a lot of active participation by different vendors.

Some of the sites i personally found interesting were yoono, grazr, reddit, digg, 
technorati etc. However coming back to "Google" i found a new feature of Google 
monikered "Google Co-op". 
It helps to create your own search engines based on specific interests/verticals.
I personally found this Web2.0 search useful, which eventually lead me to the
new world of Google Co-op. There is also an official blog for Co-op, like all other
products of Google.

Soon i hope we will see a large number of "specific" search engines powered by 
Google...

Trends and Zeitgeist

Having come across these two features of Google called me to start up a new log of my google discoveries.

Zeitgeist lists some of the top (key)words that the world is hunting for. A look at 
the site will always give a better idea of the feature.

Google Trends is one of the several other innovative offerings by the research labs of google. It shows the statistical view of the searches done using google. The search volumes are shown in the form of a graph with markers for the news references. A geographical trend can also be seen in the results of google trends where it shows the top cities and countries these searches originated from.

An annotated line graph on a time line can be used to compare the (key)words and hence the popularity of the (key)words considering the google's widespread 
usage. And, the result of one of the comparisions I have done - between Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan, bollywood (Indian) actors - is shown below: 

Red: Shahrukh Khan
Blue: Amitabh Bachchan

What is FoG?

FOG is the list of the features of google which i found interesting... rather worth keeping a log of...
in google's lingo FoG can be called "FoG site: varunpoddar.blogspot.com"