I learned about this Google Safe Browsing Diagnostic page from a Security Now podcast. You can find the Google web address below...

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=URLgoesHere

Replace URLgoesHere with a web site address (no http:// needed). Google tells you if the site hosted any malicious software in the past 90 days.

Google is definitely making good progress in delivering web tools to provide a desktop software-like experience in a web browser. Here's the latest one...

Announcing Google Chart Tools

It consists of two sets of APIs: Chart and Visualization.

TechCrunch reported that...

Aviary Now Free As A Bird

Aviary is an online image editing webapp that used to charge $24.99 per year for its full service.

Aviary's own blog item explaining the change is found here...

Setting Aviary Free

Just in time for the holiday season... well, um, ok, not really :-)

But, good dictionaries are always useful. And, it is nice to apparently have another one online from Google. You can find the Google Dictionary at:

http://www.google.com/dictionary

Note, that this is not a single dictionary source. It also provides links to a number of other sources on the web... a one-stop dictionary shop.

I've been a perfectly happy user of OpenDNS's free public DNS service. It has been much more responsive than my broadband provider's DNS which actually flaked out a few years back. It looks like OpenDNS has competition from Google now though:

Google Public DNS

FYI: I've found that I couldn't use OpenDNS on notebooks/netbooks that I used in managed hotspot locations like Starbucks and hotels that require a login to get to the Internet (makes sense).

Wonder what you have in various Google services (including privacy settings)?

Transparency, choice and control — now complete with a Dashboard!

You can find the Google Dashboard for your services at...

https://www.google.com/dashboard/

Here's a new Google Docs feature that I've been wanting for a while now...

Liberate your Google Docs with Convert, Zip and Download

It lets you bundle together multiple Google Docs documents in the format of your choice and then download them all in a single ZIP file.

More info about it is found on the Google Docs Blog...

Data Liberation, "Mark as viewed", and New!

This is mostly a note to self :-). The Google Apps Status Dashboard is found at:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus

Saves a lot of wondering to check it when a Google web app seems flakier than usual.

Ran into an odd problem. I tried uploading a video from my Mac to YouTube. This is the first time I've tried to do this since upgrading the Mac to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). The problem is that YouTube doesn't even let me see the dialog box to upload a file from the Mac. You can see what the problem looks like in the screenshot above. This happens with both Firefox and Safari on the Mac.

I was able to upload a video file from a Windows 7 computer and Firefox without any problems.

j.mp == bit.ly in the literal sense. j.mp is simply an alternative domain and 2 characters shorter than bit.ly. Everything else is the same: Login name/password, statistics, etc.

I was seeing "503" errors (server not found) for about 10 minutes when trying to get to Twitter.com. Finally, the somewhat rare Fail Whale message above showed up. Twitter seems to be up now. But, I'm not confident it will stay up.

bit.ly is my favorite URL shortener. But, it has become increasingly flaky and increasingly unavailable over the past month or so. So, what's the next great URL shortener with link statistics? I need an alternative to bit.ly.

The giant Comic Con conference has been going on for the past week. Google contributed its part by providing free licensed themes of famous comic strips and books. You can find themes based on Superman, Iron Man, Peanuts (Snoopy), Dilbert at more at...

iGoogle Comics & Comic Book Themes

I learned about this visual search tool when I decided to check-in on the Twitlive video stream and ended up watching a Net@Nite discussion between Leo LaPorte and Sarah Lane...

Spezify

I'm not sure it is something I will use regularly. But, it does provide an interesting way to literally "look for something" on the web.

Note: It doesn't render correctly when viewed using Safari 4. However, Firefox 3's rendering looks fine.

Adobe's Acrobat.com added a somewhat pricey (compared to most other web services) premium service in addition to its existing free service.

Acrobat.com Premium

The premium service is priced at $39 per month or discounted to $390 if you play for a full year.

You can find a good description of the site's premium service in this CNET article...

I learned about...

Farkie.com

The Official Google Docs Blog announced...

The file formats keep on coming! Announcing .xlsx and .docx support

This means the Microsoft Office 2007's XML-ish Microsoft Word and Excel file formats are support now. Just in time for Microsoft Office 2010 :-)

Interesting item from Microsoft's Port25 site...

Announcing the PHP SDK for Windows Azure

I found this part of the announcement equally interesting...

Microsoft has provided funding for two other SDKs that support third party programming languages: Java SDK for Microsoft .NET Services and Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET Services so as to facilitate interoperability between the Azure Services Platform and non-Microsoft languages and technologies.

ServerFault.com may not be the best name for a website, but if you are a system administrator or IT professional, you might want to consider bookmarking it. It is a Q&A site for this group of people with a Digg-like look and voting structure. Here's how their About page description starts out:

Interesting item over on Growlaw that should be read by anyone who might use a result from the WolframAlpha computational query engine...

Terms of Use: A Real Difference Between Wolfram|Alpha and Google

WolframAlpha wants full citation credit for anything it generates that is used in a publication according to Groklaw.