BubbleShare is a new photo-sharing service that allows you to very easily create photo albums with no registration and then share them with anyone in a matter of minutes. The intent of the project is to help you share your stories by creating your photo albums and sharing them. In BubbleShare’s initial launch post, they mention how it is not meant to be a simple web-based slideshow, but rather a work of art. I feel they did an excellent job and have made it extremely simple to use. I have made a few albums, tested around, and gathered my notes. Now, lets take a look at BubbleShare.

BubbleShare had mentioned that they wanted to make it as simple as possible for you to share your photos. Well, they certainly have. The first page you are presented with actually is the upload page where you select your photos and add them to the list for it to use for your album. You will see a button, “Add Photo.” When you click on this it will bring up your computers Open file window so you can select a photo. As you can see in the screenshot, in Windows, I have selected to view thumnail view so I can view the photos and then add them. When you select a photo it will add it to the list and the “Create Album” button will then allow you to select it. Make sure you have added all the photos you want before you click on the button. Once you do it will load them up and process your album. Also note that if you wanted to selected multiple photos at once, you can try to use the Enhanced Uploader that they provide a link for below the buttons.

When you click on the “Create Album” button, it will bring you to a page that looks like the above. You will see a progress bar starting at 0% and will actually upload and process each photo you have selected as you fill out the form below. Once it reaches 100%, submit the form and you will then be directed to the Slideshow Editor. This is really neat because the progress indicator actually is real-time and does not require the page to reload because I am assuming the use of Ajax. You will also receive two emails (I would prefer only one though). One that gives you the link to a page that you can manage your album and another email for the address you can share with your friends so they can view it. Now lets look at the Slideshow Editor.

The Slideshow Editor allows you to change the order or the slideshow, remove photos, change the name and descriptions, add/remove comments, and the part that got me excited was audio caption recording, which I will mention below. In the screenshot above, you see a row of thumbnails. You can take these thumnails and drag them left or right to organize the album the way you want it. You can also click on the little x’s to delete them. To manage a photo, just click on the thumnail and you will then be able to change the caption, add comments, and what I find really cool, the Audio Caption feature. But there is one thing that is missing . You cannot add photos once the album has been created. This means that when you create it for the first time, make sure you have all the photos. I’d hope that BubbleShare is working on this because it would definitely be good to have. Other than that, everything worked great.

Above, I mentioned that there is a feature in the Slideshow Editor called, “Audio Caption.” What you do is select the photo that you want to add a caption for and then click on the button on the left menu that says, “Audio Caption.” It will then bring up a box that will tell you that you can record your voice for up to 30 seconds starting once you click “record.” If you clicked on the record button for the first time, Macromedia Flash may come up with a setting box asking if you want to allow for recording. Select yes and then the recording will begin! You can describe your photo, talk about your story, or whatever it may be. When you are done, click on the “Stop” button. You can then select to record again, play what you have already made, save it for the photo, or cancel it if you decide not to use an audio caption. If you decided to save the recording, it will add a play button next to a speaker icon on the bottom right of the photo. Works great and is definitely a great feature.

Now the only thing left to do is to share your album! Here is one I made for when I was testing it out (and yes, they are my own photos). When you are the creator of the album, BubbleShare will remember that it is you and will not ask for your name or email when commenting, but if you aren’t the creator, you will see a comment text area. When you click on “Comment,” it will then slide down and give you two more fields for your name and email. The album uses Ajax and also allows you to play the slideshow instead of doing next and previous. You can also subscribe to comment feeds or subscribe to receive an email for comments from a photo you have commented on. You may also be wondering how you can get a permanent link to a photo. Simply go to the thumbnail view and copy the location of a thumbnail. I do feel that they should provide this link on the photos page itself though to make it easier to grab it.

Mac OS X users! You can even download a plugin for iPhoto that will allow you to actually create an album by using your existing photos in iPhoto! I would imagine that this would make it a whole lot simpler for you if you already use iPhoto.

If you want to keep up on news and updates with BubbleShare, you can read the BubbleShare Weblog.

View Bubble Share Photo-sharing.

Update: The BubbleShare Weblog seems to be down right now. I will keep the links active in the meantime incase it gets back up again.

Jacuba is a new service that brings spell checking right to your site or your browser and amazingly does not even require you to download, install, or register anything. “Probably the best spellchecker on the web” is what Jacuba’s site slogan reads and after using it for a while, I agree with them. Jacuba is a service that allows you to add a spellchecker to any text area on a site that you visit and give you the ability to correct the spelling, look up words in a dictionary, and even will allow you to make a list of words that do not exist in their dictionary so they don’t come up as spelling errors for you.

This is not just a normal spellchecking script that you insert into your site. You can use it on any form through your browser on any site with the use of the browser favlets (also known as Bookmarklets). This favlet is available for Firefox, Mozilla, and Windows Internet Explorer and when using it, it will turn any text area on the current page you are viewing to a Jacuba Spellchecker. If you are a WordPress user, you can probably tell what form I am in above (the Write a Post form). Notice how I can check my spelling? That is because I selected the Jacuba bookmarklet and it changed the text area to the Jacuba Spellchecker. It works for pretty much any text area on a site and is very easy to use. Say you are at a forum, writing a blog, or simply filling in an online form. Just turn on Jacuba and never worry about spelling mistakes again.

As you enter words into a text area with Jacuba on, it will use Ajax technology to check it with their dictionary of words. If you spell a word wrong, it will underline it with a red squiggly line, much like what you would see in a word processor like Microsoft Word. You can see this in the screenshot above with a few words that I have entered. When a word comes up spelt wrong, simply right click on it and you will get a listing of spelling suggestions. You can then select the correct spelling from the list to replace the incorrect spelling. If you don’t want to right click each individual word, you can simply click on the “Spelling” link that appears along with the Jacuba bar when you click inside of the text area (you can see this in the above screenshot). When you click on this link, the Spelling window will pop-up and then allow you to go through each individual word that it finds to be incorrect. Now, lets take a look at the Jacuba bar again that appears when inside of a text area and you will see the link, “Dictionary” on the right of the “Spelling” link.

I use dictionaries a lot when writing and usually looking up a word would involve me going to Dictionary.com and searching for the definition of a word. Now I don’t have to because Jacuba actually has a built in dictionary to search words with. When you click on the “Dictionary” link on the Jacuba bar, it will open a new window with their own, well layed out, dictionary. When you open the dictionary, you will immediately see at the top, “History.” This will show you the last words that you have searched the dictionary for. How does it remember what you have searched? It remembers simply by storing each word in a cookie shared on the Jacuba webserver. They use the same method to store your saved words as I mentioned earlier. Below the history is the search field. Type in a word and you will get your results. Under the search field you will see checkboxes. Checking and unchecking these will allow you to narrow down on what you are looking for in the definitions, such as examples, synonyms, antonyms, etc.. It works great and the definitions seem to be accurate when comparing to other dictionaries. Here is a little hint for you: If you want to find a definition for a word quickly that is already typed out, you can simply select the word, right click it, and then select, “Dictionary…” It will then bring up the popup and search for you. I really like the dictionary.

Jacuba works great and is extremely easy to use. If you want to add the spellchecker to your website for everyone to see, you can easily include it in your page with a matter of literally two lines of code. See the HTML help document for more details on adding it to your site. I did see two problems with Jacuba though. First, when selecting a few sentences and pasting it into a text area, it will work fine and show the incorrect spellings. But when I would select atleast a 10-15 sentence paragraph, it would get glitchy on me and not show incorrect spellings or suggestions. Is this just me or does it happen for you too? The next problem I saw isn’t actually an issue, bug, or anything of the sort. I just want to know… what about Safari! I mentioned Jacuba to my brother, whom uses a Mac, and really wanted to give it a try… until I told him it only works for Firefox, IE, and Mozilla. As you probably know, Mac users love their Safari browser. Would it be hard to get Safari support? Also, for you Flock users out there. No, it does not work in Flock, but I don’t find this as a major concern as Flock is still very new. The form styles do change, but there isn’t any functionality. Besides these minor drawbacks, the support with Firefox, Mozilla, and Internet Explorer is great and the Jacuba team did an excellent job. Everything runs very smoothly, results are good, and this is one of the most useful tools I have seen in a long time. I am excited to start using this with my everyday emails, comments, postings, etc.. Well done.

If you want to keep up on Jacuba’s developments, make sure to visit the Jacuba Blog.

View Jacuba Spellchecker for your browser or site. (via Genbeta)

There are two new services that I find to be very useful, especially if you are the type that doesn’t like to search for information on your own. The first one is called, Atiki. Atiki is a free service that will actually search for topics and keywords that you tell it to and give you a daily update on its findings from news websites and blogs by email or by subscribing to an RSS feed. The second service I am going to talk about is also created by Atiki and it is called, Techtiki. Techtiki is a personalized page that will return articles from blogs and websites based on topics that you select on your personalized page. By the way, it uses Ajax to grab the latest articles and blog headlines. More on this later, I will talk about Atiki first.

When signing up to Atiki, it will immediately ask you to create a list of keywords. Why? Because the way Atiki works is it will take the keywords that you provide and use them to search articles from websites and blogs and return you accurate results on what you are most interested in. This allows you to just provide Atiki a few keywords, let it do the work for you, and inform you about what it finds. Looking at the screenshot above, you will see the area that you provide your keywords. Don’t get intimidated by the first two fields! The first two fields take advantage of the Concept Strings while the last two are just simple keywords. Sure, you can do seperate keywords, but the magic happens when you use the concept strings. Let me explain how they work. Take a look at the first input field. When making this concept string, I had one thing in mind, blogging. So first in the string comes the name for the concept. This is the “blogging: ” part. After that follows a list of keywords each seperated by a comma. It is like creating your own group of keywords into one keyword. In this case, I used the keywords, “blog, blogging, blogs, blogosphere.” Now, when Atiki does its searching, it will look at the concept string and use all those keywords. To learn more about concept strings, view the concept help section. At first, I found this method a little confusing, but once you do it once, it is really quite easy and noticeably powerful.

Now that you have set your keywords, all you do it wait for Atiki to grab the latest results and notify when it retrieves them. You will not get results immediately though because it works on grabbing the relevant articles with your new strings as the articles come in. Give it some time and you will eventually recieve an email with the results. Not only will you get an email, but the main page and article history page in the control panel will allow you to view results. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for your results if you don’t want to settle for email. Now, lets take a look at the above screenshot. You will see a list of articles with keywords on the left of them. Yep, you guessed it. The keywords on the left of each article are the keywords that it used in finding the article. You will notice that I am hovering over the word, “blogging.” Remember when I described about creating the concept string, blogging? Well, that’s it! It found the keywords from the concept string in the articles and returned the results and letting me know it was from that concept.

For the most part, the results Atiki returns are quite accurate. But remember, it is only as accurate as you want it to be, which is why concept strings are so important. Overall, I am happy with the results. If I had to suggest one thing though, it would only be that the orange hover for links hurt my eyes on the blue background! This is not a big problem and I do receive results via email everyday anyway and usually do not go to the control panel. If you are wondering, I have been using the service for a few weeks now and love it. Sure, I keep up with a lot of the latest news without it too, but usually I use blogs as my source. Using Atiki, it searches news websites and other sites for me so I don’t have to. Very helpful when keeping up on the bigger news media.

Techtiki: Fresh Personalized TechNews

As mentioned above, Techtiki is a personalized page that will return articles from blogs and websites based on topics that you select on your personalized page. It utilizes Ajax to immediately return results for you on topics such as Web 2.0, Blogosphere, Search Engines, Open Source, to name a few.

What I love about Techtiki is that it is a very minimal page that gets straight to the point, and that is returning you news that you want. You can select multiple topics at one time and it will present you a list of the sites as you click on the topics. The articles are pretty up to date and I can confirm this because of some articles being the buzz today are showing up on it. I can see some big sources appearing, such as BusinessWeek, Boing Boing, Read/Write Web, Wired, Memeorandum, and so on. Another great is the RSS feed. When you select the topics, it will take note of it and create a custom RSS feed depending on your selection. This way, you will always be updated on the topics that you are interested in most. I do have one suggestion for Techtiki. That is to show the articles in groups. The problem is that when you select more then one topic, the results are scattered. I am assuming this is because it sorts by date? This is great, but maybe also add an option to show the results by group and split up the each topic by a divider stating the topic. It just makes things a bit easier to comprehend as you look through the listing.

Techtiki is shiny and new, so make sure to help out the developer by making suggestions in the Techtiki Wiki. I have also discussed Techtiki with the creator and he seems very open to accepting new topics and other ideas that you may have.

TechWeb is at it again for round two of the BLOG-X Awards for this years best tech blogs. I’ve come across a few blogs mentioning the event, so I figured, why not give Solution Watch a try? I may not be as big as the other blogs getting nominated, but I’d rather give it a try instead of just watching. If you like my blog, I would very much appreciate it if you would nominate Solution Watch.

If you have been following up on my blog since the beginning, I am sure you have noticed a big change in my blogging, technology being covered, and my style of writing. Taking a look at my first month of Solution Watch and then comparing it to now, I am sure you can see how much it has changed. As time passed by, I have been accepted into the 9rules Network. Since then, I have met many people and upped my standards of writing. I am now also part of the Web 2.0 Workgroup and I couldn’t be happier what with has been accomplished so far. Of course, I owe a lot of what has been accomplished because of my readers. Without your support, Solution Watch wouldn’t be where it is today.

TechWeb allows you to nominate up to five technology blogs that are published independently or are part of a major publishing company. What do the finalists win? “Ten finalists receive a “2005 TechWeb Blog-X Awards Finalist” logo and six months of promotion across TechWeb Network sites. The winner receives a special “2005 TechWeb Blog-X Awards Winner” logo and (to keep those blogging juices flowing late into the night) a $500 coffee card from Starbucks.” Yes, you read that correctly. $500 bucks worth of coffee from Starbucks! Of course, that is not the only thing I would be happy about, but certainly is a major plus!

Nominate Solution Watch if you find it to be among your favorite tech blogs. It would mean a great deal to me.

First off, you will notice that in my title, I use the term, “Shopmarking.” Never heard of it? That’s because I just created the term and figured it would be a good term to use for services such as Kaboodle. There has been some discussion about Kaboodle and I have repeatedly seen the term, “Social Bookmarking” used when describing it. Yes, it is in a sense, Social Bookmarking, but I feel this term confuses the reader. Instead, I am calling it, “Social Shopmarking.” I feel this will help give a better first impression of what the service is to a reader, and hopefully other services may like this term! Now that I have that off my chest, what exactly is Kaboodle? Kaboodle is a service that will make your life a lot easier when it comes to shopping on the internet and trying to pick that perfect item you are looking for. After reading TechCrunch’s and Om Malik’s thoughts about Kaboodle, I gave it a look and found it to be an excellent service that is definitely worth mentioning.

Kaboodle allows you to add products that you come across on the web that you are interested in buying and placing it on a page. You can place multiple items on one page, rate and comment them, and even share them with the public. For example, if you are looking for tables: Signup for your free Kaboodle account and then add their “Add to Kaboodle” button (bookmarklet) to your favorites. Create a new page called, “Tables,” and then head on over to Office Max and find a product of interest. Then use their button (bookmarklet) and add it to add it to your page. You will see something similar to the above screenshot. It will then direct you to the page in that you add the item.

Once you are directed to the “Add to Kaboodle” page, you will see the product you were looking at with a title, description, and image already prefilled for you. This makes it extremely easy for you to add your items of interest. Kaboodle will automatically search the page and find images, content, and price ranges so you don’t have to. Don’t like the prefilled content? Then change it! Look for the words, “Does it look OK to you? If not, click here to fix details,” below the item. Click on the “click here” link (I feel this should be, “If not, fix details,” and link the, “fix details,” instead of “click here.”). This will then bring up a page that will allow you to select images, title text, descriptions, and highlights (usually price ranges) that Kaboodle has automatically chosen for you. Adding an item in Kaboodle is extremely easy. I personally have had some times where I just skipped the page selection as I feel it is not a big focus point for me. This then usually brings up a problem with the pages and editing that I will point out later in the post. Another thing I would personally like to see is a field to allow us to add our own image… which reminds me. I had noticed that when you select an image from the products website, it does not save the image to Kaboodle but continues to use the image from the product website. I’m not sure if that is a good thing. Isn’t this considered hotlinking images? What if the products images are removed from the product site? Will an “X” come up or no image box? These are not big issues, but just something that comes to mind.

Now, you may say, “So what? I made a list of products on a page. Why is that so special?” The thing that makes Kaboodle so great is that you can make your pages public and allow them to rate and comment on the products on your page. You pages will list each item that you have added to it and each item will have stars and a comment link. I like to rate the items myself, just so I can see what ones I am liking. Then when I am done with the list, I can easily see what one I prefer. I can also add comments for myself along the way, which is useful for pointing out good features of a product. When you view your pages, you can also edit your items. You can click on the link, “Fix Details,” to bring up a page, much like when adding. Before I had mentioned that I feel when adding an item to a page, I sometimes forget to select a page from the dropdown list of pages. Why is this a problem? Because it does not seem as if I can change the page an item is on once it is added. I added a table to my computers page and because there wasn’t a way to change the page it was on when editing the item, I had to remove it and add it over again. That’s all really. Other then that, everything works great.

You can see I used the term, “social,” when describing Kaboodle. As I said above, you can mark your pages as public. This will allow Kaboodle visitors and users to see your pages by the selection they provide on the main page or on your “My Kaboodle” page when logged in. How else can you get people to visit your page? You can invite them. Go to one of your pages and you will see on the top navigation, “Email this Page.” Clicking this will allow you to insert email addresses, a message, and grant the ivititee(s) access to add items to your page. There is one thing that I feel could be a lot better though with the public pages. I feel that it is hard to find public pages because as time goes by, the pages will go away on the public listing page. Can we have a search field to search for pages or items? Maybe even tagging functionality?

Overall, I find Kaboodle to be an excellent “Social Shopmarking” service that is very helpful for when shopping. I am currently on the look out for office furniture and accessories, so this is perfect for choosing the best items for my office. Also with Christmas coming, I can start making pages for each person in my family and add items for them on their pages. Very useful. But I found Kaboodle not only shopping, but I have found it useful for my own personal bookmarking as well. I have found myself using it on normal websites and making a list of sites that I want to review on Solution Watch on a private page. Sure, this is not what the service is meant for, but it sure works great for organizing sites too!

View Kaboodle: Social Shopmarking.