Gplus is a free add-on for Google Talk, the instant messaging software by Google.

The main features Gplus Messenger are:

# Emoticons: And I mean real emoticons not just :). Gplus allows you to enhance your chatting experience by allowing you to express various emotions through the familiar emoticons common to all major chat agents but missing, until now, from Google Talk. Gplus, of course, supports animated emoticons.

So, you own a blog. Now how do you make your blog visible to others? For that you have to submit your blog to the blog directories. Submitting your blog to blog directories is one of the first step of promoting your blog. There are hundreds of blog directories on the internet. Submitting to each one of these is literally impossible and also unnecessary as most of them aren't popular. To help you select the best blog directories, I have compiled a list of some of the best directories I have found so far. Some of the blog directories need you to register before submitting your blog while some others are free. Here are some of the most popular blog directories.

What is ReadyBoost?

From Wikipedia:
ReadyBoost is a disk caching technology first included with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. It aims to make computers running Windows Vista more responsive by using flash memory on a USB 2.0 drive, SD card, CompactFlash, or other form of flash memory, in order to boost system performance.

Real Desktop has a fascinating new concept. It turns your desktop into 3D. Now, that's not a new concept, you would say. Let me finish. It turns your desktop into a living three-dimensional world with your icons behaving like real objects that you can touch and move as on a real desk, thanks to the powerful physics-engine. It can run on a modest system and uses very less resources.

Looking for a particular live CD? Not necessarily linux but anything, say a live CD of an anti virus to scan your PC. Then welcome to The LiveCD List. The LiveCD List contains an amazing collection of live CDs of every kind.

Planet PDF is a website dedicated to PDFs. From their site:

"Planet PDF caters to anyone and everyone with an interest in PDF - from professional Web or print publishers seeking appropriate tools, to rank beginners wondering exactly what "PDF" stands for. Assisting PDF users since 1998, Planet PDF is a comprehensive, popular and independent Web site exclusively focused on Adobe Acrobat/PDF users and uses.

Are you running the same mouse cursor (pointer) that came with Windows XP or Vista? How boring! If you can change your desktop wallpaper and icons, why not the cursors? Think of this: you take pains to get the best looking wallpaper, the best looking icons, use gadgets and widgets to decorate your desktop and yet none of these are visible when you are working on a document or reading a page, just like now. The only object that remains visible all the time is the mouse pointer. Infact, our eyes follow the pointer all the time. So a good looking mouse pointer is essential if you want to have a good looking desktop. Have a look at some of the most beautiful mouse pointers that I could find. Take your pick.

You have heard about Ascii arts I suppose, where you can convert an image into one that is created by using only text and special characters. Now you can create your own Ascii arts using your mouse! Yes.

From SoftPedia:
The WordToys Personal Edition is a Microsoft Word add-in that gives you dozens of FREE utilities that make Word easier to use and more fun to work with. No registration required!

Create your own Favorite Fonts, Favorite Symbols, and Favorite Bullets menus.

When you send a screenshot of, say your email inbox, to somebody on the Internet but don't want to reveal your email id or some other information, what do you do? Blacken out your personal information using Paint or some other image editing tool. Now if you have to send a word document that contain some personal information that you don't want to share, what will you do then? You can use the Redaction plugin for Word 2003.

If you are new Opera user, you probably don't know any of these. If you are an old Opera user, you still might not know all of these. Find out how much you know.

1. File browser: Do you know that Opera comes with a basic file browser, a Windows explorer? Type C: in the address bar of Opera and you can see the contents of your C drive. You can browse and open any file; txt files are opened within the browser itself. If you are paranoid about safety, you will be better off using Opera as your explorer. It asks for your permission every time you open a file that launches an external program :)

Google Adsense has introduced a new feature to their ad units. They have now added two buttons to scroll up and down or left and right to their ad units. Now you can click on the scroll buttons to view more related ads. It's a welcome move by Google and I feel it would benefit the publishers as well as the advertisers alike. There is no official announcement about this feature yet. Perhaps they are still testing it.

Update: If you are looking for private tracker signups, you will be interested in this - 6 Tracker Checkers to find private BitTorrent trackers with open signups

A private tracker is a tracker which restricts who can use it, often by requiring registration of a user account. Private trackers usually register how much the users upload and download and may enforce a minimum upload-to-download ratio. As a result their torrents usually offer better availability and speed compared to public trackers. Most private trackers are invites only, meaning you need to be invited by an existing member to join the network. Sometimes, they open up signing for the public. Here are some very good private trackers that are currently open to signup.

Windows Sidebar Styler takes advantage of the new technologies introduced in Windows Vista in order to provide extensions to the existing functionality of Windows Sidebar.

Looking for RSS feed icons for your website? Here is a collection of some of the most beautiful and stylish RSS icons you will ever find on the Internet. Each set contains dozens of icons of different colors and sizes. There are hundreds of different styles to choose from.

Enough with the boring blue shutdown box of Windows XP. Here comes Shedko sShutdown that allows you to skin Windows shutdown with whatever you would like to use, without actually affecting system files and screwing up your system. Shedko sShutdown also works with Windows Vista.

Ever wanted to convert a document to some other format; a JPEG image to GIF, an MPEG to DivX? There are several websites that allow online conversion, but all of them support only a few file formats. For instance, there are PDF conversion websites, image conversion sites and video conversion sites. But the 3 websites that I'm going to bring you today supports almost all the formats you have ever heard of. Now there is no need to go to different websites for converting different file types. Just visit any one of these.

What is LyX?

LyX is an advanced open source document processor running on many Unix and some non-Unix platforms. It is called a "document processor", because unlike standard word processors, LyX encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software. LyX automates formatting according to predefined rule sets, yielding consistency throughout even the most complex documents. LyX produces high quality, professional output -- using LaTeX, an open source, industrial strength typesetting engine, in the background.

When you search on Google it displays a message like "Results 1 - 10 of about 50,700,000 for ...." showing the estimated number of pages containing the terms you searched. But how many results can you actually view? Not many. Google truncates results for every search at exactly 1000.

Even though I'm not a designer and I probably can't create a good design myself, yet after years of internet surfing and visiting thousands of websites and blogs I have formed a rather strong opinion of what I believe is a good web design and what I believe is not. Over these years, I have come across an enormous number of websites that employ annoying tricks, either knowingly or unknowingly. If you own a blog or a website, make sure you don't apply these for it could very well drive away visitors from your site. Remember that these are my opinions and I don't expect everybody to agree with me.