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Just found the Pictobrowser from Thomas Hawk's blog and it is an amazing way to embed pictures in your blog. Pictobrowser is a simple widget that allows you to display sets of pictures from Flickr directly on your site or blog using Flash and the users never leave your site. Pictobrowser is the brainchild of Diego Bauducco. Check out a sample below from one of my sets:

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Google launched a beta version of the Picasa Web Albums earlier in the week and I got invited to participate in the beta of the product. Picasa Web Albums is Picasa's newest feature, designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web.

Picasa has always had the ability to take you existing pictures and create html based or webpage slideshows but you needed to have a host where you could upload and display these pictures. I've been using Picasa since it became free with the Google acquisition and it has always worked great. Picasa is really my favorite program for managing my photo collections and it's worked great for that purpose. I always used the ability to upload and print pictures directly from Picasa to Ofoto and other online digital photo printers.

The latest beta which as the Picasa Web Albums is exactly like the older (v2.0) of Picasa but the first thing I noticed that was different was the extra button in the bottom of the application named 'Web Album'. Clicking that button allowed you to upload the selected pictures to the web and stored on Google's servers. The first requirement is a Google account and you get 250MB of free storage space. For $25.00 per year, you can get a subscription to an additional 6GB of storage. While the fee is comparable to Flickr, the storage limit is something different. I have a Flickr Pro account and I essentially have unlimited storage capacity – The only restriction I have is a monthly upload bandwidth limit.

The user-interface is very simple and with a few simple clicks, you can upload your pictures directly to your Google Picasa Web Album site. One of the things that make Picasa stand apart from Flickr is that Picasa offers image manipulation ability while Flickr just offers hosting. In the past, I would export 'fixed' pictures from Picasa and upload them to Flickr or create web-pages out of Picasa to share with family and friends. Once you create an album, you can share it with friend and Picasa lets you email people to share the location of the album.

I took some pictures from my recent vacation in Hawaii and put them up using Picasa. The album interface is full of Ajax goodness like Flickr but there are a few subtle differences. A nice feature that I haven't seen in Flick is the ability to 'Download Album' which allows you to download a complete album to your computer. Each album is also accessible and available as an RSS feed which is also pretty nice. It also appears that you can add a user as an RSS feed and see future uploads in your feed reader.

All in all, Picasa Web Albums is a pretty neat idea and a very simple, yet elegant interface. I didn't see any Google Adsense ads on the site yet but I am sure that will come. Being a Picasa fanatic, I guess I'll start using the Web Albums but I wish you could get the same result but my web host for storage. I know some of the hosted features of comments, etc wouldn't work without the Google backend but I would live without those features of have that type of functionality still tied back to Google. Oh well – Time will tell and once the API opens up, people will come up with some pretty creative solutions.

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Let's hope Congress does the right thing and adds in adequate protection to guarantee Network Neutrality as life without it could really suck. Can you imagine a world where people who use Verizon as their ISP not being able to get to Google as Microsoft is paying Verizon to make MSN the preferred search engine. So all traffic to Google could be blocked or QOS'd down to a trickle. Can you imagine using a 4 MBps Internet connection where your connection to Google or other sites is a trickle of 56 Kbps? Can you imagine your Skype call sounding like crap because you are using AT&T as an ISP and they would rather sell you their VoIP services?

It's funny how the Telecommunication companies essentially want to blackmail content providers and consumers. When I surf to Google or Flickr or Digg or Live.com, I am using my local Internet connection that I pay for - Sites like Google, Flickr and Digg also pay for the bandwidth they use and so the consumer is paying to get to the provider and the provider is paying to connect to the Internet. But my ISP now wants to give one company priority on their networks over another, for a price. Sounds pretty shady, doesn't it?

Can you imagine how this would just totally kill innovation on the Internet? If we don't get Network Neutrality, innovative companies like YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us and countless others would have never been able to launch as they wouldn't have been able to pay the Telecom companies extortion. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo would be able to afford it but new upstarts would be left out and can you imagine a world where there is no real competition? Look at Microsoft and Internet Explorer - After Netscape died, Microsoft essentially disbanded the IE team and didn't add any new features in the browser for almost 6 years. Competition is critical and fuels innovation and without competition, we have stagnation and the consumer suffers.

Web2.0 or Bubble2.0, depending on your perspective has largely been made possible by the ubiquity of the high-speed Internet access. Even Al Gore, the creator of the Internet has spoken up on this issue. At a recent speech, Al Gore said "Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy. It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates." (Via FreePress.net)

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As I've blogged before, I am in the search for a new computer and have decided to get a laptop and a desktop to meet all of my needs. I will probably end up using a Mirra or something similar (NAS) to get my machines in sync. On the laptop side, I've been toying with the idea of getting a convertible Tablet PC. To me, a convertible Tablet gives you the best of both worlds – It's a laptop that has all of the functionality of the traditional laptop and yet can covert to a slate Tablet when needed.

I've wanted to try-out a Tablet PC before I buy it and so my brother was kind enough to loan me his Toshiba M4 Tablet and it only took 3 months of begging, nagging, threats and the other usual incentives to finally get the Tablet. To annoy me, he installed the first beta of Vista Tablet on his machine which made it pretty much useless. In Vista's defense, this was the 1st beta of Vista Tablet and the installer was my brother. I don't think I need to say anymore.

So I install Windows XP Tablet edition to really see what the magic is all about and I am completely in love. While I used the Tablet in a conventional laptop mode most of the time, I loved the fact that I was sitting on my couch reading blogs using my pen. While I haven't tried it yet, I think reading an eBook on the Tablet would work really well and the mobility and folding form-factor would make it ideal for reading on the couch or in bed. My only hesitation is trying to figure out if I should jump now or wait for the dual-core Tablet PCs to ship.

On a whim and with no football on TV to suck up my time, I decided to install Ubuntu on the Tablet PC. The word Ubuntu is based on an African word meaning 'humanity to others' and it is a freely available Linux-based operating system with both community and professional support. Ubuntu is very easy to install and use and I am always amazed at how easy the install process and just how usable it is as a client machine. On the Toshiba M4 Tablet, I just reboot with the Ubuntu install CD in the drive and reboot. Upon boot, I answer a few simple questions about disk portioning and the installer goes away and installs the OS. While there is no support for Tablet like functionality in the Ubuntu at this moment, Ubuntu worked like a charm using the M4 as a traditional laptop. I shouldn't be but I continue to be amazed as just how easy it is to use Linux on the desktop.

I haven't been a supporter of Linux on the desktop as all the attempts in the past never passed my parents test - Could I install RedHat or Slackware or Debian or any other Linux distribution on my parent's computer and leave them alone with it? I never thought so – Granted, they can't fix all the Windows issues they run into but there are a lot more people that can possibly help them with that vs. Linux. And I consider myself a Linux guy. I've been running Linux in one form or another since 1991 when I built my first Linux server at Marquette University that was running v0.9x kernel as part of the SLS distribution. A few years after that, I ran the Marquette University webserver on my personal Linux box (386 – 40 MHz) for a few years before people 'got it' and officially started supporting my efforts. In fact, I have introduced Linux in EVERY single company I've worked for since the early days with great success I might add. So it's great to see a Linux distribution that's useable and pretty that rocks.

By the way, I took some pictures of the computer and have them on up on Flickr. Check out the Tablet PC set or view them as a slideshow.

Tablet+PC, Tablet, Microsoft, Toshiba, toshiba+m4, dual-core, laptop, mirra, NAS, linux, ubuntu, flickr

Best Tablet PC Buy Tablet PC in Australia

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